Susana Loza

Although early internet theorists imagined the World Wide Web as a wild frontier where only minds mattered, social media testifies to the lasting force of bodily inscriptions like race, gender, sexuality, dis/ability, and class. In this course, we will consider how identity shapes how we communicate, debate, collaborate, and mobilize online. We will investigate how different populations engage with digital technologies and social media in particular; how such environments expedite stereotypes and construct difference; and how online platforms like YouTube, Twitter/X, Instagram, and Facebook are tools of social justice as well as replicators of reactionary ideologies. Our critical arsenal will draw upon Media Studies, Gender & Sexuality Studies, Cultural Studies, and Ethnic Studies. We will apply these theories to current events online. Throughout our examination of the politics of hashtags, memes, and trolls, we will foreground the ways that power relations continue to inform how bodies travel through the digital realm Keywords:Digital media, social media, social justice, Internet studies, sociology

Historically, settler states and imperial regimes have disenfranchised and dispossessed racialized Others by constructing ideological frameworks that justify and obscure the ongoing violence of the colonial process. Through a close examination of film, television, music, and digital media, this course will explore how contemporary US popular culture fabricates and disseminates imperialist fantasies and settler mythologies. It will interrogate the political meanings embedded in popular culture and ask: What do imperial productions and settler creations reveal about the tangled relationships between race, history, and desire? How do colonial and imperial settings propagate racism, sexism and ableism; anxieties about class, gender, and sexuality; and concerns about the white (settler) colonial state's ability to digest and domesticate non-normative Others? What are the material consequences of romanticizing imperialism and settler colonialism? Can cultural industries rooted in racial and sexual conquest be decolonized? How does one disrupt and subvert the white (settler) colonial gaze? Keywords:ethnic studies, critical race theory, colonialism, popular culture, film & media studies

Is music raced? Is it sexed? How do musical sounds and performances become racialized and sexualized? How does music reflect, reproduce, and/or contest gender and racial boundaries? How do individuals use music to express their cultural identity? Such questions hint at the undeniable yet ineffable influence of race and sex on the US musical imagination. This seminar will consider the fraught intersection of race, power, and desire in contemporary popular music (hip hop, electronic dance music, rock, pop, punk, R&B/soul, world music, etc.). Utilizing an interdisciplinary amalgam of Popular Music Studies, Post-Colonial Theory, Critical Race Studies, Ethnic Studies, Literary Criticism, Media Studies, Cultural Studies, and (Ethno)Musicology, we will investigate the local creation and global circulation of racially-coded and sexually-loaded sonic signifiers; questions of authenticity and appropriation; music as a form of cultural resistance and colonial domination; and music as a key component in identity formation. This course is reading-, writing-, and theory-intensive Keywords:Popular Music, Ethnic Studies, Queer Studies, Performance Studies, Black Studies

This seminar will examine the history of US immigration from the founding of the American nation to the great waves of European, Asian, and Mexican immigration during the 19th and early 20th centuries, to the more recent flows from Southeast Asia, Latin America, and Africa. In addition to investigating how these groups were defined and treated in relation to each other by the media, we will consider the following questions: Who is "American"? How does the American Dream obscure US settler colonialism and slavery? How do US immigration narratives, historically and currently, reveal the racial limits of citizenship? How do contemporary political debates about immigration compare with those from previous eras? Is public opinion about immigration shaped by the media? Special attention will be paid to the role of immigration in national politics; Hollywood's fabrication and circulation of ethnic and racial stereotypes; and the virulent xenophobia routinely exhibited in the media. This course is reading, writing, and theory intensive. Keywords:ethnic studies, critical race theory, american studies, media studies, sociology

In the wake of Obama's historic presidency, the American media triumphantly declared that we are living in post-racial times. But is race dead? Are we color-blind? If so, how do we explain the resurgence of white supremacy during and after the Trump presidency? Utilizing an interdisciplinary amalgam of Ethnic Studies, Critical Race Theory, Media Studies, US Third World Feminism, Sociology, Cultural Studies, Political Philosophy, and Post-Colonial Theory, this course will investigate how "race" continues to shape American society in the post-civil rights era. Topics to be covered include: the social construction of race, racial formation, panethnicity, class-based and gendered racialization, multiculturalism, neoliberalism, double-consciousness, colonialism, essentialism, institutional racism, commodification of race/ethnicity, identity politics, colorblind ideology, cultural appropriation, resistance, and citizenship. Particular attention will be paid to affirmative action, immigration, hate speech, hate crimes, reparations, racial profiling, and the reactionary rise of the right. This course is reading-, writing-, and theory-intensive Keywords:Government, Legal Studies, Politics, Sociology, Critical Race Theory The content of this course deals with issues of race and power

This seminar delves into the dynamics, debates, and desires that drive pop fandom. In this class, we ask: What is fan culture? Does it build community? Are fans different from other consumers? What are the ethics and politics of fandom? What are the aesthetic, social, and legal ramifications of fan-produced forms such as mash-ups, remixes, youtube videos, and fanfic/slash that borrow, customize, and reinterpret pop commodities? How do such textual appropriations call into question the boundaries between high and low, production and consumption, intellectual property and fair use? Do fan-produced forms challenge or reinforce Romantic notions of authorship and authenticity? Particular attention will be paid to: the queering of heterosexist pop texts; the racialized and sexualized construction of masculinity and femininity; the politics of sampling, remixing, and mashing; and the role of the Internet, blogs, and social networking technologies in fan culture. This course is reading-, writing-, and theory-intensive Keywords:Cultural Studies, Fandom Studies, Legal Studies, Internet Studies, Popular Music

Since its founding, the US has closely regulated the bodies of Others and punished those that rebel against these socially-constructed designations. Utilizing an interdisciplinary amalgam of Critical Race Theory, Sexuality Studies, Queer Theory, Media Studies, Sociology, American Studies, Performance Studies, and Feminist Theory, this course will explore how the state, the media, and civilian institutions police the boundaries of race, gender, and sexuality by pathologizing, criminalizing, and stigmatizing difference. We will also examine how the subjects burdened with these dangerous inscriptions evade and contest them through passing, performativity, and other forms of identity-based resistance. Special attention will be paid to the criminalization of cross-racial and same sex desire; the re-biologization of racial and sexual difference; the dehumanization of immigrants; the racialization of crime; the gendering of mental disorder; the rise of homonormativity; genetic surveillance; the biopolitics of reproduction; and the role of The Law in constructing and controlling deviant bodies. KEYWORDS:Critical Race Theory, Disability Studies, Queer Studies, Legal Studies, Sociology

Late capitalism, settler colonialism, and military imperialism have wrought catastrophic damage on our planet and its nonhuman ecologies. This course focuses on how speculative fictions and forms ? sonic, visual, and literary ? confront the legacies of imperialism, colonialism, and racism in order to imagine, envision, and enact more sustainable and just futures. Through a transdisciplinary examination of science fiction, cinematic fantasies, and popular music, this course contemplates how artists and thinkers reimagine possibilities of resistance, worldmaking, and kinship amid climate catastrophe. Questions to be considered include: what happens when we put race, gender, sexuality, and disability at the core of imagining new environmental justices? How do BIPOC/queer/disabled writers, musicians, and artists transform hegemonic genres into tools of decolonization? What do their speculative productions reveal about the complex relationships between marginalized bodies, history, and technology? How do such imaginings disrupt and dismantle white supremacy, settler colonialism, and cisheteropatriarchy? KEYWORDS: Speculative Fiction, Afrofuturism, Popular Music, Alternate History, Film Studies