This interdisciplinary course examines the politics of sound in how moments in between resistance and deep oppression are documented and understood when considering Black Southern pursuits of liberation. This course will challenge students to engage in familiar political moments in a sensory capacity, challenging understandings of political consciousness, movement success, and power building. In this course, sound will be used as a critical field to examine the voices that will produce the sound as they construct and navigate constructions of democracies and oppressive state actions that have entangled their Blackness to a dance of freedom and coercion. Thinking through a sonicscape allows for an investigation of the overlapping of the institutional and lived realities of Black rural Southerners.

This course will explore theoretical claims that shape Black political experience and thinking in the United States. We will approach our subject with attention to both "the particular" of Black Life and the normative of the "universal." We will consider what it is about Black Americans' political knowledge and experience that guide a nonnormative approach to key political theory concepts such as human nature, oppression, liberation, and so forth. Further, we will explore how social categories such as gender, age, location, and religion intersect with Black identities and Black political thinking. Through carefully reading thinkers from enslavement to the present, we will be guided by the otherwise ways Black political thought lives.

Meaningful social and political change requires not only critical and thoughtful engagement with our grounding ideas, dominant theories and our existing positions. It also demands that we learn the concrete, practical skills necessary to make our ideals real, to exercise our rights, to fulfill our duties to one another, and to transform the actual mechanisms and institutions that shape our lives. The course curriculum is organized in three dimensions, training students with the core skills necessary to participate in existing political and activist work, but also empowering them to, when necessary, imagine and carry out their own innovative and transformative campaigns. To this end, students will learn not just tactical skills, but also strategic planning and management approaches that will help them invent, implement, and improve the campaigns to which they commit themselves. This course will include instruction and workshops that bring the best practices and lessons from top businesses and campaigns, refined by political practitioners and distilled for students. It will also include tactical skills training -- media messaging and communication strategies, polling literacy, database management, budgeting and campaign finance, Get Out the Vote (GOTV) efforts, and lobbying basics.

This course interrogates the proliferation of ballroom culture in 20th and 21st century America. Students will examine the historical formation of ballroom and black queer culture in mid-20th century Harlem, New Orleans, and Chicago and its contemporary formations as sites of the objection, life, and black queer radical praxis within Black/Latino neighborhoods, also interrogating the commodification of ballroom within popular culture. Students will consider how ballroom has been circumscribed within the ethnographic (Paris is Burning, the Aggressives, Kiki, & Check It) and the consumptive (Pose, RuPaul's Drag Race, Real Housewives of Atlanta, and Madonna's Vogue) while also tracing how ballroom's reconfigurations of normative gendering, it's embodied response to quotidian antiblack violence. Its repertoire of classed, raced, and sexualized critique exists in excess of how it is spectacularized and consumed. The course offers students a complex site through which to consider how race, gender, class, and sexuality intersect and to interrogate how black queerness and transness have become central to what we know as "popular culture."

Video Podcast for Course:  Matrix Ballroom Series

This course introduces students to the key theoretical and historical frameworks that elucidate the particularities of chattel slavery in the Americas both in its "pre-emancipation" manifestations and as, Saidiya Hartman notes, the ongoing machinations of captivity, domination, and dispossession by which antiblackness continues to structure and suture the world. In this course, the particularity of chattel slavery emphasizes how the economic and social function of the enslaved as laborer and commodity, the centrality of blackness as a fungible and immutuable category of the enslaveable (non)human, and the massive global function of chattel slavery as the foundation of capitalism distinguishes this formation from other historical or regional structures of slavery, labor exploitation, trafficking, and racialized domination. Furthermore, students will be challenged to confront the ways in which the de jure abolition of chattel slavery (in 1865 in the US and across the Americas in the 19th century) has been a historical, legal, and structural misnomer that does not encapture the ways in which societies, economies, and legal structures adapted to sustain rather than eradicate the global dependence on black subjection. Students will engage the prison industrial complex, abandonment & deindustrialization, policing, geographic containment, the consumption of blackness as popular culture, formations of neoliberalism, and antiblack state and state-sanctioned terror as contemporary formations of chattel slavery's afterlives. The course engages the geographic contexts of the US, Jamaica, Haiti, and other parts of the Caribbean.

Global Los Angeles is a critical examination of greater Los Angeles and its economic, political, social, and cultural ties to the world.  Our focus will be on all how Los Angeles is an integral part of a global society.  Topics to be discussed include migration, transnationalism, environmental challenges, and economic patterns of development and underdevelopment.  More broadly, the course will inquire about how globalization affects the life of Angelenos and, reciprocally, how Angelenos contribute to globalization and the world.  To this end, the course is divided into three parts, which constitute the main focus of the class: 1) Global Los Angeles and Its People, 2) Space and Resistance, and 3) On Prisons and Policing Los Angeles.