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Course Listings

The following course descriptions for the School of Residential Community-Engaged Arts and Humanities are for the upcoming academic year. Check your Student Information System account for enrollment details. Incoming students will enroll during their New Student Orientation (NSO) during summer.

If you have any additional questions about course details, contact Interim Associate Director Terese Monberg at tmonberg@msu.edu.

Current and Upcoming Courses

  • Spring 2027

    RCAH 112: Writing, Research, and Technologies

    Section 001 (Aronoff)

    Our America:  Cultures of American Modernism, 1919-1930

    This section of RCAH 112 examines how “American culture” was renegotiated and reimagined in the 1920s and 30s.  Rapid change – industrialism, urbanization, the rise of consumer culture, mass migration, racial violence, immigration prompted writers, artists, politicians, and social scientists to redefine what was specifically "American" and to create new versions of American identity. At the same time, the form of culture as a concept was itself undergoing radical transformations, with “culture” pointing to an entire “way of life” that is relative, plural, and above all “whole,” “unified” and “meaningful.”

    Looking at various primary documents, with particular attention to the arts (modernist poetry, literature, jazz and other media), we will ask:  how do these texts imagine the relationship between “race,” “nation,” and “culture”? How do these constructions engage debates over immigration, assimilation and pluralism?  What is the relationship between racial and /or cultural identity and political identity (or citizenship)?

     

    Section 001 (Sheridan)

    The Production of Culture

    This class focuses on the ways that the analytical and creative work of the arts and humanities can help to solve real-world problems.  The premises of this course are: (1) forms of cultural expression (such as stories, videos, performances, music, etc.) can be powerful tools of social change; and (2) all of us are potentially producers of these forms. Accordingly, students will begin by identifying a cultural problem — something they would like to see changed in the world.  They will analyze the way the problem is embodied in popular culture (e.g., movies, music, websites).  Finally, they will devise their own "cultural interventions": movies, music, websites, and other compositions aimed at addressing the cultural problem in question.

     

    IAH 207R: The Presence of the Past (formerly RCAH 202)

    Section 001 (Thobani)

    Personal (Hi)stories and the Social World

    How do stories shape the way people understand where they came from, who they think they are, and where they feel they do and don’t belong? Where do these stories come from and how are they passed down? We take up these questions in this course to explore what life narratives can teach us about the relationship between the cultural, the social and the personal. Texts will include autobiographies and family histories, and will draw from a variety of media ranging from fiction to non-fiction and film. Our purpose is to not only understand how people narrativise their life histories, but how they connect their personal experiences with larger social formations, including race, gender, ethnicity and nationality. Students will also explore their own biographies and family histories to study how these intersect with the larger contexts that shape the world we live in. 

     

    Section 002 (Hamilton-Wray)

    Histories and Lore from the Cradle of Humankind

    This course explores conceptions of history, particularly those that diverge from conventional official histories. In particular, the course focuses on the histories of African peoples through various literary and artistic genre such as oral history, autobiographical history and “trans-history,” or rather history that connects the past, present and future, as well forms of material culture, archival materials, cultural expressions, geography and others. Students will gain proficiency in analyzing non-conventional sources of history; and develop skills in gathering oral histories, and in identifying and researching archival sources. 

      

    IAH 231R: Themes and Issues: Transcultural Relations (formerly RCAH 203)

    Section 001 (Aerni-Flessner)

    Transcultural Relations: African Popular Culture in the 20th Century

     In this course we will journey through African history to better understand how people spent their leisure time. Looking at cases of sport and music, primarily, we will come to an understanding of how and why these pastimes became not just popular, but also a venue for challenging political, social, and economic relations on the African continent and in the broader globalized world. From fights to free African colonies from European rule to the struggle against apartheid in South Africa, this course will look at various case studies to understand how African leisure and recreational activities became deeply entwined with struggles for rights and freedom. 

      

    RCAH 215: Introduction to Theory and Method in the Arts

    Section 001 (Baibak)

    Creative Bridges with Peckham – Art and Wellness

    This off-campus course will engage with Peckham’s Art from the Heart’s creative community to learn how making art can be used to build relationships, reduce isolation, and promote health and wellbeing. Peckham provides people with physical, cognitive, behavioral, and socio-economic challenges a platform to demonstrate their ability, learn new skills, participate in work, and enjoy the rewards of their success. We will use this unique experience to explore this “Creativity Community” by working alongside Peckham artists, in their studio, making—and sharing—stories. Students will learn and develop creative techniques to shape interpersonal interactions with Peckham team members to deepen their understanding of the world we live in. Through this collaboration, students will learn “People First Language” and look at Peckham’s universal design that works with team members to create an ever-evolving workspace that is human-centered. The course will use creative writing and art-based processes to record participation and observations. 

     

    RCAH 225: Introduction to Community Engagement

    Section 001 (Lambaren Sanchez)

    #Remixed=Hip-Hop+CommunityEngagement

    RCAH 225 is a course designed to complement students’ academic responsibilities with a community engagement project designed to collaborate with and support community needs. Students are introduced to general methods, concepts, and theories to learn Hip-Hop nuances and develop a critical and collective understanding of community engagement. Utilizing the RCAH Engagement Model, we will explore the ways that social justice education, hip-hop culture, and community engagement complement and/or challenge one another. 

     

    RCAH 235: Foundations of Language and Culture Studies

    Section 001 (Altman)
    Poetry Beyond Poetry

    This course examines the work of poets who call into question our assumptions about language, culture, and poetry itself. These artists write poems, but they also make music, paintings, performances, translations, and videos. They move across languages and cultures, and they expose the fissures within the cultures that they work. Their work is joyous, strange, and hard to categorize with the tools we have available to us: are they poets? and if they are, what is poetry anyway? How does it intersect with the language it uses, the culture in which it works? And how does it transform that culture—opening it to new languages and possibilities? 

     

    RCAH 316: Topics in the Arts

     Section (001) MacDonald

    Musical Theatre Historemix 

    Along with evaluating what musicals are and when their history might begin, in this class we’ll use multiple approaches to study these interdisciplinary live performance works and their engagement with history. Working with songs, scripts, reviews, videos, biographies and other sources, we’ll learn about innovators who caused change in the creation and production of musicals, from Eubie Blake and Noble Sissle’s Shuffle Along (1921) to Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton (2015) and Alicia Keys' Hell's Kitchen (2024). Students will work with primary sources in MSU's Special Collections to practice building musical theatre history. We'll study how musical theatre history might be told, considering the potential for histories focused on labor or minoritized communities, as well as histories that include musical theatre made by students and by people in other countries. Musicals have also put history on stage, so we’ll consider musicals themselves as documents of history, whether chronicling the lives of 16th century British queens in Six (2017) or turn-of-the-century newsboys in Newsies (2012). 

     

    RCAH 325: Methods in Community Engagement

    Section 001 (G. Delgado)

    Making Art, Making Community: The Arts in Correctional Facilities

    What happens when people make art together in a place built to keep them apart? Each week in this course, we'll visit correctional facilities, where you'll work side by side with incarcerated adults and youth to write poems, create zines, and take on other arts projects. Along the way, we'll explore the history of mass incarceration in the United States and why arts and education matter so deeply to the healing, growth, and well-being of incarcerated people. You'll learn the skills and best practices for leading creative community engagement projects, in correctional facilities and beyond, and you'll put them into action every week. Poetry is at the heart of the course, especially in our sessions with adults. We'll study poetic forms from around the world and read poets who wrote while in prison or whose poems speak to incarceration. The semester builds to a poetry slam at one of the facilities we visit, where you'll help lead the event and take part alongside incarcerated adults. No poetry or arts experience is needed, just an open mind and a willingness to take creative risks.

     

    Section 002 (Torrez)

    Socially engaged arts, Honoring stories through arts

    This course explores socially engaged arts models as implemented by local practitioners working with young people in local and national contexts. The curriculum will cover the foundational principles of socially engaged arts, examine the integration of art-based research methods within action research, and assess how these methodologies can support youth through peer mentorship. The course will culminate in an arts-based storytelling project in collaboration with youth from the Lansing region.

    Throughout this course, students will:

    • Investigate diverse definitions of community from multiple academic disciplines.
    • Receive a comprehensive introduction to the fundamental principles of CBAR.
    • Analyze the ways in which action research and socially engaged arts can enhance the ability of school districts to support newcomer and Indigenous families.
    • Understand the significance of the arts within the framework of action research (AR).

     

    RCAH 326: Topics in Community Engagement

    Section 750 (V. Delgado)

    Repair: Reparation, Rematriation, and Reciprocity in Community Engagement

    Guided by Adrienne Rich’s 1977 poem Natural Resources and her vision of using what we have to invent what we need, this course and education abroad program explores the essence of repair, restorative justice, and radical reciprocity in community engagement. Students will examine what can be saved, fixed, or repurposed by studying reparations efforts led by the Justice League of Greater Lansing and other faith-based communities, alongside Indigenous Land Tax rematriation movements in the southwestern United States. During MSU’s Spring Break, participants will travel to Yorkin, Bribri Indigenous Territory, Costa Rica, to participate directly in reparation work with the art and community organization Stibrawpa. Working alongside world-renowned artist Caledonia Curry (Swoon), students will collaborate directly with Bribri artists, leaders, and residents to examine repair and reconciliation, ultimately co-writing a publication upon return to share their insights.

    • Students must participate in the spring break education abroad program Clinics on Emergent Futures in Costa Rica (March 6-14, 2027). Passport required. Contact Vincent Delgado (delgado1@msu.edu) for more information.

     

    RCAH 335: Methods in Language and Culture

    Section 001 (Thobani)

    The Politics of Translation: Between and Across ‘Culture’

    How is cultural identity expressed, and to what effect? How are these expressions interpreted, negotiated, and/or contested within and across different cultural contexts? In what ways do cultural texts interact with embodied experience to shape the ways our identities are formed, lived, and understood?

    Taking these questions as a point of departure, this course helps students develop critical tools to analyze a wide range of cultural texts. Examples we will draw on include varied forms of artistic expression and performance, film and media, written works and life narratives. By working across diverse contexts, we will explore how cultural meaning is produced, circulated, and translated. So doing, we will interrogate constructions of cultural difference and “Otherness,” the power relations that sustain these constructions, and the politics of representation, interpretation, coded significance, and translation that they uphold.

     

    RCAH 346: Topics in the Humanities

    Section 001 (Har)

    Navigating the Music Industry

    Students will learn how the music industry is structured and apply this knowledge to Bogue Street Records (BSR), RCAH’s record label. Emphasis will be placed on learning and applying practical knowledge across two fronts, Artist/Product Development and Exposure (Publicity, Promotion and Performance), and understanding their intersections in today’s music ecosystem. Although no musical background is required, this course will interest any student with an interest in music, including but not limited to budding songwriters, producers, bands, composers, filmmakers, and artist managers across wide-ranging genres. Assignments will include developing marketing plans for musical acts, press and release kits for acts, and creating budgets for genre-specific album releases. By course end, you will be able to navigate the music industry across these two fronts and apply these principles to the development and exposure of musical acts.

     

    RCAH 492: Senior Seminar

    Section 001 (Aronoff)

    What’s Culture? Whose Culture?  Where’s Culture?

    A key term in academic and popular discourse is “culture.”  But behind this deceptively simple concept are histories of exploration, imperialism, race, class, science and the arts.  This class traces the idea of culture through Western texts in literature, science, anthropology, philosophy and aesthetics, with particular attention to the emergence of anthropology in the modernist period, and contemporary discourses around multiculturalism, transnationalism and the global circulation of “culture(s).”  We’ll ask:  What is “culture”?  What does it mean to “have” (a) culture?  How does culture intersect with ideas of ethnicity, race, nationality and identity?  What has been the “culture of RCAH?” How is the culture of RCAH (re)created by each group of students (like yourselves) who pass through?  As RCAH is now housed in the College of Arts and Letters, how might this change what we might have thought of as “RCAH culture”?  What aspects of “RCAH Culture” are important to preserve? What aspects might be ripe for change, and how might we help that happen?

Past Courses

  • Fall 2026

    RCAH 111: Writing Transcultural Contexts

    Section 001 (Aronoff)
    Telling Stories: Composing Knowledges in Transcultural Contexts
    In this section, we will examine the ways in which culture shapes the ways we perceive the world around us, and how we organize those perceptions into oral and written narratives—be they what we conventionally would call “stories” like personal narratives, myths or novels, or other genres like scientific, academic, or philosophical writing. Drawing primarily on short stories and novels, we will be interested in what happens when different “cultures,” or ways of knowing and writing, collide, clash, or mix, in a process we will call “transculturation.” In what ways, we will ask, does “culture” provide us with narratives, patterns, genres, through which we shape our experience into something meaningful? In what ways do we deploy, bend, mix these “stories”? Possible course texts include Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony and/or Art Spiegelman’s Maus.

    Section 002 (Richmond)
    Nature/Culture/Future
    The dedication of Ayana Elizabeth Johnson’s What If We Get It Right?: Visions of Climate Futures read, “For the love of nature, culture, and the future.” As artists living in the time of climate crisis, it is essential that we harness our unique skills of imagination and communication to create practices that love nature, culture, and the future. In our section of RCAH111, we will explore how as writers, artists, and communicators we have the power to tell stories about the climate futures we want to see. Case studies will draw from scholars, artists, and activists who have envisioned climate futurity through podcasts, plays, short stories, songs, film and essays. Students will have the opportunity to write creative nonfiction and political manifestos, while creating works of performance and visual art.

     

    RCAH 150: Introduction to the Arts & Humanities

    Section 001 (Yoder)
    RCAH 150 will introduce you to the RCAH program and prepare you to succeed. What is interdisciplinary study and what does it look like in the arts and humanities? Four faculty will explore this question by looking at how the theme of storytelling connects the four RCAH pathways—the Arts, the Humanities, Community Engagement, and Language and Culture. RCAH’s Student Affairs staff will help you gain insights into goal setting, stress management, career planning, and success strategies, and returning students mentors will help you plan and navigate your first year at MSU.

     

    RCAH 202: Presence of the Past

    Section 001 (Hamilton-Wray)
    Oral Traditions and the Making of History
    Oral tradition plays a vital role in the construction and reproduction of “official histories.” However, the important role of oral tradition in the construction of history is often not acknowledged. This course makes visible the presence and role of oral tradition in history-making, with particular focus on Africana oral traditions apparent in popular and folk cultural forms, including fables, music, proverbs, cuisine, humor, literature, and film. Through an exploration of various methods of conveying, documenting, and archiving the past, students interrogate the transmission and reception of oral history, the reliability of autobiography as history, the affective value of imagined histories, and the liberatory potential of Afrofuturism. The course asks: What do these multiple histories reveal about how a people, a community or a nation define themselves/itself? How is history critiqued, shaped, and employed for the present and the future? How are official histories understood when studied alongside oral tradition and other non-conventional sources, texts, and artifacts?

     

    RCAH 203: Transcultural Relations

    Section 001 (Aerni-Flessner)
    African Popular Culture in the 20th Century
    In this course we will journey through African history to better understand how people spent their leisure time. Looking at cases of sport and music, primarily, we will come to an understanding of how and why these pastimes became not just popular, but also a venue for challenging political, social, and economic relations on the African continent and in the broader globalized world. From fights to free African colonies from European rule to the struggle against apartheid in South Africa, this course will look at various case studies to understand how African leisure and recreational activities became deeply entwined with struggles for rights and freedom.

     

    RCAH 205: Transcultural Relations

    Section 750 (Delgado, V.)
    Design Justice and Radical Reciprocity
    In this education abroad program and hybrid course, you will spend the semester on campus learning and engaging in the latest practices in design, justice and sustain ability while collaborating remotely with Girls for Success, a community-run, afterschool program for Afro-Caribbean, Indigenous and Mestiza girls ages 6-12, in Hone Creek, home to workers serving the Caribbean Coast’s vibrant tourism industry. You will learn about the Caribbean’s design, justice, and community challenges and use the latest community participatory design practices, design justice theories, radical reciprocity—an RCAH-developed process for building community collaborations and the principal of emergence to dream new futures with the girls, their parents, teachers and other community members. Then, during the later part of winter break, January 2 – January 9, 2027, you will travel to Costa Rica’s diverse Caribbean Coast to collaborate with Girls for Success, to implement a 4-day program focused on storytelling that will ensure the voices of these young women are heard amid an environment of intense and unequal development and social disruption.

    This course counts as the required base course for the School of RCAH and Engineering’s collaborative Design Justice Minor as well as the university’s upper-level IAH University requirement. Students must participate in both the course and the winter break education abroad program Community Engaged Design in Costa Rica (January 2-9, 2025). Passport required. Past education abroad program fees, minus airfare, have been less than $650. Contact Vincent Delgado (delgado1@msu.edu) for more information about the course, the program, and cost.

     

    RCAH 215: Introduction to the Arts

    Section 001 (Baibak)
    Reclamation Studio
    Art thou thinking about our climate footprint? Reclamation Studio Project is a workshop based on gleaning, reuse, and transformation of found, second-hand, or inherited objects. The course is designed to help alter our perception of objects, so we can see them as an available resource for base materials: plastic, metal, wood, or fiber. We will dissect forms to discover their potential frameworks, cavities, openings, and abstractions. We will look at connective materials, including bolts, wires, rivets, interlocking tabs, springs, hinges, and lashings. We will experiment. These methods will aid us in fashioning objects that visually and physically enhance our daily passage. We will examine the utilitarian and abstract, and the importance of both. The class will read articles about reusing materials from “our great abundance” and look at artists who have used them. Reclamation Studio’s goal is to help us become more aware of available resources and to highlight our own responsibility as consumers.

    Section 002 (Har)
    Introduction to Songwriting and Music Production
    This course investigates songwriting and music production as fundamentally intertwined practices in contemporary music. Songwriting, one of the oldest musical traditions, serves storytelling, entertainment, education, cultural memory, personal and spiritual expression. Music production has advanced exponentially over the last two decades through the accessibility of Digital Audio Workstations (DAWs), the key software component in modern songwriting and production. In this workshop, students will explore songwriting and production across diverse historical, cultural, and aesthetic perspectives. Students will develop creative songwriting techniques alongside practical skills in recording, editing, mixing, and audio processing, and strategies in file management, project management, and group collaboration. Assignments include creative projects, oral presentations, and written documentation using vocabulary drawn from historical and contemporary practices. Open to students with no musical background. By course end, you will develop an appreciation for songwriting as artist-scholars whilst writing, recording, and producing an original song in a genre of your choice.

     

    RCAH 225: Introduction to Community Engagement

    Section 001 (Sanchez)
    #Remixed=Hip-Hop+CommunityEngagement
    This course is designed to complement students’ academic responsibilities with a community engagement project designed to collaborate with and support community needs. Students are introduced to general methods, concepts, and theories to learn Hip-Hop nuances and develop a critical and collective understanding of community engagement. Utilizing the RCAH Engagement Model, we will explore the ways that social justice education, hip-hop culture, and community engagement complement and/or challenge one another.

     

    Section 002 (Delgado, G.)
    Building Bridges with the Arts
    "To bridge means loosening our borders, not closing off to others. Bridging is the work of opening the gate to the stranger, within and without.” (Gloria E. Anzaldúa, This Bridge We Call Home: Radical Visions for Transformation). How do we use the arts to prepare ourselves to engage with communities in meaningful ways? In this course, students will explore best practices in community engagement that incorporate art methods to incite personal growth, fulfilment, and the realization of our true potential. Through close listening, readings, guest speakers, making, and collaborative art projects, we will learn and practice how to bridge our liberation with that of others to create a more just and equitable world. Be prepared to take creative and social positive risks.

     

    RCAH 235: Introduction to Language and Culture

    Section 001 (Aronoff)
    Words and Worlds
    “Language is the dwelling place of ideas that do not exist elsewhere. It is a prism through which to see the world”—Robin Wall Kimmerer (Potawatami) 

    This introductory course in the Language and Culture pathway will examine each of these terms, and the relation between them. What is “a language”? What is (a) “culture”? We will explore these questions through two intertwined disciplines that have made language and culture central concerns of anthropology and literature. How, we will ask, does language shape culture? How do the individual words and phrases in a language, and the “stories” told using those building blocks, shape/enable/embody “a world”? What happens when two or more languages/cultures meet, compete or combine? What happens when a language is “lost,” and how can it be revitalized? What about “invented languages” in the worldbuilding of SF and fantasy? How might the large language learning models of AI change the way we think about both “language” and “culture”? Authors and texts considered will include Gloria Anzaldua, Franz Boas, Ted Chaing, Octavia E. Butler, Jenny L. Davis, Zora Neale Hurston, Ursula K. Le Guin, James Weldon Johnson, Eduardo Vivieros de Castro, Edward Sapir, Leslie Marmon Silko, Benjamin Lee Whorf and others.

     

    RCAH 315: Methods in the Arts

    Section 001 (Har)
    Electronic Music: Processes and Techniques
    This course takes students through the creation of electronic music beyond song form—including film scoring, video game music, electronic dance music, and electroacoustic music. Through case studies and creative work, we will explore the evolution of electronic music practices across these forms and genres. You will develop an appreciation for composing, producing, and performing electronic music across contexts ranging from program music (i.e., scoring for a story) to absolute music (i.e., listening to music for its own sake). The expanding interdisciplinary, intercultural, and technological scope of electronic music will be highlighted alongside strategies for engaging collaborators from other disciplines with a holistic approach towards the field today. Open to students with no musical background. By course end, you will have the chance to pursue a specific area of interest (e.g., scoring for a short film, creating and performing EDM) and showcase your work.

     

    RCAH 316: Topics in Arts

    Section 001 (Sheridan)
    Digital Storytelling
    Digital media allow us to tell stories in new ways. Creatives from a variety of backgrounds construct digital narratives that incorporate stop motion, digital animation, still photography, hand-drawn art, music, ambient sounds, the written word, and other media elements. In this class we will ask, What makes a compelling digital story? What new ways can we tell stories in digital media? We will explore these questions together by making and sharing our own digital stories.

     

    RCAH 325: Methods in Community Engagement

    Section 001 (Delgado, G.)
    Prison Arts Project: Shining a Light on the Voices Inside
    In this course, we will explore, develop, practice, and facilitate arts workshops for incarcerated people. We’ll collaborate with educators and prison staff to navigate the carcel system in order to implement meaningful, accessible, and safe artistic opportunities. Educational and arts programming is critical to the rehabilitation and well-being of incarcerated people. During weekly visits to prisons, we will work side-by-side with incarcerated adults and youth to write poems, make art, and create ‘zines. We will examine poetic forms from around the world and examine the works by poets who wrote while in prison including Etheridge Knight, Jimmy Baca Santiago, and Reginald Dwayne Betts. At the end of the semester, you’ll co-facilitate and participate in the culminating poetry event with incarcerated people.

    Section 002 (Torrez)
    Youth Participatory Action Research
    In this course, we will learn about arts-based action research engagement models alongside local young people. This course will explore models of engagement with youth from diverse backgrounds. We will consider the complex societal issues directly impacting the lives of their young collaborators and how we can collectively work through community engagement. Visiting with several community organizers, we will discuss best practices for youth-centered community engagement. In our time visiting with community organizers, we will:

    • Investigate definitions of community.
    • Be introduced to various community engagement practices.
    • Learn how each community has methods unique to working alongside its members.

