Audrey Sprenger

2012-01-19T23:00:00.000-05:00

The absolute highlight of my academic career so far: When historian John Israel referred to me as the "Aristotle of Pop Culture" in the middle of a faculty meeting.*

*Tho being called the nomadic Kerouac scholar by a newspaper reporter was also pretty great

Follow @Audrey_Sprenger

2012-01-19T20:00:00.000-05:00

Spring 2012 Courses

Detailed Course Outline

Home Economics

During the Spring 2012 semester, students in my Monday Night class should have read/viewed/listened to all the instructional materials listed under Week 1 by M 1/30

In 1938, at the University of Indiana, zoologist Alfred C. Kinsey taught the first Sociology of Marriage and Family course to approach and present sex and sexuality in a socio-biologistic way. At first only open to seniors and married students, this course troubled the university administration, as well as some of Kinsey's fellow scientists, and thrilled students, who lobbied and fought for a seat in the course. This week in class, I present the social aspect of modern marriage and family that I think would today be as important (and explosive and popular) to study in an academic context, as sex and sexuality was in 1938, namely, the highly publicized and marketed notion that all an individual needs to find social, economic and political stability and happiness in their life is to find their perfect partner (i.e., match) and, ideally, start and raise a family. Video clips from both the narrative film and PBS documentary Kinsey (2004 & 2005, respectively) will be screened alongside scenes from the narrative film My Best Friend's Wedding (1997) and documentary Family Album (1986). In preparation for next week students should read and view the following, as well as to be sure to bring a February edition of Good Housekeeping or Family Circle magazine to class.

Kinsey's Marriage & Family Course (2005), *Click through slides 5-10
Forbidden Love, The Unashamed Stories of Lesbian Lives (1992) - *Watch Parts 1-9, Approximately 50 minutes
This American Life, Episode 261, The Sanctity of Marriage, Prologue (2004) - 6 minutes
This American Life, Episode 261, The Sanctity of Marriage, Act 1, "What Really Happens in Marriage" (2004) - 23 minutes

2012-01-19T18:48:00.000-05:00

The Facebook Project

Students in my Introductory Sociology course, It's Not Rocket Science, create a faux Facebook profile and page based on the details of a life they determine to be their social opposite and then interact with one another as these personas for ten weeks, finally revealing their true selves to one another on-line and in person, on the final day of class. The voice you are hearing above belongs to Shannon Malloy (College of Mount Saint Vincent in the Bronx) and you can hear more voices, as well as view some screen captures, from the Fall 2011 version of this project right here on 1/29. Links to follow the Spring 2012 version will be posted here in mid-February.

2012-01-19T07:45:00.000-05:00

Spring 2012 Courses

Detailed Course Outline

Race, Gender & Society

In this course students will learn about the social power of sex and romance; how gender, sexuality, race and ethnicity are officially constructed, institutionalized, performed, subverted and changed; and, perhaps most importantly how a person's physical body (i.e., their skin color, hair texture, eye shape, memories, feelings, imaginations, emotions, secrets, lies and dreams) dramatically effects the ways they live and love. They will learn about the life and times of aviators Amelia Earhart & Bessie Coleman and other individuals (such as boxer Jack Johnson and baseball player Hank Greenberg) who, since the early 1900s, have come to represent the modern American woman and man; as well as how these representations have been used by different communities and organizations to challenge specific laws and policies, which restrict people to earn an income, become educated, vote, raise a family or marry. And finally, they will learn how to document and tell their own sociological stories about how race and gender shapes and effects their own everyday life and time.

During the Spring 2012 semester, students in my semester long class should have read/viewed/listened to all the instructional materials listed under Week 1 by T 1/31 and will have had the chance to earn 3 points towards their Final Grade by midnight on Sunday 1/29

We start this course by exploring how American women possess or lose social power based upon a single physical characteristic: her weight. However, importantly, it is not actual, real weight (or fat) we explore here but prosthetic weight, i.e., fake weight. We then consider the Hollywood trend in the late 1990s, early 2000s, of very thin actresses performing the role of overweight or obese women by wearing fat suits and compare this trend with the minstrel show, which was a very popular form of theatrical entertainment in the United States from the end of the Civil War until around the early 1950s. Video clips from the film Great Expectations (1998) and Shallow Hal (2002) featuring actress Gywneth Paltrow will be screened in class, along side a montage of clips documenting various vaudeville, cinematic and televised minstrel show. In preparation for class next week, students will start to think about the social construction of parody and humor, how it changes over time and what they personally think is funny -- or not. *During the Spring 2010 Semester, this list of materials exceeded the usual 120 page/minute limit to make-up for some missed class time

Gwyneth Paltrow's Goop (2011) - *Read through every post under every category to get a good sense of what Gwyneth's brand of the perfect American woman is; This is a review of material we went over on the first day of class
"Paltrow Humiliated by Fat Suit," ABC News (2002) - 1 page, *As referenced on the first day of class
Courtney Martin, "The Frightening New Normalcy of Hating Your Body" (2007) - 3 pages, *Think about how and why the size of a (young) woman's body has become such an important identity marker and measure of her social worth in the early twenty-first century
Marisa Meltzer, Are Fat Suits the New Blackface? (2002) - 3 pages, *As referenced on the first day of class
Al Jolson Blackface Minstrel Show (1939) - 4:47 minutes, *A visual supplement to Meltzer's article; *A thorough socio-history of the minstrel show will be provided on Lecture 3, i.e., the first lecture of Week 2
Judy Garland singing in blackface (circa 1940s) - 3 minutes, *A visual supplement to Meltzer's article
Minstrel Show Blackface Stump Speech (1951) - 4 minutes, *A visual supplement to Meltzer's article
Soul Man (1987) - 90 minutes, *This link will take you to Part 1; Be sure to watch all the way through to Part 10
(Fake Fat) Goldie Hawn in Death Becomes Her (1992) - 3 minutes, *A visual supplement to Meltzer's article
(Fake Fat) Courtney Cox in Friends (2002) - 3 minutes, *A visual supplement to Meltzer's article
(Fake Fat) Eddie Murphy in The Nutty Professor (1996) - 5:48 minutes, *A visual supplement to Meltzer's article
(Fake White) Eddie Murphy, "White Like Me" (1980) - 8 minutes, *Ask yourself, is it different for Eddie Murphy to parody race and ethnicity than it is to parody fat or body size?
Margaret Cho, I'm The One That I Want (2001) - 60 minutes, *This link will take you to Part 1; Be sure to watch all the way through to Part 10 and to be aware that there is a Part 5a and a 5b
This American Life, Episode 348, Tough Room (2008) - 60 minutes, *This will take us straight into the themes we will be discussing during Week 2, which will be all about the social construction of humor and how social humor masks social terror

2012-01-18T23:00:00.000-05:00

The Facebook Project

2012-01-17T23:00:00.000-05:00

Spring 2012 Courses

Detailed Course Outline

It's Not Rocket Science, An Introduction To Academic Sociology

Sociology is the first academic discipline in the world to include real live people in its research. First created during the turn of the century in Europe and the United States by theologians, philosophers, historians, missionaries, journalists, social workers, it distinguishes itself from police work and social/political activism, other forms of social scientific inquiry, (such as anthropology or political science), as well as tabloid, literary and popular representations of reality through the use of specific research methods, namely analytic reasoning, ethnography, survey research, experiments and ethnomethodology. In this introductory course, students learn about the rhetorical power of these methods and how they can very effectively show us how to both look and listen for things like local and global cultures and communities, how children and adults are socialized and disciplined, how different social norms and niceties become institutionalized and, finally, different American & global forms of systematic oppression, inequality and injustice.

During the Spring 2012 semester, students in my Wednesday Night class should have read/viewed/listened to all the instructional materials listed under Week 2 and will have had the chance to earn 3 points towards their Final Grade (from an assignment given on 1/25 and due via email by midnight on 1/31) by the start of class on Wednesday 2/1; students in my W/F class should have read/viewed/listened to all the instructional materials listed under Week 1 by W 2/1

Sociology, at its most bare bones level, is the study of how people interact with one another right now, in the present moment. We will explore this question by watching scenes from the narrative documentary/thriller Catfish (2010), a film about the ways people interact over the social networking site Facebook. Emphasis will be placed upon what happens when people tell the truth when they interact with one another versus when they tell a lie. Students will follow this screening and discussion of Catfish with a series of video, audio and text-based stories about strangers who became friends through modes of communication before there was Facebook, namely, the mail, as well as how Facebook has, for better or for worse, forever changed human interaction. The history and demographic details of people living in rural, northern communities will also be specifically emphasized to better understand how digital technology literally and figuratively makes the world a smaller place.

