This course explores intersections of racism and scientific knowledge production in the United States. We will study how racism has been persistent across scientific fields - ranging from medicine, ecology, and genetics to statistics, eugenics, computing, and more. Simultaneously, we will examine how science has shaped structural racism - including slavery, settler colonialism, racial capitalism, immigration, militarism, policing, and incarceration. Science and technology have simultaneously been integral to scientific and technological progress. In doing so, we will also learn how science and racism are intertwined with other intersecting social and political identities: such as gender, class, sexuality, disability, and nation.

This course examines the memory and politics of war as produced through film. War has been central to circuits of modern power and imperialism; we will study how war has constructed imaginaries of race, gender, and violence both in the United States and across its empire. We will investigate multiple valences of war: from war as a spectacular event on the battlefield to war as an omnipresent force that shapes how people move through daily life. Through the medium of film (documentary, Hollywood, and indie), this course will explore what it means to live in a war society and a society perpetually at war.

Beginning with its conception in the Third World Liberation Front and anti-war social movements of the mid-20th century, Asian American studies has always been concerned with contesting U.S. racism and empire as it expanded across the United States, Asia, and the Pacific. From the early migration of Chinese and South Asian laborers to the United States to the proliferation of military bases across Hawai‘i, the Philippines, Guam, and South Korea, the making of U.S. empire has always been predicated on the dispossession of land and exploitation of labor. This course will place the racialization of Asian Americans within materialist histories of racial capitalism, settler colonialism, incarceration, militarism, environmental racism, and immigration exclusion. In doing so, this course expands our understandings of the structural violences that comprise U.S. empire, and how analytics of race, gender, sexuality, and disability become central nodes through which power operates. Additionally, we will approach the racialization of Asian Americans as a relational process, and examine how Asian American studies opens up new horizons for transnational and decolonial solidarities.

This course examines the global and historical contexts in which “life” and “death” become sites of political significance in the construction of the “human.” Humanity is not a shared universal condition, but rather a paradigm of power shaped by the violences of global capitalism, colonialism, militarization, and imperialism. Using an interdisciplinary approach that draws from history, political theory, literature, and science and technology studies, we will interrogate how categories of race, gender, sexuality, (dis)ability, and nation shape the uneven distribution of life and death across different populations. We will pay special attention to queer and feminist of color imaginaries that envision capacious, more-than-human ways of living and being that gesture towards decolonial possibilities of relating to the world.

This course offers an introduction to key terms and concepts in queer and feminist scholarship to better understand the social and political construction of gender, race, sexuality, disability, and nation as mutually constitutive and intersecting categories. Moving beyond an understanding of these categories as markers of individual identities, this course examines how social inequities are coproduced through and mutually dependent on structures of violence, including but not limited to settler colonialism, chattel slavery, militarism, and racial capitalism. We will think critically about gender and sexuality as opening analytics for understanding how difference shapes people’s material realities and lived experiences, as well explore radical, feminist social movements that open up new horizons of possibility.

This course surveys a variety of Asian American cultural productions to explore the different forms of embodiment that Asian America has inhabited at the intersections of race, gender, sexuality, and (dis)ability. Students will be introduced to theories from performance studies, Asian American studies, science studies, and feminist and queer theory to think critically about how the “body,” as both biological entity and aesthetic form, has figured prominently in narratives about Asian American racial formation. Topics will include: biopolitics, racial fears of contagion, war and militarization, techno-orientalism, environmental justice, and monstrosity.