     

    RCAH 326: Topics in Community Engagement

    Section 001 (Delgado, V.)
    From Ego to Eco: Community Storytelling and Design for Emergent Futures
    How do we use the arts, humanities, and design to respond to the impacts of inequality, conflict, globalization, and climate change on communities and the environment? In this virtual international exchange course, you will learn community participatory design methodologies and engage with a community to define and build new emerging futures in Monteverde, Costa Rica, using the arts, humanities, reflection, social responsibility, community voice, and transparency. You will learn about critiques of traditional development as a foundation for new kind of collaborative and dialogic design that utilizes community storytelling to solve problems, builds community autonomy, and enhances biocultural heritage and sustainability. Finally, you will develop the critical community engagement skills necessary to collaborate in the collaborative design of a new regional art van with Arte Sobre Ruedas (Art on Wheels), a regional community arts program that engages residents in the arts across the Tilaran Mountain region. This design will be further developed, built, and piloted in RCAH 205: Transcultural Relations – Design Justice and Radical Reciprocity in Fall 2027 and its required winter break 2027-28 education abroad program, Community Engaged Design in Costa Rica.

     

    RCAH 335: Methods in Language and Culture

    Section 001 (Thobani)
    The Politics of Translation: Between and Across ‘Culture
    How is cultural identity expressed, and to what effect? How are these expressions interpreted, negotiated, and/or contested within and across different cultural contexts? In what ways do cultural texts interact with embodied experience to shape the ways our identities are formed, lived, and understood?

    Taking these questions as a point of departure, this course helps students develop critical tools to analyze a wide range of cultural texts. Examples we will draw on include varied forms of artistic expression and performance, film and media, written works and life narratives. By working across diverse contexts, we will explore how cultural meaning is produced, circulated, and translated. So doing, we will interrogate constructions of cultural difference and “Otherness,” the power relations that sustain these constructions, and the politics of representation, interpretation, coded significance, and translation that they uphold.

     

    RCAH 336: Topics in Language and Culture

    Section 001 (Sheridan)
    Let Us All Be from Somewhere
    In his famous poem about Michigan, Bob Hicok concludes: “Let us all be from somewhere. / Let us tell each other everything we can.” What does it mean to be from an industrial city or a small town? What does it mean to be from the Lower or Upper Peninsula? How do sand dunes and skyscrapers, urban parks and suburban malls, factories and cliffs and farms and forests—how do all of these markers of place inflect our daily lives and our sense of who we are?  In this class we will explore the way stories and poems evoke a sense of place—with a particular emphasis on Michigan. This will provide opportunities for us to consider the way language shapes our understanding of culture at multiple levels, from the individual words we use to describe the world, to the larger stories we tell about our experiences.

     

    RCAH 346: Topics in Humanities

    Section 001 (Sanchez)
    Humanistic Approaches to Learning and Teaching 
    This course is designed to explore the questions: How do we approach learning? Who is responsible for teaching? How does reciprocity play a role in the relationship we have with teaching and learning? We will draw from community leaders, elders, and scholars from various academic fields and traditions. We will develop a comprehensive understanding about the different contexts (cultural and otherwise) that shape how we learn and why we teach. We will explore other settings where teaching and learning skills are utilized. We will grapple with the question: How can knowledge serve as a form of cultural capital, and, thus, contribute to the commitments of resistance and radical reciprocity?

     

    RCAH 492: Senior Seminar

    Section 001 (Thobani)
    Critical Literacies, Representation, and Life After RCAH
    Whether we realize it or not, we engage with various forms of representation on a daily basis. As artists, writers, students, scholars and activists, we also produce representations in and through our work. This capstone course is designed to build on the topics and themes you have studied during your time at RCAH in order to critically reflect on the role that representation has played in your learning, both inside and outside the university. So doing, we will explore the many ways in which you can apply your learning from your time in RCAH to your personal and professional lives after graduation. Some of the questions we will explore are: what is the relationship between theory and practice? How has your identity been shaped by your experience in the university, and how will you take this out into the world after your degree? In what ways can you critically translate your learning as you transition to life after RCAH?

  • Spring 2026

    RCAH 112: Writing Research Technologies

    Section 001 (Yoder)
    Researching and Writing about Bioethics
    While questions in bioethics are often considered to be very personal, they are also at the heart of many public controversies. In this course we will use both public and scholarly reflection on bioethical issues to deepen our understanding of the practice of research and writing in the humanities. 

    Section 002 (Sheridan)
    The Production of Culture
    This class focuses on the ways that the analytical and creative work of the arts and humanities can help to solve real-world problems.  The premises of this course are: (1) forms of cultural expression (such as stories, videos, performances, music, etc.) can be powerful tools of social change; and (2) all of us are potentially producers of these forms.  Accordingly, students will begin by identifying a cultural problem — something they would like to see changed in the world.  They will analyze the way the problem is embodied in popular culture (e.g., movies, music, websites).  Finally, they will devise their own "cultural interventions": movies, music, websites, and other compositions aimed at addressing the cultural problem in question. 

    Section 003 (Aronoff)
    Our America:  Cultures of American Modernism, 1919-1930 
    The 1920s was a period of rapid change – industrialism, urbanization, the rise of consumer culture, mass migration, racial violence, immigration – and in response to what were perceived as new conditions, writers, artists, politicians, and social scientists sought new ways to define what was specifically "American" about America. But even as American writers and critics in the ‘20s attempted to redefine the content of a particularly “American” culture, the form of culture as a concept – what counted as “culture” – was itself undergoing radical transformations, with the development of ideas of “culture” as an entire “way of life” that is relative, plural, and above all “whole,” “unified” and “meaningful.” 

    We will examine debates over “American” culture, race, national identity and art in the modernist period. Looking at various primary documents, with particular attention to the arts (modernist poetry, literature, jazz and other media), we will ask: how do these texts imagine the relationship between “race,” “nation,” and “culture”? How do these constructions engage debates over immigration, assimilation and pluralism?  What is the relationship between racial and/or cultural identity and political identity (or citizenship)? The breadth of these questions will allow for a wide variety of approaches and specific interest: like all sections of 112, we will be able to pursue the burning questions we raise by developing our skills as researchers and writers. 

     

    RCAH 202: Presence of the Past 

    Section 002 (Thobani)
    Representing the Exotic: Sex, Gender and Culture in Colonial and Postcolonial Contexts 
    What makes something ‘exotic’? Where do our ideas about the ‘exotic’ come from? Are the tropes used to depict the exotic in popular culture new, or are they part of a longer history of representation? How do these tropes shape our ideas about gender, sexuality and race, ideas that we often take for granted? We take up these questions in this course, which introduces students to the politics of representation. We will pay specific attention to how gender, sexuality and race have been presented in depictions of the ‘exotic’. Furthermore, by studying examples taken from contemporary popular culture as well as from earlier forms of colonial representation, we will learn how to trace the relationship between past and present in the production of popular culture. 

    Section 004 (Aerni-Flessner)
    Enslavement in World History 
    This course will question what it has meant to be enslaved at various times in history, and whether it is even useful to try to compare enslavements across time and space. We will look at examples of enslavement in the Atlantic World, the Indian Ocean World, as well as on the African continent. We will examine important questions like what role did enslavement play in the creation of the globalized world in which we live and work, and how is that past still with us today. Through case studies in enslavement, we will better understand how the forces that led to the rise and fall of slavery in the Americas and across the world have shaped our communities in a wide variety of ways. This course will help you interrogate the ways in which this is still important, and how debates over the legacy of slavery and reparations have been and continue to be contentious. 

     

    RCAH 203: Transcultural Relations

    Section 001 (Aerni-Flessner)
    African Popular Culture in the 20th Century 
    In this course we will journey through African history to better understand how people spent their leisure time. Looking at cases of sport and music, primarily, we will come to an understanding of how and why these pastimes became not just popular, but also a venue for challenging political, social, and economic relations on the African continent and in the broader globalized world. From fights to free African colonies from European rule to the struggle against apartheid in South Africa, this course will look at various case studies to understand how African leisure and recreational activities became deeply entwined with struggles for rights and freedom. 

    Section 750 (Delgado, V.) 
    Contemporary Emergent Futures: Costa Rica and Latin America 
    Critical to engaging in communities – whether for sustainability, peace or transformative change – is the development of an understanding of yourself and the people and communities with whom you are working. This course will challenge you to build an understanding of emergent Latin American theories of emergence, resilience, and system change; alternatives to development; conflict resolution frameworks; and community-participatory research methods. You will also learn how to use the transdisciplinary arts and humanities to build an integrated understanding of your relationship to Costa Rican indigenous and campesino communities. Together, we will consider the development of Costa Rica’s commitment to and challenges with emergence through its ideas, history, literature, poetry and film.  

    This course is a key part of the RCAH’s community-engaged, spring, research semester abroad: Emergent Futures and Participatory Action Research in Costa Rica. 

     

    RCAH 215: Introduction to the Arts 

    Section 001 (MacDonald) 
    Introduction to Documentary Theatre Practices 
    Using a range of warmups, theatre games, improvisation, and acting exercises, this introductory course develops students’ basic acting skills and uses them to tell the stories of real people and events. We will study practitioners such as Anna Deavere Smith, Tectonic Theater Project and Recorded Delivery to explore a range of approaches to capturing history and biography for adaptation as performance. Along with studying and performing monologues and scenes based on real people and events, students will learn how to research history and biography, and develop their own, original documentary theatre performances. Students will work as an ensemble and learn how to breakdown scripts, develop character psychology and physicality, and apply this to monologues and scene work in class. We will watch live and recorded performances of documentary plays and musicals, write short responses, perform in class and in public, and continuously practice discussing their creative work.  

    NOTE: This course is designed for beginners with no prior theatre or acting experience. Experienced performers are welcome but should reflect on whether they will be sufficiently challenged. 

    Section 002 (Baibak) 
    Painting on the Edge 
    If one is going to paint, why paint on a canvas? Our world holds so many forms. 
    Let us explore them with acrylic paint. In this class, students will examine the relationships between paint and the 3-dimensional surface. We will look at artists/designers who already paint this way while developing our own painting techniques. We’ll consider how form can communicate our ideas, create metaphors, and present as visual poetic compositions. The class will work with translucent forms and paint in reverse. We will be guided by real shadow-and-light relationships. We shall explore objects as topographies and alter their varying surfaces.
    Let’s transform! 
    We will question ideas about objects in our culture; why and how to create in a world where maybe we have too many things. Let’s reason “makings” value; should we create more stuff, or is it part of our evolution? These are questions that always come up for me, so maybe you’re thinking about these things, too. Let’s paint on the edge without fear of falling off. No previous painting experience needed. 
     
    The course will be held in the RCAH Art Studio and in lieu of a book purchase students will need to purchase a paint kit. 

     

     

    RCAH 235: Introduction to Language and Culture

    Section 001 (Torrez) 
    Learning Languages through Community Arts 
    In this introductory course on language and culture, we will explore the intricate connection between language and identity formation, as well as our interactions with the world around us. MSU students will collaborate with youth from the Lansing School District's Newcomer Center to uncover the rich histories and social movements that shape our communities. Together, we will examine the story of our local community within the broader context of political discussions surrounding language attrition and revitalization, and how these processes affect individual and community identity. We will discuss linguistic shifts within families and communities and explore effective communication across cultural boundaries. Through meaningful dialogue, we will reflect on the role of language in shaping our identities and the impact of language loss on our communities. The course will focus on three key concepts: language, culture, and identity. Each section will begin with a clear definition, enabling us to develop a deeper understanding of how these concepts relate to the themes of the course. 

     

    RCAH 315: Methods in the Arts

    Section 001 (MacDonald) 
    Musicalturgy: Building Musical Theatre Worlds 
    Dramaturgs help theatre artists to build worlds on stage and in musical theatre, that world-building includes songs and dances as well as scripts and design elements. In this course you’ll learn how musical theatre creators engage audiences with worlds created on stage, and practice doing this yourself on new musicals in progress. You will study different kinds of world-building, like documentary, revival, dance and jukebox musicals. This course will hold space for the lyrics of “Defying Gravity,” as well as the musical Wicked and its place in a history of adaptations. Other musicals that we might work on include Billy Elliot, Come From Away, Waitress, and Jagged Little Pill. Along with reading scripts, listening to songs, and watching performances, you will research topics relevant to different musical worlds and prepare material to engage theatre audiences. You will also collaborate as a dramaturge with professional writers and composers, to help develop their songs and scripts. Students should have an interest in watching or making theatre and be ready to do research as part of their creative practice.

     

    RCAH 316: Topics in the Arts

    Section 002 (Har)
    Fundamentals of Sound Art
    Sound art has made its mark across diverse fields of contemporary art—spanning ambient, noise, installation art, poetry, theater, and cinema. Central to its practice is the creative use of recording and production technology in a process-based manipulation of sounds transcending idiomatic approaches to melody, rhythm, and harmony. Throughout history, art has evolved with technology and music is no exception; recorded and produced sound is the main form of music dissemination today. Through skill-building exercises, critical ear training, and studying techniques and aesthetics across global and interdisciplinary perspectives, students will create a portfolio with supporting documentation and presentations contextualizing their contributions, and explore a specific area of interest (e.g., creating custom audio effects, generative music, and visualizations). Taught at the RCAH Language and Media Center (LMC), we will use a digital audio workstation, and portable and studio recording gear. Exploring sound art is essential to contemporary music and will enhance creative thinking, imagination, and interdisciplinary collaboration.

     

    RCAH 325: Methods in Community Engagement 

    Section 001 (Delgado, G.) 
    Prison Arts Project: Shining a Light on the Voices Inside 
    In this course, we will explore, develop, practice, and facilitate arts workshops for incarcerated people. We’ll collaborate with educators and prison staff to design and implement meaningful, accessible, and safe creativity opportunities in the carcel system. Educational and arts programming is critical to the rehabilitation and well-being of incarcerated people. During weekly visits to prisons, we will work side-by-side with incarcerated adults and youth to write poems, make art, and create ‘zines. We will examine poetic forms from around the world and examine the works by poets who wrote while in prison including Etheridge Knight, Jimmy Baca Santiago, and Reginald Dwayne Betts. At the end of the semester, you’ll co-facilitate and participate in the culminating poetry event with incarcerated people. 

    Section 750 (Delgado, V.) 
    Co-creating Community Futures: Radical Reciprocity and Participatory Action in Costa Rica 
    This course prepares students co-create emergent futures with communities that respond to local challenges using a powerful research methodology for community change: Participatory action research. You will learn critical skills, theories and models for community engagement, peace building and research as well as dynamic, transdisciplinary approaches in the arts, humanities and design, instrumental in developing sustainable community futures. Students, working in teams, take these methods into communities across Costa Rica to engage in projects that address critical local challenges. The result: impactful, publishable, community-based research to be shared with community partners. Our partners in Costa Rica include: ADESSARU – a non-profit preserving forests to protect the water supply for nearly 50,000 people; Centro Cultural RioChante – a youth arts collective; Girls for Success – an afterschool program of young Campesina, Afro-Caribbean and Indigena women; the Monteverde Community Foundation; ADISL – a Campesinx community development organization; ADITIBRI – the Indigena Bribri Autonomous Territorial Government; LIFE Monteverde – a permaculture coffee farm.  

    This course is a key part of the RCAH’s community-engaged, spring, research semester abroad: Emergent Futures and Participatory Action Research in Costa Rica. 

     

    RCAH 326: Topics in Community Engagement 

    Section 002 (Delgado, G.) 
    What if? Art, Community Engagement, and Possibilities 
    What if you wrote a song about the environment, or painted art about a social issue? What does art do and how does it allow us to build bridges within and beyond our communities? In this course we will explore how artists and communities use the arts to engage with societal issues such as human rights, poverty, discrimination, violence, and social inequities. We will collaborate and work experientially. We will design, draw, paint, walk, write, and create music to shine a light on selected topics. We will investigate methods in building capacity in ourselves and with others for promoting awareness, dialogue, and co-generative action. 

     

    RCAH 336: Topics in Language and Culture

    Section 001 (Altman) 
    Poets’ Theater 
    This course will take you deep into a delightful, if little known, genre: poets’ theater. In poets’ theater, poets bring all their creativity and imagination to bear on playwrighting, producing strange, surreal, impossible plays; a poets’ theater play might be set on the surface of the sun or inside someone’s mouth. They tend to be DIY and low stakes, performed by amateur actors on improvised stages. These plays will challenge, expand, and enrich your sense of what a poem—and a play—can be. Inspired by their example, we will write our own funny, weird, and beautiful plays. And we will close out the class with a festival of poets’ theater, in which you will stage and perform your peers’ plays for a live audience. 

     

    RCAH 345: Methods in the Humanities

    Section 001 (Aronoff) 
    Reading Science Fiction:  Encountering the Other/Encountering the Self 
    This course will serve as a broad introduction to science fiction as a genre, examining the formal elements and the literary history of the genre, and touching on a range of key themes and problems addressed by science fiction. We will pay particular attention to a specific problematic within the genre: that is, they ways in which science fiction has been a key site through which ideas of culture, identity and “the human” have been constructed, from the 19th through the 21st centuries. How, we will ask, do science fictions construct their “other worlds,” and those world’s “Others”?  What narrative techniques do authors use to construct those “worlds,” and what do these techniques tell us about our ideas of culture and knowledge?  How do these narratives draw upon, critique, resist and/or transform the dynamics of colonial exploration and encounters that have shaped 20th century anthropology (and science fiction) – as well as the theories of race, gender, language and the human that these histories have produced? Authors/texts considered will include those by Mary Shelley, H.G. Wells, Ursula Le Guin, Octavia Butler, Rebecca Roanhorse and others.  

     

    RCAH 346: Topics in the Humanities

    Section 001 (Hamilton-Wray) 
    Film Authorship and Independent Cinema 
    Why do we rush out to see the latest Wes Anderson, Guillermo del Toro or Greta Gerwig film? Is it that we delight in experiencing Anderson’s quirky characters, del Toro’s visual wizardry, or Gerwig’s keen social commentary? These filmmakers are not just directors-for-hire, but true artists who bring their distinct filmmaking style and technique to their storytelling. Through a focus on Haile Gerima, a renowned filmmaker in the world of Black independent and international cinema, this course introduces students to the history, critical debates and key concepts of auteur theory, that is the idea that the director is the dominant creative force of a film. Additionally, this course will provide students with an overview of the approaches and tools for making in-depth study of a film director of their choosing. 

    Section 002 (Sanchez) 
    Humanistic Approaches to Learning and Teaching
    How do we approach learning? Who is responsible for teaching? How does reciprocity play a role in the relationship we have with learning and teaching? In this course, we will draw from community leaders, elders, and scholars from various academic fields and traditions to develop a comprehensive understanding about the different contexts (cultural and otherwise) that shape how we learn and why we teach. We will explore other settings where teaching and learning skills are utilized. We will grapple with the question: How can knowledge serve as a form of cultural capital, and, thus, contribute to the commitments of resistance and radical reciprocity?

     

    RCAH 492: Senior Seminar

    Section 001 (Thobani) 
    Critical Literacies, Representation, and Life After RCAH 
    Whether we realize it or not, we engage with various forms of representation on a daily basis. As artists, writers, students, scholars and activists, we also produce representations in and through our work. This capstone course is designed to build on the topics and themes you have studied during your time at RCAH in order to critically reflect on the role that representation has played in your learning, both inside and outside the university. So doing, we will explore the many ways in which you can apply your learning from your time in RCAH to your personal and professional lives after graduation. Some of the questions we will explore are: what is the relationship between theory and practice? How has your identity been shaped by your experience in the university, and how will you take this out into the world after your degree? In what ways can you critically translate your learning as you transition to life after RCAH? 

  • Fall 2025

    RCAH 111: Writing in Transcultural Contexts

     

    Section 001 (Aronoff)
    Telling Stories: Composing Knowledges in Transcultural Contexts
    In this section, we will examine the ways in which culture shapes the ways we perceive the world around us, and how we organize those perceptions into oral and written narratives—be they what we conventionally would call “stories” like personal narratives, myths or novels, or other genres like scientific, academic or philosophical writing. Drawing primarily on short stories and novels, we will be interested in what happens when different “cultures,” or ways of knowing and writing, collide, clash or mix, in a process we will call “transculturation.” In what ways, we will ask, does “culture” provide us with narratives, patterns, genres, through which we shape our experience into something meaningful? In what ways do we deploy, bend, mix these “stories”? Possible course texts include Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony and/or Art Spiegelman’s Maus.

    Section 002 (Sheridan)
    Transculturation in Michigan
    “Who in the world are you?”  This is the desperate question of Anders, a character in Charles Baxter’s award-winning short story, “The Disappeared.” A Swedish engineer visiting Detroit, Anders meets a local resident who bewilders and emotionally overpowers him. He is left to wonder, “Who are you?”  Michigan is the setting for many stories of this kind—stories that involve cross-cultural encounters in which participants must seek out tools for mutual understanding. In this section of RCAH 111, we’ll examine Michigan narratives that take place in the cities and small towns around us. We’ll let these stories teach us about the challenges and opportunities that emerge when different cultural groups come into contact. We’ll seek out a variety of ways to report our findings, from analytical essays to digital videos.

    Section 004 (Richmond)
    Nature/Culture/Future
    The dedication of Ayana Elizabeth Johnson’s What If We Get It Right?: Visions of Climate Futures reads, “For the love of nature, culture, and the future.” As artists living in the time of climate crisis, it is essential that we harness our unique skills of imagination and communication to create practices that love nature, culture, and the future. In our section of RCAH111, we will explore how as writers, artists, and communicators we have the power to tell stories about the climate futures we want to see. Case studies will draw from scholars, artists, and activists who have envisioned climate futurity through podcasts, plays, short stories, songs, film and essays. Students will have the opportunity to write creative nonfiction and political manifestos, while creating works of performance and visual art.  

     

    RCAH 150: Introduction to the Arts and Humanities

     

    Section 001 (Yoder)
    RCAH 150 will introduce you to the RCAH program and prepare you to succeed. What is interdisciplinary study and what does it look like in the arts and humanities? Four faculty will explore this question by looking at how the theme of storytelling connects the four RCAH pathways—the Arts, the Humanities, Community Engagement, and Language and Culture. RCAH’s Student Affairs staff will help you gain insights into goal setting, stress management, career planning, and success strategies, and returning students mentors will help you plan and navigate your first year at MSU.

     

    RCAH 202: Presence of the Past

     

    Section 004 (Thobani)
    Representing the Exotic: Sex, Gender and Culture in Colonial and Postcolonial Contexts
    What makes something "exotic"? Where do our ideas about the "exotic" come from? Are the tropes used to depict the exotic in popular culture new, or are they part of a longer history of representation? How do these tropes shape our ideas about gender, sexuality and race, ideas that we often take for granted? We take up these questions in this course, which introduces students to the politics of representation. We will pay specific attention to how gender, sexuality and race have been presented in depictions of the "exotic." Furthermore, by studying examples taken from contemporary popular culture as well as from earlier forms of colonial representation, we will learn how to trace the relationship between past and present in the production of popular culture.

     

    RCAH 203: Transcultural Relations

     

    Section 001 (Aerni-Flessner)
    African Popular Culture in the 20th Century
    In this course we will journey through African history to better understand how people spent their leisure time. Looking at cases of sport and music, primarily, we will come to an understanding of how and why these pastimes became not just popular, but also a venue for challenging political, social, and economic relations on the African continent and in the broader globalized world. From fights to free African colonies from European rule to the struggle against apartheid in South Africa, this course will look at various case studies to understand how African leisure and recreational activities became deeply entwined with struggles for rights and freedom.