John Mankoff & Somini Sengupta, "Separating You & Me?, 4.74 Degrees," New York Times (2011) - 1 page
Jeffrey Travers & Stanley Milgrim, Abstract to "An Experimental Study of the Small World Problem" (1969) - 1 page, *Be sure to remember the name Stanley Milgrim and the methodology he used in his small worlds experiment
This American Life, Episode 246, My Pen Pal, Act 1, "Who Put The Pistol In Epistolary" (2003) -- 41 minutes
This American Life, Episode 286, Mind Games, Prologue & Act 1 (2005) -- 12 minutes, *You only need to listen to the story about Lori Gottlieb, i.e., the first 12 minutes
This American Life, Episode 66, Tales From The Net (1997) -- 60 minutes
ABC 20/20 News Special on Catfish (2010) - 40:35 minutes
David Edelson, "Catfish, A Great Story of Isolation & Connection" (2010) - 1 page & 6:08 minutes

We look to the not so distant past this week, to try and remember what the world was like before social networking sites like Facebook, then start to figure out all the social things that make and make-up a single person (i.e., self), paying specific attention to those moments when people (re)present themselves as something they are not. *At this point in the course, take special note of all the stories we have focused on in class so far which have been located in rural northern communities and, respectively, Latin America

This American Life, Episode 108, Truth & Lies At Age Ten, "Prologue" (1998) - 3 minutes
This American Life, Episode 18, Liars (1996) - 50 minutes
This American Life, Episode 155, Hoaxing Yourself, "Prologue" (2000) - 4 minutes
This American Life, Episode 155, Hoaxing Yourself, Act 1, "The Sun Never ..." (2000) - 15 minutes
This American Life, Episode 197, Before It Had A Name, "Of Course I Remember Your Name" (1998) - 6 minutes
This American Life, Episode 360, Switched At Birth (2008) - 50 minutes
"The Stuff of Life" (2001) - 1 page, *You don't need to listen to the audio embedded on this page, however you should click through some of the embedded links to get a really good sense of this story
Paul Shoebridge & Michael Simons, Welcome To Pine Point (2011) - Approximately 30 minutes, *Copy & paste this link into your browser, http://pinepoint.nfb.ca/#/pinepoint; Once you get on the Welcome To Pine Point page, click either on the "Go" button, (in the lower right), or the "Next" button, (on the edge of the page to the right), to start to proceed through the story; Parts of it will be told in text, parts in video, parts in images

2012-01-07T23:00:00.000-05:00

Spring 2012 Courses

The Family (Home Economics)

Race, Gender & Society

Introductory Sociology (It's Not Rocket Science)

2012-01-07T15:15:00.000-05:00

Academia & Teaching

Academic Courses & Programs

Spring 2012 Courses

2011-12-31T23:00:00.000-05:00

Course Timetable

It's Not Rocket Science, An Introduction to American Sociology

Course Description & Instructional Materials
Course Policies & Grading
The Facebook Project

Spring 2012 - W Night Class

Weeks 7-12 will be posted on W 02/22

W 01/18 - Week 1 Lectures 1 & 2; In preparation for Week 2 read, listen to, view all instructional materials listed under Week 1

W 01/25 - Week 2 Lectures 3 & 4; Class Discussion on all instructional materials listed under Week 2 worth a maximum of 2 points towards your Final Grade; In preparation for Week 3 read and listen to all instructional materials listed under Themes 2 and finish Part 1 of your Facebook Project (i.e., Who Do You Think You Are?); You will be adding to Part 1 of your Facebook Project in class W 02/01; Part 1 of your Facebook Project is due on-line on M 04/30 by noon and worth a maximum of 5 points towards your Final Grade

W 02/01 - Week 3 Lectures 5 & 6; You will be adding some information to Part 1 of your Facebook Project in class; Part 2 of your Facebook Project (i.e., Creating Your Social Opposite) will be explained and assigned; It is due on-line on 02/06 by noon and worth a maximum of 5 points towards your Final Grade

W 02/08 - Week 4 Lectures 7 & 8; Part 3 of your Facebook Project (i.e., Becoming A Part Of The Facebook Project) will be explained and assigned; It is due on-line on S 04/28 by noon and worth a maximum of 10 points towards your Final Grade

W 02/15 - Week 5 Lectures 9 & 10; Part 4 of your Facebook Project (i.e., Sociologically Observing The Facebook Project) will be explained and assigned; It is due on-line on W 05/09 by 6 pm and worth a maximum of 10 points towards your Final Grade

W 02/22 - Week 6 Lectures 11 & 12; Part 5 of your Facebook Project (i.e., Breaching The Facebook Project) will be explained and assigned; It is due on-line on W 05/09 by 6 pm and worth a maximum of 5 points towards your Final Grade

By the end of Week 6 it will be possible to have earned 7 points towards your Final Grade and be working on 30 points

2011-07-09T22:30:00.021-04:00

Audrey Sprenger, Ph.D

I am a writer, field producer and professor of sociology and have lived and worked in South Asia, the United Kingdom and Central America, as well as some of the most rural parts of Canada, the United States and Mexico. My recently completed book about the modern cultural myth of Jack Kerouac, The Beauty Parts, was researched and written with support of the Charles Warren Center for American Studies at Harvard University and was used as the basis for my new play about Kerouac, Reports of My Death Have Been Highly Exaggerated, created for and archived at the Reorb.it project.

I have been teaching my own original academic courses and programs since I was a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the mid-1990s and have traveled around the world as a faculty member for the University of Virginia's Semester At Sea Program; taught on the sociology, geography, law and gender studies faculties at the University of Wisconsin-Madison & the University of Denver; directed a London Study Abroad Program and taught urban studies at City College in London; developed a northeastern border studies and rural sociology curriculum at the State University of New York; helped develop and teach an interdisciplinary lecture series at Brown University; and developed a free, university-accredited adult and continuing education program for the Denver Public Library. My cross-country sociology and documentary making course, Jack Kerouac Wrote Here, Crisscrossing America Chasing Cool, has been featured on National Public Radio, The News Hour With Jim Lehrer and in the Chronicle of Higher Education, the Denver Post, the Denver Westword and the Lowell Sun.

In addition to this academic work, I have also produced large public events for Rocky Mountain PBS, Masterpiece Theatre, the Nation Magazine, the Denver Art Museum and the 2008 Democratic National Convention and often work as a commentator for public radio and television.

For more, click here.

2011-04-12T22:30:00.266-04:00

No, I am not @Hemingsteen * Tho I did help with this

Contrary to popular rumour, Jack Kerouac is not my favourite author; Margaret Laurence is

What the San Francisco Examiner said about my Jack Kerouac play * Announcement of my collaboration with photographer Gabor Szilasi at the Reorb.it project * More on my work with Reorb.it

I didn't know that I made a couple of small cameos in this really great Swedish film about Neal & Carolyn Cassady until I saw it premiere at the 2011 Tribeca Film Festival

The main topic my Kerouac book covers

The 6 minutes that made me go from being a sociology professor to "That Kerouac Girl"

The Christmas I spent at Hunter S. Thompson's house in Aspen

Why I moved back to Denver briefly in 2008

The time I got to speak alongside Carl Bernstein & Anna Deveare Smith * And the second time

Proof I was once a professor with a campus address

The first time David Amram & I ever collaborated

The last American Sociological Association Meeting I ever attended

The first of many papers I wrote for the Canadian Forest Service to fund my doctoral studies

On my life & work in India 1990-4

2011-04-12T20:00:00.036-04:00

I Am - The Library

Created for the 2008 Democratic National Convention and featuring video footage I shot in the months preceding the Convention, this film shows, in the plainest of terms, how people and public institutions are one and the same, a seamless social entity, even when they may think otherwise. If, as the novelist James Baldwin once wrote, "we are trapped within history and history is trapped within us," then I Am The Library captures how "we are trapped within our public spaces & institutions and our public spaces and institutions are trapped within us."

Featuring the voices & images of librarians, library executives, book shelvers, security guards and library patrons, the film started out as a community based story corps project inspired by the Reverend Jesse Jackson's call & response speech I Am -Somebody, as well as Jackson's own early experiences using the Greenville Public Library in South Carolina in 1960.

You can see this earlier project (shot and edited by the Denver based production company Lockerpartners), here. You can also hear me discuss the ways public libraries & spaces are changing in the 21st century, here, around the 36:00 mark. I Am - The Library is regularly used in sociology of organization, as well as ethnographic and digital media methods classes. To view or obtain this film, contact me at draudreysprenger@gmail.com.

2011-04-11T23:00:00.019-04:00

Field Notes

The main topic my Kerouac book covers * Dream field site

2011-04-09T23:00:00.011-04:00

Reports of My Death Have Been Highly Exaggerated

A version of my play about Jack Kerouac, Reports Of My Death Are Highly Exaggerated, featuring music by David Amram, photographs by Gabor Szilasi & sketches by Ed Adler, is archived here. Read some reviews here & here.

2011-01-13T23:00:00.006-05:00

The main topic my Kerouac book covers

This video field note features Jack Kerouac's close friend and first musical collaborator, composer David Amram.

2011-01-12T22:30:00.007-05:00

Dream field site

At first it was like being backstage at a rock concert.

