Reading Race: Race, Literacy & Intersectional Research

Catalog description

This course provides an opportunity for the exploration of representations of race in a variety of forums from academic literature to popular media. In this class, we will employ an understanding of literacy that broadens the definitions of texts and reading beyond paper books and our interactions with them. The unifying feature of the artifacts considered will be a consideration of their implications for education and, more specifically, education for social justice. Together we will explore the ways that race has come to be understood both historically and contemporarily in a range of contexts from those that are popular and social in nature to those that are scientific and academic. These understandings will inform our interrogations of educational and literacy topics. Our lived experiences will be a prominent and important feature of the class as will be the course readings-the grounding of our conversations. By the end of this class, students can expect to have developed, bolstered or refined their own stances on race and how it can be taken up in educational and/or research work. This course is suggested for individuals interested in applying a racialized lens of understanding to their work, regardless of the disciplinary field.