Graduate

LALS 200 Bridging Latin American and Latina/o Studies

Provides historical and analytical foundations for the inter/transdisciplinary and transnational project of bridging the fields of Latin American and Latino studies (area and ethnic studies). Explores social, cultural, economic, and political changes connecting Latin America and U.S. Latina/o communities. Traces the intellectual genealogy of these efforts and how they contribute to each other. Introduces students to LALS' four substantive themes: (1) Transnationalisms, Migrations, and Displacement; (2) Intersectionality, Identities, and Inequalities; (3) Collective Action, Social Movements, and Social Change; and (4) Culture, Power, and Knowledge. Core requirement for students pursuing the Designated Emphasis in Latin American and Latino studies.

Credits

5

Instructor

Fernando Leiva

Requirements

Enrollment is restricted to graduate students.

Quarter offered

Fall

LALS 200A Power and Society

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.

Credits

5

Instructor

Fernando Leiva

Requirements

Enrollment is restricted to graduate students.

LALS 200B Cultures and Subjectivities in the Américas

Introduces theoretical frameworks that explore the relationships between culture, power, and subjectivities. Emphasizes developing interdisciplinary, interpretive, and analytic skills and engages foundational critical approaches including queer theory, border theory, subaltern studies, intersectionality, feminisms, and critical race theory. (Formerly Theories of Culture in the Americas.)

Credits

5

Instructor

Patricia Pinho

Requirements

Enrollment is restricted to graduate students.

Quarter offered

Winter

LALS 201 Research in Practice

Problematizes the construction of research approaches in the interdisciplinary field of Latin American and Latino studies, and showcases particular approaches in the social sciences and humanities so students may engage in innovative, transnational research. (Formerly Research in Praxis: Epistemology, Ontology, and Ethics.)

Credits

5

Instructor

Catherine Ramirez

Requirements

Enrollment is restricted to graduate students.

Quarter offered

Spring

LALS 202 Latin/o American Spaces and Modernity

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.

Credits

5

Instructor

Cecilia Rivas

Requirements

Enrollment is restricted to graduate students.

LALS 203 Latin American Social Movements

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

Credits

5

Instructor

Jessica Taft

Requirements

Enrollment is restricted to graduate students.

LALS 204 Migration, Borders, and Borderlands

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.

Credits

5

Requirements

Enrollment is restricted to graduate students.

LALS 205 Comparison as Method

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? (Formerly offered as Comparative Mobilities.)

Credits

5

Instructor

Catherine Ramirez

Requirements

Enrollment is restricted to graduate students.

LALS 206 Queer Cuba

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.

Credits

5

Requirements

Enrollment is restricted to graduate students.

LALS 207 Youth Cultures, Global Capitalism, and Social Change

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.

Credits

5

Instructor

Jessica Taft

Requirements

Enrollment is restricted graduate students.

LALS 208 Politics of Childhood and Youth

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.

Credits

5

Instructor

Jessica Taft

Requirements

Enrollment is restricted to graduate students.

LALS 210 Latina Feminisms: Theory and Practice

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.

Credits

5

Instructor

Sylvanna Falcon

Requirements

Enrollment is restricted to graduate students.

LALS 211 Paradigms of Race/Color, Sexuality, and Culture in Latin America

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.

Credits

5

Requirements

Enrollment is restricted to graduate students.

LALS 212 Latina/o Ethnographic Practice

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.

Credits

5

Requirements

Enrollment is restricted to graduate students.

LALS 215 Latina Cultural Studies: Culture, Power, and Coloniality

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.

Credits

5

Requirements

Enrollment is restricted to graduate students.

LALS 220 Transnational Civil Society: Limits and Possibilities

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.

Credits

5

Requirements

Enrollment is restricted to graduate students.

LALS 225 Race in the Americas

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.

Credits

5

Instructor

Gabriela Arredondo

Requirements

Enrollment is restricted to graduate students.