     

    RCAH 205: Transcultural Relations - Design Justice

     

    Section 750 (Delgado, V.)
    Culture, Sustainability and Everyday Life
    Critical to engaging in communities – whether for sustainability, peace or transformative change – is the development of an understanding of yourself and the people and communities with whom you are working. This on-campus semester course and winter break education abroad program challenges students to build an understanding of sustainability theories, alternatives to development, conflict resolution frameworks, and community-engaged methods. Students will also learn how to use the arts and humanities to build an integrated understanding of their relationship to Costa Rican indigenous and campesino communities. The course will also consider the development of Costa Rica’s commitment to and challenges with sustainability through its ideas, history, literature, poetry and film.

    This course counts both as the required base course for the Design Justice Minor and the upper-level ISS University requirement for RCAH, Engineering, and Forestry students. Students must participate in both the course and the education abroad program (December 14-21, 2025). Passport required. Contact Vincent Delgado (delgado1@msu.edu) for more information about the course, the program, and cost.

     

    RCAH 215: Introduction to the Arts

     

    Section 001 (Baibak)
    Creative Bridges with Peckham – Art and Wellness 
    This off-campus course will engage with Peckham’s Art from the Heart’s creative community to learn how making art can be used to build relationships, reduce isolation, and promote health and wellbeing. Peckham provides people with physical, cognitive, behavioral, and socio-economic challenges a platform to demonstrate their ability, learn new skills, participate in work, and enjoy the rewards of their success. We’ll use this unique experience to explore this “Creativity Community” by working alongside Peckham artists team members, in their studio, making—and sharing—stories. RCAH students will be fueled to reflect on how interpersonal interactions expand their understanding of the world we live in. Through this collaboration, students will learn “People First Language” and look at Peckham’s universal design that works with team members to create an ever-evolving workspace that is human-centered. The course will use creative writing, journaling, and art-based processes to record participation and observations. 

    Section 002 (Austin Oting Har)
    Introduction to Songwriting and Music Production (Arts Workshop)
    This course investigates songwriting and music production as fundamentally intertwined practices in contemporary music. Songwriting, one of the oldest global musical traditions, serves storytelling, entertainment, education, cultural memory, personal and spiritual expression. Music production has advanced exponentially over the last two decades through the accessibility of Digital Audio Workstations (DAWs), the key software component in modern songwriting and production. Through an interdisciplinary framework, in this workshop, students will explore songwriting and production across Western and non-Western traditions, integrating historical, cultural, and aesthetic perspectives. Students will develop creative songwriting techniques alongside practical skills in recording, editing, mixing, and audio processing, and strategies in file management, project management, and group collaboration. Assignments include creative projects, oral presentations, and written documentation using vocabulary drawn from historical and contemporary practices of songwriting and production. By course end, students will be equipped to approach music-making as artist-scholars across traditional, commercial, and experimental domains.

     

    RCAH 225: Introduction to Community Engagement

     

    Section 001 (Sanchez)
    Wellness through Sports and Community Engagement
    Students are introduced to general methods, concepts, and theories related to social justice education, wellness, and community engagement. In concert with the RCAH Engagement Model, students learn about sports (e.g., soccer, breakdancing), additional wellness activities (e.g., meditation, yoga), history and current events, and how they complement and challenge community engagement knowledge. Wellness goes beyond an individual’s physical and mental health; it may also include one’s social, emotional, and spiritual well-being. Community Engagement is more than volunteer and service acts; it involves critical reflection on larger social justice systemic issues that affect specific historically marginalized communities (i.e., youth of color, women, people with disabilities, etc.). This class will learn from and with various community partners that specialize in specific sports or activities to understand the ways in which they support community wellness.

    Section 002 (Sanchez)
    #Remixed=Hip-Hop+CommunityEngagement 
    Students are introduced to general methods, concepts, and theories related to social justice education, Hip-Hop culture, and community engagement. In concert with the RCAH Engagement Model, students learn about Hip-Hop history and current events, and how they complement and challenge community engagement knowledge. Hip-Hop encompasses more than rap; it is a cultural movement born in Bronx, New York, that includes music, dance and art. Community Engagement is more than volunteer and service acts; it involves critical reflection on larger social justice systemic issues that affect specific historically marginalized communities (i.e., youth of color, women, people with disabilities, etc.). This class will partner with All of The Above (AOTA) Hip Hop Academy for their community engagement project. AOTA is a Lansing-based non-profit with the mission to mentor youth, support artistic expression and serve as a Hip-Hop cultural resource.

     

    RCAH 235: Introduction to Language and Culture

     

    Section 001 (Altman)
    Poetry Beyond Poetry
    This course examines the work of poets who call into question our assumptions about language, culture, and poetry itself. These artists write poems, but they also make music, paintings, performances, translations, and videos. They move across languages and cultures, and they expose the fissures within the cultures that they work. Their work is joyous, strange, and hard to categorize with the tools we have available to us: are they poets? and if they are, what is poetry anyway? How does it intersect with the language it uses, the culture in which it works? And how does it transform that culture—opening it to new languages and possibilities?

     

    RCAH 307: Women of Color Feminisms

     

    Section 001 (Thobani)
    Women of Color Feminisms
    The category "woman" is by no means homogenous, as women of colour have long pointed out. In this course, we examine how experiences of gender are shaped by, and shape in turn, formations of race. Questions we will address include: What is the relationship between feminist, anti-racist and anti-colonial practices? How is gender shaped by, and how does it shape in turn, other components of social identity, including as race, class, nationality and sexual orientation? Where do feminist politics sit within the wider structure of global power? Drawing on postcolonial, critical race and feminist studies, the course is designed to introduce students to a broad range of issues pertaining to antiracist, postcolonial and transnational feminist approaches.

     

    RCAH 315: Methods in the Arts

     

    Section 001 (MacDonald)
    Musicalturgy: Building Musical Theatre Worlds
    Dramaturgs help theatre artists to build worlds on stage and in musical theatre, and that world-building includes songs and dances as well as scripts and design elements. In this course you’ll learn how musical theatre creators engage audiences with worlds created on stage, and practice doing this yourself on new musicals in progress. You will study different kinds of world-building, like documentary, revival, dance and jukebox musicals. This course will hold space for the lyrics of “Defying Gravity,” as well as the musical Wicked and its place in a history of adaptations. Other musicals that we might work on include Billy Elliot, Come From Away, Waitress, and Jagged Little Pill. Along with reading scripts, listening to songs, and watching performances, you will research topics relevant to different musical worlds and prepare material to engage theatre audiences. You will also collaborate as a dramaturge with professional writers and composers, to help develop their songs and scripts. Students should have an interest in watching or making theatre and be ready to do research as part of their creative practice.

     

    RCAH 316: Topics in the Arts

     

    Section 001 (Sheridan)
    Digital Media Production and Design
    This course will ask students to explore the social and aesthetic potentials of digital video and graphic design. Students will generate creative and socially meaningful projects, exploring fundamental principles of design in the process. We will also investigate strategies for critiquing the work of others. This class will provide excellent preparation for anyone who wishes to work in the RCAH Language and Media Center.

    Section 002 (Richmond)
    Conflict/Climax/Catharsis: eco-Theatre and the Climate Crisis
    The climate crisis demands action now, and the theatre brims with actions and actors. But is the dramatic arc of conflict, crisis, climax and catharsis really up to the task of cultural revolution? On the one hand, a rising contingent of ecodramaturgs—artists and scholars invested in the environmentalist messaging and ecological practices of the theatre—caution that theatre is problematically human-centric; consider that the theatre literally positions the human-centre stage! On the other hand, theatre’s unique ability to gather communities in spacetime to tell evocative stories calling for political action is needed now more than ever; what tools might live performance offer environmental activists and climate communicators? In this class, we will look at the trajectory of ecopolitics within canonical Western theatre and contrast this legacy with the intersectional environmentalist work of contemporary queer, feminist, and Indigenous environmentalist playwrights. Students will have the opportunity to read, watch, analyze, and perform works of eco-Theatre.

     

    RCAH 325: Methods in Community Engagement

     

    Section 001 (Delgado, G.)
    Prison Arts Project: Shining a Light on the Voices Inside
    In this course, we will explore, develop, practice, and facilitate arts workshops for incarcerated people. We’ll collaborate with educators and prison staff to navigate the carcel system in order to implement meaningful, accessible, and safe artistic opportunities. Educational and arts programming is critical to the rehabilitation and well-being of incarcerated people. During weekly visits to prisons, we will work side-by-side with incarcerated adults and youth to write poems, make art, and create ‘zines. We will examine poetic forms from around the world and examine the works by poets who wrote while in prison including Etheridge Knight, Jimmy Baca Santiago, and Reginald Dwayne Betts. At the end semester, you’ll co-facilitate and participate in the culminating poetry event with incarcerated people.

    Section 002 (Torrez)
    Youth Participatory Action Research
    In this course, we will learn about youth participatory action research and community-based action research engagement models from folx doing the work with young people locally and throughout the U.S. This course will explore models of engagement with youth from diverse backgrounds. We will consider the complex societal issues directly impacting the lives of their young collaborators and how we can collectively work through community engagement. Visiting with several community organizers, we will discuss best practices for youth-centered community engagement. In our time visiting with community organizers, we will:

    • Investigate definitions of community.
    • Be introduced to various community engagement practices.
    • Learn how each community has particular fundamental methods unique to working alongside its members.
    • And how these communities have co-developed engagement evaluations. 

     

    RCAH 326: Topics in Community Engagement

     

    Section 002 (Delgado, V.)
    Design for the Common Good
    How do we use design to respond to the impacts of conflict, globalization, and climate change on communities and the environment? In this course, students will learn advanced community participatory methodologies that design and build peace collaboratively using the arts, humanities, reflection, social responsibility, community voice, and transparency. We will check out the latest research on participatory design, community autonomy, and biocultural sustainability; engage with ideas and modalities in the arts and humanities, including storytelling, histories, ethics and others; and develop the critical engagement skills necessary to share these new ideas with community partners in Costa Rica and early-career engineering students at MSU. Together, RCAH and engineering students will collaborate remotely on a community-engaged design project with Ninas Para El Exito (Girls for Success), an educational program for indigena and campesina girls, ages 8-12, on Costa Rica’s Caribbean Coast.

     

    RCAH 335: Methods in Language and Culture

     

    Section 001 (Altman)
    Poetry and the Archive
    This class treats academic research as a space for artistic play and political engagement. We will study artists and poets such as Jen Bervin and Dianna Frid who work in archives and conduct research—but call into question the limits of academic practices. Whose stories are excluded from the archive? How might we reconstruct those lost narratives? What happens if we bring our bodies into contact with the past, using the archive as a space for performance? To answer these questions, we’ll explore the work of radical scholars like Sadiya Hartman and Ann Cvetkovich, who encourage us to reimagine what an archive is and what it means to do research. Finally, you will conduct your own archival studies, working in Special Collections to develop poetic research projects that answer your own questions and identities—and which help you develop your own methods as a researcher and artist.

     

    RCAH 336: Topics in Language and Culture

     

    Section 001 (Torrez)
    Language, school, and policy
    In this course, we will investigate issues of language attrition and revitalization. We will focus on how language is impacted by U.S. educational policy, particularly through the emergence (and transformation) of language policy. Through seminar-style learning, we will discuss the following questions: How does one evaluate the importance of a language? What is a heritage language, and how does one learn their heritage language? Should resource-strapped educational systems expend funds to provide multilingual education? How does one foster a multilingual space? In addition to these questions, students will investigate how schools are working with heritage language communities to become active agents in maintaining language and protecting their community’s way of life.

     

    RCAH 346: Topics in Humanities

     

    Section 001 (MacDonald)
    What Happened? America in the 1970s
    This course explores major trends, events and cultural phenomena of the 1970s to question and challenge a common dismissal of the 1970s as a decade in which “nothing happened” (Peter Carroll, 2000). Topics to be covered include the Vietnam War, Watergate, feminism, nostalgia, disco, New York City, and the American Indian Movement. While focusing on the United States, this course will also look at the October Crisis and the 1972 hockey Summit Series in Canada, Deng Xiaoping’s economic reforms and the growth of Chinese capitalism, and other global developments through the decade. Case studies include singer-songwriter Carole King’s album Tapestry, the television series Little House on the Prairie, Ntozake Shange’s play for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf, and the films Easy Rider and Saturday Night Fever. The class will also visit the Gerald R. Ford Museum in Grand Rapids. Students will develop their own ideas about 1970s history and culture through research presentations and essays and use their new knowledge to create a public history project.

     

    RCAH 492: Senior Seminar

     

    Section 001 (Aronoff)
    What’s Culture? Whose Culture? Where’s Culture?
    A key term in academic and popular discourse—including in the RCAH curriculum—is “culture.” But behind this deceptively simple word is a long, tangled history, the study of which leads one immediately into histories of exploration, imperialism, race, class, science and the arts. This class will examine key texts in the history of the idea of culture in the West—ranging from works of literature, science, anthropology, philosophy and aesthetics—with particular attention to the emergence of anthropology in the modernist period, and the many permutations and problems with culture in contemporary discourses of multiculturalism, transnationalism and the global circulation of “culture(s).” Along the way we will ask questions like: What is “culture”? What does it mean to “have” (a) culture? How do ideas of culture intersect with ideas of ethnicity, race, nationality and personal identity? Who owns (a) culture? How do particular cultures “own” you? What is the “culture” of the RCAH? How is that culture (re)created by each group of students (like yourselves) who pass through?




  • Spring 2025

    RCAH 112: Writing Research Technologies

    RCAH 112 (001) Yoder
    Researching and Writing about Bioethics
    While questions in bioethics are often considered to be very personal, they are also at the heart of many public controversies. In this course we will use both public and scholarly reflection on bioethical issues to deepen our understanding of the practice of research and writing in the humanities.

    RCAH 112 (002) Sheridan
    The Production of Culture
    This class focuses on the ways that the analytical and creative work of the arts and humanities can help to solve real-world problems. The premises of this course are: (1) forms of cultural expression (such as stories, videos, performances, music, etc.) can be powerful tools of social change; and (2) all of us are potentially producers of these forms. Accordingly, students will begin by identifying a cultural problem—something they would like to see changed in the world. They will analyze the way the problem is embodied in popular culture (e.g., movies, music, websites). Finally, they will devise their own "cultural interventions": movies, music, websites, and other compositions aimed at addressing the cultural problem in question.

    RCAH 112 (003) Aronoff
    Our America: Cultures of American Modernism, 1919-1930
    The focus of this section of RCAH 112 is the idea of “American culture” as it is renegotiated and reimagined in the United States in the 1920s and 30s. The 1920s was a period of rapid change—industrialism, urbanization, the rise of consumer culture, mass migration, racial violence, immigration—and in response to what were perceived as new conditions, writers, artists, politicians, and social scientists sought new ways to define what was specifically "American" about America, to create new versions of American identity. But even as American writers and critics in the ‘20s attempted to redefine the content of a particularly “American” culture, the form of culture as a concept—what counted as “culture”—was itself undergoing radical transformations, with the development of ideas of “culture” as an entire “way of life” that is relative, plural, and above all “whole,” “unified” and “meaningful.”

    This section, then, will examine debates over “American” culture, race, national identity and art in the modernist period. Looking at various primary documents, with particular attention to the arts (modernist poetry, literature, jazz and other media), we will ask: how do these texts imagine the relationship between “race,” “nation,” and “culture”? How do these constructions engage debates over immigration, assimilation and pluralism? What is the relationship between racial and /or cultural identity and political identity (or citizenship)? The breadth of these questions will allow for a wide variety of approaches and specific interest: like all sections of 112, we will be able to pursue the burning questions we raise by developing our skills as researchers and writers.

    RCAH 112 (004) Richmond
    Environmental Justice in Michigan
    Social justice is environmental justice; there is no way to address social inequities without ensuring access to healthy environments and there is no way to redress environmental destruction without accounting for inequitable impacts on human communities. In this course, students will research the history, present state, and future of environmental justice activism in Michigan, explore relationships between community-based and academic research, and experiment with scholarly and artistic modes of presenting research findings. The semester will conclude with a public showcase of research projects created through the class.

     

    RCAH 202: The Presence of the Past

    RCAH 202 (002) Hamilton-Wray
    Oral Traditions and the Making of History
    Oral tradition plays a vital role in the construction and reproduction of “official histories.” However, the important role of oral tradition in the construction of history is often not acknowledged. This course makes visible the presence and role of oral tradition in history-making, with particular focus on Africana oral traditions apparent in popular and folk cultural forms, including fables, music, proverbs, cuisine, humor, literature, and film. Through an exploration of various methods of conveying, documenting, and archiving the past, students interrogate the transmission and reception of oral history, the reliability of autobiography as history, the affective value of imagined histories, and the liberatory potential of Afrofuturism. The course asks: What do these multiple histories reveal about how a people, a community or a nation define themselves/itself? How is history critiqued, shaped, and employed for the present and the future? How are official histories understood when studied alongside oral tradition and other non-conventional sources, texts, and artifacts?

    RCAH 202 (004) Aerni-Flessner
    Enslavement in World History
    This course will question what it has meant to be enslaved at various times in history, and whether it is even useful to try to compare enslavements across time and space. We will look at examples of enslavement in the Atlantic World, the Indian Ocean World, as well as on the African continent. We will examine important questions like what role did enslavement play in the creation of the globalized world in which we live and work, and how is that past still with us today. Through case studies in enslavement, we will better understand how the forces that led to the rise and fall of slavery in the Americas and across the world have shaped our communities in a wide variety of ways. This course will help you interrogate the ways in which this is still important, and how debates over the legacy of slavery and reparations have been and continue to be contentious.

     

    RCAH 203: Transcultural Relations

    RCAH 203 (001) Areni-Flessner
    African Popular Culture in the 20th Century
    In this course we will journey through African history to better understand how people spent their leisure time. Looking at cases of sport and music, primarily, we will come to an understanding of how and why these pastimes became not just popular, but also a venue for challenging political, social, and economic relations on the African continent and in the broader globalized world. From fights to free African colonies from European rule to the struggle against apartheid in South Africa, this course will look at various case studies to understand how African leisure and recreational activities became deeply entwined with struggles for rights and freedom.

    RCAH 203 (750) Delgado, V.
    Transculturation Across the Ages: Culture, Sustainability and Everyday Life
    Whether working for sustainability, peace or transformative change, the development of an understanding of yourself and the people and communities with whom you are working is critical to engaging with communities. This course challenges students to build an understanding of sustainability theory, alternatives to development, conflict resolution frameworks, and community-engaged methods. Students will also learn how to use the arts and humanities to build an integrated understanding of their relationship to Costa Rican indigenous and campesino communities. Finally, students will consider the development of Costa Rica’s commitment to and challenges with sustainability through its ideas, history, literature, poetry and film.

    This course is part of RCAH’s community-participatory research semester in Costa Rica: Sustainability and Civic Engagement in Costa Rica.

     

    RCAH 215: Introduction to the Arts 

    RCAH 215 (001) Delgado, G.
    Creativity in Everyday Life
    What does an interdisciplinary arts practice look like both inside and outside of the classroom? This course explores the artist practice and prepares students to develop habits for creating in everyday life. Students will work in a variety of art-based projects to expand their creative toolbox including drawing, creative journaling, songwriting, music, photography, and poetry. Weekly journal assignments and readings including videos and podcast shows will allow students to gain a deeper understanding of artmaking as a tool for personal transformation and social practice.

     

    RCAH 225: Introduction to Community Engagement

    RCAH 225 (001) Glasby
    Queer Advocacy and Storytelling
    For queer people, what is the power of learning our histories, cultivating our voices, and telling  stories on our own terms? What is happening on a local community-led level to support and celebrate queer people and share their stories? In this course, students will explore queer rhetoric and different genres of creative non-fiction writing, from manifestos and documentaries to zines, as vital community empowerment practices. Through a creative and critical lens, students will investigate the queer history of the Lansing area, the network of local services available to support queer people, and the queer individuals currently working for social change in the surrounding areas. Occasionally, we will work on-site alongside community members at the Salus Center, Lansing’s LGBTQIA+ community center, as well as with members from other local LGBTQ-connected organizations. Course goals include (but are not limited to): using interviews and research to listen and learn from experts; offering zine workshops; hosting queer storytelling events; assisting with community-led events; and collaborating to share work by local queer writers, artists, and activists.

    This is a hybrid class, which will require in-person, on-site meetings and events outside of the Tuesday 3-4:50 p.m. time slot.

     

    RCAH 235: Introduction to Language and Culture

    RCAH 235 (001) Altman
    Poetry Beyond Poetry
    This course examines the work of five poets—Samiya Bashir, Cecilia Vicuña, Jjjjjerome Ellis, Bhanu Kapil, and Sawako Nakayasu—who call into question our assumptions about language, culture, and poetry itself. These artists write poems, but they also make music, paintings, performances, translations, and videos. They move across languages and cultures, and they expose the fissures within the cultures that they work. Their work is joyous, strange, and hard to categorize with the tools we have available to us: are they poets? and if they are, what is poetry anyway? How does it intersect with the language it uses, the culture in which it works? And how does it transform that culture—opening it to new languages and new possibilities?

     

    RCAH 315: Methods in Arts

    RCAH 315 (001) Baibak
    A Photographic Meditation
    Photography has the potential to take us to places we would not normally go. Sometimes as the viewer and other times as the photographer. Let’s ponder Henry Cartier Bresson’s phrase “The Decisive Moment” and look at how photography changed our understanding of the passage of time. We will examine the history of the medium and its effects on everything for good and for ill; The artform seems riddled with negatives and positives. In this course we’ll become image makers who use taking pictures as a contemplative practice to slow down and observe. Using our devices to see light, shadow, and tableau anew. The class will have visitors – people who capture images of our world for a living. They will illuminate us with their pictures, share their stories, and give us the scoop on their professional strategies. Photography has the potential to change the way we see…literally. Let’s look at that, and let it change us.

     

    RCAH 316: Topics in Arts

    RCAH 316 (001) Richmond
    Theatre for Social Change
    Theatre for Social Change refers to an array of movements that mobilize techniques of theatre-making beyond the dramatic stage, empowering participants to use theatrical tools to transform their communities. In this course students will play, practice, and facilitate applied theatre exercises while conducting research into applied theatre movements including Theatre of the Oppressed & Forum Theatre, Drama Therapy, Theatre for Young People, Prison Theatre, Documentary Theatre, and Community-Based Theatre. The semester will conclude with a public performance of work generated in the class. No previous theatre experience is required to participate in this course.

    RCAH 316 (002) MacDonald
    Musical Theatre Historemix
    Along with evaluating what musicals are and when their history might begin, in this class we’ll use multiple approaches to study these interdisciplinary live performance works. Working with songs, scripts, reviews, videos, biographies and other sources, we’ll learn about innovators who caused change in the creation and production of musicals, from Eubie Blake and Noble Sissle’s Shuffle Along (1921) to Michigander Michael R. Jackson’s A Strange Loop (2019). We’ll also consider how musicals have put history on stage, and we’ll consider musicals themselves as documents of history, including the lives of 16th century British queens in Six (2017), turn-of-the-century newsboys in Newsies (2012), and the life of stripper Gypsy Rose Lee in Gypsy (1959). Finally, we'll explore the many ways musical theatre history has been captured, from books to documentary films and vlogs, and make our own contributions to expanding musical theatre historiography (HOW musical history is told). This might involve centering particular communities in musical theatre history, such as Jewish or queer musical creators, or it could involve telling history from the perspective of musical theatre audiences and fans. We will also employ practice-as-research methods, such as studying history by singing or dancing, and we will have opportunities to study musicals in performance.

