Syllabi
Working with San Diego Newcomer Communities
The EDS 137/139 course offers UCSD students a service-learning opportunity to work in newcomer and refugee communities in San Diego, and to critically analyze policies and practices that affect access to equitable opportunities to learn.
The Refugee
This course explores how refugees have portrayed themselves and have been portrayed in literature, memoir, testimony, film, and art. Mindful of the current political crisis over refugees, it focuses mainly on the post-45 years and contextualize our study of refugee art by reading widely from law, political and globalization theory, border studies, anthropology, history, and policy.
Writing About History: Climate Refugees
We will also look at how these displacements have created new opportunities for collective responses to addressing climate change that are rooted in migrant, indigenous, land, and human rights. This course is designed to train students in effective methods of researching and writing about history.
Critical Refugee Studies
This course explores refugees not as a problem to be solved but as a site of social and political critiques of colonization, war, human rights, and displacement.
Intro to Critical Refugee Studies
Critical refugee studies is an emergent multidisciplinary field of studies that intersects the humanities and the social sciences. It encompasses several strands of inquiry that interrogate the politics of refugees and refugees’ impacts. Departing from dominant understandings of refugees as victims, objects of rescue, problems, and crises, this course reconfigures refugees and refugeeness as fluid subjects and sites of social, political, and cultural inquiries and critiques.
Advancing Refugee Justice Through an Academic Institution
This introductory course focused on the deconstruction of refugee indentities. Incorporating art and music, the course examines five examples of forced migration affecting refugees of color and LGBTQ refugees.
Critical Refugee Studies
This undergraduate lecture course introduces students to the field of critical refugee studies. Rather than depict the refugee as a victim of displacement or an object of sociological study, this course centers the refugee as a subject of knowledge production. We inquire what critical analyses of war, empire, militarism, and humanitarianism are made visible via a refugee epistemology. This course is transnational and intersectional in analysis. We begin by mapping the political and theoretical field of critical refugee studies, attending to the ways in which the refugee figure highlights the limits of the nation-state order to guarantee human rights. We will then focus on how particular refugee subjects—Vietnamese, Cambodian, Lao, Syrian, Iranian, Palestinian, Central American—negotiate their refugee status and stories via cultural production. During this course, we will identify what criticisms of state violence, imperial intervention, and humanitarian discourse a refugee epistemology makes possible, as well as inquire how the different formal qualities of each piece of literature or film dictate the shape and meaning of the refugee intervention.