Social Relationships and Responsibility: Whiteness Studies

Theme: Whiteness Studies

Through this course, students will examine both the history of the representation of race and whiteness in the United States and Western Europe and also the ways in which such representations have been shaped by cultural, political, historical, social, and economic forces and contexts in political and economic structures, academia, the mass media, and popular culture. Students will examine a wide range of works related to this increasingly established field of inquiry regarding these issues from the fields of anthropology, history, sociology, political science, and cultural studies. These readings and class discussions will emphasize the ways in which multiple discourses from each of these different fields of study have impacted each other and worked both in unison and tension to influence the ways in which the study and concepts of race and whiteness have been perceived and portrayed over the past several centuries.