     

    RCAH 325: Methods in Community Engagement

    RCAH 325 (001) Delgado, G.
    The Prison Poetry ‘Zine Project
    This course investigates the history of mass incarceration in the US; to understand why art and educational programming is critical to the rehabilitation and well-being of incarcerated peoples; and to gain the skills necessary to facilitate creative community engagement projects within marginalized populations. During weekly visits to prisons you will work side-by-side with incarcerated adults and youth writing poems and creating ‘zines. We will examine poetic forms from around the world and the works by poets who wrote while in prison including Etheridge Knight, Jimmy Baca Santiago, and Reginald Dwayne Betts. At the end of each prison project, you’ll co-facilitate and participate in the culminating slam poetry events with incarcerated communities.

    RCAH 325 (750) Delgado, V.
    Community Engagement, Research and Change
    This course prepares students to collaborate with communities on local challenges using a powerful research methodology for community change: Community participatory research. Students learn critical skills, theories and models for civic engagement, peace building and research as well as dynamic approaches in the arts, humanities, design, and the social sciences that can lead to sustainable solutions and community resilience. Students, working in teams, take these methods into communities across Costa Rica to engage in research projects addressing critical local challenges. The result: Publishable, community-based research to be shared with community partners. Partners in Costa Rica include: ADESSARU—a non-profit preserving forests to protect the water supply for nearly 50,000 people; Centro Cultural RioChante—a youth arts collective; Girls for Success—an afterschool program for young Campesina, Afro-Caribbean and Indigena women; the Monteverde Community Foundation; ADISL—a Campesinx community development organization; ADITIBRI—the Indigena Bribri Autonomous Territorial Government; and LIFE Monteverde—a permaculture coffee farm.

    This course is part of RCAH’s community-participatory research semester in Costa Rica: Sustainability and Civic Engagement in Costa Rica.

     

    RCAH 326: Topics in Community Engagement

     

    RCAH 326 (001) Sanchez
    Community Engagement in Chicago: Non-profits, Social Enterprises, and Careers 
    In this course, students will review various topics and approaches related to community engagement. Students will carefully analyze concepts and models, their critiques, and develop a collective understanding about them. In addition, students will learn about Chicago, different non-profit organizations (i.e., mission, social enterprises, services, etc.), and community leaders to participate in a number of visits at the end of the semester. We will not only visit some of the non-profit organizations, but we will also work with them to figure out how RCAH students can support their missions and aspirations. Lastly, we will connect with RCAH alumni to hear about their respective career paths and experiences working in a big city, like Chicago. Community partners in Chicago include: New Moms and their social enterprise, Bright Endeavors; Cara Collective and their social enterprise, Cleanslate; Inspiration Corporation’s social enterprise, Inspiration Kitchen; Puerto Rican Cultural Center, and the National Museum of Puerto Rican Arts & Culture. 

    • This section is designed to run as a domestic study-away program.
    • Dates of trip: Monday, May 5, 2025 - Sunday, May 11, 2025  
    • Program Fee: $700 

     

    RCAH 326 (002) Sanchez
    Community Engagement in Belize: Relationships to Culture and Education
    In this course, students will review various topics and approaches related to community engagement, including the RCAH engagement model. Students will also carefully analyze whether such topics, approaches and models are appropriate for the global/transnational context. Students will also learn about Belize’s history, multicultural communities, and higher education system. In addition, students will prepare for a trip to San Ignacio, Belize, where they will gain perspectives about the relationship various communities have with food and education. We will partner with Sacred Heart Jr College to organize a culture and education event for both MSU students and SHJC students. Additional community partners in Belize include: Sacred Heart High School; San Antonio Women’s Cooperative; and Collaborate Belize.  

    • This section is designed to run as a domestic study-away program. 
    • Dates of trip: Friday, February 28, 2025 - Saturday, March 8, 2025 
    • Program Fee: $2,400

     

    RCAH 336: Topics in Language and Culture

    RCAH 336 (001) Torrez
    Challenging and affirming the place of language in our lives
    “I am my language. Until I take pride in my language, I cannot take pride in myself.” (Gloria Anzaldúa)

    In this introductory course on language and culture, this section will investigate how language is linked to identity formation and how we interact with the world. This course will explore concepts related to language, culture, society, arts and community. What happens when a newcomer community is forced to hide or lose its language? Can community members create their identities without the language of that community, or does the identity of that community shift to accommodate its language loss? This course will delve into a discussion of language attrition and revitalization and how these processes affect the identity formation of young people (both individually and as a community). We will explore how linguistic shifts within our families. Through meaningful dialogue with artists, educators, and newcomer students, we will discuss the importance of language on identities and how we might use the arts to explore these new identities. 

     

    RCAH 345: Topics in Humanities

    RCAH 345 (001) Aronoff
    Writing Other Worlds: Narrating the Human in Speculative Fiction
    This course will examine the ways in which science fiction has been a site for speculation about what it means to “be human.” With particular attention to the way science fiction stands at the intersection of such fields as philosophy, anthropology, neuroscience and literary theory, how, we will ask, do science fictions construct their “other worlds,” and those world’s “Others”? What narrative techniques do authors use to construct those “worlds,” and what do these techniques tell us about our ideas of culture and knowledge? How do these narratives draw upon, critique, resist and/or transform the dynamics of colonial exploration and encounters that have shaped 20th century anthropology (and science fiction)—as well as the theories of race, gender, language and the human that these histories have produced? How are our ideas of the human challenged by recent developments in neuroscience, artificial “intelligence,” genetics, and other fields of biology and animal behavior?

    Texts might include: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; Ray Bradbury’s Martian Chronicles; Ursula Le Guin’s Left Hand of Darkness; Scott Card’s Ender’s Game; Octavia Butler’s Lilith’s Brood; Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake; short stories by Rebecca Roanhorse; and others.

     

     

    RCAH 346: Topics in Humanities

    RCAH 346 (002) Yoder
    Naturalism and the Humanities 
    “Naturalism,” the view that we should look to the natural world rather than some supernatural realm to explain and give meaning to our experience, is a working assumption in the natural and social sciences. However, it is less clear that it has been widely adopted in the humanities. In this course we will look at what it would mean to take naturalism seriously as we work in the humanities. How do we understand ourselves as humans if we assume that we are fully natural beings? How might we think of both religion and morality if we do not depend on the existence of a supernatural realm. Can there be authentic religious responses to the world that do not depend on the existence of a supernatural realm? How do we think about free will and moral agency?

     

    RCAH 492: Senior Seminar

    RCAH 492 (001) Hamilton-Wray
    Senior Seminar: American Independent Cinema Movements
    American Independent Cinema of the 1960s and 1970s is a notable time in Film History. Work from this period reflects the tumultuous political scene, rising attention to a multiculturalism, and a rejection of Hollywood formulaic fare. Access to cheaper means of production meant that radical political movements from the U.S. to Latin American and other parts of the world were exploiting film as an ideological tool, while avant-garde artists were exploring the creative boundaries of the medium. In this course, we’ll interrogate concepts such as American culture and the American dream through the interdisciplinary theoretical framework of American Cultural Studies. We’ll look at how essayists, authors, and film artists gave birth to the Black Independent Film Movement of the mid-twentieth century, all while critically engaging with conceptions of America, history, representation, race, class, gender, aesthetics, power, language, access to means of production, distribution, and exhibition.

  • Fall 2024
    RCAH 111: Writing Transcultural Contexts

    Section 001 (Aronoff)
    Telling Stories: Composing Knowledges in Transcultural Contexts
    In this section of RCAH 111, we will focus on the connection between culture and “storytelling,” broadly conceived. That is, we will examine the ways in which culture shapes the ways we perceive the world around us, and how we organize those perceptions into oral and written narratives – be they what we conventionally would call “stories” like personal narratives, myths or novels, or other genres like scientific, academic or philosophical writing, each with their own generic rules for the “stories” they tell. Drawing primarily on short stories and novels, we will be particularly interested in what happens when different “cultures,” or ways of knowing and writing, collide, clash or mix, in a process we will call “transculturation.” In what ways, we will ask, does “culture” provide us with narratives, patterns, genres, through which we shape our experience into something meaningful? In what ways do we deploy, bend, mix these “stories”? If different kinds of stories embody different ways of knowing the world, what do each of these ways of knowing/writing/storytelling enable us to see, and what might they leave out? In what ways can certain kinds of writing or storytelling be seen as the mixing of, or struggle between, multiple systems of meaning or cultures? Possible course texts include Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony and/or Art Spiegelman’s Maus.

    Section 002 (Sheridan) 
    Transculturation in Michigan
    “Who in the world are you?” This is the desperate question of Anders, a character in Charles Baxter’s award-winning short story, “The Disappeared.” A Swedish engineer visiting Detroit, Anders meets a local resident who bewilders and emotionally overpowers him. He is left to wonder, “Who are you?” Michigan is the setting for many stories of this kind — stories that involve cross-cultural encounters in which participants must seek out tools for mutual understanding. In this section of RCAH 111, we’ll examine Michigan narratives that take place in the cities and small towns around us. We’ll let these stories teach us about the challenges and opportunities that emerge when different cultural groups come into contact. We’ll seek out a variety of ways to report our findings, from analytical essays to digital videos.

    Section 004 (Richmond)
    Naturecultures & Anthropo(s)cenes: Writing Beyond the Human
    “Natureculture” is a term created by Donna Haraway to emphasize that nature and culture are not opposites nor separate. In other words, nature is already a cultural concept and culture cannot stand outside of nature. Natureculture has more recently been taken up by science and technology studies scholars, artists, and activists to engage a broader audience with the impacts of climate change as we have now entered what Paul Crutzen calls “the Anthropocene,” an era where humans have undeniably impacted and changed planet Earth. In this section of RCAH111, we will explore how the conditions of the Anthropo(s)cene have prompted writers, artists, and other cultural communicators to experiment with the tools of their craft. How do the ethics and aesthetics of writing change when we recognize that “the very idea of nature itself is not natural,” the very concept and understanding of nature itself is cultural. Throughout this course, we will learn to apply climate justice and ecocritical frameworks to our academic and creative writing projects, as we write towards our own articulation of “naturecultures.” Case studies will draw from scholars, artists, and activists who have engaged these two concepts in creative and innovate ways through podcasts, plays, short stories, documentary photography, video games, and TV series.

    RCAH 150: Introduction to the Arts and Humanities
    Section 001 (Yoder)
    What is interdisciplinary study and what does it look like in the arts and humanities? In this course, four faculty will help us explore this question by looking at how the theme of storytelling connects the four RCAH pathways – the Arts, the Humanities, Community Engagement, and Language and Culture.

    RCAH 202: Presence of the Past
    Section 004 (Hamilton-Wray)
    Oral Traditions and the Making of History
    Oral tradition plays a vital role in the construction and reproduction of “official histories.” However, the important role of oral tradition in the construction of history is often not acknowledged. This course makes visible the presence and role of oral tradition in history-making, with particular focus on Africana oral traditions apparent in popular and folk cultural forms, including fables, music, proverbs, cuisine, humor, literature, and film. Through an exploration of various methods of conveying, documenting, and archiving the past, students interrogate the transmission and reception of oral history, the reliability of autobiography as history, the affective value of imagined histories, and the liberatory potential of Afrofuturism. The course asks: What do these multiple histories reveal about how a people, a community or a nation define themselves/itself? How is history critiqued, shaped, and employed for the present and the future? How are official histories understood when studied alongside oral tradition and other non-conventional sources, texts, and artifacts?

    RCAH 203: Transcultural Relations

    Section 001 (Aerni-Flessner)
    African Popular Culture in the 20th Century
    In this course we will journey through African history to better understand how people spent their leisure time. Looking at cases of sport and music, primarily, we will come to an understanding of how and why these pastimes became not just popular, but also a venue for challenging political, social, and economic relations on the African continent and in the broader globalized world. From fights to free African colonies from European rule to the struggle against apartheid in South Africa, this course will look at various case studies to understand how African leisure and recreational activities became deeply entwined with struggles for rights and freedom.

    Section 750 (Delgado, V)
    Transculturation Through Ages: Design Justice
    In this on-campus semester course and winter break education abroad program, we will collaborate remotely with water and forest protectors in Costa Rica to apply new ideas about justice; engagement; the design of things, programs, and projects; and the arts and humanities for a more peaceful, just, and sustainable world. Then, December 14-21, 2024, we travel to Palmichal, Costa Rica, to engage directly with local youth to design, build and pilot a new program – modeled after the U.S. Civilian Conservation Corps – to connect youth with art, coffee culture, cloud forest reserve design and forest management. Each night in Costa Rica, we will consider our experiences and accomplishments using group dialogue and artmaking with the area’s vibrant sense of community, cloud forests, and clear rivers as inspiration. We end the trip with a visit by boat to coastal and island wildlife refuges in the Bay of Nicoya.
     
    This course counts both as the required base course for the New Design Justice Minor and the upper-level ISS university requirement for RCAH, Engineering, and Forestry students. Students must participate in both the course and the education abroad program. Passport required. Contact Vincent Delgado (delgado1@msu.edu) for more information about the course, the program, and costs.

    RCAH 215: Introduction to the Arts
    Section 001 (Baibak)
    Reclamation Studio Project
    Art thou thinking about our climate footprint? Reclamation Studio Project is a workshop based on gleaning, reuse, and transformation of found, second-hand, or inherited objects. The course is designed to help alter our perception of the things we get rid of, so we can see them as an available resource for base materials: plastic, metal, wood, or fiber. We will dissect forms to discover their potential frameworks, cavities, openings, and abstractions. We will look at connective materials, including bolts, wires, rivets, interlocking tabs, springs, hinges, and lashings. We will experiment with these methods to construct both abstract and utilitarian objects out of castaway materials to give kinetic visibility to the issues of disposable culture. The class will read articles about reusing materials from “our great abundance”, and we will meet, part of the time, at MSU’s Surplus Store & Recycling Center’s education wing. Where we will witness the handling of all the stuff that is disposed of across our grand campus. MSU Surplus Store & Recycling Center is the hub of the universities recycling and resource management. Reclamation Studio’s goal is to help us to become more aware of available resources and to highlight our own responsibility as consumers.


    RCAH 225: Introduction to Community Engagement     

    Section 001 (Sanchez)
    #Remixed=Hip-Hop+CommunityEngagement 
    This course is designed to complement students’ academic responsibilities with a community engagement project; to collaborate with, support community aspirations, and strengthen university-community relationships. Students are introduced to general methods, concepts, and theories related to social justice education, Hip-Hop culture, and community engagement. In concert with the RCAH Engagement Model, students learn about Hip-Hop history and current events, and how they complement and challenge community engagement knowledge. Hip-Hop encompasses more than rap, it is a cultural movement born in Bronx, New York that includes music, dance and art. Community Engagement is more than volunteer and service acts; it involves critical reflection on larger social justice systemic issues that affect specific historically marginalized communities (i.e., youth of color, women, people with disabilities, etc.). This class will partner with All of The Above (AOTA) Hip Hop Academy for their community engagement project. AOTA is a Lansing -based non-profit with the mission to mentor youth, support artistic expression and serve as a Hip Hop Cultural resource.

    Section 002 (Delgado, G)Building Bridges with the Arts
    "To bridge means loosening our borders, not closing off to others. Bridging is the work of opening the gate to the stranger, within and without.” (Gloria E. Anzaldúa, This Bridge We Call Home: Radical Visions for Transformation). How do we use the arts to prepare ourselves to engage with communities in meaningful ways? In this course, students will explore best practices in community engagement that incorporate art methods to incite personal growth, fulfilment, and the realization of our true potential. Through close listening, readings, guest speakers, making, and collaborative art projects, we will learn and practice how to bridge our liberation with that of others to create a more just and equitable world. Be prepared to take creative and social positive risks.


    RCAH 235: Introduction to Language and Culture

    Section 001 (Torrez)
    Language, identity, education and schooling
    “When a language dies, so much than words are lost. Language is the dwelling place of ideas that do not exist elsewhere. It is a prism through which to see the world.”  (Robin Wall Kimmerer). In this introductory course on language and culture, this section will investigate the role of language and culture in local communities. Engaging in meaningful inter/intra dialogue has never been more important than at this moment in time when we are learning to reconnect. In this course, we will engage in topics relating to language loss, regeneration, and impact of language on one’s identities. We consider the educational system’s role in sociolinguistic practices and the ways in which youth have (and continue) to reclaim cultural identities through language. Additionally, we will discuss the relationship between language and power as they relate to newcomers and Indigenous communities. 


    RCAH 315: Methods in Arts

    Section 001 (MacDonald)
    Musicalturgy: Building Musical Theatre Worlds
    Dramaturgs help theatre artists to build worlds on stage and in musical theatre, that world-building includes songs and dances as well as scripts and design elements. In this course you’ll develop an awareness of musical theatre dramaturgy and an understanding of how musical theatre artists engage audiences with worlds created on stage. You will study different kinds of musical theatre world-building, like adaptation, revival, dance and jukebox musicals. Along with reading scripts, listening to songs, and watching performances, you will research topics relevant to the musicals we study, and prepare material that might help to engage theatre audiences. You will also learn and practice skills for developing new musical theatre worlds and collaborate as a dramaturge with professional writers and composers. Reading scripts and listening to song demos, you’ll offer feedback on your collaborators’ drafts and ideas. Students should already have an interest in watching or making theatre and be ready to use their research skills to inform their discussions of musical theatre.


    RCAH 316: Topics in Arts

    Section 001 (Sheridan)
    Digital Storytelling
    Digital media allow us to tell stories in new ways. Creatives from a variety of backgrounds construct digital narratives that incorporate stop motion, digital animation, still photography, hand-drawn art, music, ambient sounds, the written word, and other media elements. In this class we will ask, What makes a compelling digital story? What new ways can we tell stories in digital media? We will explore these questions together by making and sharing our own digital stories.


    RCAH 325: Methods in Community Engagement

    Section 001 (Torrez)
    Community based research: Intergenerational dialogues with Latine and Indigenous communities
    “The heart of justice is truth telling, seeing ourselves and the world the way it is rather than the way we want it to be. More than ever before we, as a society, need to renew a commitment to truth telling.” (bell hooks) In this course, students will work with youth and community leaders from the Greater Lansing Area’s Latine and Indigenous communities to learn stories of strength, resistance and love. Meeting weekly with youth through afterschool programs, we will learn the basic principles of community-based action research through a culturally responsive approach with a focus on Latine and Indigenous studies. Together we will engage in intergenerational conversations with the Lansing School District community to deepen our understanding of how the local community has sustained (and continues to advocate for) a strong sense of connectedness. Working together, we will co-create materials (visual, written, and audio) to be distributed in the community. 

    RCAH 326: Topics in Community Engagement

    Section 002 (Delgado, V)
    Topics in Civic Engagement: Design for the Common Good
    How do we use design to respond to the impacts of conflict, globalization, and climate change on communities and the environment? In this fully remote course, students will learn community participatory design methodologies and co-generate solutions to community challenges using the arts, humanities, reflection, social responsibility, community voice, and transparency. We will review the latest ideas about participatory design, community autonomy, and biocultural heritage; engage with ideas and modalities in the arts and humanities, including storytelling, histories, ethics, and visual arts; and develop the critical engagement skills necessary to collaborate with Centro Cultural Riochante and Monteverde youth on a project that combines public art and cloud forest design and management in a small cloud forest reserve next to this important community center.

    Section 003 (Delgado, G)
    Art with Incarcerated Youth     
    This course investigates the history of mass incarceration in the US and how it impacts youth and communities across the county; to understand why art and educational programming is critical to the rehabilitation, well-being, and empowerment of marginalized populations; and to gain skills in best practices necessary to design and facilitate safe and inclusive creative community engagement projects. During weekly visits to the youth detention facility, students will co-facilitate creative learning opportunities and collaborate with youth in making art in a variety of forms including poetry and ‘zine making.

    RCAH 335: Methods in Language and Culture
    Section 001 (Altman)
    Poetry and the Archive
    This class treats academic research as a space for artistic play and political engagement. We will study artists and poets such as Jen Bervin, Dianna Frid, and Bhanu Kapil who work in archives and conduct research—but call into question the limits of academic practices. Whose stories are excluded from the archive? How might we reconstruct those lost narratives? What happens if we bring our bodies into contact with the past, using the archive as a space for performance? To answer these questions, we’ll explore the work of radical scholars like Saidiya Hartman and Ann Cvetkovich, who encourage us to reimagine what an archive is and what it means to do research. Finally, you will conduct your own archival studies, working in Special Collections to develop poetic research projects that answer to your own questions and identities—and which help you develop your own methods as a researcher and artist.

    RCAH 336: Topics in Language and Culture
    Section 001 (Aerni-Flessner)
    Lesotho: Complex Culture in Southern Africa
    A mountainous, landlocked country in southern Africa is where we will explore how language and culture intersect with history, art, and literature. Seemingly endless mountains and the history of being an independent enclave in the middle of the apartheid system in South Africa make Lesotho a fascinating place to examine all of these issues. The course will look at a wide variety of literature, history, music, and film—all produced in and made about Lesotho—in an effort to see how cultural forces help shape the world that we see around us and live in. The culture of Lesotho extends deep into South Africa as well through the history of labor migration, and even into Europe and North America. We will find ways in which the languages and cultures of southern Africa have influenced the rest of the world.

    RCAH 346: Topics in Humanities
    Section 001 (MacDonald)
    What Happened? America in the 1970s 
    This course explores major trends, events and cultural phenomena of the 1970s to counter and question this decade’s frequent dismissal as a decade in which “nothing happened” (Peter Carroll, 2000). Historians have begun to re-assess the decade as a turning point, so this course aims to engage with and contribute to the expanding historiography. Topics to be covered include the Culture of Narcissism, disaster movies, disco, divorce, the rights revolution and Watergate. While focussing on the United States, this course will also look at the October Crisis and the 1972 hockey Summit Series in Canada, Deng Xiaoping’s economic reforms and the growth of Chinese capitalism, the Latin American literary boom, and other global developments through the decade. Case studies include Carol King’s album Tapestry, the television series Little House on the Prairie and Sanford and Son, Ntozake Shange’s play for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf, and the films Taxi Driver (Scorsese), and Saturday Night Fever (Badham).

    RCAH 492: Senior Seminar
    Section 001 (Aronoff)
    What’s Culture? Whose Culture? Where’s Culture?
    A key term in academic and popular discourse—including in the RCAH curriculum—is “culture.” But behind this deceptively simple word is a long, tangled history, the study of which leads one immediately into histories of exploration, imperialism, race, class, science and the arts. This class will examine key texts in the history of the idea of culture in the West—ranging from works of literature, science, anthropology, philosophy and aesthetics—with particular attention to the emergence of anthropology in the modernist period, and the many permutations and problems with culture in contemporary discourses of multiculturalism, transnationalism and the global circulation of “culture(s).” Along the way we will ask questions like: What is “culture”? What does it mean to “have” (a) culture? How do ideas of culture intersect with ideas of ethnicity, race, nationality and personal identity? Who owns (a) culture? How do particular cultures “own” you? What is the “culture” of the RCAH? How is that culture (re)created by each group of students (like yourselves) who pass through? These questions have taken on new urgency during these last 2+ years of pandemic: what does (a) culture look like in a virtual community? How has the shift online changed/sustained/threatened what we might have thought of as “RCAH culture” in 2020? What is RCAH culture in this post-pandemic world?
  • Spring 2024

    RCAH 112: Writing Research Technologies
    Section 001 (Yoder)
    Researching and Writing about Bioethics

    While questions in bioethics are often considered to be very personal, they are also at the heart of many public controversies.  In this course we will use both public and scholarly reflection on bioethical issues to deepen our understanding of the practice of research and writing in the humanities. 

