1 to 3 credits
Fall 2025 Lecture HonorsHumanitiesUpper DivisionVariable Title
To understand and combat systemic injustices, our students must be equipped to engage with the historical and present-day racial and ethnic "reckonings" that define the United States, and large parts of the globe. This course offers students an opportunity to focus on cultural landscapes/contexts, to learn how race and ethnicity permeate cultural texts, genres, and industries. The course trains students to recognize how race-and-ethnicity-based inequities intersect with issues of class, gender, and/or sexuality, and how these intersections articulate themselves in/through culture. Students will grapple with the colonial, national, transatlantic, trans-cultural, and diasporic underpinnings of culture. Topics that will be explored will vary each semester, but to attend to the diverse ways in which students learn and demonstrate their learning, all sections will use interdisciplinary materials like songs, films, video games, sporting events, poems, neighborhood maps, photographs, fine art pieces, oral histories, interviews, and newspapers, in addition to traditional/scholarly publications.
Learning Outcomes1Recognize and describe humanistic, historical, or artistic works or problems and patterns of the human experience, especially those related to matters of race, ethnicity, and difference.
2Apply disciplinary methodologies, epistemologies, and traditions of the humanities and the arts to better engage with historical and present-day debates about race and ethnicity.
3Analyze and evaluate texts, works, objects, events, or ideas in their cultural, intellectual, or historical contexts to recognize how race and ethnicity-based inequities intersect with issues of class, gender, and/or sexuality.
4Create, interpret, or reinterpret artistic and/or humanistic works through performance, analysis or criticism to grapple with how difference is inscribed onto cultural landscapes and contexts.
5Analyze diverse narratives and evidence in order to explore the complexity of colonial, national, transatlantic, trans-cultural, and diasporic human experiences across space and time.
Prerequisites
made by Purdue students.