This class, team-taught by CEE Visiting Fellow Reggie Wilson and Deborah Thomas, investigates various forms of contemporary performance in relationship to Africanist forms and functions of dance, movement and action. We will concern ourselves with how the body knows, and with how we learn to identify the structures of movement that provide context, meaning and usefulness to various Africanist communities across time and space. Grounding ourselves within a history of ethnographic analyses of the body in motion, and within Africana theorizing about the affective power of the body, we will consider what people are doing when they are dancing. In other words, we will train ourselves to recognize the cultural values, social purposes, and choreographic innovations embedded in bodily action and motion. While we will attend to these phenomena in a range of locations throughout the African diaspora, we will also highlight aspects of the Shaker and Black Shout traditions in Philadelphia. The course will be divided between discussions centered on close reading of primary and secondary material (both text and video) and creative writing/movement exploration (no previous movement experience necessary).

In this activity-centric course, you will explore art, medicine, and magic as entangled approaches for healing human bodies across time, space, and societies. At first glance, artists, doctors, and religious leaders may seem to address questions about bodies and healing in very different ways. Yet, in practice, art, magic, and medicine have been in deep conversation with one another for millennia. 4,000 years ago in Mesopotamia, medical doctors were professionals who had offices, hospital beds, and pharmacological and surgical equipment expertise, but they often worked hand in hand with diviners and exorcists. In rural Haiti today, Haitian Vodou priestesses collect herbs, craft sculptures, and sing as they clean wounds and dispense antibiotics within the course of a single "remed" (remedy). In the United States, megachurches send thousands of doctors on evangelical medical missions each year, while in Colombia, contemporary artists are called on to assuage profound social trauma related to decades of military conflict. Examples like these show that art, magic, and medical practice have long been entangled technologies; sometimes working together, sometimes at odds with one another, these practices have always been in dialog about what "healing" is and how it can be achieved. Attending to these entanglements this course asks "what does healing look like and feel like - in what ways do humans transform affliction?" Together, we will investigate how everyday bodily experiences of "wellbeing" and "illness" are configured through art, magic, and medical practices across human communities, shaping how people understand and manage disorders from COVID-19 to schizophrenia, from ancestral trauma to breast cancer. Throughout the course, you will use ethnographic case studies & in-class activities to work through three aspects of the core class question: 1) how do art, magic, and medicine work in communities? 2) how are they experienced in communities (who has access to what kind of healing and who doesn't have access; who can be a healer and who can't be; what should and does healing/sickness feel like?) 3) how do they approach inequalities? (e.g. how and why are illnesses unequally distributed; what illnesses matter more (and less) than others; which communities should be saved (and which sacrificed).

This course is about how to apply a race, gender and LGBTQ lens to support contemporary social justice movements in the U.S. and globally, including Black Lives Matter, #MeToo, transgender equality, and disability justice. We will explore intersectionality as a theoretical framework, and how it is practically applied to support social justice organizations and leaders, and fund social change. Over the course of the semester, Professor of Practice Roz Lee, a black lesbian feminist and lifelong racial, gender, LGBTQ and economic justice advocate, and who currently serves as Vice President of Strategy and Programs at the Ms. Foundation for Women, will be joined by movement leaders and philanthropy colleagues to discuss and analyze what's happening on the frontlines of movements for equity, justice and freedom.

The end of colonial rule was the springboard for the start of cold wars in various regions of Africa. Where peace could not be maintained violence erupted. Even where secession has been attained, as in the new country of South Sudan, the threat of civil war lingers. While domestic politics have led to the rise of armed conflicts and civil wars in many African countries, the external factors should also not be ignored. Important in all current conflicts is the concern to international peace and security. Overall this course will: (1) investigate the general nature of armed conflicts in Africa (2) provide in-depth analysis of the underlying factors (3) and discuss the regional and the international responses to these conflicts and their implications. Special emphasis will be placed upon African conflicts and civil wars in: great Lakes area, Mali, Nigeria, Senegal, Sudan, Somalia, South Sudan, and Uganda.

