Spring 2025 Course Offerings

Also listed as AFCS 1261

Instructor: Kris Manjapra

CRN: 38162

Days, Time: MW 2:50-4:30PM

Description:

Focuses on the culture and history of Caribbean societies in global perspective. Explores Caribbean creativity and resilience across English, French, and Spanish linguistic and political spheres with examples from literature, art, music, food, technology, and performance. Considers the global reach of Caribbean diasporas, highlighting the long local histories of Caribbean communities in Boston. Follows four key themes—indigeneity, blackness, diaspora, and creolization—to understand this unique point of entry for the study of race, gender, and sexuality in the Americas.

Instructor: Isabel Martinez

CRN: 37253

Days, Time: MW 2:50-4:30PM

Description:

Surveys topics related to Latinx youthhood. Includes historical, social, and cultural roots of Latinx youthhoods in the United States and how Latinx youthhood has been shaped within colonial, transnational, and global contexts. Emphasizes understanding the ways in which social institutions found in and across the United States and Latin American sending communities have structured Latinx youthhoods in relation to race, gender, class, and citizenship, as well as how Latinx youths have exercised agency to contest the social inequalities resulting from the practices and policies of these social institutions.

Instructor: Alan West-Duran

CRN: 30740

Days, Time: MWR 10:30-11:35AM

Description:

Examines the rich interconnections between literature and language and the culture that supports them. Discusses the relationship of language to literature and investigates how language and literatures are embedded in culture. Addresses several very broad and important questions, such as the relationship between language and culture; the relationship between language and thought; the definition of cultural relativism; and how ethical dilemmas are expressed in different cultures. Explores the relationship of esthetic and rhetorical traditions in given languages to the culture from which they sprang. In this context, examines the extremely interesting case of American Sign Language and how a gestural language sheds light on these issues.

Instructor: 3 sections

CRN: 30339, 37629, 40273

Days, Time: 3 sections

Description:

Examines contemporary works of cinematography in Latin America, focusing on the culture and imagery of the Spanish-, French-, and Portuguese-speaking peoples of the Western hemisphere, including the United States. Critically engages topics of history, memory, and cultural resiliency; colonialism, racism, and patriarchy; dictatorship, revolution, and democratization; and nationalism, dependency, and globalization. Conducted in English; most films are in French, Portuguese, or Spanish with English subtitles.

Instructor: Daniel Voionmaa

CRN: 36349

Days, Time: MWR 10:30-11:35AM

Description:

Offers students an opportunity to learn about Latin American culture through the study of historical episodes such as colonization, independence, and dictatorships. Explores current issues including migration, globalization, and digital media. Examines writings by Latin American authors and selected films from Latin America. Conducted in English.

Instructor: Alan West-Duran

CRN: 33169

Days, Time:  MW 2:50-4:30PM

Description:

Introduces the study of world cinema from the past several decades as a form of artistic and cultural expression. Emphasizes the way that different ethnicities and cultures mix and even clash within national boundaries. Readings cover such topics as the postcolonial inheritance, immigration, the boundaries of class, the pressures of modernization, ethnic identities, and historical memory. Examines storytelling in its multicultural aspects and deals with the diverse influences of entertainment cinema and art cinema, as well as measures taken by countries to limit the influx of foreign films in order to protect their own cultural productivity. One overall concern of the course is the place of film in contemporary global culture.

Instructor: Daniel Cuenca

CRN: 37630

Days, Time:  MW 2:50-4:30PM

Description:

Examines issues in social justice in contemporary works of cinematography from Latin American and Latinx cultures. Critically engages—from a technical (cinematographic) and socio-historical perspective—topics related to the representations of historically vulnerable populations, such as people of color, women, LGBTQIA+ persons, and indigenous peoples. Conducted in Spanish.

Instructor: Daniel Voionmaa

CRN: 10700

Days, Time:  MWR 1:35-2:40PM

Description:

Offers an overview of the major trends in Latin American narrative, poetry, drama, and essays, from Bernal Diaz through Borges and Bolaño. Studies broad cultural and political contexts, especially the Cold War period and the impact of neoliberalism. Conducted in Spanish.

