Graduate

Explores social, cultural, economic, and political changes that connect Latin America and U.S. Latina/o communities. The objective of this interdisciplinary team-taught course is to bridge previously distinct research approaches of Latin American and Latina/o studies to better understand processes that link peoples and ideas across borders as well as help students to conceptually and methodologically identify and design new objects of study and revisit traditional approaches. Core requirement for students pursuing the Parenthetical Notation in Latin American and Latino studies.

Assesses key concepts organized around questions of power in contemporary Latina/o and Latin American interdisciplinary intellectual thought in the social sciences. Emphasis is on understanding power in relation to transnationalism and the department's substantive themes.

Introduces foundational theories and problems organized around questions of culture and epistemology; emphasizes developing interdisciplinary, humanities-based interpretive and analytic skills for understanding how culture is conceptualized; draws from critical social and cultural theories.

Problematizes the construction of research approaches in the interdisciplinary field of Latin American and Latino studies, and provides training in particular approaches in the social sciences and humanities so students may engage in innovative, transnational research.

Students engage and discuss texts that examine the relationship between space, narratives, and ideas of the modern nation, along with critical studies that highlight the social effects of imaginaries and representations.

Grounds students in the social science literature on Latin American social movements, integrating anthropological, sociological, and political science approaches to the field.

Explores concepts and approaches related to migration; the multiple types of borders that migrants transcend--geopolitical, social, cultural, or interpersonal; and borderland formations constructed in relation to bodies in motion.

Brings together comparative studies of physical and social mobility with a focus on race, migration, and citizenship. Both an articulation and study of comparison, course is organized around three components: comparative borders; comparative migration; and comparative ethnic studies. The questions animating it include: What happens when different histories, places, and peoples are compared? How and why do scholars in the humanities and humanistic social sciences compare? What are the strengths and challenges of a comparative approach?

Seminar that engages social, political, and cultural histories of homosexuality in Cuba, focusing on LGBT ostracism and activism after 1959, with particular attention to the social and economic impact of the developments of the USSR on Cuba's LGBT population.

Introduces intellectual histories of youth studies scholarship in the context of Latin American and Latino studies; explores young people's lived experiences of racialized capitalism and globalization; and addresses various forms of youth resistance and the relationship between youth cultures, politics, and social change.

Explores how narratives about children, teens, youth, and students are imbued with political significance, and the ways young people are actively engaged in political practices. Considers how representations and lived experiences of youth can serve to reproduce and/or challenge inequalities.

Through an interdisciplinary approach, explores Latina feminist social theory and scholarly practice—especially in representation and interpretation of Latina experiences. Examining key texts at different historical junctures, charts how Latinas of varied ethnic, class, sexual, or racialized social locations have constructed oppositional and/or relational theories and alternative epistemologies or political scholarly interventions and, in the process, have problematized borders, identities, cultural expressions, and coalitions.

Explores foundational texts by Latin American intellectuals that have served to construct and sustain continental, regional, national, and transnational cartographies of identities and the search for lo americano. Examines race/color, sexuality, and culture by tracing their narrative and conceptual (trans)formations in the region and its diaspora. Most texts are read in the original language of publication.

Explores the social construction of Latino cultures in their varied regional, national-ethic, and gendered contexts. Examines how culture, as a dynamic process constructed with a historical context of hierarchical relations of group power, is interrelated to the structural subordination of Latinos. Focuses on how power relations create a context for the creation of specific Latino cultural expressions and processes.

Examines the theories and practices informing the field of Latina cultural studies in the Americas. For students pursuing the Designated Emphasis in Latin American and Latino studies and students with interest in theories of coloniality of power, decolonialism, intercultural and transnational feminist methodologies. (Formerly Latina Cultural Studies: Transborder Feminist Imaginaries.)

Analyzes social, civic, and political actors that come together across borders to constitute transnational civil society, drawing from political sociology, political economy, comparative politics, and anthropology to address collective identity formation, collective action, institutional impacts, and political cultures.

Considers historical moments in the development of race in the Americas to understand how race is given meaning and actualized through practices, beliefs, and behaviors. Interrogates theories and racial dynamics in the 19th through 21st centuries to reveal interconnections with constructions of gender and nation.

Examines cultural, philosophical, and political foundations for human rights and provides students with critical grounding in the major theoretical debates over conceptualizations of human rights in the Americas. Addresses the role of feminist activism and jurisprudence in the expansion of human rights since the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Addresses challenges of accommodating gender rights, collective rights, and social and economic rights within international human rights framework.

Explores how globalization, transnationalism, and the social construction of gender are interrelated, contingent, and subject to human agency and resistance. Examines particular configurations of globalization, transnationalism, and gender through the Américas and their implications for race, space, work, social movements, migration, and construction of collective memory.

Explores the utility of geographical information systems (GIS) for social science research. This course has three components: critical discussions of spatial analysis in published research, training in GIS software, and the application of digital mapping to students' research projects.

Examines efforts by intellectuals from the Global South, mainly Latin America, to cast off the political, cultural, and epistemological notions imposed by European colonialism and preserved today through the practices of Western/Eurocentric knowledge, to forge their own epistemologies of the South.

Required for all LALS graduate students in residence, colloquium includes a mix of activities aimed at supporting the development of graduate students as teachers, researchers, and active participants in academic communities. Includes lectures by distinguished speakers, work-in-progress sessions for both faculty and graduate student research, pedagogical theory and practice seminars, and professional development workshops.

Students submit a reading course proposal to a department faculty member who supervises independent study in the field. Faculty and student jointly agree upon reading list. Students expected to meet regularly with faculty to discuss readings. This independent study must focus on a subject not covered by current UCSC graduate curriculum. Students submit petition to sponsoring agency. Enrollment restricted to graduate students.

Students submit a reading course proposal to a department faculty member who supervises independent study in the field. Faculty and student jointly agree upon reading list. Students expected to meet regularly with faculty to discuss readings. This independent study must focus on a subject not covered by current UCSC graduate curriculum. Students submit petition to sponsoring agency. Enrollment restricted to graduate students.

Students submit a reading course proposal to a department faculty member who supervises independent study in the field. Faculty and student jointly agree upon reading list. Students expected to meet regularly with faculty to discuss readings. This independent study must focus on a subject not covered by current UCSC graduate curriculum. Students submit petition to sponsoring agency. Enrollment restricted to graduate students.

Enrollment restricted to graduate students and permission of instructor. Students submit petition to sponsoring agency.

Enrollment restricted to graduate students and permission of instructor. Students submit petition to sponsoring agency.

Enrollment restricted to graduate students and permission of instructor. Students submit petition to sponsoring agency.