Course Descriptions
Locating Asias: (Nation, Culture and Diaspora)
Winter Quarter (W25)
Dept/Description | Course No., Title | Instructor |
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ART HIS (W25) | 162C CONTEMPORARY JAPAN | WINTHER TAMAKI, B. |
Emphasis/Category: Locating Asias (Nation, Culture, and Diaspora) This course highlights developments in Japanese art over the past half century emphasizing topics such as the avant-garde, women artists, environmental art, craft traditions, and museum exhibitions. Art works in media including manga, sculpture, architecture, printmaking, and installation art are examined as windows into war memory, the emperor system, pollution, urbanization, and other historical phenomena. | ||
ASIANAM (W25) | 100W RSCH METH/FIELD RES | QUINTANA, I. |
Emphasis/Category: Locating Asias (Nation, Culture, and Diaspora) In this course, we will explore a range of research methodologies in Asian American Studies and, more broadly, in Ethnic Studies. The readings are organized around questions, approaches, and critiques that will help students develop qualitative research skills, while also considering the politics of research and representation. Students are required to complete daily short written assignments, a research project, and in-class presentations. Peer-writing exchange workshops will be a key component of our learning. | ||
ASIANAM (W25) | 138 RACE & URBAN SPACE | QUINTANA, I. |
Emphasis/Category: Locating Asias (Nation, Culture, and Diaspora) This upper-division undergraduate course takes the city as a starting point to understand larger social and political developments in the United States. Processes of segregation and exclusion have placed nonwhite people on the periphery of social, cultural and geographical power in the nation. Histories of racialization tell us that power has always been contested, negotiated, and shaped by people and institutions in historical context—specific times and places. | ||
ASIANAM (W25) | 144 POLITICS OF PROTEST | KIM, C. |
Emphasis/Category: Locating Asias (Nation, Culture, and Diaspora) This course examines how the Black freedom struggle has challenged racial, economic, and political inequalities in U.S. history, with a specific focus on the role that Black collective action and social movements have played in advancing social change. We will look at abolitionism in the 1800s, Black internationalism during the long arc of the twentieth century, the civil rights movement, the Black Power movement, the Los Angeles rebellion of 1992, and the Black Lives Matter movement. | ||
ASIANAM (W25) | 168 ANIMAL RIGHTS | KIM, C. |
Emphasis/Category: Locating Asias (Nation, Culture, and Diaspora) This course examines the moral, legal, and practical status of nonhuman animals in the contemporary U.S. Topics to be covered include: theoretical debates about the moral status of animals; current knowledge about animal minds and emotions; modern industrial farming; the use of animals for scientific experimentation and human entertainment; the ethics of vegetarianism and veganism; divergent ideologies, strategies, and tactics within the animal liberation/welfare movement; the role of capitalism in furthering animal exploitation; the relationship between animals and ecological crisis; and the nexus of racism and speciesism. | ||
EAS (W25) | 120 NARR NATURE IN JPN | PITT, J. |
Emphasis/Category: Locating Asias (Nation, Culture, and Diaspora) Japanese culture is often portrayed as having a uniquely harmonious relationship to nature. From Shinto to Buddhism, from haiku poetry to the animated films of Miyazaki Hayao, nature has served as a central concern for Japanese thinkers, writers, and artists more broadly. At the same time, Japan has suffered from devastating natural disasters and industrial pollution. This course begins with two questions: 1) How can the human relationship to nature be both harmonious and harmful? and 2) What happens when we stop seeing nature as merely the background for human action, and start considering it as a character in a text? To answer these questions, we will adopt an interdisciplinary approach from the emerging field of environmental humanities. We will focus on examples of modern Japanese literature and film in which landscapes and non-human animals and plants play a central role, as well as religious texts, works of Japanese environmental philosophy, environmental history, and anthropology. We will examine the different ways nature is represented in all of these texts, and what these descriptions might say about the human relationship to nature. All readings will be in English translation; no Japanese language ability is required. | ||
EAS (W25) | 126 JAPANESE SOCIOLING | RIGGS, H. |
Emphasis/Category: Locating Asias (Nation, Culture, and Diaspora) This course is an introduction to Japanese sociolinguistics, which is the study of the relationship between a language and society. We will explore variety of language uses in modern Japanese and how such variation is constructed by identity and culture. An exploration of attitudes and ideologies about these varieties will be of importance to understanding this relationship. Its main goal is to provide students a systematic introduction to the nature and characteristics of the language use. The course covers: | ||
EAS (W25) | 190 BOTANICAL EAST ASIA | PITT, J. |
Emphasis/Category: Locating Asias (Nation, Culture, and Diaspora) What happens when plants do not stay silent? Are humans more like plants than we care to admit? With these questions in mind, this colloquium pairs theoretical readings from the field of Critical Plant Studies with novels, short stories, poetry, and films from Japan, China, and South Korea in which plants likes trees and moss are prominently featured. Through seminar-style discussion and student presentations, we will consider various depictions of plants, including plants as spiritual beings and at times as horrific monsters. How can cultural media from East Asia, including modern literary and cinematic works of drama, horror, and sci-fi teach us to see the botanical world in a new way? | ||
HISTORY (W25) | 132E ARMENIANS MODERN | BERBERIAN, H. |
Emphasis/Category: Inter-Area Studies, Locating Asias (Nation, Culture, and Diaspora), Global Middle East This course covers the most important themes in the history of Armenians and Armenia in the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries and does so within a regional (i.e., Middle East and Caucasus) and global context. This course will have a strong thematic approach as we proceed from imperial rule in the nineteenth century through twentieth-century genocide, brief independence, sovietization, and independence again, culminating in the Velvet Revolution, and most recently the war over Artsakh/Karabakh. As we explore this history, we will focus on Armenians as imperial and national subjects in ancestral lands as well as transimperial and transnational subjects in a diaspora that has had a complex relationship with the idea and reality of homeland. |
Courses Offered by Global Cultures or other Schools at UCI
Locating Asias: (Nation, Culture and Diaspora)
Winter Quarter (W25)
Dept | Course No., Title | Instructor |
---|---|---|
GLBLCLT (W25) | 103A GERMANY & ASIA | BROADBENT, P. |
Emphasis/Category: Locating Europes and European Colonies, Locating Asias (Nation, Culture, and Diaspora) |