Also listed with HUSV and SOCL

Instructor: Matthew Lee

CRN: 33755

Days, Time: MR 11:45AM-1:25PM

Description:

Examines racism, racial identity, and theories of social change and racial empowerment primarily within the U.S. context. Highlights different ways in which racism and racial privilege have been experienced by different racial communities, more specifically at the micro-, meso-, and macro-levels. Offers students an opportunity to learn ways to promote racial empowerment and equity. Using theory from primarily psychology and sociology, the course investigates the impact of social systems and institutions on individual-level and group experiences of racism. Investigates students’ own racial identities, a deeper understanding of institutional inequalities and intersectionality, and practical skills in leadership and community building that can promote positive social change and racial equality.

Also listed with SOCL

Instructor: Anjanette Chan Tack

CRN: 40399

Days, Time: TF 1:35-3:15PM

Description:

Examines the comparative racialization of Blacks and Asians in the Americas and relations between these communities. Introduces sociological theories of race/ethnicity, a chronology of Afro-Asian relations in the United States, and the impact of 1970s deindustrialization and post–1965 Asian immigration. Covers the internationalism of Black and Asian leaders (e.g., W.E.B. du Bois and Mao Tse-Tung) in the developing nations and the overlapping Civil Rights, Black Power, and Asian American movements.

Also listed with WMNS and POLS

Instructor: Layla Brown

CRN: 39664

Days, Time: T 11:45AM-1:25PM, R 2:50-4:30PM

Description: 

Introduces key issues, themes, and debates in feminist transnational theory, practice, and activism in contemporary contexts and how it has changed under socioeconomic, political, and cultural processes of globalization. Examines differences among women relating to race, class, sexuality, national identity, and political economy in reckoning with possibilities for sustainable social justice. Students interrogate the relationship between the local and global; the production of knowledge in different regional spaces; the pragmatics of political mobilization; the varying contours of “social justice”; and other key issues. Offers students an opportunity to discuss the impact of globalization, neoliberalism, and state and intimate violence on gendered politics and relations and to contend with the politics of difference, to debate its challenges, and to imagine possible futures for transnational gender justice.

Instructor: Mario Hernandez

CRN: 38964

Days, Time: MW 11:50AM-1:30PM

Description: 

Focuses on the social construction of race and ethnicity and the nature of dominant/minority relations in the United States. Emphasizes the peculiar evolution of race relations in U.S. history, the political and economic conditions that have transformed race relations, and the nature of contemporary racial and ethnic relations in the United States. Topics include immigration, ethnic and racial identity, discrimination, and race-based policies (e.g., residential restrictive codes, Jim Crow segregation). Offers students an opportunity to develop a critical lens from which to observe and interpret contemporary debates over structural racism.

Instructor: Ramiro Martinez

CRN: 33463

Days, Time: TF 1:35-3:15PM

Description: 

Explores theories and research on the institutionalized forms of inequality that have accompanied the rise of advanced capitalism in Western society. Major topics include the competing definitions of class that have developed among social scientists; the relation between class and race in the United States; how class and gender have intersected historically; and the link between workers’ movements, political systems, and the forms that capitalist development has assumed in Western Europe and the United States. Students conduct projects in which they explore the conceptions of social justice held by members of subordinate groups.

• ASNS 1150 – East Asian Studies
• HIST 1215 – Origins of Today: Historical Roots of Contemporary Issues
• HIST 2211 – The World Since 1945

• ASNS 2245 – Introduction to Asian American Studies
• ANTH 4350 – Ethnography of Southeast Asia
• PHIL 1275 – Hinduism, Buddhism, and Beyond
• PHIL 1290 – Chinese Philosophy and Religion

• ASNS 2245 – Introduction to Asian American Studies
• ASNS 3100 – Asian American Cinemas
• HIST 1252 – Japanese Literature & Culture
• HIST 2308 – Law, Justice, and Society in Modern China
• HIST 2351 – Modern Japan
• AFAM 4526 – Afro-Asian Relations in the Americas
• CLTR 1700 – Intro to Japanese Pop Culture
• PHIL 1275 – Hinduism, Buddhism, and Beyond
• PHIL 1290 – Chinese Philosophy and Religion
• ANTH 4350 – Ethnography of Southeast Asia

See course catalog for more options – or email csgs@northeastern.edu if you see a potential class that would apply!