    Section 002 (Russell)
    Poetry of Witness, Poetry of Resistance

    How have poets used their craft to document, to bear witness, to ask hard questions, to recenter marginalized voices, to uncover secrets and buried histories, to reclaim narratives, and to demand justice? What are the ethical considerations, and what are the stakes? Drawing on a range of modern and contemporary poetry, with particular emphasis on U.S. poets operating in documentary and investigative modes from the 1930s to the present day, we will explore how poets have used poetry in general, and research-based creative practices in particular, to affect change. As in all sections of RCAH 112, students will develop their skills as researchers and writers. This section will provide opportunities for both critical and creative writing and assumes that both can be valid modes of inquiry.

    Section 003 (Aronoff)
    Our America:  Cultures of American Modernism, 1919-1930

    The focus of this section of RCAH 112 is the idea of “American culture” as it is renegotiated and reimagined in the United States in the 1920s and 30s.  The 1920s was a period of rapid change – industrialism, urbanization, the rise of consumer culture, mass migration, racial violence, immigration – and in response to what were perceived as new conditions, writers, artists, politicians, and social scientists sought new ways to define what was specifically "American" about America, to create new versions of American identity.  But even as American writers and critics in the ‘20s attempted to redefine the content of a particularly “American” culture, the form of culture as a concept – what counted as “culture” – was itself undergoing radical transformations, with the development of ideas of “culture” as an entire “way of life” that is relative, plural, and above all “whole,” “unified” and “meaningful.”

    This section, then, will examine debates over “American” culture, race, national identity and art in the modernist period.  Looking at various primary documents, with particular attention to the arts (modernist poetry, literature, jazz and other media), we will ask:  how do these texts imagine the relationship between “race,” “nation,” and “culture”? How do these constructions engage debates over immigration, assimilation and pluralism?  What is the relationship between racial and /or cultural identity and political identity (or citizenship)? The breadth of these questions will allow for a wide variety of approaches and specific interest:  like all sections of 112, we will be able to pursue the burning questions we raise by developing our skills as researchers and writers.

    Section 005 (Sheridan)
    The Production of Culture

    This class focuses on the ways that the analytical and creative work of the arts and humanities can help to solve real-world problems.  The premises of this course are: (1) forms of cultural expression (such as stories, videos, performances, music, etc.) can be powerful tools of social change; and (2) all of us are potentially producers of these forms.  Accordingly, students will begin by identifying a cultural problem — something they would like to see changed in the world.  They will analyze the way the problem is embodied in popular culture (e.g., movies, music, websites).  Finally, they will devise their own "cultural interventions": movies, music, websites, and other compositions aimed at addressing the cultural problem in question.

     

    RCAH 202: The Presence of the Past

    Section 001 (Plough)
    Language Globalization

    Language Globalization begins by examining the various definitions of “global language”. We will ask why and how a global language develops. The reasons for the global spread of English are explored. Different global contexts in which Englishes are used are examined. The educational and economic effects on societies and on individuals of the varied status of World Englishes are critically reviewed, including the role of language standardization and assessment on the maintenance of global inequality.

    Section 002 (Thobani)
    Representing the Exotic: Sex, Gender and Culture in Colonial and Postcolonial Contexts

    What makes something ‘exotic’? Where do our ideas about the ‘exotic’ come from? Are the tropes used to depict the exotic in popular culture new, or are they part of a longer history of representation? How do these tropes shape our ideas about gender, sexuality and race, ideas that we often take for granted? We take up these questions in this course, which introduces students to the politics of representation. We will pay specific attention to how gender, sexuality and race have been presented in depictions of the ‘exotic’. Furthermore, by studying examples taken from contemporary popular culture as well as from earlier forms of colonial representation, we will learn how to trace the relationship between past and present in the production of popular culture.

    Section 003 (Aerni-Flessner)
    The Presence of the Past: Enslavement in World History

    This course will question what it has meant to be enslaved at various times in history, and whether it is even useful to try to compare enslavements across time and space. We will look at examples of enslavement in the Atlantic World, the Indian Ocean World, as well as on the African continent. We will examine important questions like what role did enslavement play in the creation of the globalized world in which we live and work, and how is that past still with us today. Through case studies in enslavement, we will better understand how the forces that led to the rise and fall of slavery in the Americas and across the world have shaped our communities in a wide variety of ways. This course will help you interrogate the ways in which this is still important, and how debates over the legacy of slavery and reparations have been and continue to be contentious.

    Section 004 (Hamilton Wray)
    African Oral Traditions and the Making of History

    Oral tradition plays a vital role in the construction and reproduction of “official histories”. However, the important role of oral tradition in the construction of history is often not acknowledged. This course makes visible the presence and role of oral tradition in history-making, with particular focus on African diasporic oral culture found in folklore, music, proverbs, cuisine, humor, literature, and other aspects of African and African diasporic society. Through a look at multiple histories--oral history, imagined history, autobiographical history, and “trans-history” (history that connects the past and the future)--students address the questions: What do these multiple histories reveal about how a people, a community or a nation define themselves/itself? How is history critiqued or employed for the use in the present? How do we understand our own official histories when we take into account oral tradition and other historical voices?

     

    RCAH 203: Transcultural Relations

    Section 001 (Esquith)
    Violence and the Arts and Humanities 

    Many people in the U.S. today believe that it is legitimate to commit violence against their own government or non-governmental groups and individuals they believe are threats to their way of life. These feelings of anger and fear are creating a political tinder box that some believe could lead to major forms of violence in the US.  In other countries similar trends have led to civil war. How are these trends being represented in the arts and humanities in the U.S. and elsewhere? What can and should the arts and humanities do in response to these forms of real and potential violence? In this section of RCAH 203 we will consider these questions through the work of particular poets, historians, documentary film makers, and multi-media artists. Students also will have an opportunity to compose and explain the rationale behind their own artistic and/or literary responses to violence and the threat of violence in their own experience. 

    Section 750 (Delgado V.)
    Culture, Sustainability and Everyday Life

    Critical to engaging in communities – whether for sustainability, peace or transformative change – is the development of an understanding of yourself and the people and communities with whom you are working. This course challenges students to build an understanding of sustainability theories, alternatives to development, conflict resolution frameworks, and community-engaged methods. Students will also learn how to use the arts and humanities to build an integrated understanding of their relationship to Costa Rican indigenous and campesino communities. The course will also consider the development of Costa Rica’s commitment to and challenges with sustainability through its ideas, history, literature, poetry and film.


    RCAH 225: Introduction to Community Engagement

    Section 001 (Delgado, G)
    Building Bridges and Sustaining Community

    This course introduces students to community engagement, with a particular focus on the intersection of the arts and humanities and social justice. We will examine an asset-based perspective and how to build reciprocal partnerships. Students will explore their own identities and how they shape their experience in community. We will discuss the challenges in community work and how to navigate issues such as assumptions, biases, judgments, and stereotypes about individuals and communities. Throughout the course, we will read from Mariame Kaba’s book We Do This 'Til We Free Us: Abolitionist Organizing Transforming Justice and Shira Hassan’s book Saving Our Own Lives: A Liberatory Practice of Harm Reduction. In this course we will be guided by the words of Murri visual artist, activist and academic, Lilla Watson: “If you have come here to help me you are wasting your time, but if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.”

     

    RCAH 235: Introduction to Language and Culture

    Section 001 (McCarthy)
    Adapt, Transcribe, Transduce, Translate

    This course lays a groundwork in language and culture studies by giving students hands-on experience with four important tasks: adaptation, transcription, transduction, and translation. Each of these tasks takes a source from one medium or milieu and somehow moves it into another. All of them therefore require critical reflections on key debates in language and culture studies. How is meaning mediated by assumptions, conventions, experiences, forms, habits, ideas, and values? How are assumptions, conventions, experiences, forms, habits, ideas, and values themselves grounded in social relations? What constitutes a “language” or a “culture?” What does it take to communicate?

     

    RCAH 315: Methods in Arts

    Section 001 (Baibak)
    Building Bridges with Community – Art and Wellness 

    This course will engage with Peckham’s Art from the Heart’s creative community to learn how making art can be used to build relationships, reduce isolation, and promote health and wellbeing. Peckham provides people with physical, cognitive, behavioral, and socio-economic challenges, a platform to demonstrate their ability, learn new skills, participate in work, and enjoy the rewards of their success. We’ll use this unique experience to explore this “Creativity Community” by working alongside Peckham, artists team members, in their studio, making, and sharing stories. RCAH students will be fueled to reflect on how interpersonal interactions expand their understanding of the world we live in. Through this collaboration students will learn “People First Language” and look at Peckham’s universal design that works with team members to create an ever-evolvingworkspace that is human-centered. The course will use creative writing, journaling, and art-based processes to record participation and observations. 

     

    RCAH 316: Topics in Arts

    Section 002 (MacDonald)
    Musical Theatre Historemix

    Along with evaluating what musicals are and when their history might begin, in this class we’ll use multiple approaches to study these interdisciplinary live performance works. Working with songs, scripts, reviews, videos, biographies and other sources, we’ll learn about innovators who caused change in the creation and production of musicals, from Eubie Blake and Noble Sissle’s Shuffle Along (1921) to Michigander Michael R. Jackson’s A Strange Loop (2019). We’ll also consider how musicals have made history by centering particular communities, such as the Jewish diaspora in Fiddler on the Roof (1964) and Latine New Yorkers in Lin-Manuel Miranda’s In the Heights (2008). Musical theatregoers have played a role in deciding what musicals are important, so we’ll study the ways musicals like The Wiz (1975) and Rent (1996) have made history with their audiences. Musicals have also put history on stage, and we’ll consider musicals themselves as documents of history, including the lives of 16th century British queens in Six (2017), turn-of-the-century newsboys in Newsies (2012) and lesbian cartoonist Alison Bechdel’s 1970s childhood in Fun Home (2015).

     

    RCAH 325: Methods in Community Engagement

    Section 001 (Delgado G)
    The Prison Poetry ‘Zine Project

    The goals of this course are to investigate the history of mass incarceration in the US; to understand why art and educational programming is critical to the rehabilitation and well-being of incarcerated communities; and to gain the skills necessary to facilitate creative community engagement projects within marginalized populations. During weekly visits to prisons you will work side-by-side with incarcerated adults and children writing poems and creating ‘zines. We will examine poetic forms from around the world and the works by poets who wrote while in prison including Etheridge Knight, Jimmy Baca Santiago, Marilyn Buck, and Reginald Dwayne Betts. At the end of each prison project, you’ll co-facilitate and participate in the culminating slam poetry events with incarcerated communities.

    Section 002 (Delgado V)
    Community Engagement, Research and Change

    This course prepares students to work with communities on local challenges using a powerful research methodology for community change: Community participatory research. Students learn critical skills, theories and models for civic engagement, peace building and research as well as dynamic approaches in the arts, humanities, design, and the social sciences that can lead to sustainable solutions. Students, working in teams, take these methods into communities across Costa Rica to engage in research projects addressing critical local challenges. The result: publishable, community-based research to be shared with community partners. Partners in Costa Rica include: ADESSARU – a non-profit preserving forests to protect the water supply for nearly 50,000 people; Centro Cultural RioChante – a youth arts collective; Girls for Success – an afterschool program of young Campesina, Afro-Caribbean and Indigena women; the Monteverde Community Foundation; ADISL – a Campesinx community development organization; ADITIBRI – the Indigena Bribri Autonomous Territorial Government; LIFE Monteverde – a permaculture coffee farm.

     

    RCAH 326: Topics in Community Engagement

    Section 001 (Torrez)
    Youth Participatory Action Research with Detroit Ecological Arts Leaders

    Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR) "is an approach that involves young people as principal investigators in a research process where they determine research questions, conduct data collection, and provide data analysis, with adult researchers facilitating the process" (Harris & Kiyama, 2015,p. 171). Youth co-researchers use YPAR to examine inequities impacting their lives critically.

    Building upon a Fall 2022 Community Engagement course, we will explore and practice youth participatory action research practices focused on the intersection of arts and ecology. Through biweekly gatherings with University Preparatory Science and Math high school and Department of Forestry graduate students, our group will investigate Detroit's robust arts community and organizations dedicated to securing community water resources. Our meetings will be a combination of Zoom meetings, RCAH students' visits to UPSM, and UPSM students visiting RCAH. Please note we will be meeting at UPSM five times throughout the semester. Transportation will be provided. 

    Section 002 (Esquith)
    Global Peace Education Through the Arts and Humanities 

    The topic of this community engagement course is global peace education through the arts and humanities. We will be participating in a community engagement project that began in 2020-21 with students from the University for the Arts and Human Sciences in Bamako, Mali.  In 2022-23 we worked closely with these students and young people in three internally displaced persons camps in Mali to help them lead local dialogues on the importance of education for peacebuilding in Mali. The local dialogues were prompted by photographs of life in three IDP camps taken by the students and young people. Our goal in RCAH 326 in spring 2024 is to continue this photovoice project and these local community dialogues in Mali, and possibly in neighboring West African countries.

     

    RCAH 336: Topics in Language and Culture

    Section 001 (Thobani)
    Performing India: Arts, Culture and Nation Formation

    This course examines the role of ‘arts and culture’ in producing ideas about Indian national identity. Some of the questions we will address include: How did British colonialism shape the way Indian identity came to be defined? Did this overlap with, or differ from, ideas about Indian identity as defined by anti-colonial nationalists? In what ways does the construction of Indian national identity draw on, and reproduce, ideas about race, gender, religion and sexuality? What does it mean to practice and consume ‘arts’ today that are historically rooted in the colonial encounter? By addressing these specific questions, students will engage in a larger study of the politics of nation formation, as well as the relationship between nationalist politics and cultural production more generally.

     

    RCAH 345: Methods in the Humanities

    Section 001 (MacDonald)
    Documenting Liveness

    Considering live performances such as concerts, plays and operas, as well as sporting and political events, we’ll think about how live events are documented in the present and what this means when we study and write history. Journalists, photographers, historians, and curators are professionals who help to capture and preserve liveness, but amateurs have also taken advantage of new technologies to document liveness, and now contribute to “digital cultural memory” (Abigail De Kosnik, Rogue Archives, 2016). Phillip Auslander has observed how, “The ubiquity of reproductions of performances of all kinds in our culture has led to the depreciation of live presence,” (Liveness, 1999) so we’ll also reflect on how technology and the ability to document liveness may influence and shape what happens at live events (and whether they happen at all). We’ll attend local events to study liveness and practice documentation, including but not limited to making notes, taking photos and videos, conducting interviews and surveys. We might attend a performance at the Wharton Center, sporting events on campus, and/or visit Michigan’s State Capitol.

     

    RCAH 346: Topics in Humanities

    Section 001 (Aronoff)
    Writing Other Worlds:  Narrating the Human in Speculative Fiction

    This course will examine the ways in which science fiction has been a site for speculation about what it means to “be human.”  With particular attention to the way science fiction stands at the intersection of such fields as philosophy, anthropology, neuroscience and literary theory, how, we will ask, do science fictions construct their “other worlds,” and those world’s “Others”?  What narrative techniques do authors use to construct those “worlds,” and what do these techniques tell us about our ideas of culture and knowledge?  How do these narratives draw upon, critique, resist and/or transform the dynamics of colonial exploration and encounters that have shaped 20th Century anthropology (and science fiction) – as well as the theories of race, gender, language and the human that these histories have produced?  How are our ideas of the human challenged by recent developments in neuroscience, artificial “intelligence,” genetics, and other fields of biology and animal behavior?

    Texts might include:  Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; Ray Bradbury’s Martian Chronicles; Ursula Le Guin’s Left Hand of Darkness; Scott Card’s Ender’s Game; Octavia Butler’s Lilith’s Brood; Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake; short stories by Rebecca Roanhorse; and others.

    Section 002 (Aerni Flessner)
    Public Health in Africa

    On the heels of the global Covid-19 pandemic, this course will ask students to interrogate what they think they know about disease and public health. We will look at the history of public health interventions on the African continent, explore how the histories of colonization and economic dependency have influenced public health campaigns, and think through the ethics and morality of public health interventions. Looking at both endemic and epidemic diseases like cholera, malaria, HIV/AIDS, and Covid-19, this course will ask students to think deeper about how disease and public health are constructed and combatted.

     

    RCAH 492: Senior Seminar

    Section 001 (Hamilton-Wray)
    American Independent Cinema Movements

    American Independent Cinema of the 1960s and 1970s is a notable time in Film History. Work from this period reflects the tumultuous political scene, rising attention to a multiculturalism, and a rejection of Hollywood formulaic fare. Access to cheaper means of production meant that radical political movements from the US to Latin American and other parts of the world were exploiting film as an ideological tool, while avant-garde artists were exploring the creative boundaries of the medium. In this course, we’ll interrogate concepts such as American culture and the American dream through the interdisciplinary theoretical framework of American Cultural Studies. We’ll look at how essayists, authors, and film artists gave birth to the Black Independent Film Movement of the mid-twentieth century, all while critically engaging with conceptions of America, history, representation, race, class, gender, aesthetics, power, language, access to means of production, distribution, and exhibition. 

    Section 002 (Yoder)
    Thinking Critically about Your Education

    In this course we will place the RCAH program and experience in the broader context of higher education. Among the questions we will consider are the following: What are the goals of higher education and how does your RCAH experience reflect them? How and why was RCAH formed on what are the foundational assumptions behind the curriculum? What are the important issues facing higher education (e.g., DEI, free speech on campus, COVID, remote learning, etc.) and how has your experience been affected by them

  • Fall 2023

    RCAH 111: Writing Transcultural Contexts

    Section 001 (Hamilton-Wray)
    Diasporas

    In this course, students engage the idea of transcultural contexts through an exploration of the concepts of diaspora, home, and migration, specifically as they apply to people of African descent, but also as they apply to people with German, Chinese, Irish, Indian, Jewish, and other heritages. Through literature, film, essays and scholarly sources, students investigate the formation and transformation of diasporas, and investigate their own connections with the concept of diaspora. Students gain practice in responsibly using various sources in their inquiry of the course material and individual projects on family, community, and ethnic histories. Aside from developing skills in recursive writing, students will consider objective, genre, and audience in writing and in the use of technology.

    Section 002 (Aronoff)
    Telling Stories:  Composing Knowledges in Transcultural Contexts

    In this section of RCAH 111, we will focus on the connection between culture and “storytelling,” broadly conceived.  That is, we will examine the ways in which culture shapes the ways we perceive the world around us, and how we organize those perceptions into oral and written narratives – be they what we conventionally would call “stories” like personal narratives, myths or novels, or other genres like scientific, academic or philosophical writing, each with their own generic rules for the “stories” they tell.  Drawing primarily on short stories and novels, we will be particularly interested in what happens when different “cultures,” or ways of knowing and writing, collide, clash or mix, in a process we will call “transculturation.”  In what ways, we will ask, does “culture” provide us with narratives, patterns, genres, through which we shape our experience into something meaningful?  In what ways do we deploy, bend, mix these “stories”? If different kinds of stories embody different ways of knowing the world, what do each of these ways of knowing/writing/storytelling enable us to see, and what might they leave out?  In what ways can certain kinds of writing or storytelling be seen as the mixing of, or struggle between, multiple systems of meaning or cultures?  Possible course texts include Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony and/or Art Spiegelman’s Maus.

    Section 003 (MacDonald)
    Americans in/and the World

    This section of RCAH 111 explores the transcultural engagement that has occurred because of the United States’ economic, political and cultural influence on other countries. This presence beyond American borders has included participation in conflicts such as the Philippine-American War and the Vietnam War; aid distribution such as the Marshall Plan; tourism; and education. American presence and influence have been captured in poetry, journalism, novels, movies, comic books, vlogs, and more. We’ll explore what stories get told and who gets to tell them. What do these stories tell us about power? How do these stories contribute to causing change? What’s the difference between overseas American military presence and American tourists on holiday? We’ll practice different storytelling forms to develop our writing skills and will also explore visual, oral, audio and digital storytelling. Case studies include dancer and anthropologist Katherine Dunham, Donald Duck comics, writing by Mark Twain and Pearl S. Buck, the Indiana Jones film series, and fashion designer Telfar Clemens.

    Section 004 (Sheridan)
    Transculturation in Michigan

    “Who in the world are you?”  This is the desperate question of Anders, a character in Charles Baxter’s award-winning short story, “The Disappeared.” A Swedish engineer visiting Detroit, Anders meets a local resident who bewilders and emotionally overpowers him.  He is left to wonder, “Who are you?”  Michigan is the setting for many stories of this kind — stories that involve cross-cultural encounters in which participants must seek out tools for mutual understanding.  In this section of RCAH 111, we’ll examine Michigan narratives that take place in the cities and small towns around us.  We’ll let these stories teach us about the challenges and opportunities that emerge when different cultural groups come into contact.  We’ll seek out a variety of ways to report our findings, from analytical essays to digital videos.

     

    RCAH 150: Introduction to the Arts and Humanities

    Section 001 (Thobani)      
    Section 002 (Yoder)  
    Section 003 (Delgado G.)
    Section 004 (Miner)   

    What is interdisciplinary study and what does it look like in the arts and humanities? In this course we will look at chosen issues using the four broad disciplinary areas represented in RCAH – the humanities, the arts, community engagement, and language and culture – in order to see how an interdisciplinary approach works, deepens our understanding, and promotes creativity.

     

    RCAH 203: Transcultural Relations

    Section 001 (Aerni Flessner)
    Transcultural Relations: African Popular Culture in the 20th Century

    In this course we will journey through African history to better understand how people spent their leisure time. Looking at cases of sport and music, primarily, we will come to an understanding of how and why these pastimes became not just popular, but also a venue for challenging political, social, and economic relations on the African continent and in the broader globalized world. From fights to free African colonies from European rule to the struggle against apartheid in South Africa, this course will look at various case studies to understand how African leisure and recreational activities became deeply entwined with struggles for rights and freedom.

    Section 750 (Delgado,V)
    Design Justice

    Given the challenges of global conflict and human sustainability, how should we ensure just design and design for justice? Designers, artists, ethicists and others have long imagined, creatively designed and implemented solutions to human conflicts – solutions that can radically transform and improve human and natural wellbeing. In this course, students explore global challenges to sustainability; critiques of traditional design, technology and development; and the promise of alternatives to development, technology and design often embedded in the arts, humanities, and community engagement. Students will use these ideas to collaborate remotely and in person with a community-based partner in Costa Rica to address a community issue related to justice and sustainability. This course requires students to participate in an education abroad program December 17-23, 2023. The Office of Education Abroad requires students to have a valid passport by the start of the program. Maximum program fee $600, plus airfare.

     

    RCAH 215: Introduction to Arts

    Section 001 (Baibak)
    Creative Shadow Expedition

    In this course we will explore the medium of shadow theater as an artistic and cultural practice. We will experiment with various materials to learn how they can serve as surrogate actors; be used to build worlds, props, and visual effects that elicit emotions; change the way we see reality, and present new ways of authoring stories. The class will apply film industry techniques and vocabulary to compose light and shadow scenes that can be storyboarded into short narratives or visual experiences. We’ll view and critique historical traditions, such as the Balinese Shadow Puppet Theater, Wayang, and contemporary performances that use overhead projectors and live feed cameras to create cinematic stage extravaganzas. The aim is to build a library of known and newly invented shadow making methods that can be organized into intertwining immersive visual experiences that amplify the dreamt and the real.