2010-11-26T22:30:00.026-05:00

Academic Courses & Programs

The courses and programs I have created and taught are sorted below. In each one of them students learn how to clearly distinguish the difference between the ways people think through, document and tell stories about their everyday lives and the ways that scientific, academic sociologists do. They also learn how to clearly distinguish between the ideas, theories, methods and genres of scientific, academic sociology and the ideas, theories, methods and genres of other social scientists (especially anthropologists), social workers, the welfare state, news and tabloid journalists, documentary filmmakers, reality television, novelists, poets and filmmakers.

The Sociology of Place & Ancestry
The Sociology of Cultural Invention
Social Inequalities
Socio, Docu & Digital Media Research Methods
Introductory Sociologies

Communication Arts & Media Studies
Feminist Studies
Border Studies
Integrated Liberal Studies

Study Around The World
London Study Abroad
Jack Kerouac Study At Home

Urban Studies Short Courses

2010-11-25T23:45:00.093-05:00

Academic Courses & Programs

The Sociology of Place & Ancestry

Place Maps, The Sociology of Home

In this course we will examine how people are drawn together into a community and how they are kept separated in communities a part. In the first five weeks we will consider what community means in the contemporary moment by examining the ways people form groups, organizations and societies in the American Midwest and urban Afghanistan. The purpose of this investigation will be to articulate what American ideals of community might be and how they are used. Subject matter will include the social consequences for girls who live as/pretend to be boys; how work is socially constructed in the United States, Mexico and Canada; and two important moments in American legal history, the Salem Witch Trials and the writing of the U.S. Constitution. In the second five weeks, having established a working definition of American community, we will then consider how some specific communities in the North America are organized, policed and transformed using the analytic tools established by sociologists, geographers and social theorists. Subject matter will include the place stories of specific towns and cities, the sociology of global travel, and whether or not it's possible to find enchantment in a disenchanted world.

The Sociology of Coming, Going, Leaving, and Staying

In this course we will examine how place can be used as a social index to understand people's everyday sense of social order and desire. We will start in the southern United States using both literary and critical sources to figure out what it means to be on the social insides and outsides of small town America, and then widen our scope to consider how these meanings have become idealized as a part of a broader national identity. We will then shift our analysis away from the United States to another part of the world, the island of Antigua, to document the social distances and differences between places around here and over there. Once our footing is established in places both familiar and exotic, we will study the history of map-making, slowly refocusing our analysis away from places outside the United States to inside, slowly refocusing our analysis away from places outside the United States to inside, re-entering the country through the southern city of Memphis, Tennessee. By re-entering the United States through Memphis, we will have brought our analysis around full circle, and will be able to re-ask and re-examine the question with which we started this course, namely, what does it mean to belong to a place and how do we map it.

Courses currently being revised or are in development
Rural Sociology

2010-11-25T23:30:00.106-05:00

Academic Courses & Programs

The Sociology of Cultural Invention

Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage

In this course we will explore both the social fantasy and reality of marriage and family. We will start by reading the stories of three women who made their way to the United States from Japan, Brazil and India by accepting proposals of marriage in, respectively, the early nineteenth century, the 1950s and early in 2000. Their stories will help us understand the sociology of marriage and family in both a global, as well as historical context, as well as help us start to interrogate the social meaning of platonic friendship, courtship, love, hate, bloodlines, ancestry and familial names. We will then shift our gaze to the United States and study the socio-history of marriage, adoption and divorce laws and governmental policies since the early 1900s to the present exploring specifically the civil torte of adultery; three famous radio and TV families (including Ozzie and Harriet, The Brady Bunch and The Gosselins); how specific advances in science and medicine have dramatically changed the ways people fall in love, as well as enter into legal sexual and familial partnerships; and finally, three notorious love stories, which didn't result in marriage or family.

Names We Call America, Digging the Roots of Cool

This course focuses on three very different communities, set in three very different places and times: African Americans living in the rural South during the first half of the twentieth century; bohemian Americans living in New York City and San Francisco in the post war, cold war era; and then finally, present day teenagers living in the American middle-west. This will allow us to explore and interrogate a very distinct kind and brand of American culture, American cool. Over the past 100 years, American cool has been a philosophy and a survival strategy, a kind of music, an identity, an artistic movement, a commodity, a marketing campaign and finally, a popular colloquialism. Arguably the literal and figurative foundation of modern American culture, to study the story of American cool is to study the African slave trade and African Americans struggle for individual and collective civil rights; blues, gospel, jazz and rock music; the work and popular image of American artists like Elvis, Jack Kerouac, James Dean and Jackson Pollack; as well as the aesthetic and rhetoric of American fashion, art and advertising. Readings for this course include but are not limited to Major Jackson's Hoops, Daniel Clowes' Ghost World, Amiri Baraka's Blues People, J.D. Salinger's Catcher In the Rye, Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar, Lewis MacAdams' Birth of the Cool and Thomas Frank's The Conquest of Cool.

Stories That Could Be True, The Sociology of Truth & Fiction

In this course, students explore two key questions: First, how life is lived like a story and then second, how sociologists document these stories in sounds and images. Students are required to learn how to think sociologically, that is, they are required to think in an objective, unbiased way about other people's lives, especially the lives of those different from themselves. In addition, they are also required to try and figure out what distinguishes sociological stories from other kinds of true-life stories, namely stories told by novelists, audio documentary makers, anthropologists, photo journalists, documentary filmmakers, tabloid journalists and the producers of reality TV shows. The lives they study are specifically: North Americans living in the borderlands of places; a working-class American family living in San Francisco's Chinatown; two Amish American teenagers; a man intent on achieving the American dream; a very rich woman and a very poor man; and a man who is in prison for a crime he didn't commit. Emphasis is placed upon the ways these people are both officially and unofficially recognized as citizens of the United States, as well as members of five distinct regional communities, namely, Potsdam, New York; Queen's, New York; Amish Country, Indiana; Milwaukee, Wisconsin; New York City's Upper West Side and Angola Prison, Louisiana. The authors of these true-life stories will include but not be limited to one sociologist, Charles Lemert, as well as a photographer, Dorthea Lange, a documentary filmmaker, Chris Smith and me, a sociologist turned written/audio documentary maker.

Courses currently being revised or are in development

Ashes, The Sociology of Death & Mourning

Making Yourself Up, Autobiography, Memoir & The Sociology of Self

Tribal Rites/Rights, The Sociology of Culture

2010-11-25T23:15:00.092-05:00

Academic Courses & Programs

Social Inequalities

Forget The Alamo, The Sociology of Race in America

The objective of this course is to understand how race is a social thing something that happens in the world, as well as a sociological thing, something that happens in the world, which sociologists write about. To do this we will examine the most mundane of social activities, for example, what is eaten for breakfast or how people greet each other on the street, alongside the largest of social statements and events, for example, the Rodney King Verdict, the Thomas Hearings, the O.J. Simpson Trial, so we can grapple with the way that race is informed and transformed in the United States whether through the experiential activity of people's everyday lives or the specific ideas of sociologists and sociological thinkers. Focus will be placed on the practical methodological conflicts within sociologies of race, namely tensions between assimilation/order perspectives; ethnogenesis and ethnic pluralism; biosocial perspectives; migration and competition theories; power-conflict theories, for example, theories of internal colonialism; new-Marxism, oppositional cultures, split labour markets, middleman minorities, ethnic enclaves and urban ethnography; feminist and post-colonial analyses; and the sociology of place.

Platter Licked Clean, Social Inequalities in America

This course explores how body weight is an indicator of social status in the United States. It is divided into four parts starving, eating, binging and purging. We will start by considering how the body is used as a vehicle for performance and parody, focusing specifically on the history of the blackface and the fat suit in Hollywood movies. This analysis will allow us to see how the body is both a social invention, as well as a living organism that can't survive without food. We will then examine contemporary ideas about the relationship between people and food by studying the social foundations of eating and eating strategies, like anorexia nervosa, bulimia and over-eating. This will shift our analysis away from social bodies to social structures, so we can consider how food, namely, breakfast cereal, salt, chocolate and beef is not simply a fuel, but a commodity and cultural symbol, something that is bought and sold on the global market. Finally, once we have laid bare some of the literal and figurative meanings of food, we will return to our discussion of the American body, and how it works to both idealize and revile gluttony.

Race, Gender & Society

In this course students will learn about the social power of sex and romance; how gender, sexuality, race and ethnicity are officially constructed, institutionalized, performed, subverted and changed; and, perhaps most importantly how a person's physical body (i.e., their skin color, hair texture, eye shape, memories, feelings, imaginations, emotions, secrets, lies and dreams) dramatically effects the ways they live and love. They will learn about the life and times of aviators Amelia Earhart & Bessie Coleman and other individuals who, since the early 1900s, have come to represent the modern American woman; as well as how these representations have been used by different communities and organizations to challenge specific laws and policies, which restrict people to earn an income, become educated, vote, raise a family or marry. And finally, they will learn how to document and tell their own sociological stories about how race and gender shapes and effects their own everyday life and time.

