Study Around The World
This series of courses was created for the Institute for Shipboard Education, i.e., Semester at Sea, which for that semester was housed at the University of Virginia
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. •
Shipwrecks, Castaways, Pirates and 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. • University of Virginia