    Section 002 (TBD)
    Coming Soon!

     

    RCAH 225: Introduction to Community Engagement

    Section 001 (Glasby)
    Queer Storytelling

    For queer people, what is the power of cultivating our voices and telling our stories on our own terms? As MSU students and faculty, how might we work collaboratively with Lansing-area community members and activists to support and celebrate queer voices and queer stories? In this course, students will explore queer rhetoric and creative non-fiction writing as vital community practices. Through a creative and critical lens, students will investigate the queer history of the Lansing area and engage with work by queer writers, artists, and activists. Occasionally we will also work onsite with community members at the Salus Center, Lansing’s LGBTQIA+ community center, in generative writing workshops, and ultimately produce a resource guide for the Salus Center to distribute to queer community members who are looking for tools to assist them in writing and sharing their stories. 

    Section 002 (Hamilton-Wray)
    Narrative Portraits 

    In this course, students will be introduced to the RCAH model of Community Engagement through an exploration of everyday autobiography, history, spoken narratives and storytelling in partnership with members of greater Lansing-based communities. The act of storytelling has the potential to help us form stronger connections with our family members, peers, and community members; furthermore, stories and the act of storytelling can serve as a way to deepen our understanding of our place in the world. Together with community partners, this class will look at how “stories” or “narratives” connect to various cultural, political, and social expressions and explore how stories can help define and build community. Ultimately, students will produce narrative portraits in visual, written and audio forms.

     

    RCAH 235: Introduction to Language and Culture

    Section 001 (Torrez)
    Cultural Memory and Linguistic Diversity

    Cultural memory and linguistic diversity. "I am convinced that language is the vehicle that permits thought to be in accordance with the knowledge and the world vision of a given culture, of a given people, who have inherited this from their ancestors and which, at the same time, makes it possible to pass it on to the new generations." Rigoberta Menchú Tum. 

    In this course, we will explore concepts related to language, culture, society, and community. We address the following questions: What are the different community language practices utilized for linguistic survival? How do community members create identities without that community's language? What is a linguistic and cultural shift, and how does public policy impact them? This course will discuss language attrition and revitalization and how these processes affect people's identity formation (individually and as a community). We will explore how linguistic shifts within our families. Through meaningful dialogue, we will discuss the importance of language in our identity formation and the consequences of language loss. We will focus on the manifestations of these issues from a global perspective, acutely interested in the marginalized communities of North America. 

     

    RCAH 307: Women of Color Feminisms

    Section 001 (Thobani)
    Women of Color Feminisms

    The category ‘woman’ is by no means homogenous, as women of colour have long pointed out. In this course, we examine how experiences of gender are shaped by, and shape in turn, formations of race. Questions we will address include: what is the relationship between feminist, anti-racist and anti-colonial practices? How is gender shaped by, and how does it shape in turn, other components of social identity, including as race, class, nationality and sexual orientation? Where do feminist politics sit within the wider structure of global power? Drawing on postcolonial, critical race and feminist studies, the course is designed to introduce students to a broad range of issues pertaining to antiracist, postcolonial and transnational feminist approaches.

     

    RCAH 315: Methods in Arts

    Section 001 (MacDonald)
    Musicalturgy: Building Musical Theatre Worlds

    Dramaturgs help theatre artists to build worlds on stage and in musical theatre, that world-building includes songs and dances as well as scripts and design elements. In this course you’ll develop an awareness of musical theatre dramaturgy and an understanding of how musical theatre artists engage audiences with worlds created on stage. You will study different kinds of musical theatre world-building, like adaptation, revival, dance and jukebox musicals. Along with reading scripts, listening to songs, and watching performances, you will research topics relevant to the mpusicals we study, and prepare material that might help to engage theatre audiences. You will also learn and practice skills for developing new musical theatre worlds and collaborate as a dramaturge with professional writers and composers. Reading scripts and listening to song demos, you’ll offer feedback on your collaborators’ drafts and ideas. Students should already have an interest in watching or making theatre and be ready to use their research skills to inform their discussions of musical theatre.

     

    RCAH 316: Topics in Arts

    Section 001 (Sheridan)
    Advanced Media Production and Design

    This course will ask students to explore the social and aesthetic potentials of digital video and graphic design. Students will generate creative and socially meaningful projects, exploring fundamental principles of design in the process. We will also investigate strategies for critiquing the work of others. This class will provide excellent preparation for anyone who wishes to work in the RCAH Language and Media Center.

    Section 002 (MacDowell)
    Creative Heritage Work: Community-Engaged Research in Traditional Arts

    Engaging in community-based, arts-focused research projects can be a means to break down hierarchies of privilege, develop project outputs that respond to community needs, and transform relationships between universities and communities. Students will learn about and employ methods to document traditional arts and everyday culture, preserve that documentation in physical and digital collections, and then share collected documentation in exhibitions, media products, and publications. Students will learn about and contribute to the international Black Diaspora Quilt History Project of MSU’s Matrix: Center for Digital Humanities and Social Sciences as well as three state-wide projects focused on cultural assets, the Michigan Heritage Awards Program, and the Anishinaabe Porcupine Quillwork Project of the Michigan Traditional Arts Program. We will focus on developing and implementing collaborative projects, including issues of reciprocity, shared authority, mutuality, trust, and communication.

     

    RCAH 325: Methods in Community Engagement

    Section 001 (Delgado, G)
    The Prison Poetry ‘Zine Project

    The goals of this course are to investigate the history of mass incarceration in the US; to understand why art and educational programming is critical to the rehabilitation and well-being of incarcerated communities; and to gain the skills necessary to facilitate creative community engagement projects within marginalized populations. During weekly visits to prisons you will work side-by-side with incarcerated adults and children writing poems and creating ‘zines. We will examine poetic forms from around the world and the works by poets who wrote while in prison including Etheridge Knight, Jimmy Baca Santiago, Marilyn Buck, and Reginald Dwayne Betts. At the end of each prison project, you’ll co-facilitate and participate in the culminating slam poetry events with incarcerated communities.

     

    RCAH 326: Topics in Community Engagement

    Section 002 (Torrez)
    Youth Participatory Action Research with Detroit Ecological Arts Leaders

    Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR) "is an approach that involves young people as principal investigators in a research process where they determine research questions, conduct data collection, and provide data analysis, with adult researchers facilitating the process" (Harris & Kiyama, 2015,p. 171). Youth co-researchers use YPAR to examine inequities impacting their lives critically.

    Building upon a Fall 2022 Community Engagement course, we will explore and practice youth participatory action research practices focused on the intersection of arts and ecology. Through biweekly gatherings with University Preparatory Science and Math high school and Department of Forestry graduate students, our group will investigate Detroit's robust arts community and organizations dedicated to securing community water resources. Our meetings will be a combination of Zoom meetings, RCAH students' visits to UPSM, and UPSM students visiting RCAH. Please note we will be meeting at UPSM five times throughout the semester. Transportation will be provided.  

    Section 003 (Delgado, V)
    Design for the Common Good

    How do we use design to respond to the impacts of conflict, globalization, and climate change on communities and the environment? In this course, students will learn advanced community participatory methodologies can design solutions to community challenges using the arts, humanities, reflection, social responsibility, community voice, and transparency. We will review the latest research on participatory design, community autonomy, and biocultural sustainability; engage with ideas and modalities in the arts and humanities, including storytelling, histories, ethics and visual arts; and develop the critical engagement skills necessary to share these new ideas with community partners in Costa Rica and early-career engineering students at MSU. Together, RCAH and engineering students will collaborate remotely on a community-engaged design project with the residents in one of RCAH’s six community-based partners in Costa Rica.

     

    RCAH 335: Methods in Language and Culture

    Section 001 (McCarthy)
    Culture and Society

    People today tend to accept that we can speak of "culture" and "society" as separate yet somehow interrelated. But this notion is a relatively novel one, and as a kind of common sense, it conceals vigorous debates regarding the meaning of these two terms and the nature of their interrelationships. Beginning with readings on language, culture, and society by the Welsh critic Raymond Williams (1921–1988), students in this class will develop an appreciation of what is sometimes described as a "materialist" tradition in language and culture studies, an exceptionally diverse tradition characterized by the idea that modern societies have prompted new ways of speaking and being in the world, and that how we speak, create, and live can somehow shape society, in however indirect a way. Students will develop this appreciation in part through independent projects based upon their own original archival and ethnographic research.

     

    RCAH 336: Topics in Language and Culture

    Section 001 (Aerni Flessner)
    Lesotho: Complex Culture in Southern Africa

    A mountainous, landlocked country in southern Africa is where we will explore how language and culture intersect with history, art, and literature. Seemingly endless mountains and the history of being an independent enclave in the middle of the apartheid system in South Africa make Lesotho a fascinating place to examine all of these issues. The course will look at a wide variety of literature, history, music, and film—all produced in and made about Lesotho—in an effort to see how cultural forces help shape the world that we see around us and live in. The culture of Lesotho extends deep into South Africa as well through the history of labor migration, and even into Europe and North America. We will find ways in which the languages and cultures of southern Africa have influenced the rest of the world.

     

    RCAH 346: Topics in Humanities

    Section 001 (Yoder)
    Naturalism and the Humanities  

    “Naturalism,” the view that we should look to the natural world rather than some supernatural realm to explain and give meaning to our experience, is a working assumption in the natural and social sciences. However, it is less clear that it has been widely adopted in the humanities. In this course we will look at what it would mean to take naturalism seriously as we work in the humanities. How do we understand ourselves as humans if we assume that we are fully natural beings? How might we think of both religion and morality if we do not depend on the existence of a supernatural realm. Can there be authentic religious responses to the world that do not depend on the existence of a supernatural realm? How do we think about free will and moral agency?

     

    RCAH 492: Senior Seminar

    Section 001 (Aronoff)
    What’s Culture? Whose Culture?  Where’s Culture?

    A key term in academic and popular discourse – including in the RCAH curriculum – is “culture.”  But behind this deceptively simple word is a long, tangled history, the study of which leads one immediately into histories of exploration, imperialism, race, class, science and the arts.  This class will examine key texts in the history of the idea of culture in the West – ranging from works of literature, science, anthropology, philosophy and aesthetics – with particular attention to the emergence of anthropology in the modernist period, and the many permutations and problems with culture in contemporary discourses of multiculturalism, transnationalism and the global circulation of “culture(s).”  Along the way we will ask questions like:  What is “culture”?  What does it mean to “have” (a) culture?  How do ideas of culture intersect with ideas of ethnicity, race, nationality and personal identity?  Who owns (a) culture?  How do particular cultures “own” you? What is the “culture” of the RCAH?  How is that culture (re)created by each group of students (like yourselves) who pass through?  These questions have taken on new urgency during these last 2+ years of pandemic:  what does (a) culture look like in a virtual community?  How has the shift online changed/sustained/threatened what we might have thought of as “RCAH culture” in 2020?  What is RCAH culture in this post-pandemic world?

  • Spring 2023

    RCAH 112: Writing Research Technologies

    Section 001 (Sheridan)
    The Production of Culture.

    This class focuses on the ways that the analytical and creative work of the arts and humanities can help to solve real-world problems.  The premises of this course are: (1) forms of cultural expression (such as stories, videos, performances, music, etc.) can be powerful tools of social change; and (2) all of us are potentially producers of these forms.  Accordingly, students will begin by identifying a cultural problem — something they would like to see changed in the world.  They will analyze the way the problem is embodied in popular culture (e.g., movies, music, websites).  Finally, they will devise their own "cultural interventions": movies, music, websites, and other compositions aimed at addressing the cultural problem in question.

    Section 002 (Hamilton Wray)
    Writing Research Technologies: Daughters of the Screen and Black Women’s Film Practice 

    Long before the “#Oscars So White” and “4% Challenge” campaigns, Black women artists have asserted their voices in the medium of film – creating, what some might call, a Black female gaze. What is the Black female gaze in film? This course interrogates the social, political, economic, and artistic implications of Black female-centered cinema. Students are introduced to Black Feminist Film Theory in the study of Black women’s film practice. Thus, students will draw on Black women’s literary practice and activism, and consider the politics of production, distribution, and exhibition in their investigation of Black women’s film practice. This research process course asks students to undertake an original research project that incorporates primary and secondary texts and requires them to use their newly acquired media literacy skills. Class assignments typically include oral presentations, interviews, and creative presentations.

    Section 003 (Aronoff)
    Our America:  Cultures of American Modernism, 1919-1930

    The focus of this section of RCAH 112 is the idea of “American culture” as it is renegotiated and reimagined in the United States in the 1920s and 30s.  The 1920s was a period of rapid change – industrialism, urbanization, the rise of consumer culture, mass migration, racial violence, immigration – and in response to what were perceived as new conditions, writers, artists, politicians, and social scientists sought new ways to define what was specifically "American" about America, to create new versions of American identity.  But even as American writers and critics in the ‘20s attempted to redefine the content of a particularly “American” culture, the form of culture as a concept – what counted as “culture” – was itself undergoing radical transformations, with the development of ideas of “culture” as an entire “way of life” that is relative, plural, and above all “whole,” “unified” and “meaningful.”

    This section, then, will examine debates over “American” culture, race, national identity and art in the modernist period.  Looking at various primary documents, with particular attention to the arts (modernist poetry, literature, jazz and other media), we will ask:  how do these texts imagine the relationship between “race,” “nation,” and “culture”? How do these constructions engage debates over immigration, assimilation and pluralism?  What is the relationship between racial and /or cultural identity and political identity (or citizenship)? The breadth of these questions will allow for a wide variety of approaches and specific interest:  like all sections of 112, we will be able to pursue the burning questions we raise by developing our skills as researchers and writers.

     

    RCAH 202: The Presence of the Past

    Section 002 (McCarthy)
    Living with the Dead

    Modern people have devised their own peculiar ways of relating to the dead. Radical social theorists as disparate as Karl Marx and Friedrich Nietzsche have shared an overarching preoccupation with the apparent power of the dead over the living, and artists from Mary Shelley to Raymond Roussel and John Carpenter have imagined new forms of intercourse between the living and the dead. Capitalism's tendency toward rapid "creative destruction" has provoked movements for cultural preservation, while film and sound recordings have made new forms of preservation possible, and new synthetic media have even put deceased celebrities back to work, after a fashion. References to the dead permeate discussions of virtually every urgent social question today, from racial injustice to gender oppression, capitalist exploitation, and climate change. Students in this class will use a wide range of case studies to think carefully about modern life among the dead, discussing a number of "big questions." What can we learn about ourselves and our world by thinking through our peculiar relationship with the dead? In what ways do the dead haunt our moment? How should we remember the dead? Does there ever come a time to forget them? How does the inevitability of our own demise shape our moral responsibilities to the present and future generations? What, after all, are we trying to get at when we talk about being alive?

    Section 003 (McCarthy)
    Living with the Dead

    Modern people have devised their own peculiar ways of relating to the dead. Radical social theorists as disparate as Karl Marx and Friedrich Nietzsche have shared an overarching preoccupation with the apparent power of the dead over the living, and artists from Mary Shelley to Raymond Roussel and John Carpenter have imagined new forms of intercourse between the living and the dead. Capitalism's tendency toward rapid "creative destruction" has provoked movements for cultural preservation, while film and sound recordings have made new forms of preservation possible, and new synthetic media have even put deceased celebrities back to work, after a fashion. References to the dead permeate discussions of virtually every urgent social question today, from racial injustice to gender oppression, capitalist exploitation, and climate change. Students in this class will use a wide range of case studies to think carefully about modern life among the dead, discussing a number of "big questions." What can we learn about ourselves and our world by thinking through our peculiar relationship with the dead? In what ways do the dead haunt our moment? How should we remember the dead? Does there ever come a time to forget them? How does the inevitability of our own demise shape our moral responsibilities to the present and future generations? What, after all, are we trying to get at when we talk about being alive?

     

    RCAH 203: Transcultural Relations

    Section 001 (Esquith)
    Violence and the Arts and Humanities

    Many people in the U.S. today believe that it is legitimate to commit violence against their own government or non-governmental groups and individuals they believe are threats to their way of life. These feelings of anger and fear are creating a political tinder box that some believe could lead to major forms of violence in the US.  In other countries similar trends have led to civil war. How are these trends being represented in the arts and humanities in the U.S. and elsewhere? What can and should the arts and humanities do in response to these forms of real and potential violence? In this section of RCAH 203 we will consider these questions through the work of particular artists and writers. Students also will have an opportunity to compose and explain the rationale behind their own artistic and/or literary responses to violence and the threat of violence in their own experience.

    Section 750 (Delgado V.)
    Designing for Peace (EGR/RCAH Peace Engineering Initiative)
    Given the challenges of global conflict and human sustainability, how should we design for peace, justice and human security? It is not an easy question. But designers, artists, ethicists and others have long imagined, designed and implemented creative solutions to human conflicts – solutions that radically transform and improve human and natural wellbeing. In this course, students explore global challenges to human sustainability; the good and the bad of design, technology and development; and the promise of new ideas in the arts, humanities and design justice. Students will use these ideas as they collaborate remotely and in person with Chicas para el Exito (Girls for Success) a community-based, after-school program for campesinx/indigenx girls, ages 7-12, and with the Bribri Autonomos Territorial government on pluriversal design. This course requires students to participate in an education abroad program following the end of the MSU spring semester, May 8-14, 2023. The Office of Education Abroad requires students to have a valid passport before the start of the program. Program fee for the Fall 2022 program was $505, plus airfare.

     

    RCAH 215: Introduction to Arts

     

    Section 002 (Baibak)
    Painting on the Edge

    If one is going to paint, why paint on a canvas? Our world holds so many forms.
    Let us explore them with acrylic paint. Paint is the great transformer! Its color and texture can alter the way we perceive the shape of a thing. In this class, students will examine the relationships between paint and the 3-dimensional surface. Analyze artists/designers who already paint this way while exploring with our own painting techniques. We’ll consider how form can communicate our ideas, create metaphors, and present as visual poetic compositions.  We will be guided by real shadow and light relationships. We’ll explore objects as micro and macroscopic worlds. Let’s transform! Let’s question how we understand objects in our culture. Let’s reason “makings” value; should we create more stuff, or is it part of our evolution? These are questions that always come up for me, so maybe you’re thinking about these things too. Let’s paint on the edge without fear of falling off. No previous painting experience needed.

     

    RCAH 235: Introduction to Language and Culture

    Section 002 (Thobani)
    The Language of Culture: Constructing Social Identities

    Although we encounter the term ‘culture’ frequently in everyday life, upon closer examination, we find that the term is incredibly difficult to define. Our aim in this course is to explore the various meanings of the term ‘culture’, and trace the different ways in which it is and has been used. So doing, we will address questions such as: How is culture shaped by, and how does it shape, human life? How can we study ‘culture’ given the range of cultural diversity in the world? What is the relationship between culture and the construction of race, ethnicity and gender? What role does language play in shaping ideas about ‘culture’? By addressing these and other questions, this course will also provide students an introduction to disciplines that have generally taken language and culture as objects of study, including anthropology and cultural studies.

     

    RCAH 315: Methods in Arts

    Section 001 (McCarthy)
    Sound Technology in Creative Practice 

    Students in this course will explore sound technology in creative practice, in the broadest possible sense of both terms. Discussing a wide range of case studies—from the earliest pianofortes to the Roland TR-808 Rhythm Composer, from ringtones on high frequencies "adults can't hear" to experimental radio art—they will become more appreciative of humanity's fraught relationship with technology: attentive to the ways technologies discipline listeners and appreciative of the ways creative people "misuse" technologies. They will develop skills and knowledge pertaining to specific sound technologies and use what they are learning to make their own creative projects in an environment of mutual support. No prior experience is required. Course participants will work to identify and build upon their own experiences, interests, and skills, wherever these may be.


    RCAH 316: Topics in Arts

    Section 001 (Delgado G.)
    Art in Daily Life: A Creative and Contemplative Practice

    This interdisciplinary arts course allows students to explore and practice artmaking as a as an everyday practice. Students will create images and text from their awareness and engagement with their personal stories, topics of interest, and surrounding landscapes. Exercises such as drawing, painting, photography, writing, ‘zines, mapmaking, printmaking, bookmaking, walking, stretching, and breathing, will be practiced throughout the course to inform and inspire creative projects.

    Section 003 (Russell)
    Center for Poetry Workshop

    This course in poetry and interdisciplinary creating will align with the RCAH Center for Poetry’s spring 2023 programming. Students will have the opportunity to interact with several outstanding visiting poets, writers, and performers throughout the semester and to engage with those visiting artists’ work from the inside out. Conceiving of poetry as an interdisciplinary practice, we will work across genres and mediums and collapse the walls between presenter and audience, creator and critic, so that accomplished guests will have the chance to listen to and learn from students, and students will have the opportunity to learn from guests with a range of creative practices and approaches to poem making. The class will read, listen to, and discuss the work of visiting poets and other artists, engage with those poets and artists first hand, and also experiment with their techniques and strategies to create our own poetry and other creative works, as we work individually and collaboratively toward new modes of making.


    RCAH 325: Methods in Community Engagement

    Section 001 (Delgado G)
    The Prison Poetry ‘Zine Project

    The goals of this course are to investigate the history of mass incarceration in the US; to understand why art and educational programming is critical to the rehabilitation and well-being of incarcerated communities; and to gain the skills necessary to facilitate community engagement projects within marginalized populations. During weekly visits to prisons you will work side-by-side with incarcerated adults and children writing poems and creating ‘zines. You will examine the works by poets who wrote while in prison including Etheridge Knight, Jimmy Baca Santiago, Marilyn Buck, and Reginald Dwayne Betts. At the end of each prison project, you’ll co-facilitate and participate in the culminating slam poetry events with incarcerated communities.

     

    RCAH 326: Topics in Community Engagement

    Section 001 (Delgado V.)
    Design for the Common Good

    How do we use design to respond to the impacts of conflict, globalization, and climate change on communities and the environment? In this course, students will learn advanced community participatory methodologies that design and build peace collaboratively using the arts, humanities, reflection, social responsibility, community voice, and transparency. We will check out the latest research on participatory design, community autonomy, and biocultural sustainability; engage with ideas and modalities in the arts and humanities, including storytelling, histories, ethics and others; and develop the critical engagement skills necessary to share these new ideas with community partners in Costa Rica and early-career engineering students at MSU. Together, RCAH and engineering students will collaborate remotely on a community-engaged design project with Ninas Para El Exito (Girls for Success), an educational program for indigena and campesina girls, ages 8-12, on Costa Rica’s Caribbean Coast.

    Section 002 (Esquith)
    Global Peace Education through the Arts and Humanities

    The topic of this community engagement course is global peace education through the arts and humanities. We will be participating in a community engagement project that began in 2020-21 in RCAH with a multi-media community engagement course with the Lansing Refugee Development Center (LRDC)’s Young Leaders Program. One of the instructors in that course with RCAH students and Lansing high school students was Dr. Welore Tamboura, a visiting scholar in RCAH from the University of Letters and Human Sciences in Bamako, Mali.  Dr. Tamboura then returned to Mali in 2021, and she has been working with her students there on series of activities (video animation, theater, poetry, and photography) based on the RCAH community engagement values of reciprocity and sustainability. Now, our goal in this section of RCAH 326 is to establish a Day of Global Peace Education in collaboration with the LRDC Young Leaders and Dr. Tamboura’s students in Mali.