Courses currently being revised or are in development

Home Economics

2010-11-25T23:00:00.048-05:00

Academic Courses & Programs

Socio, Docu & Digital Media Research Methods

Advanced Sociological & Research Methods

In this course we will study what sociology is & what it isn't, focusing specifically on the different methodological techniques sociologists have developed over the years as a way to create, defend & sustain their discipline. We will start by reading selections from four different kinds of canonical sociological theory, ethnography, survey research & experiments paying close attention to the ways these specific genres of sociology become linked to certain subject matters, as well as the methodological techniques associated with each genre. Students will follow-up these readings by writing a Draft Proposal for a Sociological Study of their own. We will then carefully study the similarities & differences between sociology and other forms of social scientific & realist writing, including theology, anthropology, history, political science, geography, documentary studies & finally digital storytelling (i.e., audio, visual and photographic stories). Students will then create from start to finish a digital (audio, visual, photographic) story of their own based on a topic I assign to the entire class. This will allow them to further explore, develop and critique core methodological techniques such as conceptualizing, documenting, observing and archiving. Many of the readings used in this course (including but not limited to selections from Durkheim's Suicide, White's Street Corner Society & Kinsey's sexuality surveys) will be distributed via email, however, students will be required to obtain a copy of Robert Coles' Doing Documentary Work, any edition, Zora Neale Hurston's Every Tongue's Got To Confess and Denis Wood's Everything Sings.

Audio Ethnography
In this course students will learn how sounds ranging from everyday conversations to oral histories to song lyrics can be used to understand the social dynamics of community, the relationship between individuals and communities, institutional power and social injustice. They will start by reviewing how sociologists working both inside the academic discipline of sociology and out have used sounds to create analyses about the social world. This will include a thorough review of the ethnographic work and methodological strategies of Clifford Shaw (criminology), Zora Neale Hurston (folklore), David Boder (anthropology), Harold Garfinkel (ethnomethodology), Glenn Gould (public radio), Mitchell Duneier (ethnography) and Ira Glass (public radio), as well as an exploration of how this work compares to other forms of documentary work, such as visual sociology, documentary photography and photojournalism and documentary filmmaking. Following this literature review, they will then explore how different audio ethnographies have been used to both document the social world, as well represent it. This will include an exploration of the ways academic sociologists, as well as other social scientists and historians, have used audio as a form of evidence in their work, as well as a their final form of analysis. During this portion of the course, students will have the chance to actually record and produce a short, ethnographic audio clip from start to finish. These clips may be about any topic of the student's choosing, except for one requirement: They must be set in and around the town where the course is taught.

Turning Life Into Fiction, The Methods of Sociological Research

This course is all about the way sociology (and other social scientific analyses) get made & made-up, that is, how sociology is researched, written & defended. We start by examining philosophical ideas about truth, fiction & reality using recent news, tabloid and pop cultural stories. We then shift into the history of sociology and when and why different kinds or genres of sociology were first made, namely sociological theory, ethnography, survey research, & experiments. Finally, we put into practice four different methodological techniques, observation, questioning, measuring & testing, as well as consider the ethical, social & rhetorical power of these techniques.

Courses currently under revision or in development

Writing Ethnography & Biography

2010-11-25T22:30:00.134-05:00

Academic Courses & Programs

Introductory Sociologies

It's Not Rocket Science, An Introduction To American Sociology
Sociology is the first academic discipline in the world to include real live people in its research. First created during the turn of the century in Europe and the United States by theologians, philosophers, historians, missionaries, journalists, social workers, it distinguishes itself from police work and social/political activism, other forms of social scientific inquiry, (such as anthropology or political science), as well as tabloid, literary and popular representations of reality through the use of specific research methods, namely analytic reasoning, ethnography, survey research, experiments and ethnomethodology. In this introductory course, students learn about the rhetorical power of these methods and how they can very effectively show us how to both look and listen for things like local and global cultures and communities, how children and adults are socialized and disciplined, how different social norms and niceties become institutionalized and, finally, different American & global forms of systematic oppression, inequality and injustice. More >>

Practical/ity Matters
This is a course about all of the sociological work that happens, (and, sometimes, becomes published), outside of the academy. That is, all the work people do in industrialized places to care for and protect their fellow citizens, which is more practical than scientific, more hands on than theoretical. The course starts in the United Kingdom, in the late nineteenth century with the work of Florence Nightingale, a heroic field nurse who also did pioneering work in modern social statistics and demography, two disciplines which became important methods and subfields of academic sociology and other social scientific disciplines. It then shifts to the United States and the early part of the twentieth century and the South Side of Chicago where police officers, detectives and young graduate students at the University of Chicago collaborated to create elaborate ethnographic maps of the city to try and understand the culture of its subterranean and criminal communities. There were also newspaper reporters and social workers working in the Sociology Department at the University of Chicago in those days and their work is also explored here as a way to lay the foundation for the courses final areas of inquiry: First, the rise of first person newspaper reporting (i.e., what is often called New Journalism) in the postwar and civil rights era. And, finally, the life and times of the most globally known social worker of the twentieth century, Mother Teresa. Throughout the duration of the course emphasis will be placed upon the kinds of sociological thinking these practical sociologists came to use, as well as the kinds of methods they used to document people's lives. Students will also try their hand at actually using these methods themselves.

Courses currently being revised or are in development
Modern Social Problems

2010-11-25T21:30:00.111-05:00

Academic Courses & Programs

Study Around The World*

Passing Through Customs, The Social Class of Strangers

This is a course about the global traffic of people in the twentieth and twenty-first century and how different countries regulate them. In it students use their own passports and travel itinerary in and out of different nations to explore how seemingly utilitarian places like border crossings, customs booths and post offices are important sites of class struggle. They also learn about their own class status as a student studying abroad in the context of nine very different kinds of travelers, namely, tourists, artists, ethnographers, journalists, ex-patriots, nomads, migrants, immigrants and political refugees. Emphasis will be placed upon the differences between people who spend time or settle abroad outside the United States versus those who come to the United States; the international institutions, which work to better facilitate or curtail this kind of travel (including the Red Cross, American Express Corporation, Fulbright Foundation, Peace Corps, and Council of US Embassies); the stories of ten famous travelers who spent significant time outside their home country, (including but not limited to poet Gary Snyder, writers Paul and Jane Bowles, anthropologist Margaret Mead, painters Tobias Schneebaum and Diego Rivera, journalist Hunter S. Thompson and musician Arturo Sandoval); and the finally the stories of ten not so famous people (each from a different nation). Many of the readings used in this course will be available to download for free, however, students will be required to have on hand a copy of Fae Mynne Ng's Steer Towards Rock and Che Guevera's The Motorcycle Diaries, as well as an inexpensive digital camera and audio recorder to take this course. To view a short film I made with students taking this course, click here.

Shipwrecks, Castaways, Pirates & Other Sociological Rumors About The Sea

In this course students explore how industrial development in the twentieth and twenty-first century irreparably changed people's relationship to the sea, particularly for those who make their home there, both on and off its shores. To do this, we will follow two distinct but inter-related lines of analysis. First, we will examine a series of sensational stories about sea travel and its consequences popularized by newsreels, radio, comic books, pulp and narrative fiction (including stories about the Titanic and S.S. Newfoundland) television shows (including The Love Boat and Gilligan's Island) and Hollywood movies (including South Pacific, Jaws, Das Boot, Pirates of the Caribbean and The Perfect Storm), to try and understand how over the last hundred years the sea has been configured as a vast mysterious space where untold freedom, romance and danger lurks. Second, (using the exact same methods the 1930s Chicago School of Sociology used to study cities, i.e., gleaning, mapping, direct observation and direct questioning), we will also document the social ecology and everyday life of a community living and working aboard a ship, as well as in twelve different seaport towns and cities. This will allow us to locate those effects of industrial development popular stories often gloss over or leave out, such as environmental degradation and pollution, poverty and worker exploitation. Many of the readings used in this course will be available to download for free, however, students will be required to have on hand a copy of Salman Rushdie's Haroun and the Sea of Stories and Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and The Sea, as well as an inexpensive digital camera and audio recorder to take this course.

Where America Comes From, Understanding Race In A Post 9-11 World

Queens New York is one of the most racially and ethnically diverse places in the world. In this course we will study the story of nine of its residents (profiled in Warren Lehrer and Judith Sloan's audio ethnography project Crossing the Boulevard), then travel to the neighborhoods from where they came, a geographical expanse which includes Japan, China, Vietnam, India, Mauritius, South Africa, Brazil and PuertoHilo, Hawaii, as well as Fort Lauderdale and Marathon Florida. In addition, the data we gather from neighborhoods around the world will be supplemented by the real and fictive stories of people who have never left or plan to leave these places, relevant demographic data, and the social theories of James Baldwin, Erich Fromm, Thich Nhat Hahn, Paulo Friere, Gustavo Guiterrez, and Lorraine Hainsbury. Students who take this course for credit will be required to ghostwrite two brief fictive autobiographies; record and edit nine short neighbor sound sketches; and finally learn and practice ten very basic ethnographic words, phrases and questions in nine different languages. Many of the readings used in this course will be available to download for free, however, students will be required to have on hand a copy of Lehrer and Sloan's Crossing the Boulevard and bell hooks' All About Love, as well as an inexpensive digital camera and audio recorder to take this course.

