CORE 101 Humanities for Just Communities
This summer virtual course is part of the Humanities for Just Communities (HJC) curriculum, which aims to demonstrate the power of the Humanities to address a different social justice issue each year. Open only to incoming first-year students. Graded on Credit/No Credit basis only.
Migration, Displacement, and Cultural Resilience
In summer 2023, the HJC summer virtual course will introduce students to the range of ways Humanities disciplines—including Black Studies, History, Media Arts & Culture, Spanish, and Religious Studies—study the migration and displacement of people. Equipped with analytical frames from these fields, students will explore the transformative political activism of people of Asian descent who migrated to the United States from the 19th century to the present; the “Great Migrations” of six million African Americans who left the rural South to move to cities in the North, Midwest, and West in the first half of the 20th century, laying the groundwork for the civil rights movement, the quest for Black power, and ongoing social justice movements; how and why food has shaped the contours and collective identities of migrant communities, as well as the core of migrant rights projects in California; the connections between language, identity, and “home” for speakers of Spanish, Mandarin, and indigenous American languages in Los Angeles; fights for migrant justice and migrant rights in contemporary feminist transnational cinema; and the ways in which displaced peoples today frame their experiences in terms of ancient precedents (such as, odyssey and exodus), providing them with conceptual resources to cope with and navigate their own displacement.