Race and Racism in America: A Very Short History

Picture this: you and your friends are grabbing burgers and you overhear someone order a pop. You instantly get the urge to correct them because soda is the proper word you were taught. Later, the server brings the coke they ordered, which further increases your urge to intervene because they actually ordered Sprite. After all, soda is the correct word. Or is it? Which word is correct? Actually, they all are.

Linguistic variation is inherent to all languages and from a linguistic standpoint, all languages are equal. Yet, humans are continuously judged, evaluated, and discriminated against based on how they speak and write in professional, academic, and everyday settings. These seemingly innocuous comments about correctness have harmful effects on people who don’t conform to perceived language standards. As a result, various forms of discrimination and policies that exist continue to marginalize people due to misinformation and in some cases, disinformation. In this class, we will examine the intersections of language, ideology, and discrimination in everyday, educational, and professional settings while developing our research practices.

Classes will be facilitated through weekly reading discussions and discourse analysis of data (i.e., data sessions) in small and whole group activities. Readings will address the intersections of language and discrimination, such as accentism, racialization, language subordination, and social identities. The class will provide foundational concepts from applied linguistics and related fields, such as sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology. The course is also focused on developing your research literacies and project management skills. You will learn how to develop and carry out a project, evaluate the credibility of information, and various types of data. Labs will be used to create space for data sessions and peer-reviews.

Through discourse analysis, you will apply concepts you learned in class to develop your understanding of linguistic diversity and language related issues. Projects can utilize print and digital media to address, for instance, monolingual policies and their impact in educational or workplace settings, intersections of language and gender or race, and various forms of linguistic discrimination in the US or other contexts.

There are no prerequisites and this course is suitable for students who are curious about language, discourse, social issues, as well as research. Students will be evaluated based on completed assignments, such as readings and other homework, research projects, peer-review, and overall class contributions, including lab sessions. You must be prepared to reflect on implicit biases and perceptions of language and rethink how you approach and conceptualize research. This course meets both the writing requirement and HS requirement as it develops genre knowledge, rhetorical awareness, understanding of writing as dynamic and iterative processes, and research literacies grounded in social sciences.

This course is designed for students planning to teach in schools whether in Maine or outside of the United States. Culturally sustaining/revitalizing education (CSRE) builds on the aims, values, insights, and practices of anti-racist education, culturally relevant pedagogy, culturally responsive teaching, culturally sustaining/revitalizing pedagogy, decolonizing education, global education, intercultural education, and multicultural education. In particular, it aims to contextualize education in the history of colonization, land theft, slavery, the continued struggle for sovereignty and self-determination of native tribes and First Nations, and calls for wider community accountability. This educational approach challenges deficit mindsets and structures that undergird policies and practices that widen the opportunity gap and equitable access to basic human and civil rights and impede educational access for sustaining and revitalizing cultures that settler colonialism has attempted to eliminate, assimilate, or marginalize. Students will practice asset-based and growth mindsets to gain an understanding of the relationship between CSRE and respect for tribal sovereignty and support of contemporary struggles for tribal continuity and resistance to cultural genocide and epistemicide. The course also opens a dialogue on the applicability of CRSE for immigrant, refugee, and asylum-seeking students whose relationship to their new place of residence may be tenuous at best and whose heritage languages and cultures are also endangered as a result of first- to second-generation assimilation in their adopted communities. Students will gain an understanding of conceptual frameworks, knowledge of empirical studies documenting outcomes and impacts of these approaches, and skills in ethically and effectively teaching indigenous, immigrant, and other culturally and linguistically diverse learners. For students seeking Maine teaching endorsements, this course will prepare them to implement LD291 requiring Maine educators to teach Wabanaki history and culture. Students will learn through field trips, guest speakers, films, discussions, critical exploration and reflection, independent research, observation/fieldwork/practicum, and peer teaching. Evaluation will include artifacts to be incorporated into a teaching portfolio: a lesson plan, teaching video, self-assessment, assessment of PK-12 student work, and communication with families and community members. Although there are no prerequisites, the following are recommended; Learning and/or proficiency in a language other than English; a psychology, sociology, or anthropology course; and/or a prior education course.

Algerian Jewish philosopher, Jacques Derrida (1930-2004), one of the most widely translated French philosophers of the 20th century, developed a body of work often referred to as "deconstruction." Derrida’s oeuvre has influenced multiple fields and disciplines, including Literature, Anthropology, Philosophy, Postcolonial Studies, Psychoanalysis and Feminist Theory. This course will track some of the ways in which Derrida engaged with ideas of difference, through a focus on questions his work poses for understandings of the human. The class will engage with Derrida’s archive through reading some of his early work, including essays and interviews about the status of writing and speech, language, and philosophy, and then move through his later work, including his increasing focus on explicitly political topics such as the death Peñalty, the animal, sovereignty, and war. Although the texts we read will be primarily Derrida’s own writing, we will also read authors who respond to and build on Derrida’s thought. These may include Gayatri Spivak, Ranjana Khanna, Samir Haddad, Peggy Kamuf, and Michael Naas, as well as texts by those with whom Derrida was in dialogue, such as Sigmund Freud, Hélène Cixous, Michel Foucault, Sarah Kofman, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Karl Marx, Martin Heidegger and Emmanuel Levinas. As we move through Derrida’s texts and those informed by them, we will pay particular attention to questions about sexual difference, colonialism, the human, death in relation to life, and representation. Students will be evaluated on participation in seminar discussions, weekly reading responses, a mid-term paper and final paper. There are no prerequisites for this course, but students will be expected to conduct close readings of challenging texts. Students are encouraged to contact the professor with any questions about the course and whether it is a good fit for them.