*Originally created for the University of Virginia's Semester At Sea Program

2010-11-25T20:30:00.078-05:00

Academic Courses & Programs

Urban Studies Short Courses*

The Most Perfect Day Off
Since the late 1980s international literary phenom Banana Yoshimoto has introduced the world to the joys and malaise of contemporary Japanese youth culture. (She is also particularly talented at writing about contemporary Japanese food). Using some of her fictional writings as our guide we will take to the streets of Kobe by foot and walk through a young person's most perfect day off. Stopping off in coffee houses and department stores, clothing boutiques and record shops we will listen to and read aloud both Japanese and translated English passages of Yoshimoto's writings to try and find some of the specific characters, sounds, tastes and smells she so effectively describes. We will also stop off at a bookstore to contextualize Yoshimoto's work in the context of other forms of narrative youth culture, as well as contemporary Japanese literature as a whole and at the end of our day toast Yoshimoto with a bowl of katsudon, the soup she famously wrote about in her debut novel Kitchen.

Searching For Fortune Cookies
This is a two-part Field Practicum set in the streets of Shanghai and Hong Kong. Using a list culled from Renee Tajima's documentary My America Or Honk If You Love Buddha, we will set out into the streets of two very different Chinese cities in search of traces of Chinese-American culture. Gleaning evidence from Shanghai's and Hong Kong's architecture, markets and street food we will figure out and literally track-down where distinctly Western inventions like fortune cookies and Chinatowns come from, making note of where these things can be found all across the United States -- even in places with relatively small Chinese American populations.

Introduction to South Asian Pop Cinema
Learn in one morning and afternoon the history and culture of South Asian Pop Cinema. We will meet at the Indian Coffee House, an important hang out for Cochin moviegoers for over twenty-five years. There, we will scour the daily newspapers for cinema listings and select three contemporary movies we will pop in and out of over the course of the afternoon. After a brief introduction to the history of both Malayalam and Bollywood Cinema, as well as the history of mainstream American movies in Cochin, we will set off on an urban hike through the city, which will take us past nine different movie theatres, three of which we'll stop off in to catch parts of the movies we selected earlier in the day, paying particular attention to the cultural protocol of purchasing tickets, buying popcorn and candy, watching advertisement, previews and, of course, parts of films. We will also at some point in the day visit a few newsstands to read and purchase movie magazines.

*Originally created for the University of Virginia's Semester At Sea Program

2010-11-25T20:00:00.046-05:00

Academic Courses & Programs

London Study Abroad Program*

London In The American Imagination
In this course, we will study stories about the city of London made popular in the United States through children's literature, pub rock, pop and punk music, as well notorious rumors about the British Royal Family. Emphasis will be placed upon interrogating cultural representations of the city and then finding evidence of these representations in London's physical topography and architecture. Each week, class time will be divided into cartography labs and urban hikes through the city of London, as well as a few sites outside of London's city limits. Students will prepare for labs by completing a set of literary, critical, and sociological readings, as well as weekly film screenings. Lab time will be used for lecture, group discussion, and turning the readings students prepare into sketch maps of the city of London, which we will then follow during our urban hikes. Students will be required to record these hikes using words and photographs in a personal documentary journal. At the end of the course, students will have created two very different kinds of urban cartographies. First, a set of sketch maps created out of their readings, or in many cases, re-readings of famous stories about London, perhaps some of the stories that made them want to travel to this city in the first place; and then second, a set of narrative and photographic maps created out of their early, and in some cases, first impressions of the city's actual, geographic terrain. Doing this will not only allow students to consider and interrogate their personal ideas about the city, but learn how to recognize the cultural links between the United Kingdom and United States, which has been reified over the last hundred years through literature and music, the news and tabloid press, as well as historical biographies. In addition, as students work through the reading list and mapping assignments, they will also develop a keen theoretical understanding of what culture means and how its meaning changes over time and in different geographical contexts.

London In Reverse
In this course we will explore the city of London, England on-site focusing specifically on the interaction or, in many cases, lack of interaction, between those urban dwellers who identify themselves as "native" to the city versus those who identify themselves as a "Londoners who comes from someplace else." During the first week of class, students will be introduced to Peter Ackroyd's urban ethnography, London: The Biography (2003) and Zadie Smith's novel White Teeth (2000), two very different texts about this city, which offer keen anthropological and sociological insights into the London's migrant, immigrant, ex-patriot and tourist populations. Ackroyd's work will be supplemented with some selected readings from other authors and thinkers who have written on London's working class and bohemian cultures, such as Karl Marx, Charles Dickens, Mark Twain, and Rabindranath Tagore; Smith's work will be supplemented with some selected readings from cultural critics and geographers who have written about London's immigrant populations, such as Homi Bhabha, Vron Ware, and Salman Rushdie. After the first week of the course, each class period will take place in a different part of London or its immediate environs. Students will prepare for the class by attending a film screening which will preview the parts of the city we will be studying that week (such as Dirty Pretty Things, My Beautiful Laundrette, Bend It Like Beckham, Secrets and Lies, and Prick Up Your Ears), as well as by completing selections from Ackroyd's and Smith's work and any supplementary readings. During class time we will survey the part of the city we are studying for that day as a group, then students will have time to make their own individual audio recordings of the setting, documenting its sounds, as well as their own personal observations of what they see. At the end of the course, as well as their stay in London, students will have the chance to listen to each other's audio journals and discuss the similarities and differences between their observations and personal interpretations of them. In addition, I will compile selections of the students' recordings into a single audio journal to summarize the findings and reflections of the entire class.

Bangla Town Laid Bar
In London's East End there's a small neighborhood of narrow alleyways and courts bound by a brick road called Brick Lane. In medieval times there were brick factories there and in the 17th century Huguenot silk factories and the Black Eagle Brewery. But by the 19th century it was mostly a slum, home to all the people who found work there, including a small population of Jews who opened up a few kosher butcher shops and a few bakeries. On the cusp of the 20th century, Brick Lane was where many of Jack the Ripper's victims lived and where a few of them were actually murdered, and in the early 1920s came the first of three waves of Bangladeshi immigrants, mostly seamen, who in time would open up so many curry shops that today Brick Lane seems permanently steeped in the strong fragrant smells of fresh coriander and cumin. This is where this course starts, in the curry shops along Brick Lane, where students literally map all of the miles its Bangladeshi residents traveled to get there by eating and learning how to cook Bangladeshi cuisine. While familiarizing themselves with the route between Dhaka, Bangladesh and London, England they will supplement these maps by reading Brick Lane by British novelist and Bangladeshi born Monica Ali, using the fictional characters and storylines she creates to try and understand what its like for a person to live very far away from the country where they were born. Following our reading of Brick Lane, we will then shift to some very brief selections from the writings of novelists Zadie Smith, Rehana Ahmed, Hari Kunzru, Adeline Yen Mah, and Marian Keyes to draw us away from Brick Lane and into other parts of the city of London, namely its South Asian, West Indian, African, Chinese and Irish neighborhoods, where we will again draw maps and eat. Doing this will allow us to figure out which parts of the city come from some place else and which parts were always there, knowledge which we will take back to Brick Lane to try and figure out what parts of this neighborhood were there before the Bangladeshi sailors came.

*Originally created for the University of Denver's Urban Studies Program

2010-11-25T19:30:00.084-05:00

Academic Courses & Programs

Jack Kerouac Study At Home Program

At Lilac Evening, Jack Kerouac In Denver
In Denver, Colorado, in 1951, en route from the West Coast to his home in the East, Jack Kerouac wrote On The Road, a fictional autobiography about his life in the mid to late 1940s hitchhiking back and forth across America. The novel was published in 1957 and was immediately heralded as a classic story of American cool. In this course, we examine both the writing and content of this novel, using the city of Denver as a way to understand how places can become stories, as well as how a story can become a place. Class time will include lectures, novel and poetry readings, not only of Kerouac's writings but also the work of his peers Neal Cassady, Allen Ginsberg, Joyce Johnson and Carolyn Cassady, documentary and film screenings, as well as urban hikes through the city of Denver to the place sites Kerouac, Cassady, Ginsberg and Cassady lived in and wrote about, sometimes all at once. Topics of in-depth analysis will include the buying and selling of beat literature and stories by corporate America, i.e., the long history of beatsploitation; how to read Beat literature and stories as narrative sociology, a counter to the analyses put forth by scientific sociology; the distances and differences between beat writers and black cool; the understated geographical foundations of spontaneous prose; the intersection between racial, ethnic and sexual struggles since post/cold war America. To hear a radio broadcast about this course click here.