This course draws on an interdisciplinary body of biological and social scientific literature to explore critically the connections between race, science, and justice in the United States, including scientific theories of racial inequality, from the eighteenth century to the genomic age. After investigating varying concepts of race, as well as their uses in eugenics, criminology, anthropology, sociology, neuroscience, and medicine, we will focus on the recent expansion of genomic research and technologies that treat race as a biological category that can be identified at the molecular level, including race-specific pharmaceuticals, commercial ancestry testing, and racial profiling with DNA forensics. We will discuss the significance of scientific investigations of racial difference for advancing racial justice in the United States.

This course draws on an interdisciplinary body of biological and social scientific literature to explore critically the connections between race, science, and justice in the United States, including scientific theories of racial inequality, from the eighteenth century to the genomic age. After investigating varying concepts of race, as well as their uses in eugenics, criminology, anthropology, sociology, neuroscience, and medicine, we will focus on the recent expansion of genomic research and technologies that treat race as a biological category that can be identified at the molecular level, including race-specific pharmaceuticals, commercial ancestry testing, and racial profiling with DNA forensics. We will discuss the significance of scientific investigations of racial difference for advancing racial justice in the United States.

This course draws on an interdisciplinary body of biological and social scientific literature to explore critically the connections between race, science, and justice in the United States, including scientific theories of racial inequality, from the eighteenth century to the genomic age. After investigating varying concepts of race, as well as their uses in eugenics, criminology, anthropology, sociology, neuroscience, and medicine, we will focus on the recent expansion of genomic research and technologies that treat race as a biological category that can be identified at the molecular level, including race-specific pharmaceuticals, commercial ancestry testing, and racial profiling with DNA forensics. We will discuss the significance of scientific investigations of racial difference for advancing racial justice in the United States.

One's home is the first site of self-identity, socialization, and notions of citizenship. In the United States, neighborhoods are the basic units of political organization, educational options, and familial wealth. This course explores the intersections between race and housing in the United States with a specific focus on the experiences of African-Americans in urban centers. The intersectional housing experiences of Asian, Latinx, first-generation immigrants, Arab, and indigenous communities will also be analyzed. This course represents both a timely and nuanced opportunity to address housing as a focal point of existing racial tensions and deepening socio-economic inequalities in the U.S. Increasingly, housing has become a contested subject, with heated debates concerning its status as a human, and potentially constitutional, right. Students will explore urban governance values, the commodification of urban landscapes, and the institutional dimensions of race in the United States. Students will develop a critical understanding of the underlying structural causation for the issues faced by minority populations seeking adequate, affordable, and safe housing in the U.S. Prior knowledge of urban planning, housing, or social policy is not necessary for this course. Students will finish the course equipped with a broad knowledge base of associated development topics including globalization, commodification, and social justice.

In recent decades, many African countries have perennially ranked very high among the most religious. This course serves as an introduction to major forms of religiosity in sub-Saharan Africa. Emphasis will be devoted to the indigenous religious traditions, Christianity and Islam, as they are practiced on the continent. We will examine how these religious traditions intersect with various aspects of life on the continent. The aim of this class is to help students to better understand various aspects of African cultures by dismantling stereotypes and assumptions that have long characterized the study of religions in Africa. The readings and lectures are will be drawn from historical and a few anthropological, and literary sources.

In this advanced seminar, students will be introduced to a variety of approaches to African American literatures, and to a wide spectrum of methodologies and ideological postures (for example, The Black Arts Movement). The course will present an assortment of emphases, some of them focused on geography (for example, the Harlem Renaissance), others focused on genre (autobiography, poetry or drama), the politics of gender and class, or a particular grouping of authors. Previous versions of this course have included "African American Autobigraphy," "Backgrounds of African American Literature," "The Black Narrative" (beginning with eighteenth century slave narratives and working toward contemporary literature), as well as seminars on urban spaces, jazz, migration, oral narratives, black Christianity, and African-American music. See Africana Studies Department's website at https://africana.sas.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.