     

    RCAH 336: Topics in Language and Culture

    Section 001 (Aerni-Flessner)
    Topics in Language and Culture: Lesotho, South Africa, and the World  

    A mountainous, landlocked country in southern Africa might not be the first place you think of when you want to explore how language and culture intersect with history, art, and literature. However, the seemingly endless mountains and a history of being an independent enclave in the middle of the apartheid state make Lesotho a fascinating place to examine all of these issues. The course will look at a wide variety of literature, history, music, and film—all produced in and made about Lesotho—in an effort to see how cultural forces help shape the world that we see around us and live in. The culture of Lesotho extends deep into South Africa as well through the history of labor migration, and even into Europe and North America. We will explore the ways in which the vibrant languages and cultures of southern Africa have shaped the region and influenced the rest of the world.

     

     

    RCAH 346: Topics in Humanities

    Section 002 (Aronoff)
    Fictions of Science and Technology

    This course will examine the interplay between scientific philosophies, technology and literature.  We will explore this interplay in terms of both content and form: in other words, we will study the ways in which the “subject matter” of science and technology – the theories, discoveries, inventions of science – are explored within novels and short stories to probe their implications for our conceptions of society, the self, and art; we will also think about how scientific “ways of knowing” – rationality, empiricism, linear narrative – have been deployed and resisted to shape the genres of the realist novel, detective fiction, gothic tales and science fiction.  Finally, we will also think about how the technology of the book itself shapes the kinds of narratives that can be produced, and how new technologies – the internet, hypertext, etc. – might produce new kinds of narratives.  Texts might include:  Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; Ray Bradbury’s Martian Chronicles; Ursula Le Guin’s Left Hand of Darkness; Scott Card’s Ender’s Game; Octavia Butler’s Kindred; Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake; short stories by Rebecca Roanhorse; and others.

     

    RCAH 492: Senior Seminar

    Section 001 (Hamilton-Wray)
    American Independent Cinema Movements

    American Independent Cinema of the 1960s and 1970s is a notable time in Film History. Work from this period reflects the tumultuous political scene, rising attention to a multiculturalism, and rejection of Hollywood formulaic fare. Access to cheaper means of production meant that radical political movements from the US to Latin American to Europe were exploiting film as an ideological tool, while avant-garde artists were exploring the creative boundaries of the medium. Several independent film movements spearheaded by Black artists emerged at this time in the US West, Midwest and East Coast, each with different histories, influences and impulses. Ultimately, these movements contributed to a shift in themes and techniques in American independent cinema and, ultimately, Hollywood cinema. This course explores this moment in American independent cinema and offers students the knowledge and skills in Film Studies to launch their own in-depth study of one of the many fascinating film movements across the globe.

  • Fall 2022

    RCAH 111: Writing Transcultural Contexts

    Section 001 (Aronoff)
    Telling Stories:  Composing Knowledges in Transcultural Contexts

    In this section of RCAH 111, we will focus on the connection between culture and “storytelling,” broadly conceived.  That is, we will examine the ways in which culture shapes the ways we perceive the world around us, and how we organize those perceptions into oral and written narratives – be they what we conventionally would call “stories” like personal narratives, myths or novels, or other genres like scientific, academic or philosophical writing, each with their own generic rules for the “stories” they tell.  Drawing primarily on short stories and novels, we will be particularly interested in what happens when different “cultures,” or ways of knowing and writing, collide, clash or mix, in a process we will call “transculturation.”  In what ways, we will ask, does “culture” provide us with narratives, patterns, genres, through which we shape our experience into something meaningful?  In what ways do we deploy, bend, mix these “stories”? If different kinds of stories embody different ways of knowing the world, what do each of these ways of knowing/writing/storytelling enable us to see, and what might they leave out?  In what ways can certain kinds of writing or storytelling be seen as the mixing of, or struggle between, multiple systems of meaning or cultures?  Possible course texts include Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony and/or Art Spiegelman’s Maus.

    Section 002 (MacDonald)
    Americans in/and the World 

    This section of RCAH 111 explores the transcultural engagement that has occurred as a result of American imperialism - the economic, political and cultural influence the United States has exerted on other countries. This presence beyond American borders has included participation in global conflicts such as the Philippine-American War and the Vietnam War, the distribution of aid through initiatives such as the Marshall Plan, and the promotion of peace and friendship through the Peace Corps. American presence and transcultural relations have been captured in poetry, journalism, novels, movies, comic books, vlogs, memes and more. While some stories construct narratives promoting modernization led by Americans, others use narrative to counter ideologies of progress and amplify what might be perceived as traditional cultures. We’ll explore what stories get told and who gets to tell them.  What do these stories tell us about power? What’s difference between overseas American military presence and American tourists on holiday?  Case studies will include Karl May’s Winnetou novels and films, Donald Duck comics, essays by Mark Twain and Eslanda Goode Robeson, dance pioneer Katherine Dunham, the Indiana Jones film series, and Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat Pray Love.

    Section 004 (Sheridan)
    Transculturation in Michigan.

    “Who in the world are you?”  This is the desperate question of Anders, a character in Charles Baxter’s award-winning short story, “The Disappeared.” A Swedish engineer visiting Detroit, Anders meets a local resident who bewilders and emotionally overpowers him.  He is left to wonder, “Who are you?”  Michigan is the setting for many stories of this kind — stories that involve cross-cultural encounters in which participants must seek out tools for mutual understanding.  In this section of RCAH 111, we’ll examine Michigan narratives that take place in the cities and small towns around us.  We’ll let these stories teach us about the challenges and opportunities that emerge when different cultural groups come into contact.  We’ll seek out a variety of ways to report our findings, from analytical essays to digital videos.

     

    RCAH 150: Introduction to the Arts and Humanities

    Section 001 (Yoder)      
    Section 002 (Thobani)  
    Section 003 (Delgado G.)
    Section 004 (Miner)   

    What is interdisciplinary study and what does it look like in the arts and humanities? In this course we will look at chosen issues using the four broad disciplinary areas represented in RCAH – the humanities, the arts, community engagement, and language and culture – in order to see how an interdisciplinary approach works, deepens our understanding, and promotes creativity.


    RCAH 202: The Presence of the Past

    Section 001 (Hamilton-Wray)
    The Presence of the Past: Black Oral Traditions and the Making of History

    Oral tradition plays a vital role in the construction and reproduction of “official histories”. However, the role of oral tradition is often not explicitly acknowledged. This course makes visible the presence and role of oral tradition in history-making, with particular focus on African diasporic oral culture found in folklore, music, proverbs, cuisine, humor, literature, and other aspects of African and African diasporic society. Through a look at multiple histories, specifically oral history, imagined history, autobiographical history, and “trans-history” (history that connects the past and the future), students address the questions: What do these multiple histories of peoples of African descent reveal about their struggle, resistance, and liberation? How have and can these histories be employed for positive social change? How do we understand our own official histories when we take into account oral tradition?

    Section 002 (Aerni-Flessner)
    Presence of the Past: Global Slavery

    This class looks at how slaves in many places around the world have produced not only goods and services, but also shaped a wide range of societies. We will look at Africa, the Caribbean, North and South America, and places in the Indian Ocean to examine and compare different forms of slavery across time and space. We will be looking at how these systems that put people in positions of dependence were similar and different—and debate what exactly qualifies to be called “slavery.” The globalized world we live in is shaped, in many ways, by the past and the present of slavery. By bringing the story into our present contexts, we will better explain why knowing the history of enslavement is important, and help you better understand why debates about monuments, reparations, and human rights continue to be contentious and political.

     

    RCAH 203: Transcultural Relations

    Section 001 (Hamilton-Wray)
    Transcultural Relations: Social Change Movements in Contact Zones      

    Contemporary social justice movements, such as #Me Too, Black Lives Matter, and March for Our Lives, are shaping U.S. national dialogue. Throughout U.S. history, social justice movements have challenged societal and cultural conventions due to social activists’ quest to transform the lives of marginalized populations. What are the elements inherent in a social change movement? A great leader? A catalyzing moment? A motivated group of like-minded people? A political manifesto? And why do these movements matter to us in our everyday lives? This course takes a case study approach to exploring popular social movements and their transcultural dynamics in U.S. society. The course will require students to engage with a variety of sources, including historical readings, legal proceedings, narrative film, autobiographies, and propaganda materials to investigate past movements and address pressing issues of today.

    Section 750 (Delgado,V/Hinds,T)
    Designing for Peace (EGR/RCAH Peace Engineering Initiative)

    Given the challenges of global conflict and human sustainability, how should we design for peace, justice and human security? It is not an easy question. But designers, artists, ethicists and others have long imagined, designed and implemented creative solutions to human conflicts – solutions that radically transform and improve human and natural wellbeing. In this course, students explore global challenges to human sustainability; the good and the bad of design, technology and development; and the promise of new ideas in the arts, humanities and design justice. Students will use these ideas to collaborate remotely and in person with ADESSARU, a campesinx, community-based organization devoted to the protection of the local watershed and a critical cloud-forest reserve. This course requires students to participate in an education abroad program December 17-23, 2022. Students will develop and implement a youth community design program to complete community-engaged design projects with residents. The Office of Education Abroad requires students to have a valid passport and updated vaccination status by the start of the program. Maximum program fee $450, plus airfare.

     

    RCAH 215: Introduction to Arts

    Section 001 (McCarthy)
    Community Song

    Students in this course will improve their ability to facilitate collective singing in participatory contexts. Through first-hand encounters with a variety of repertoires—including experimental exercises by the composer Pauline Oliveros, four-part hymns, children's vocal games, and worker songs—they will develop a skill and knowledge base. And they will organize and lead their own community singing events. No prior experience is required. Course participants will work to identify and build upon their own experiences, interests, and skills, wherever these may be.

    Section 002 (MacDonald)
    Introduction to Acting: From the Inside Out and the Outside In

    Using a range of warmups, theatre games, improvisation, and acting exercises, this course introduces different approaches to developing acting skills. We will study practitioners such as Stanislavski and Anna Deavere Smith, and establish a toolkit for building characters, using our voices, minds, bodies, and emotions. Working as an ensemble, students will learn how to work with their own imagination and impulses, breakdown scripts, develop character psychology and physicality, and apply this to monologues and scene work in class. We will learn how to lead physical and vocal warmups, and how to undertake basic dramaturgical work as an actor. Along with analyzing scripts, and developing characters, students will learn basic acting vocabulary and be able to discuss their practice, in class as well as in an oral defence of their work. We will work collaboratively and respectfully, to develop an understanding and appreciation of the craft of acting.


    RCAH 225: Introduction to Community Engagement

    Section 001 (Delgado,G)
    The Prison Poetry ‘Zine Project

    The goals of this course are to investigate the history of mass incarceration in the US; to understand why art and educational programming is critical to the rehabilitation and well-being of incarcerated communities; and to gain the skills necessary to facilitate community engagement projects within marginalized populations. During weekly visits to prisons you will work side-by-side with incarcerated adults and children writing poems and creating ‘zines. You will examine the works by poets who wrote while in prison including Etheridge Knight, Jimmy Baca Santiago, Marilyn Buck, and Reginald Dwayne Betts. At the end of each prison project you’ll co-facilitate and participate in the culminating slam poetry events.

    Section 002 (Brooks)
    Intro to Community Engagement

    This proseminar is an introduction to community engagement and explores the concepts of Identity, consciousness, community, culture, citizenship, and reflection. This course will assist students with developing an understanding of the various types of community engagement activities in relation to the RCAH Engagement Model (insight, practice, action, passion. In addition, students will complete experiential learning exercises off campus that build relationships with civic organizations.

     

     

    RCAH 235: Introduction to Language and Culture

    Section 001 (Torrez)
    Cultural Memory and Linguistic Diversity

    In this introductory course on language and culture, this section will investigate how language is linked to identity formation and how we interact with the world. This course will explore concepts related to language, culture, society, and community. What happens when a community is forced to hide or lose its language? Can community members create their identities without the language of that community, or does the identity of that community shift to accommodate its language loss? This course will delve into a discussion of language attrition and revitalization and how these processes affect the identity formation of people (both individually and as a community). We will explore how linguistic shifts within our families. Through meaningful dialogue, we will discuss the importance of language on our own identities and the implications of language loss on the identities of our respective communities. 

     

     

     

    RCAH 315: Methods in Arts

    Section 001 (Baibak)
    Reclamation Studio Project 

    Art thou thinking about our climate footprint? Reclamation Studio Project is a workshop based on gleaning, reuse, and transformation of found, second-hand, or inherited objects. The course is designed to help alter our perception of objects, so we can see them as an available resource for base materials: plastic, metal, wood, or fiber. We will dissect forms to discover their potential frameworks, cavities, openings, and abstractions. We will look at connective materials, including bolts, wires, rivets, interlocking tabs, springs, hinges, and lashings. We will experiment. At the start of the semester, we will use these methods in fashioning wearable suits made of castaway materials to give kinetic visibility to the issues disposable culture. We will examine the utilitarian and abstract, and the importance of both. The class will read articles about reusing materials from “our great abundance”, and we will meet regularly in MSU Surplus Store & Recycling Center’s education wing. MSU Surplus Store & Recycling Center is the hub of the universities recycling and resource management. Reclamation Studio’s goal is to help us to become more aware of available resources and to highlight our own responsibility as consumers. 



    RCAH 316: Topics in Arts

    Section 001 (Sheridan)
    Digital Storytelling

    Digital media allow us to tell stories in new ways.  Creatives from a variety of backgrounds construct digital narratives that incorporate stop motion, digital animation, still photography, hand-drawn art, music, ambient sounds, the written word, and other media elements.  In this class we will look at examples of digital storytelling that help us understand the possibilities of this new genre.  We will also create our own digital stories.  This class is excellent preparation for anyone who wishes to work in the RCAH Language and Media Center.

     

    RCAH 325: Methods in Community Engagement

    Section 001 (Torrez)
    Youth Participatory Action Research

    In this course, we will learn about youth participatory action research and community-based action research engagement models from folx doing the work with young people locally and throughout the US. This course will explore models of engagement with youth from diverse backgrounds. We will consider the complex societal issues directly impacting the lives of their young collaborators and how we can collectively work through community engagement. Visiting with several community organizers, we will discuss best practices for youth-centered community engagement. In our time visiting with community organizers, we will:

    • Investigate definitions of community.
    • Be introduced to various community engagement practices.
    • Learn how each community has particular fundamental methods unique to working alongside its members.
    • And how these communities have co-developed engagement evaluations. 

     

    RCAH 326: Topics in Community Engagement

    Section 001 (Brooks)
    Social Justice Pedagogy

    This course explores the concept of social justice and its implications on community engagement. We will examine various theories of justice, select methods of civic and community action, and a collection of engagement practices that lead to personal and collective recovery, reconciliation, and transformation. We will discuss issues with racism, classism, sexism, genderism, ageism, ableism, homophobia, xenophobia, and other forms of oppression and discrimination and produce strategies to work toward reducing the impact these forms of injustice have on our communities and society. The primary goals are to assist students with exploring what it means to be a civically and democratically engaged citizen and to develop knowledge and skills in leading positive and transformative social change.

    Section 002 (DelgadoV/Hines)
    Topics in Community Engagement: Design for the Common Good

    How do we use design to respond to respond to the impacts of conflict, globalization, and climate change on communities and the environment? In this course, students will learn advanced community participatory methodologies that design and build peace collaboratively using the arts, humanities, reflection, social responsibility, community voice, and transparency. We will check out the latest research on participatory design, community autonomy, and biocultural sustainability; engage with ideas and modalities in the arts and humanities, including storytelling, histories, ethics and others; and develop the critical engagement skills necessary to share these new ideas with community partners in Costa Rica and early-career engineering students at MSU. Together, RCAH and engineering students will collaborate remotely on a community-engaged design project with the residents of San Luis, Costa Rica, a campesinx community on the edge of one of the largest cloud forests in the world.


    RCAH 335: Methods in Language and Culture

    Section 001 (Plough)
    Methods of Sociolinguistic Research

    This is a general survey course that builds on content covered in RCAH 235 (Introduction to Sociolinguistics or Language as a Social and Cultural Phenomenon). Combining lecture, seminar, and fieldwork, the course introduces students to generating original data through ethnographic fieldwork, interviews, guided prompts, and written questionnaires. Readings include sociolinguistic studies on different world languages. Throughout the course, the advantages and disadvantages of different methods are critically examined with attention to the relationship between sociolinguistic phenomena and the selection of a particular research methodology.

     

    RCAH 336: Topics in Language and Culture

    Section 001 (Thobani)
    Performing India: Arts, Culture and Nation Formation

    This course examines the role of ‘arts and culture’ in producing ideas about Indian national identity. Some of the questions we will address include: How did British colonialism shape the way Indian identity came to be defined? Did this overlap with, or differ from, ideas about Indian identity as defined by anti-colonial nationalists? In what ways does the construction of Indian national identity draw on, and reproduce, ideas about race, gender, religion and sexuality? What does it mean to practice and consume ‘arts’ today that are historically rooted in the colonial encounter? By addressing these specific questions, students will engage in a larger study of the politics of nation formation, as well as the relationship between nationalist politics and cultural production more generally.

    RCAH 346: Topics in Humanities

    Section 002 (Yoder)
    The Ethics of Being and Becoming Human

    In this course we will draw upon material from philosophy, literature, art, and history to explore multiple versions of the questions, “What does it mean to be human?”  Is there such a thing as a fixed human nature or is it something malleable that is in flux?  How is technology affecting how we think about human nature?  Are there moral limits to how we can create and enhance humans, and if so, what are they? The goal of the course is to explore such questions.

     
    RCAH 492: Senior Seminar

    Section 001 (Aronoff)
    What’s Culture? Whose Culture?  Where’s Culture?

    A key term in academic and popular discourse – including in the RCAH curriculum – is “culture.”  But behind this deceptively simple word is a long, tangled history, the study of which leads one immediately into histories of exploration, imperialism, race, class, science and the arts.  This class will examine key texts in the history of the idea of culture in the West – ranging from works of literature, science, anthropology, philosophy and aesthetics – with particular attention to the emergence of anthropology in the modernist period, and the many permutations and problems with culture in contemporary discourses of multiculturalism, transnationalism and the global circulation of “culture(s).”  Along the way we will ask questions like:  What is “culture”?  What does it mean to “have” (a) culture?  How do ideas of culture intersect with ideas of ethnicity, race, nationality and personal identity?  Who owns (a) culture?  How do particular cultures “own” you? What is the “culture” of the RCAH?  How is that culture (re)created by each group of students (like yourselves) who pass through?  These questions have taken on new urgency during these last 2+ years of pandemic:  what does (a) culture look like in a virtual community?  How has the shift online changed/sustained/threatened what we might have thought of as “RCAH culture” in 2020?  What is RCAH culture in this post-pandemic world?

  • Spring 2022

    RCAH 112: Writing Research Technologies

    Section 001 (MacDonald)
    Global Fan Practices:  Translation, Subtitling, Fanfiction and Fanart

    This section of RCAH 112 explores the processes by which fans of film, theatre, literature, television, print culture and music overcome linguistic difference and geographic distance to engage with the cultural texts they love. Including but not limited to remediation, translation, and distribution, global fan practices will inspire us to research and write about a multitude of cultural exchanges. As fandoms are often social, the course will investigate how communities are formed and maintained around a shared interest in a particular object of fandom or a particular nation’s popular culture, both physically and virtually. We will research the origins of fandom, considering sports and theatre celebrities of the 19th and early 20th centuries, literary fandoms around authors such as Jane Austen as well as music and comics fandoms. We will also study how digital technologies and online platforms facilitate fan practices today. Students will formulate their own research projects and working with a range of printed and digital sources, they will develop their writing skills through in class writing tasks, peer review, blog posts, essays, and presentations.

    Section 002 (Russell)
    Poetry of Witness, Poetry of Resistance

    How have poets used their craft to document, to bear witness, to ask hard questions, to recenter marginalized voices, to uncover secrets and buried histories, to reclaim narratives, and to demand justice? What are the ethical considerations, and what are the stakes? Drawing on a range of modern and contemporary poetry, with particular emphasis on U.S. poets operating in documentary and investigative modes from the 1930s to the present day, we will explore how poets have used poetry in general, and research-based creative practices in particular, to affect change. As in all sections of RCAH 112, students will develop their skills as researchers and writers. This section will provide opportunities for both critical and creative writing and assumes that both can be valid modes of inquiry.

    Section 003 (Aronoff)
    Our America:  Cultures of American Modernism, 1919-1930

    The focus of this section of RCAH 112 is the idea of “American culture” as it is renegotiated and reimagined in the United States in the 1920s and 30s.  The 1920s was a period of rapid change – industrialism, urbanization, the rise of consumer culture, mass migration, racial violence, immigration – and in response to what were perceived as new conditions, writers, artists, politicians, and social scientists sought new ways to define what was specifically "American" about America, to create new versions of American identity.  But even as American writers and critics in the ‘20s attempted to redefine the content of a particularly “American” culture, the form of culture as a concept – what counted as “culture” – was itself undergoing radical transformations, with the development of ideas of “culture” as an entire “way of life” that is relative, plural, and above all “whole,” “unified” and “meaningful.”

    This section, then, will examine debates over “American” culture, race, national identity and art in the modernist period.  Looking at various primary documents, with particular attention to the arts (modernist poetry, literature, jazz and other media), we will ask:  how do these texts imagine the relationship between “race,” “nation,” and “culture”? How do these constructions engage debates over immigration, assimilation and pluralism?  What is the relationship between racial and /or cultural identity and political identity (or citizenship)? The breadth of these questions will allow for a wide variety of approaches and specific interest:  like all sections of 112, we will be able to pursue the burning questions we raise by developing our skills as researchers and writers.

    Section 004 (Sheridan)
    The Production of Culture

    This class focuses on the ways that the analytical and creative work of the arts and humanities can help to solve real-world problems.  The premises of this course are: (1) that forms of cultural expression (such as stories, videos, performances, music, etc.) can be powerful tools of social change; and (2) that all of us are potentially producers of these forms.  Accordingly, students will begin by identifying a cultural problem — something they would like to see changed in the world.  They will analyze the way the problem is embodied in popular culture (e.g., movies, music, websites).  Finally, they will devise their own "cultural interventions": movies, music, websites, and other compositions aimed at addressing the cultural problem in question.


    RCAH 202: The Presence of the Past

    Section 001 (McCarthy)
    The Sixties Today

    The 1960s, that period of roughly two decades between the decolonization struggles of the 1950s and the reorganization of the postwar liberal world order during the crises of the 1970s, haunts current understandings of the present day. When the War in Afghanistan ended in August 2021, pundits from across the political spectrum looked to the Fall of Saigon in 1975 to explain what had happened. Reform-minded activists borrow “the names, battle slogans, and costumes” of the Sixties to protest gender inequality, racial violence, and sexual repression today. Conservatives draw rich dividends from ideological seeds planted during an era of liberal triumphalism. Critics contextualize new art and entertainment by referring to canons established half a century ago. Numerous brand names look to this reputed golden age of advertising for inspiration. As global supply chains fail, economists wonder what is happening to “containerization” and “just-in-time” manufacturing, epochal commercial innovations of this same period. When reform-minded people feel that humanity is taking a step forward, they scoff at the imagined backwardness of this bygone era. When they feel themselves to be falling behind the arch of history, they lament the fading “spirit of ’68.”

