Academic Courses & Programs
Border Studies
Imaginary Indian, The
In this course students will explore how popular, legal and ethnographic representations of Indians and Indian culture are built and circulated in the United States and Canada and how they are used as a symbolic counterpart to American and Canadian ideals of work, citizenship, community, place and home. In the first half of the course we will start be exploring how the terms Indian, Indigenous and Native have been used to name not only Native Americans and Native Canadians, but also Asian and Latino immigrants to the United States and Canada, as well as people living in the countries of Pakistan, Nepal, India, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. Topics of specific inquiry will include the book and television series Little House on the Prairie; the sociohistory of immigration and forced migration in the United States and Canada; the work and writings of Canadian painter Emily Carr; and Hollywood and Television Westerns. In the second half of the course we will tighten our geographic focus and study representations of Indians and Indian Culture, which are specifically endemic to northern New York, Vermont, Ontario and Quebec, namely those, which underlie the rituals and game performed/played in Family and Children's Summer Camps and Boys and Girls Scouting Programs. This portion of the course will include two weekend field trips and tours of Family and Children Summer Camps in the Adirondacks. Our analysis throughout the course will be guided by the theoretical and ethnographic ideas of ethnographers John Tanner, Franz Boas, Michaela di Leonardo, Rene Tajima-Pena and Eden Robinson. • State University of New York-College at Potsdam
Women in Cross-Societal Perspective
The objective of this course is to understand how women are different from one another and how they are the same. To do this we will examine what women do over the course of a day and week and season and lifetime; what women have done from the early 1900s to the present; and finally, the social experiences they share growing up and growing old. To focus this analysis we will use the stories of ordinary and extraordinary women living in places such as the United States, Japan, Hawaii, the World, the United Kingdom, Algeria, the Philippines, Toronto, Montreal, Las Vegas, India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Indian Country, Puerto Rice, Alaska, Tijuana, the America Southwest, the American Northwest, Mexico, the American South, Harlem, San Francisco, Greenwich Village, London, Paris, Moscow, New York, Chicago, Jamaica, Lusaka, Sao Paulo, the South of France, Vancouver/Vancouver Island, Ontario, Tel Aviv, Manitoba, Manawaka, Germany, Chinatown, Vienna, Argentina, Kentucky, Los Angeles, Mainland China, Tibet, Texas, South Beach, and Palos Verdes, as they are told by a select group of feminist filmmakers, academics, authors, activists, geographers, musicians, journalists, and painters. • University of Wisconsin-Madison