This course will explore heroines from two Hindu epics, Mahabharata and Ramayana, alongside the Greek mythological figures Ariadne, Medusa, Circe, and Galatea. Both sets of heroines have generated deeply rooted cultural archetypes. Central to the upbringing of more than half of the Indian population through comic books, TV shows, movies, and the like, the Hindu epics have set the standard for what an ideal Hindu woman should be, bolstering the patriarchal system in the name of religion and culture. Much like Helen of Troy, “the face that launched a thousand ships” in Greek mythology, some of these women have been the cause of wars of “epic proportions.” Others have become infamous archetypes for women’s witchiness and trouble-making, especially in Greek epics Western authors have retold. Myths of their beauty or its opposite have long been part of these narratives, but do we hear them speak? What do we know about the power they yield? Epics and mythologies have been unable to provide us with concrete answers.

Therefore, we will turn to female authors like Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, Kavita Kané, Volga, and Vaishnavi Patel for the Hindu epics and Madeline Miller, Jennifer Saint, and Rosie Hewlett for the Greek tales. These authors have created spaces where women’s voices can be heard and analyzed, where archetypal and epic types can be studied as multifaceted humans. We’ll not only read their novels closely but also supplement their work with feminist theory and short videos. Eventually, we’ll trace how these epics stay relevant with regard to the construction of gender and sexuality in the modern Indian and Western world.

Students will be evaluated based on class participation, an oral presentation, response posts, final paper, and a multimodal project. This class will be good for students who are interested in reading feminist literature and theory and understanding the enduring power of epics and myths as well as the contemporary feminist purpose in giving their heroines voice. Reading the Indian epics alongside the Greek tales will provide an opportunity for ample comparison of patriarchal systems and how they developed in representative cultures from the East and West.

This seminar will provide an in-depth exploration of public speech texts by a wide array of 19th century woman suffrage activists in the United States. This includes works by those individuals most often associated with the first wave of the movement including: Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Sojourner Truth, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Ernestine Rose, Anna Dickinson, Lucretia Mott, Victoria Woodhull, as well as other activists who are generally less well known today. While this is a course rooted in the history of what we might consider early American feminism, it should come as no surprise that, along the way, we will confront issues that continue to have salience today. Many of the topics surrounding gender, sex, identity, equality, empowerment, and political allyship that these activists wrestled with are still just as relevant for us to consider in our contemporary context. This is especially true when it comes to the topic of race and the intersectional nature of the discourse around gender equality, both then and now. We will spend time examining how the idea of race was rhetorically constituted, in both exclusionary and inclusionary ways, within these texts. We will also look specifically at the works of early Black feminists in the United States, and the myriad of ways they navigated the challenges of the moment, especially as they confronted a deeply embedded legacy of white supremacy within the early woman suffrage movement. Rather than rely primarily on secondary historical accounts, there will be a heavy emphasis on the close reading of primary source materials, mostly speeches, as we encounter these speakers “in their own words.” In addition, students will also take part in “hands on” recovery projects designed to locate, transcribe, document, and make broadly accessible works from the period that have been previously undocumented or left unaccounted for. In doing so, students will learn basic techniques for exploring and making effective use of various types of digitized historical collections that have emerged in recent years. Class sessions will be organized as a discussed based seminar. Assignments will emphasize critical, reflective, and analytical writing. Evaluation will be based on participation in class discussion, short written response papers, two longer form take-home essays, individual presentations, and a final “recovery” project. Students interested in topics related to gender, politics, historical research, and activism are especially encouraged to enroll. This is an introductory class and open to all students regardless of whether they have a previous background in feminism, social theory, US history, or politics.

It feels like pizza has always been considered American, but we know that it was originally brought to the US by Italian immigrants. Both the US and Italy claim pizza as a national dish, and this type of debate about where food comes from—and who it belongs to—is highly connected to our national and local identities. As humans continue to migrate across borders and blur the boundaries in digital spaces, our identities continue to develop as we interact with each other and different types of food. We will consider how this movement shapes our ideas of ‘foreign’ and ‘local’ and how one becomes the other, as well as the line between honoring a culture and appropriating it.

We will examine the intersections of the genre conventions, rhetorical situation, and the writers’ identities to understand how these elements work together when producing texts. We will learn key composition concepts (genre, rhetorical situation, and multimodality) and support the development of your genre research skills. We will use these concepts and conduct genre research to examine various food writing genres, such as narratives, recipes, and social media posts to understand how writing is an activity that goes beyond putting words together on a piece of paper. These activities will support your overall genre research skills and deepen your understanding of writing, which can be transferred to other writing activities beyond this course. Classes will be based on genre analysis activities and group discussions. We will read works that address food writing genres and identity, and we will watch documentaries that explore the intersections of food, identity, and migration. Course assignments include your reproduction of a food writing genre, weekly reading responses, reflections and narratives to document your learning trajectory, which will also be used for assessment purposes.