Since hip hop first emerged in the South Bronx nearly half a century ago, it has grown into a global movement. Youth around the world not only consume hip hop; they also create their own, adapting hip hop music, texts, dance, and visual culture to local realities. This course traces the ongoing connections between hip hop's roots in the cultural expression of marginalized African American and Latinx youth in the postindustrial urban United States, its contemporary relationship to US popular culture, and its routes around the globe, where diverse practitioners mobilize its beats, rhymes, and visual culture to address experiences of oppression and displacement, celebrate life, and agitate for social justice.

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS, SCD-AS) (CA-AG, D-AG, LA-AG)

Full details for AMST 2371 - Planet Rap: Where Hip Hop Came From and Where It's Going

The importance of sports to American society and popular culture cannot be denied, and this seminar will study sports films' vital significance in representing the intersection of sports, history, and social identities. This seminar explores how the role of competition between individuals and teams in sports films relate to the competing discourses on race, gender, class, and sexuality in society at large. Additionally, we will examine how social issues are understood in sporting terms and concepts, such as: the hero and the underdog; urban and rural; natural talent versus hard work; and the individual versus team identity.

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS, SCD-AS) (CA-AG, D-AG, LA-AG)

Full details for AMST 2505 - Playing out Difference: History and Identity in Sports Film

The United States stands alone among Western, industrialized countries with its persistent, high rates of incarceration, long sentences, and continued use of the death penalty. This "American exceptionalism" -- the turn to mass incarceration -- has been fostered by the use of sharply-delineated categories that define vast numbers of people as outlaws and others as law-abiding. These categories that are based on ideas of personal responsibility and assumptions about race are modified somewhat by a liberal commitment to human rights.   Our purpose in this course is to understand how such ideas have taken root and to locate the consequences of these ideas for policy and practice. 

Catalog Distribution: (SSC-AS) (D-AG, SBA-AG)

Full details for AMST 3141 - Prisons