Pro-seminar: Research in Ethnic Studies
Ethnic
Studies 200C Ross
Frank
Spring 2012 ” Office: SSB 227
Thursday 10AM – 12:50PM, SSB 103 Phone: 534-6646
Office Hours: Weds. 10-2 and by appt. rfrank@weber.ucsd.edu
Course materials available at: http://weber.ucsd.edu/~rfrank
Course Description
This course will present students with project research designs, in the form of published monographs, and presented by Ethnic Studies and affiliated faculty. We will interrogate published works to understand their component parts, the research design, and the decisions made that resulted in the presentation of the scholarship in its final form. Presenters will discuss how they conceive of and pose their research questions, integrate theoretical and methodological models that guide their research plan, how they think about the type and direction of the research undertaken, and how they conceptualize the end result in terms of presentation and reading audiences, publishing plans, and the larger conversations that the research will engage.
Evaluation
Seminar
assignments will consists of:
1) Active
participation in the discussion of the materials considered in class each week. This requires that students come to
class having completed the readings assigned, and having given thought to the
series of questions set out below.
Seminar participation and weekly responses (see #2 below) accounts for 30%
of the seminar grade. Evaluation will recognize primarily student's insight and
constructive participation in achieving the collective intellectual goals of
the seminar.
2) In order to focus class
discussions, students during 2, 3, 5, 7 and 9 will post a weekly 1-2 page
response paper by 6PM the Wednesday evening before class. We will agree on a common means of
distribution (email, TED, Dropbox) at the first class meeting. Response papers will address the set of Guidelines
outlined below in relation to the week's assigned readings.
Students will read the response papers
submitted by the other students before the class meeting on Thursday.
3) During
weeks 2, 3, 5, 7 and 9, one or two students will facilitate the seminar meeting
in order to help the class elicit and organize productive discussions about the
week's reading. Facilitation of the
seminar meeting will provide 20% of the final grade.
4) Each
student will prepare and present in seminar 2 Research Topic Papers: 5-10 pp.
preliminary ideas for research projects in Ethnic Studies. The research idea paper needs
to (1) specify the thesis topic and research questions; (2) indicate the relevant literature(s)
that place the proposed research topic in context; 3) identify the significance of the
project as original Ethnic Studies discovery scholarship; (4) explain and
justify the research methods to be employed; (5) indicate the feasibility of
the research and identity the primary sources or data bases to be used. One or two students will present their draft
research topic paper each week during weeks 3-10. The week following a presentation, a
revised draft of the Research Topic Paper will be due by the beginning of the
Thursday class meeting. Each
Research Topic Paper will comprise 25% of the seminar grade (a total of 50%).
Guidelines for interrogating assigned readings
¥ What
area(s) of research does the work cover?
Within those areas, what central research question or questions does the
book pose and strive to answer?
What related or ancillary research questions emerge?
¥ Theoretical
frameworks are used to shape the understanding of the areas of research and the
research questions, as well as to help interperet the material under
analysis. Identify the major theoretical
influences used to create such a framework. What other theories are utilized, and
how are they employed?
¥ Which
methodologies are employed to organize the collection, organization, and
analysis of the information, data, or other materials that are used to
structure and argue responses to the research questions? How does the work respond to the tension
between methodologies that have disciplinary origins and strategies for
interdisciplinary research and analysis?
¥ What
materials are used as evidence over the course of the book? How are they used? How appropriate and effective is the
evidence and the uses made of it?
¥ What
is the structure or architecture of the text that organizes theory,
methodology, information, and analysis to bring them to bear on the research
questions and goals at hand?
Acommodations
Please
discuss with me as soon as possible any disabilities or medical conditions that
may affect your participation in any aspect of the course, and if you require
specific accommodations. I will make
all reasonable efforts to assist students in completing and benefitting from
the course.
Syllabus
Readings
NOTE:
These books have not been ordered.
Please plan on purchasing or arranging for library copies.
Patrick
Anderson. So Much Wasted: Hunger, Performance, and the Morbidity of Resistance. Durham: Duke University Press, 2010.
John D.
Blanco. Frontier Constitutions: Christianity and Colonial Empire in the
Nineteenth-Century Philippines.
Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2009.
Jodi A.
Byrd. Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critques of Colonialism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 2011.
Fatima El-Tayeb. European
Others: Queering Ethnicity in Postnational Europe. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2011.
Avery Gordon. Ghostly Matters : Haunting and the Sociological Imagination.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997.
”
Week 1 (April 5): Introduction – What is Ethnic Studies?
Please
read the following for Week 1
seminar:
Gloria Bowles, Clara Sue Kidwell, Ron
Takaki. "Ethnic Studies and Women's Studies at UC/Berkeley: A Collective
Interview." The Radical
Teacher , 14 (December, 1979), pp. 12-18. W
Stable URL:
http://www.jstor.org/stable/20709219
Evelyn Hu-DeHart, "The History, Development, and Future
of Ethnic Studies."
The
Phi Delta Kappan, 75:1 (Sep., 1993), pp. 50-54. W
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20405023
Gulbenkian Commission on
the Restructuring of the Social Sciences, "What kind of Social Sciences Shall
We Now Build?" in Open the Social
Sciences : Report of the Gulbenkian Commission on the Restructuring of the
Social Sciences. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1996,
70-93. W
Gerald Vizenor, "Transethnic Anthropologism:
Comparative Ethnic Studies at Berkeley."
Studies in American Indian Literatures, Series
2, 7:4 (Winter 1995), pp. 3-8. W
Stable URL:
http://www.jstor.org/stable/20736879
Joan Walsh, "As American as
ethnic studies." Pacific News Service, Sept. 2, 1998. W
Vine Deloria, Jr., David E. Wilkins, "Racial and Ethnic Studies, Political
Science, and Midwifery."
Wicazo Sa Review, 14:2 (Autumn, 1999), pp. 67-76. W
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1409552
Yen Le Espiritu. "Disciplines Unbound: Notes on
Sociology and Ethnic Studies."
Contemporary Sociology, 28:5 (Sep., 1999), 510-514. W
Stable URL:
http://www.jstor.org/stable/2654984
Tommy Craggs, "Ethnic
Warfare: A bitchy academic fight within SFSU's College of Ethnic Studies puts
the future of the program in question." San
Francisco Weekly, 1/26/2005. W
Gregory
Rodriguez, "Academia's hidden crackpots: What kind of discipline would nurture
a hatefilled academic such as fired professor Ward Churchill?" Los Angeles Times, July 30, 2007.
W
Week 2 (April 12): Indigeneity and Colonialism
(reconsidered)
Jodi A.
Byrd. Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critques of Colonialism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 2011.
_______________________________________________________________
Week 3 (April 19): Troubling Sociology
Avery Gordon. Ghostly Matters : Haunting and the Sociological Imagination.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997.
_______________________________________________________________
Week 4 (April 26): Discussion and Presentation I
Visitor: Professor Wayne Yang (11:30)
_______________________________________________________________
_______________________________________________________________
Week 5 (May 3): Unsettling Histories
John D. Blanco.
Frontier Constitutions:
Christianity and Colonial Empire in the Nineteenth-Century Philippines. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009.
Ranjit Guha.
"On Some Aspects of the Historiography of Colonial India." Selected
Subatern Studies. ed. Ranajit
Guha, and Gayatri Chakravtoy Spivak.
New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. 37-44. W
_______________________________________________________________
Week 6 (May 10): Discussion and Presentation II
Visitor: Professor
Jody Blanco (Literature)
_______________________________________________________________
_______________________________________________________________
Week 7 (May 17):
Fatima El-Tayeb. European Others: Queering Ethnicity in Postnational Europe. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2011.
_______________________________________________________________
Week 8 (May 24): Discussion and Presentation III
Visitor: Professor Fatima El-Tayeb
_______________________________________________________________
_______________________________________________________________
Week 9 (May
31): Enacting
and Reading Performativity
Patrick
Anderson. So Much Wasted: Hunger, Performance, and the Morbidity of Resistance. Durham: Duke University Press, 2010.
_______________________________________________________________
Week 10
(June 7): Discussion and Presentation IV
Visitor: Professor Patrick Anderson (11:30)
_______________________________________________________________
_______________________________________________________________