At this level, when the basic skills and working vocabulary have been mastered, emphasis can be placed on the linguistic rules to enable the student to communicate with more competence. There is also a focus on translation. Lessons use a holistic approach and incorporate discussions on history, current events, literature, pop culture, and native values. To observe and experience the language at work, the course includes field trips to Filipino centers in the New York/ New Jersey area, as well as invited guests who converse with students in Filipino about their life and work.
An introduction to Filipino with an emphasis on mastering basic grammar skills and working vocabulary. Lessons incorporate discussions on history, current events, literature, pop culture, and native values. Open to beginning language students, and lessons are modified according to the needs of individual students. Because language is key to connecting with community concerns, the course includes field trips to Filipino neighborhoods in Queens and Jersey City.
Provides students with an elementary understanding of Swahili, a Bantu language with a rich oral and written tradition that is spoken by about 100 million people from Somalia to Mozambique and Zanzibar. After a short presentation of Swahili?s history, codification, and relation to other languages, students are drilled in phonetics and grammar. They are also introduced to poems, songs, and oral narratives.
America is not always the answer. This class offers an introduction to the many and varied fictions that have been produced by diasporic South Asians across the globe over the last 150 years: in Australia, Africa, Europe, Caribbean. Our exploration of the poetics and politics of immigration will attend to different types of traveller (inc. soldiers, students, athletes, medics, cosmonauts) and draw on a wide range of media (inc. literature, cinema and music). Particular attention will be paid to the diverse geographies of Asian migration – be they plantations, dance Floors, restaurants, call centres. Themes to be addressed include coolietude, globalization, the impact of 9/11 and techno-servitude.
Designed to interest and challenge both the student new to the study of gender and sexuality and the student who has taken departmental courses focusing on women, gender, and/or sexuality. Through a focus on particular issues and topics, explores the construction of sex, gender, and sexuality; gender asymmetry in society; sexual normativity and violations of norms; and the interactions of sex, gender, sexuality, race, class, and nation. This interdisciplinary course engages materials and methodologies from a range of media and disciplines, such as literature, the visual arts, history, sociology, psychology, and anthropology. Examines both feminist and nonfeminist arguments from a variety of critical perspectives.
This course examines fashion as both a product and expression of globalization. It explores fashion’s contested histories; its modes of production, consumption, and address; its relationship to colonial enterprises; its system of meaning-making. In this course, we will tackle such issues as the social uses of fashion; the fashion cycle (use, reuse, discard); the relationship between dress and the body; feminist critiques of fashion; the politicization of clothing (from ethnic dressing to green clothing); and the links between style consumption and garment production–and the relationship of all of these to the processes of globalization.
This course examines the history of Latinx contributions to the artistic vitality of the United States and will introduce students to some of the contemporary artists, debates and institutions that support Latinx art in NYC and beyond. We will pay especial attention to the relationship between Latinx and Latin American art and consider linkages between museums, private and governmental art stakeholders and communities. We will visit studios, speak to artists and also learn about the role of contemporary art markets in shaping Latinx art worlds.
Explores environmental issues in urban centers, their causes and impacts, and the rise of a movement that considers the “environment” not just as the term we use to describe the natural world from which most urban residents feel dissociated, but rather as the array of places where we live, work and play. Considers the relationship between society and public policy in the context of environmentalism. Introduces students to public policy analysis, with a focus on policy implementation and decision-making in New York City. Examines the powers of the NYC Council and explains the role of agencies, the private sector, and interest groups as critical parts of a bureaucracy through which environmental issues are shaped, managed and negotiated. Through a variety of case studies, increases students’ understanding of the political, legal, economic and technical and scientific constraints of the policy decision-making process and explores the path towards managing, using and protecting environmental resources in urban centers.
Historically, education has been the most accessible and effective means for groups to achieve social mobility in American society. However, access to public education has never been equal for all segments of society, and there continues to be considerable variability in the quality of education provided to students. As a result of both explicit and subtle discrimination, racialized minority groups have at various times been denied access to education or been relegated to inferior schools or classrooms. Yet education has also been the arena where the greatest advances in social justice and racial equality have been achieved. Understanding the contradictions created by the hope and unfulfilled promise of American education is a central theme of this course.
Introduces theories, methods, and political trajectories central to the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis (SCA). SCA 101 addresses how individuals and populations structure their worlds and navigate the resulting social, cultural, and political terrain. It privileges scholarly work with an intersectional approach, drawing on theoretical insights from such fields as social geography, feminism and queer studies, ethnic studies, urban and metropolitan studies, critical race theory, labor studies, and cultural studies.
What are the diverse ways in which New York City has been imagined on the silver screen? How does a cinematic perspective shape our understanding of urban spaces? This course analyzes films that portray New York as a site of local encounter and global exchange in both commercial and documentary films since the 1960s. We will investigate the dramatic mapping and remapping of urban space through works that articulate questions of gentrification, immigrant labor, organized crime, and sexual subcultures. In turn, we will examine how these stories have helped shape and contest the city’s image of itself–as a space of struggle, belonging, illegality, emancipation, and transformation. The goal is to see how each particular film captures a distinct moment both in the city’s history over the past fifty years as well as in the history of filmmaking. In so doing, we will blend the perspectives of urban studies, ethnic studies, and visual culture, placing films within their aesthetic, political, and historical context.
Marcel Mauss developed a concept of an alternative, non-market type of economy, based on a nonmonetary exchange of such symbolic values as social recognition, sovereignty, and political participation. Today, this concept has acquired a new relevance in relation to the economy of the Internet. Examines various theories of the symbolic that expand the original Maussian model and encompass multiple aspects of culture.
Iampolski. Offered every year. 4 points. An examination of the history of Russian cinema from its beginnings. The main focus is on landmarks of cinematic art and on the cultural specificity of Russian cinema. The survey also includes questions of cinema and politics (cinema as a propaganda tool), and cinema and the market. Artists discussed include Eisenstein, Vertov, Pudovkin, Kuleshov, Barnet, Shub, Kozintsev, Trauberg, and Tarkovsky. Topics include cinema and revolution, the cinema of the Russian avant-garde and constructivism, cinema and totalitarianism, and socialist realism in film.
Designed for students who speak some Russian at home but have virtually no reading and writing skills. Does not satisfy the College Core Curriculum language requirement.
Students work on pronunciation, grammar, and vocabulary enrichment. Emphasis is placed on developing and enhancing listening, comprehension and oral skills. Additional hours are offered to improve pronunciation. Written and oral examinations required.
The course combines the traditional grammatical approach with a communicational, interactive method. Since the size of the classes is usually small we can put a great emphasis on oral drills and improving speaking in Russian on various subjects. Students will be given short topics to talk about at the beginning of every lesson and most written essays will have to be presented orally in class. The class also focuses on improving your writing skills and broadening your vocabulary. That is why the students are expected to keep a diary in Russian and write several compositions during the course. The students will also read several Russian short stories which will be discussed in class. We will review familiar grammar and study some advanced grammatical structures. The students will do considerable amount of grammar and vocabulary exercises in the Workbook as part of the home assignments. Several short lectures on various aspects of Russian culture and history will be given during the course and we will watch two Russian films that would be followed by the discussions.