Jack Kerouac Wrote Here, Crisscrossing America Chasing Cool
Between 1946 and 1969, Jack Kerouac, a Massachusetts native of French Canadian descent wrote thousands upon thousands of pages. Inspired by the beauty of people's lives his literary imagination during this time seemed to know no narrative bounds. He moved freely within and between several different writing styles and literary genres, producing diaries and letters, novels and plays, haikus and blues poems, each one of them a deeply personal and intimate account of his everyday life, even when they were fictionalized. In this course we will read and listen to brief selections from all of these writings, as well as the writings and music of Kerouac's peers and contemporaries, and allow them to lure us out in the world into the places where they were set and, in many instances, actually written, namely Denver, Colorado; San Francisco, California; Chicago, Illinois; New York City, New York; Lowell, Massachusetts; and, of course, all the road, which rests in between. Doing this will allow us to separate Jack Kerouac's life from his work, as well as his work from his mythological image, as well as to try and put into practice the narrative strategies he developed for documenting the places he moved through and rested in. To hear some radio broadcasts of this course, click here and here.

2010-11-25T17:45:00.047-05:00

Academic Courses & Programs

Integrated Liberal Studies

No More Walls, Towards A Truly Liberal Arts Education

During the Spring 2006 academic quarter at the University of Denver and Spring 2008 semester at Brown University, I created a lecture series for composer, conductor and multi-instrumentalist David Amram. Inspired by the Integrated Liberal Studies Program I completed as an undergraduate at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Amram traveled between the Departments of Anthropology, Biology, English, Judaic Studies, Theatre and Urban Studies where he gave an exclusive lecture/performance for the students, staff and faculty of these departments, as well as any of their guests. Topics included the global politics of world music; the scientific and aesthetic links between the natural world and symphonic music; his collaboration with novelist Jack Kerouac; the socio-cultural relationship between Judaic, African-American and Native American music; a critical retrospective of Amram's work in the theatre and film industry; a screening of his holocaust opera for television, The Final Ingredient; and finally, Amram's reflections on his lifetime touring the world's great cities.

In addition to these lectures, Amram also co-taught with me my sociology of American culture course, Names We Call America, Digging the Roots of Cool. This course included seven special events with Amram, myself and two of Amram's professional peers, painter and art historian Ed Adler, filmmaker and photographer and filmmaker Chris Felver.

These special events included a screening of the classic Beat film Pull My Daisy, for which Amram composed the score, as well as appeared in; readings from Amram's two books, Vibrations, an autobiography, and Off Beat: Collaborating With Kerouac, a socio-cultural history; a gallery exhibit of Amram's unpublished caricatures; a live performance of Amram's From Cairo to Kerouac, A Program of World Music, Classics of Jazz and Readings of Kerouac With Music; a gallery exhibit of the work of Ed Adler; and a film and photography retrospective of Chris Felver. All of these special events were scheduled outside of class time and open to the wider university community. Finally, in addition to his work in the Division of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences and the Division of Natural Sciences, Amram also conducted students at the Lamont School of Music for a performance of parts of his 1962 film score, The Manchurian Candidate, as well as gave one lecture/performance on the history of the polycultural roots of symphonic music.

2010-11-24T23:00:00.028-05:00

Academic Courses & Programs

Communication Arts & Media Studies

Introductory Digital Media Studies

In this course we study how people and institutions create digital identities and compare them to identities which actually get printed on paper, such as passports and family photo albums, supplementing our analysis with social theories on the subject of the self and authenticity. We then work through and annotate the traffic patterns of people who have immigrated to the United States since the 1900s, as well as a short modern history of paper making, photography, the newspaper and tabloid news industry, movies, the radio and television. This will allow us to better understand the literal and figurative difference between creating things versus ideas, as well as to explore the environmental impact of the industrial and global revolution in four specific settings: New York state, the province of British Columbia and the countries of India & Ghana. Over the duration of the semester students will be expected to create their own digital media project about the themes in the course in or around the campus where they take this course. A basic but thorough introduction to using digital media making software (including Audacity, Photoshop and Final Cut) will also be included with this course.

The Sociology of Sound, Sight, Taste, Touch & Smell
In this course students will learn how the social meaning of everyday life changes when expressed through or documented in words, sounds or still or moving images. Emphasis will be placed upon the everyday experiences of people who move through the world without one or more senses, as well as specific artistic mediums which emphasize one or another sense, namely radio, photography, movies, cooking and sculpture. Students will learn about different cultures associated with one or another sense (such as deaf or blind culture) and the forms of media created by these cultures (such as sign language and braille), different social movements associated with these cultures and how medical definitions and media representations of these cultures (and states of being) have changed since the early 1900s. Students will also consider how these cultures (and state of being) parallel and/or intersect with the development of different broadcast and digital forms of media.

Introductory Rhetoric & Public Speaking
In this course we will explore the rhetorical difference between expressing ideas through formal or spontaneous modes of speaking, as well as the spoken versus printed word. We will start with an analysis of American blues, jazz, scat, rap and hip hop and then compare these musical and poetic forms alongside the printed lyrics of other forms of poetry and lyrical and popular music. We will then move on different kinds of political and legal speech, making clear the rhetorical distinctions between rallying cries and campaign speeches, congressional debates and Constitutional and appellate forms of law. Next, we will consider different kinds of theatrical modes of talk, including the monologues and soliloquies from classic American literature, as well as study the kinds of speeches written and given during times of crisis and triumph. Finally, we will study the common tropes used by both the famous and not so famous during press conferences and interviews, as well as how these kinds of performances get documented and reported. Students will write and/or perform two or more of the following five kinds of spoken word or speech exercises: 1) Recite a pop song, sing a poem or read aloud a children's book; 2) interpret selections from a famous speech; 3) engage in a Congressional or Lincoln/Douglas style debate or speak extemporaneously on an assigned topic; 4) perform a dramatic or comedic monologue or re-enact a famous interview or press conference; 5) compose and recite an original oratory.

2010-11-24T21:00:00.052-05:00

Academic Courses & Programs

Feminist Studies

American Romance At Home & Abroad
This course starts by examining a series of highly romanticized pop cultural images and stories, which originate in the United States, but are read, beloved and used to sell products all over the world, like the movie star James Dean, characters from the Wizard of Oz or songs from the television show Glee. This will allow us to sharpen our sense of global geography and encounter a few languages other than English, such as Spanish, Hausa, Afrikaans, Hindi-Urdu, Vietnamese, Chinese, Arabic and French; as well as figure out what makes for a truly global and, often, timeless, representation of American sexuality, whether heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual or transgender. We then shift from studying pop cultural images and stories, which are exported out of the United States to the diaries, letters and memoirs of people who have recently moved into the United States. Here we will focus on the everyday lives of people who have migrated or immigrated for the explicit purpose of romantic freedom and encounter former sex trade workers and nannies, newly married couples and young and extended families, as well as starry eyed individuals looking for love. Emphasis will be placed upon people who have moved specifically to the five boroughs of New York City and upstate of New York from Uzbekistan, Liberia, Lima, Poland, Korea, Tibet and Ecuador, (communities, which have been recently dubbed by sociologists as the "New New York Littles), to allow students the chance to directly engage with these stories and document them in words, sounds and images. Students will then use this ethnographic data to return to some of the original themes of the course and create some pop cultural images and stories about American romance of their own, ones that include the perspectives and experiences of individuals and communities newly settled within the United States. Both their ethnographic data and pop cultural creations will be archived on-line on a special course web page and, possibly, submitted for broadcast on public radio.

Feminist Bohemians of the 1950s
This course explores how individual women defied social norms and legal boundaries to live an undomesticated life during a time when there was no active women's movement. Starting with the cross-country road trip across America made by French philosopher Simone de Beauvoir in 1947, (the exact same year American novelist Jack Kerouac famously made and documented his own nomadic adventures), and ending in Paris, where North American and British women moved in to the left bank neighborhoods once occupied by female (many of them lesbian) artists and writers in the 1920s it introduces the lesser known lives and work of photographer Vivian Maier and writer Lynn Barber alongside the already fabled Joyce Johnson and Sylvia Plath. It also includes the fictional writings of Richard Yates and young adult novelist Ellen Conford, as well as social scientific analyses by Anne Parsons and Jane Jacobs. Films will include Robert Frank and Alfred Leslie's Pull My Daisy and the 1959 Hollywood re-make of Jack Kerouac's novella The Subterraneans.

The Judy Blume Revolution, An Introduction to American Feminisms
The objective of this course will be to understand how woman, identified by variable political and cultural markers such as race, class, religion, language, and education, resist or acquiesce to institutionalized sexism, both individually and collectively and in different historical and geographical contexts. In the first three units, we will focus on the social construction of gender by examining a series of social institutions and practices central to gender identification and stratification in the United States: science, beauty, sexuality, U.S, histories of slavery and abolitionism, capital formation and labour organizing, forced migration and immigration, contemporary storytelling, life stories and political events, white privilege, spirituality, romance, marriage, motherhood, education, work in the private sphere, sport, leisure, public workplaces, the law, public policies, politics, organized social movements, and second wave feminism. In the final unit, our analysis will be structured more historically so that we can consider how feminist ideas about gender identification and stratification are directly linked to key historical events, social movements and feminist cultural icons from the 1920s to the present including pre-women's suffrage and suffrage thinkers, the feminist avant garde, wartime feminism, the culture of true womanhood, women in American inner-cities, suburbia and rural places, lesbian culture, Marxist and socialist feminisms, feminist geographies, postcolonial and postmodern feminisms, and girl culture.
Courses currently being revised or are in development
Flying Blind, American Women in Place and Landscape
Introductory Queer Studies

2010-11-24T20:30:00.024-05:00

Academic Courses & Programs

Border Studies

The Imaginary Indian
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/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.

