Race and Resistance in the Digital World ((3))

Catalog description

The course offers students an opportunity to explore and understand the complex issues of race, class and gender in digital culture within the United States and the ¿global¿ community. In particular, it will examine the relationships between race, class, gender and digital technology, and question how digital media serves to complicate, diversify, deconstruct and recreate cultural and social boundaries in the understanding of race, class, and gender, as well as, how concepts of race, class and gender are embodied in digital technologies. Students will examine tensions, anxieties and conflicts around race, class, gender, technology, and hegemonic culture, as well as the possibilities for alternative identities, communities, and cultures that digital technology offers. Students will create scholarly multimedia projects to express, reflect, and analyze their own attitudes on the issues of race, class, and gender in digital culture, and consider how living in a diverse society can function as a form of social and cultural enrichment. Further, this course will examine the ways in which race and ethnicity have shaped debates about politics, power, and digital technologies. Lastly, this course will emphasize how historically oppressed peoples use digital media to build community and struggle for social justice.