LALS 235 Sexuality and Migration

Approaches the nexus of sexuality and migration to examine contemporary theories of citizenship, security, violence, and power. Drawing on case studies that center experiences at, around, and across diverse borders throughout the Americas, the course takes an intersectional approach to understand: how migration is embedded in sexual identities and practices; and how sexuality, alongside race, class, and gender, influence who migrates and under what circumstances. Examining how researchers have approached sensitive questions of sexuality, students emerge better prepared to develop future research in the broader thematic fields of transnationalism, migration, and displacement.

Credits

5

Instructor

Justin Perez

Requirements

Enrollment is restricted to graduate students.

LALS 240 Culture and Politics of Human Rights

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.

Credits

5

Cross Listed Courses

FMST 240

Instructor

Sylvanna Falcon

Requirements

Enrollment is restricted to graduate students.

LALS 242 Globalization, Transnationalism, and Gender in the Americas

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.

Credits

5

Requirements

Enrollment is restricted to graduate students.

LALS 244 Digital Mapping and Human Geographies

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.

Credits

5

Instructor

Jeff Erbig

Requirements

Enrollment is restricted to graduate students.

LALS 245 Epistemologies of the South

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.

Credits

5

Instructor

Fernando Leiva

Requirements

Enrollment is restricted to graduate students.

Quarter offered

Fall, Winter, Spring

LALS 258 Critical Cultural Political Economy

Explores how the divide between cultural studies and political economy can be resolved through a post-disciplinary approach which is attentive to how semiotic and material practices co-constitute contemporary capitalism and an ever-changing set of strategies attempting to manage its multiple contradictions.

Credits

5

Requirements

Enrollment is restricted to graduate students, or by permission of the instructor.

LALS 292 LALS Graduate Colloquim

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.

Credits

2

Instructor

Patricia Pinho

Requirements

Enollment is restricted to graduate students.

Repeatable for credit

Yes

Quarter offered

Fall, Winter, Spring

LALS 297A Independent Study

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.

Credits

5

Repeatable for credit

Yes

LALS 297B Independent Study

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.

Credits

10

LALS 297C Independent Study

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.

Credits

15

LALS 299A Thesis Research

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

Credits

5

Repeatable for credit

Yes

LALS 299B Thesis Resaerch

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

Credits

10

Repeatable for credit

Yes

LALS 299C Thesis Research

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

Credits

15

Repeatable for credit

Yes

Cross-listed courses that are managed by another department are listed at the bottom.

Cross-listed Courses

PHIL 80E Latin American Philosophy

Is there a general school of philosophy endemic to Latin America? Would it have to appeal to quintessential Western philosophical questions regarding knowledge, values, and reality? If not, why not, and would it then still count as philosophy? What difference do ethnic and national diversity, as well as strong political and social inequality, make to the development of philosophical questions and frameworks? Course explores a variety of historically situated Latin American thinkers who investigate ethnic identity, gender, and socio-political inequality and liberation, and historical memory, and who have also made important contributions to mainstream analytical and continental philosophy.

Credits

5

Cross Listed Courses

LALS 80E

POLI 243 Comparative Methods

Introduces the comparative method in social science. Trains students in the use of this method by examining how scholars have used it to compare across national governments, subnational units, public policies, organizations, social movements, and transnational collective action.

Credits

5

Cross Listed Courses

LALS 243

Instructor

Kent Eaton

Requirements

Enrollment is restricted to graduate students.

THEA 161P Theater in the Chicano Power Movement

Covers the rise of Teatro Chicano as a cultural-political force within the 1960's Chicano Power Movement starting with founding playwriter Luis Valdez and El Teatro Campesino and covering Chicana/o playwrights inspired by the movement, e.g. Cherrie Moraga, Luis Alfaro, and Josefina Lopez.

Credits

5

Cross Listed Courses

LALS 161P

General Education Code

ER