Strangers In Good Company, 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.

2010-11-11T23:00:00.005-05:00

I Speak Out

The hip hop concert I produced for the Denver Public Library featuring David Amram, Panama Soweto & The Flobots.

2010-11-01T23:00:00.000-04:00

Academic Courses & Programs

Road Courses

Border Studies
Study Around the World
London Study Abroad
Jack Kerouac Study At Home

2010-05-15T23:00:00.018-04:00

I'm Happy To Be Here

*If you do not use headphones to listen to this you may miss the opening narration spoken over the opening credits by literary critic and novelist Amitava Kumar and composer and musician David Amram.

Shot entirely on point and shoot cameras and produced from start to finish in the field on a borrowed lap top computer in Japan, China, Vietnam, Cambodia, India, Mauritius, South Africa, Ghana and Brazil during the winter and spring of 2010, this short film captures a project I assign to students who take any road or place-based courses with me: To, quick simply, learn how to say the phrase "I'm happy to be here" in every language they encounter during the course, which is different from their own, [i.e., they language(s) they speak at home and the language(s) they speak at school]; and then second, to document themselves on digital video, actually speaking this phrase.

2010-05-13T17:18:00.006-04:00

Jane Austen, Literature's Posthumous "It" Girl

2008-12-31T14:30:00.091-05:00

The Mexican Girl Had A Name (2008)

Note: The people written about in this story were real and they did write letters to one another. The content of those letters, however, are my words, alone. More about The Mexican Girl is right here.

In between his carefully marked files of book manuscripts and letters, Jack Kerouac saved a black and white photograph of a young woman who he briefly fell in love with when he himself was quite young, barely twenty-six, and just a few months and a few thousand miles into the cross-country travels that would one day make him famous.

Her name was Beatrice, just like in Dante he would later note, and, even though in the photograph she stares straight into the camera unblinking and unsmiling, it is quite certain that for a short time she fell in love with him too.

"My Dearest Loving Jackie," she wrote on Friday, October 25, 1947. "Hope that when you get this letter in your sweet little hands you will have arrived safely home. I bet your mom will be there, waiting at the door, with arms ready to welcome you back. How I wish I were there, next to her. I missed you even before you said goodbye. Jackie, you know that if it weren't for little Albert, I would have gone with you even if it were hitchhiking. You say it's too hard, but even then, I would have gone, willingly."

She was small, blue-eyed and pretty, a third generation American of Mexican decent, with a mean husband, two young children and a large extended family of aunts and brothers who kept her and her children safe.

He met her on a bus heading out of Bakersfield, California, a few hours outside of Oakland, they were both traveling south, and after shyly introducing himself, she invited him to sit with her, the two of them sinking immediately into a deep conversation and the privacy of their shared double seat.

He told her he was a writer and had been on the road for several months, his first trip west, traveling from New York City to Chicago to Davenport to Des Moines, partly by hitching rides and partly by bus. Then came North Platte, Cheyenne, Laramie, Denver, Salt Lake, Reno and San Francisco, where he had planned to take a job as a ship's purser and head out to sea, but instead, for the last month had been working as a night watchman in Marin City.

He sent all the money he had earned home to his mother in New York, he told her. "You," she replied poking a finger into his shoulder and looking him straight into his eyes. "You -- are a good college boy."

She told him how she was traveling south to stay with her sister in Los Angeles. How she was having such bad trouble with her husband that she decided that she just had to leave, her parents agreeing to baby-sit her children and loan her some bus fare, just so she could, for a day or two at least, escape her husband's unrelenting rage and give herself a brief reprieve.

And there she was, she crowed, barely an hour out the door and already she felt better! She sunk down deeper into the rhythms of the bus, looking up at him with shining eyes and Jack, completely beguiled by her outburst of joy, took her hand in his and told her he didn't think he could ever let it go. "We sat shoulder to shoulder," Jack later wrote in his spiral bound diary, "She holding her ankles, her feet pulled up beneath her on the seat and holding in the breath that I knew was my only chance, I slid my palm in between her foot and her hand."

They got off in Los Angeles a few hours later, Jack still holding her hand and she now wearing his thick-lined canvas coat, and after a quick first breakfast and even quicker first argument, (she accused him of hustling her, then he accused her of hustling him), they checked into a run-down hotel room, their love effortless, inevitable, complete.

She was, Jack wrote later that morning, the most soulful girl he had ever met, well spoken, genuine and kind, the daughter of an America new and utterly foreign to him yet somehow strangely familiar, the migrant workers and Spanish lilted English of the California coast reminiscent of his own hometown in industrial Massachusetts and native New England French. He adored her and she him and so after their third night together they decided never to part, making plans to earn money so they could re-locate together to New York and quickly settling themselves into a sweet domestic bliss.

"Dearest Jackie," Beatrice wrote in between the pages of his diary the very next afternoon. "I took fifty cents for car fare and coffee so I could go to Carmen's. Will bring the change back." "Los Angeles," Jack wrote beneath Bea's note on the very same page, later that night, "Looking out the window of the hotel, the sirens whining, the whole awful city groaning, while Bea soundly sleeps."

They returned back north to Beatrice's hometown in the vineyards outside of Selma, finding work picking cotton and setting up house with Beatrice's son in a leaky ragged tent. Which seemed like a good plan at the time, with the sun still high every morning, warming the earth and their backs. But the winter rains came early that year and the cotton was scarce, so they made a new plan for Beatrice to move back with her son into her parent's house in the village proper with Jack sleeping a few doors down in a neighbor's goat house free of rent.

"Dear Alex," Beatrice wrote to her brother, again in between the pages of Jack's diary, "Will you please come over today so that little Albert and I can come to stay with the folks. It's so cold for us here and we can't make anything picking cotton." "Working out in the fields," Jack wrote on the backside of her note, "We felt the winter slowly seep up through our knees and decided to stop."

Less than a day after they moved to the village, there were rumors that Beatrice's husband was furious and coming after them, that he was going to kill the Anglo who had taken up with his wife. Beatrice's father threatened to kill Jack himself if there was even a hint of any trouble. So again, within a few days, they had to change their plans, with Jack wiring his mother asking to borrow fifty dollars so he could catch a bus home out of Los Angeles and Beatrice promising Jack that she would follow him, that she would meet him later in New York, in a few months.

"All the town's all a-gossip that Bea's husband is a-coming," Jack wrote. "All the town's a-gossip that there's gonna be a fight."

They said goodbye on the outskirts of Selma, Jack heading out towards Los Angeles on foot and then catching a bus to Pittsburgh, the closest stop home he could afford and Beatrice sending Jack a letter the very day he left addressing it to "Jackie Kerouac, Cross-Bay Boulevard, Ozone Park, Queens." "My Dearest Honey Jackie," she wrote. "I think a big part of me died today when we said goodbye. But what can I do? I will leave little Albert with my parents and work very hard starting Monday picking grapes for the winery at ten cents a box and I will save as much money as I can. Then I will be able to come see you in New York for Christmas and we will be together again."

She sent him a penny postcard a few days later from Los Angeles, after receiving a card from him postmarked "Phoenix," then explicit instructions on how to post his letters to her at her parent's house. "Do not use my sister's address in Los Angeles," she wrote. "Use the Selma address, my parent's address. And, write my name like this," she added, cramming her words in her letter's already crowded margins. 'Beatrice R. Franco,' because there's another Franco family in this town and I don't want my mail getting lost or mixed up."

He wrote her about his hard and hungry trip home (leaving out the pretty blond he met in St. Louis and necked with all the way to Columbus, Ohio) and the joy of settling back into his mother's walk-up in Ozone Park with her brand new Frigidaire, about the Mexican restaurants he would take her to when she made it out to New York, and about how in his dreams he could still feel her body beside him and make out every detail of her face. She wrote him back about her baby daughter Patsy, whom Jack had never met, her brother Alex's new girlfriend Nellie, about her son Albert coming down with pneumonia and the long nights she had to stay up at his bedside, trying herself not to become sick.

"What work children are," she wrote. "Though I really don't mind. Still I envy your freedom to just pick up and leave, to just be able to get up and take off, to just go! How I wish I could do the same, to just leave this place and everything behind so I could be with you right now in New York."

They each wrote one another again in late November, he writing her that they might have to postpone their reunion, since he was thinking about shipping off with the Merchant Marines, she writing back that she was broke and overburdened, and that her husband was back wanting to reconcile, trying to seduce her with promises and schemes. But by December their romance was over. At least until Jack decided to write about her about five years later, in the spring of 1951, in one of his early typewritten drafts of his novel On The Road, before he would change any of the characters names.

He wrote, "Bea brought my breakfast. I had my bag all packed and ready to go to New York, as soon as I picked up my money in Selma. I knew it was there, waiting for me by now. I told Bea I was leaving. She had been thinking about it all night and was resigned to it. Emotionlessly she kissed me in the vineyards and walked off down the row. We turned at a dozen paces, for love is a duel, and looked at each other for the last time."

"'See you in New York Bea,' I said. She was supposed to drive to New York in a month with her brother. But we both knew she wouldn't make it somehow. At a hundred feet I turned to look at her. She just walked back to the shack, carrying my breakfast plate in one hand. I bowed my head and watched her. Well lackadaddy I was on the road again. I walked down the highway to Selma, eating black walnuts from the walnut tree. I walked on the SP tracks and balanced on the rail, I passed a water tower and a factory. This was the end of something."

He would, a few years after he first wrote of their romance, mark up all of his diary entries about her and label all the letters she had sent with the fictional name he would eventually give her. "Teresa," he would note, "She is Teresa from On The Road. And in 1957 Viking Press would publish On The Road, this story of Teresa in particular singled out and featured six months earlier in The Paris Review, as well as chosen by Martha Foley for the Best American Short Stories Anthology of 1956.

But right then, in the early winter of 1947, her name to him was still just Beatrice, the beautiful Mexican girl who pre-occupied his life for two weeks and his diary for two months before slowly disappearing and giving way to his one other pre-occupation that year, the novel he was writing, The Town and the City ...

2008-12-31T14:00:00.087-05:00

Afterward for David Amram's Vibrations (Paradigm 2009)

I first read David Amram's autobiography Vibrations in 1987 when I was seventeen, having found it by chance in the library looking for books about Bob Dylan and James Dean. And even though I had no ambition of becoming a composer or a musician like David happened to be, I was completely and utterly in love with New York City in the late 1950s and its impossibly romantic bohemian scene. Vibrations was set right in the middle of it.

David worked with jazz greats Lionel Hampton and Charlie Mingus, playwright Arthur Miller and movie director Elia Kazan, he recorded jazz albums in Paris, wrote an opera about the Holocaust for network television, shot a cameo in Robert Frank's experimental film Pull My Daisy and was the first composer for Joe Papp's Shakespeare in the Park.

He spoke fluent French and Spanish and German, learned to play two and three penny whistles at once, the Middle Eastern dumbek, the Chinese husai and wove into his symphonies and concertos rhythms from Native and Latin America, from India, from Marrakesh. And even though his work was refined and eclectic and sometimes a little bit obscure, he was forever immortalized into American pop culture by both Esquire and Life magazine.

The Esquire article came first, in 1957, just two years after he arrived in New York, a photograph of David all buttoned up in a jacket and tie playing the French horn with his quartet at the Five Spot in Greenwich Village with directions for readers on how they could find him. The article in Life was published a little over ten years later after that, a three-page story laid out in the exact same format the magazine had used to introduce new talent before, like Jackson Pollack in 1949 or Jean Seberg in 1963.

Under the headline, "David Amram, A Rising American Composer," Diana Lurie wrote, "David Amram, his teeth clenched with conviction tackles a set of snare drums with the bravado of a Buddy Rich, breakfasts on rice, almonds and peppermint tea and goes lumbering down Park Avenue in a battered Land Rover."

The article continues, "He has composed dozens of works for orchestra and chamber groups which are becoming widely performed, three movie scores and several jazz pieces. Last year he became the New York Philharmonic's first resident composer in the 1966-67 season. In this post he wrote The King Lear Variations, which was performed last spring. After hearing it, one veteran critic predicted that if young Amram kept it up, he would most likely help set a direction for modern American music."

Vibrations was just another part of all this, just another unexpected project from David's quirky well-lived life. He had first balked at the idea of writing it thinking that at the age of thirty-six he was still far too young to write his autobiography. But an editor at MacMillian persisted and so David eventually gave in deciding that if nothing else a book would reflect well on his literary family, (his mother and sister were both translators, his father and grandfather legal scholars), as well as help promote his music, for the classical composer always an unpredictable and often less than profitable pursuit.

He started writing and not without hesitation for aside from an undergraduate history thesis on the social effects of whaling in Nantucket and a barely started novel about a young Greek American French horn player, he had never really written anything longer than the occasional poem or letter.

Still, over the years much of his best musical compositions and performances had been inspired by plays, movies, novelists and poets, he had a memory well-honed from learning and conducting classical music scores and he knew from his work as a composer and musician that the best forms of self expression always required two simple things: Purity of intent and an exquisite choice of notes. After a long year of writing, Vibrations would have both.

Which, is why, I think, it left such a powerful impression on me. For even though David's life was filled with extraordinarily talented people and circumstances and moments and scenes, his telling of it was very humble and very beautiful, very real.

He came into this life out of nowhere he wrote, (having spent his boyhood on a farm in rural Pennsylvania, the only Jewish family in a town of a hundred and twenty and his adolescence in one of the few integrated neighborhoods in Washington D.C.), he worried about pleasing his parents and smarter older sister and knew very well what it was like to try and try and sometimes be rejected or fail and how hard such rejections or failures were, especially when times were lean.

But there was also the grand old community of composers and musicians, who since his boyhood had encouraged him and taken him under their wing, (like Dmitri Metropolis and Leonard Bernstein), his West Village community of like minded poet and painter acquaintances and friends, (like e. e. cummings and Franz Kline), and the warmth of his one and half room Sixth Avenue walk-up, barely big enough to move a piano in. "When are you going to give up on this bourgeois existence," his close friend Jack Kerouac once joked while temporarily camped out in a sleeping bag on his couch.

Lives like this really happen, I thought. Lives like this could include -- me. I studied the photographs in Vibrations for evidence of stories I read in the text, (if the bungalow David shared during the summers he worked on Fire Island was as bare as he wrote, if he really walked through wintry streets with his French horn and a bag full of instruments slung over his shoulder like a sailor headed out to sea). And made lists of the addresses of places I promised myself to one day go out into the world and find, to one day go out into the world and be, (the Art Foods Deli, the Café Figaro, the Village Vanguard, the Village Gate).

Today I laugh when I think about how this book enchanted me, because at the time it was already twenty-years old. In 1987 David was no longer a rising young composer but an established, respected one composing hundreds more symphonic works including ones for the Philadelphia Orchestra, choreographer Jacques D'Amboise, flutist James Gallway and the family of Woody Guthrie.

He had gone on to perform in Cuba with Dizzy Gillespie and all over the country with Floyd Red Crow Westerman and Willie Nelson, become a lyric in a famous children's song and had long moved out of his Sixth Avenue apartment having married and become a father, all facts about his life that I had no idea about when I first read his autobiography when I was seventeen. Such are the power of stories, especially life ones. They forever freeze a person in time, lasting far longer than the actual person, the actual time itself.

I know this truth well, since today, amazingly, I know David Amram in life and not just his autobiography. In the early spring of 2005 I met him after asking him to participate in one of my courses on the sociology of American culture and we quickly became artistic and pedagogical collaborators, putting together a series of lectures and courses not only about this topic but also, the often discordant relationship between our respective disciplinary homes, his being the arts, mine, the academy.

It has been an exciting and productive collaboration, one that has taken us from the University of Denver to Shakespeare's New Globe Theatre to the 2008 Democratic National Convention to Brown University. We have created courses and programming about the 50th Anniversary of Jack Kerouac's novel On The Road, the historical links between jazz poetry and hip hop, the legacy of the American civil rights movement and of David's own artistic and cultural legacy.

But it has also been a challenging one, for no matter how much alike in mind and taste and spirit we may be, there is always the burden of my seventeen year old imagination haunting us. Though I know that he is seventy-eight and his autobiography, forty-three, David at thirty-six, (almost my exact same age at our first actual, real live meeting), is often all I can ever see -- even at his sixtieth high school reunion.

I try to talk about this with David all the time, of what it might have been had we met and had been the same age. But this conversation doesn't really interest him. For David, age is all at once an inevitable and unimportant truth about who we are. That is, he is, quite simply, who he is today, the exact same person he was in his late thirties, only older. He doesn't see himself as being anything more or less than who he was then.

And as for what it would have been like to meet me then, the question just seems silly to him. "Audrey," he always says calmly. "You weren't born yet. Charlie Parker always said 'now' is the time, now is the time. Let's talk about 'now,' not then."

So we talk about "now" and I think about "then." I can't help it. Especially whenever I venture to his old neighborhood doing him a favor by delivering his latest symphonic work to his music copyist or meeting him after his monthly gig in the city.

I make my way to Cornelia St. and Bleecker and walk down the steps to the basement club where he plays. And then I suddenly I stop, right there in the middle of the steps and said out loud to myself, "What are you doing? You have to get over this. You have to stop thinking you're going around with David Amram in Greenwich Village in the 1950s."

But then I suddenly heard David playing through the tunneled doorways in that basement bar and am left with no other choice but to keep going, feeling all the stories in Vibrations I once read and re-read and forever committed to my memory feeling solid beneath my feet. "Just once more," I whisper to myself walking down the steps. "'Now' can wait one more night."