    Using case studies, this course examines the foundational importance of the 1960s to diverse understandings of “the present” today. Through shared readings, group discussions, independent research, and creative practice, students will improve their knowledge of the 1960s and think critically about the ways in which stories about the 1960s weigh upon people today. And they will share their thickening knowledge with the broader RCAH community in a public forum of their own design, making the Sixties present in their own ways.

    Section 002 (Thobani)
    Representing the Exotic: Sex, Gender and Culture in Colonial and Postcolonial Contexts

    What makes something ‘exotic’? Where do our ideas about the ‘exotic’ come from? Are the tropes used to depict the exotic in popular culture new, or are they part of a longer history of representation? How do these tropes shape our ideas about gender, sexuality and race, ideas that we often take for granted? We take up these questions in this course, which introduces students to the politics of representation. We will pay specific attention to how gender, sexuality and race have been presented in depictions of the ‘exotic’. Furthermore, by studying examples taken from contemporary popular culture as well as from earlier forms of colonial representation, we will learn how to trace the relationship between past and present in the production of popular culture.


    RCAH 203: Transcultural Relations

     

    Section 002 (Hamilton-Wray)
    Transcultural Relations: Social Change Movements in Contact Zones     

    Contemporary social justice movements, such as #Me Too, Black Lives Matter, and March for Our Lives, are shaping U.S. national dialogue. Throughout U.S. history, social justice movements have challenged societal and cultural conventions due to social activists’ quest to transform the lives of marginalized populations. What are the elements inherent in a social change movement? A great leader? A catalyzing moment? A motivated group of like-minded people? A political manifesto? And why do these movements matter to us in our everyday lives? This course takes a case study approach to exploring popular social movements and their transcultural dynamics in U.S. society. The course will require students to engage with a variety of sources, including historical readings, legal proceedings, narrative film, autobiographies, and propaganda materials to investigate past movements and address pressing issues of today.



    RCAH 215: Introduction to Arts

    Section 001 (MacDonald)
    Introduction to Acting: From the Inside Out and the Outside In

    Using a range of warmups, theatre games, improvisation, and acting exercises, this course introduces different approaches to developing acting skills. We will study practitioners such as Stanislavski and Anna Deavere Smith, and establish a toolkit for building characters, using our voices, minds, bodies, and emotions. Working as an ensemble, students will learn how to work with their own imagination and impulses, breakdown scripts, develop character psychology and physicality, and apply this to monologues and scene work in class. We will learn how to lead physical and vocal warmups, and how to undertake basic dramaturgical work as an actor. Along with analyzing scripts, and developing characters, students will learn basic acting vocabulary and be able to discuss their practice, in class as well as in an oral defense of their work. We will work collaboratively and respectfully, to develop an understanding and appreciation of the craft of acting.

    Section 002 (Baibak)
    Focus on Seeing

    In this course we will explore the notions of, “seeing is believing” and that, “How we see that determines what we see”. We will read John Berger’s “Ways of seeing” a short book that talks how we perceive art in a time when images can be so easily reproduced. We will also read excerpts from Jenny Odell’s book “How to do nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy” where Odell writes about actively seeing the world and how it has been perceived by different artists. The class will delve into theories and observations on visual perspective and see how it birthed new understandings of the world we live in. We will look at deep fake imagery and virtual reality and speculate on how it will affect our perception of what we consider to be real. All this combined with making some small art works that focus on playing with material reality.  

     

    RCAH 225: Introduction to Community Engagement

    Section 001 (DelgadoG)
    The Prison Poetry ‘Zine Project

    The goals of this course are to investigate the history of mass incarceration in the US; to understand why art and educational programming is critical to the rehabilitation and well-being of incarcerated communities; and to gain the skills necessary to facilitate community engagement projects within marginalized populations. During weekly visits to prisons you will work side-by-side with incarcerated adults and children writing poems and creating ‘zines. You will examine the works by poets who wrote while in prison including Etheridge Knight, Jimmy Baca Santiago, Marilyn Buck, and Reginald Dwayne Betts. At the end of each prison project you’ll co-facilitate and participate in the culminating slam poetry events.

    Section 002 (Monberg)
    Reciprocity, Sustainability, and Reflexivity in Community Engagement Projects

    The aim of the course is to prepare students for more intensive community engagement by understanding the research and theory behind community engagement—and to design and/or pilot a small project with local communities. Through the lens of key concepts like reciprocity and sustainability, we compare different approaches to community engagement, rethinking how these concepts might serve the current moment facing our communities. Students will trace key concepts historically, beginning with the Asian American Movement of the 1970s and moving toward more contemporary models for community building and community empowerment. Throughout the semester, we will address fundamental questions like: What motivates us to work with communities? What makes community collaborations successful? What difficulties might we anticipate and learn how to navigate? Our primary focus will be on models that move beyond serving communities and move toward building, sustaining, and empowering communities over longer durations of time.


    RCAH 235: Introduction to Language and Culture

    Section 001 (McCarthy)
    Adapt, Transcribe, Transduce, Translate

    This course lays a groundwork in language and culture studies by giving students hands-on experience with four important tasks in the field: adaptation, transcription, transduction, and translation. Each of these tasks takes a source from one milieu and somehow moves it into another. Thus all of them require critical reflections on key debates in language and culture studies. How is meaning mediated by assumptions, conventions, experiences, forms, habits, ideas, and values? How are assumptions, conventions, experiences, forms, habits, ideas, and values themselves grounded in social relations? What constitutes a “language” or “culture?” What does it take to communicate?

    Students will read and discuss theoretical and fictional works wherein adaptation, transcription, transduction, and translation appear as intellectual and moral problems. They will choose source materials and adapt, transcribe, transduce, and translate them. And they will reflect upon their efforts with the aim of improving their ability to contribute to the advancement of language and culture studies.


    RCAH 315: Methods in Arts

    Section 001 (Scales)
    Songwriting and Music Production

    This class involves the creation and recording of popular music, from the initial stages of songwriting through to the recording of those songs. Students will explore the challenges of the creative process, develop their musicianship skills, and become proficient in digital recording technologies, including various kinds of microphones, microphone placements, and some of the basic principles of acoustics.  Part of this process will also include analyzing songs we love and those we love to hate. Students should have the minimum ability to perform in some fashion the music they currently enjoy to listen to and create. 


    RCAH 316: Topics in Arts

    Section 001 (DelgadoG)
    The Art of Walking

    This interdisciplinary arts course allows students to explore the act of walking as a medium for activism, creativity, and integration with the arts. Through mindful walking, students will develop deeper questions, meaning, and inspiration from engagement the surrounding landscapes by drawing, painting, photographing, writing, and mapping everyday walks. Throughout the course, we will examine and discuss the walking praxis of artists and thinkers including Ernesto Pujols, Rebecca Solnit, Mary Oliver, Henry David Thoreau, Thich Nhat Hanh, Barry Lopez, Edward Hirsh, and Gabriel Orozco.

    Section 002 (Bosse)
    Women in Popular Music

    This course will explore the role of women in popular music, focusing on the careers of groundbreaking women across roles and genres. Topics will include the marginalization of women’s voices and the ever-increasing gender gap in the popular music industry, the reception history of women performers, and the representation of women musicians. Student work will involve the critical examination of the received (and predominantly biased) cultural messages about women within narratives of musical talent and taste; the analysis of specific musical works and performances; and creative work that engages with the voices and themes we will explore throughout the semester.


    RCAH 325: Methods in Community Engagement

    Section 001 (Brooks)
    Health and Wellness in Our Communities

    This course on engagement and reflection assists students with developing a deeper understanding of community engagement and cultivates a commitment to improving personal and community health and wellness. Students will be introduced to various methods in community engagement to address select issues and challenges affecting the health and wellbeing of our communities. Topics explored consist of historical and cultural perspectives on health/wellness, psychosocial challenges to healthy living, environmental concerns, chronic diseases, alternative interventions and resources, and health policy studies. The goals of this course are to improve health literacy, draw attention to health disparities, and encourage greater participation in physical activity. In addition, students will complete experiential learning exercises off campus that build relationships with civic organizations.

     

    RCAH 326: Topics in Community Engagement

    Section 001 (Torrez)
    Nuestrxs Historias

    “Telling stories is one way we can begin the process of building community, where inside or outside of the classroom…Stories help us to connect to a world beyond the self. In telling our stories we make connections with other stories.” Using bell hooks' understanding of stories as central to community building, this course will partner with the Lansing School District to create spaces for storying with Latinx youth. In this course, students will work alongside Greater Lansing Latinx youth to discuss the importance of Chicanx/Latinx histories and social movements from a national to a local context. MSU and LSD students will collaboratively work to understand the story of the Lansing Latinx community as it relates to larger political conversations. Engaging with high school students and local Latinx community leaders, we will engage in storytelling practices to uplift the Latinx story and illuminate its profound impact on Michigan. In the end, we will have a community reception to share our storywork. 

    Please note, we will be meeting off-site for this engagement.

     


    RCAH 336: Topics in Language and Culture

    Section 001 (Torrez)
    Language, School, and Policy

     In this course, we will investigate issues of language attrition and revitalization. We will focus on how language is impacted by US educational policy, particularly through the emergence (and transformation) of bilingual education. Through seminar-style learning, we will discuss the following questions: How does one evaluate the importance of a language? What is a heritage language, and how does one learn their heritage language? Should resource-strapped educational systems expend funds to provide multilingual education? How does one foster a multilingual space? In addition to these questions, students will investigate how schools are working with heritage language communities to become active agents in maintaining language and protecting their community’s way of life.

     

    RCAH 345: Methods in the Humanities

    Section 001 (Hamilton-Wray)
    Film Studies Methods from “Black Face” to Blindspotting

    The cinema emerging from a nation, community, or artist’s movement can provide a rich site for investigating dominant and contested ideologies within society. This course challenges the notion that cinema is “just entertainment” or pure escapism, and instead suggests that racial, ethnic, and other social identities are constantly being defined in cinema and that these cinematic representations have political implications. Thus, with a particular focus on the history of Black representation in two competing industries, mainstream and Black independent film, this course sets out to investigate the dynamics of the shared cultural space of U.S. cinema. Specifically, this Film Studies methods course seeks to investigate the interplay between film practices, film spectatorship, and popular culture through historical, social, political, and economic lenses. Ultimately, the course guides students through a survey of Black Film history and offers them Film Studies theoretical frameworks and research methods to make their own investigations.

     

    RCAH 346: Topics in Humanities

    Section 002 (Yoder)
    Religion without God? – Topics in Religious Naturalism  

    “Religious naturalism” is a term that emerged in the 1980s from a wide-ranging conversation between theologians, scientists, and philosophers of religion. Though it is an umbrella term used to cover a range of positions, the intellectual terrain included in religious naturalism is roughly defined by two shared commitments. The first is a commitment to naturalism, to the premise that we should look to the natural world, rather than some supernatural realm to explain and give meaning to our experience. The second is the claim that this commitment to naturalism does not preclude religion, that there can be authentic religious responses to the world that do not depend on the existence of a supernatural realm.

     

    RCAH 492: Senior Seminar

    Section 001 (Monberg)

    The Art(s) of Counter-Memory: Stories as Collective Geographies of History

    What memories of our past are most memorialized? What memories are more likely to become institutionalized? And how might other forms of storytelling prompt us to remember differently? In this seminar, we will look to Asian/American literature, film, and other forms of storytelling that sustain forms of counter-memory. By narrating multiple, diverse, and sometimes competing versions of the past, these storytelling forms reveal forms of making and narrating history that are performed in everyday spaces and places. We will ask, what histories are these storytelling forms remembering or retelling? What methods do these works use to juxtapose stories and counterstories of the past? How do these representations of the past complicate common understandings of family, community, time, and space? In what ways do these stories position the reader/viewer not just as a passive recipient of these histories but also as an active agent of history, a person who can further the remembering?

     

    WS 307: Women of Color Feminisms

    Section 001 (Thobani)

    Women of Colour Feminisms

    The category ‘woman’ is by no means homogenous, as women of colour have long pointed out. In this course, we examine how experiences of gender are shaped by, and shape in turn, formations of race. Questions we will address include: what is the relationship between feminist, anti-racist and anti-colonial practices? How is gender shaped by, and how does it shape in turn, other components of social identity, including as race, class, nationality and sexual orientation? Where do feminist politics sit within the wider structure of global power? Drawing on postcolonial, critical race and feminist studies, the course is designed to introduce students to a broad range of issues pertaining to antiracist, postcolonial and transnational feminist approaches.

  • Fall 2021

    RCAH 111: Writing Transcultural Contexts

    Section 001 (Aronoff)
    Telling Stories:  Composing Knowledges in Transcultural Contexts

    In this section of RCAH 111, we will focus on the connection between culture and “storytelling,” broadly conceived.  That is, we will examine the ways in which culture shapes the ways we perceive the world around us, and how we organize those perceptions into oral and written narratives – be they what we conventionally would call “stories” like personal narratives, myths or novels, or other genres like scientific, academic or philosophical writing, each with their own generic rules for the “stories” they tell.  Drawing primarily on short stories and novels, we will be particularly interested in what happens when different “cultures,” or ways of knowing and writing, collide, clash or mix, in a process we will call “transculturation.”  In what ways, we will ask, does “culture” provide us with narratives, patterns, genres, through which we shape our experience into something meaningful?  In what ways do we deploy, bend, mix these “stories”? If different kinds of stories embody different ways of knowing the world, what do each of these ways of knowing/writing/storytelling enable us to see, and what might they leave out?  In what ways can certain kinds of writing or storytelling be seen as the mixing of, or struggle between, multiple systems of meaning or cultures?  Possible course texts include Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony and/or Art Spiegelman’s Maus.


    Section 002 (MacDonald)
    Americans in/and the World 

    This section of RCAH 111 explores the transcultural engagement that has occurred as a result of American imperialism - the economic, political and cultural influence the United States has exerted on other countries. This presence beyond American borders has included participation in global conflicts such as the Philippine-American War and the Vietnam War, the distribution of aid through initiatives such as the Marshall Plan, and the promotion of peace and friendship through the Peace Corps. American presence and transcultural relations have been captured in poetry, journalism, novels, movies, comic books, vlogs, memes and more. While some stories construct narratives promoting modernization led by Americans, others use narrative to counter ideologies of progress and amplify what might be perceived as traditional cultures. We’ll explore what stories get told and who gets to tell them. What do these stories tell us about power? How do these stories contribute to causing change? What’s the difference between overseas American military presence and American tourists on holiday? We’ll practice different storytelling forms to develop our writing skills and will also explore visual, oral, audio and digital storytelling. Course texts might include Karl May’s Winnetou novels and films, Donald Duck comics, writing by Mark Twain and Edwige Danticat, the Indiana Jones film series, and Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat Pray Love. 

     

    Section 003 (McCarthy)
    Adventures in Modernity

    A change is gonna come, or so artists, activists, and intellectuals in virtually every corner of the globe have said. This course examines efforts to come to grips with the thrilling, terrifying, and quintessentially modern feeling of being swept up in radical social change. Students will read "texts" in which modernity itself plays a dynamic role, perhaps including personal letters by a young Karl Marx, popular short stories by Yiddish-language writer Sholem Aleichem, films by Indian auteur Satyajit Ray, improvised comedy sketches by thespian Elaine May, reflections on Trinidadian cricket by historian C.L.R. James, electric guitar music by Malian band Tinariwen, or sneakers by sports apparell corporations. Classroom discussions will ask how authors use and reinvent existing forms, genres, literatures, and technologies to engage diverse audiences. In frequent writing ventures, students will continuously develop their talents as generous and resourceful communicators.

     

    RCAH 150: Introduction to the Arts and Humanities

    Section 001 (Yoder)      
    Section 002 (Thobani)  
    Section 003 (Brooks)
    Section 004 (Russell)       

    What is interdisciplinary study and what does it look like in the arts and humanities? In this course we will look at chosen issues using the four broad disciplinary areas represented in RCAH – the humanities, the arts, community engagement, and language and culture – in order to see how an interdisciplinary approach works, deepens our understanding, and promotes creativity.


    RCAH 202: The Presence of the Past

    Section 001 (Hamilton-Wray)
    The Presence of the Past: African Oral Traditions and the Making of History

    Oral tradition plays a vital role in the construction and reproduction of “official histories”. However, the role of oral tradition is often not explicitly acknowledged. This course makes visible the presence and role of oral tradition in history-making, with particular focus on African diasporic oral culture found in folklore, music, proverbs, cuisine, humor, literature, and other aspects of African and African diasporic society. Through a look at multiple histories, specifically oral history, imagined history, autobiographical history, and “trans-history” (history that connects the past and the future), students address the questions: What do these multiple histories of African peoples reveal about their struggle, resistance, and liberation? How have and can these histories be employed for positive social change? How do we understand our own official histories when we take into account oral tradition?


    RCAH 203: Transcultural Relations

    Section 001 (Hamilton-Wray)
    Transcultural Relations: Social Change Movements in Contact Zones     

    Contemporary social justice movements, such as #Me Too, Black Lives Matter, and March for Our Lives, are shaping U.S. national dialogue. Throughout U.S. history, social justice movements have challenged societal and cultural conventions due to social activists’ quest to transform the lives of marginalized populations. What are the elements inherent in a social change movement? A great leader? A catalyzing moment? A motivated group of like-minded people? A political manifesto? And why do these movements matter to us in our everyday lives? This course takes a case study approach to exploring popular social movements and their transcultural dynamics in U.S. society. The course will require students to engage with a variety of sources, including historical readings, legal proceedings, narrative film, autobiographies, and propaganda materials to investigate past movements and address pressing issues of today.

     
    Section 750 (Delgado,V/Hinds,T)
    Designing for Peace (EGR/RCAH Peace Engineering Initiative)

    Given the challenges of global conflict and human sustainability, how should we design for peace, justice and human security? It is not an easy question. But designers, artists, ethicists and others have long imagined, designed and implemented creative solutions to human conflicts – solutions that radically transform and improve human and natural wellbeing. In this course, students explore global challenges to human sustainability; the good and the bad of design, technology and development; and the promise of new ideas in the arts, humanities and design justice. Students will use these ideas as they collaborate remotely and in person with the residents of San Luis, Costa Rica, a campesinx community on the edge of one of the largest cloud forests in the world. This course includes an education abroad program to complete community-engaged design projects with residents January 2-8, 2022. Maximum program fee $450, plus airfare.

     

    RCAH 215: Introduction to Arts


    Section 002 (Russell)
    Writing Poetry: Process and Play

    The poet Harryette Mullen says, “From childhood on, I’ve associated poetry with games and puzzles, with singing and dancing, with codes and ciphers, with riddles and rhymes. I’ve never lost that sense of play and pleasure in making poetry.” Merging academic rigor with a spirit of “play and pleasure,” this introductory-level course will focus on the craft and process of poem making, with particular emphasis on the relationship between content and form. Through individual and collaborative writing activities, interaction with guest poets, and engagement with modern and contemporary poetry from across the stylistic spectrum, students will have the opportunity to try a variety of approaches to poetry writing—while gaining an understanding of some key tools and terms of the art.


    RCAH 225: Introduction to Community Engagement

    Section 001 (Delgado,G)
    The Prison Poetry ‘Zine Project

    The goals of this course are to investigate the history of mass incarceration in the US; to understand why art and educational programming is critical to the rehabilitation and well-being of incarcerated communities; and to gain the skills necessary to facilitate community engagement projects within marginalized populations. During weekly visits to prisons you will work side-by-side with incarcerated adults and children writing poems and creating ‘zines. You will examine the works by poets who wrote while in prison including Etheridge Knight, Jimmy Baca Santiago, Marilyn Buck, and Reginald Dwayne Betts. At the end of each prison project you’ll co-facilitate and participate in the culminating slam poetry events.


    RCAH 235: Introduction to Language and Culture

    Section 001 (Thobani)

    The Language of Culture: Constructing Social Identities

    Although we encounter the term ‘culture’ frequently in everyday life, upon closer examination, we find that the term is incredibly difficult to define. Our aim in this course is to explore the various meanings of the term ‘culture’, and trace the different ways in which it is and has been used. So doing, we will address questions such as: How is culture shaped by, and how does it shape, human life? How can we study ‘culture’ given the range of cultural diversity in the world? What is the relationship between culture and the construction of race, ethnicity and gender? What role does language play in shaping ideas about ‘culture’? By addressing these and other questions, this course will also provide students an introduction to disciplines that have generally taken language and culture as objects of study, including anthropology and cultural studies.

    Section 002 (Torrez)
    Cultural Memory and Linguistic Diversity

    In this course we will explore concepts related to language, culture, society and community. What happens when a community is forced to hide or lose their language? Can community members create their identities without the language of that community or does the identity of that community shift to accommodate its language loss?  This course will delve into a discussion of language attrition and revitalization, in addition to how these processes affect the identity formation of people (both individually and as a community). We will explore how linguistic shift within our families. Through meaningful dialogue we will discuss the importance of language on our identity formation and the consequences of language loss.

     

    RCAH 315: Methods in Arts

    Section 001 (Baibak)
    Painting on the Edge

    If one is going to paint, why paint on a canvas? Our world holds so many forms.  Paint is the great transformer! Its color and texture can alter the way we perceive the shape of a thing. In this class, students will use acrylic paint examine the relationship between seeing and the 3-dimensional surface. Let us look at an abbreviated history of painting, and how the process was set free by the invention of photography. We will look at artists and designers who already paint this way while developing our own painting techniques. We’ll consider how form can communicate our ideas, create metaphors, and present visual poetic compositions.  We will be guided by real shadow and light relationships. We’ll look at objects as micro and macroscopic worlds. Let’s paint on the edge without fear of falling off. No previous painting experience needed.

     


    RCAH 316: Topics in Arts

    Section 001 (MacDonald)
    Theatre, Performance and Identity

    How do we construct our identities? How can these identities be represented on stage? How does performance inspire us to reflect on our own identity and the identities of others?  In this course we will explore constructions and performances of race, class, gender, sexuality, disability, regional and national identities that have been presented on stage throughout the 20th and 21st centuries. We will investigate how playwrights and theatre makers have addressed issues of identity in different social, political and historical contexts. How can identity be understood as a performance? How can theatre and performance challenge identity construction? Case studies we might explore include Dominique Morisseau’s The Detroit Project, Tennessee Williams’ Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Larissa FastHorse’s The Thanksgiving Play and Jeanine Tesori and Lisa Kron’s Fun Home. Reading scripts and watching performances, we will consider how identity changes when bodies are live on stage and in the community of an audience. We will also explore theatre artists’ activism related to identity, such as the We See You White American Theatre initiative. Students in this course will lead discussions, write performance responses, work with contemporary drama on the New Play Exchange to fill gaps in the syllabus, and develop public engagement projects ranging from podcasts to Wednesday Night Live.

     

    RCAH 326: Topics in Community Engagement

    Section 001 (Brooks)
    Social Justice Pedagogy

    This course explores the concept of social justice and its implications on community engagement. We will examine various theories of justice, select methods of civic and community action, and a collection of engagement practices that lead to personal and collective recovery, reconciliation, and transformation. We will discuss issues with racism, classism, sexism, genderism, ageism, ableism, homophobia, xenophobia, and other forms of oppression and discrimination and produce strategies to work toward reducing the impact these forms of injustice have on our communities and society. The primary goals are to assist students with exploring what it means to be a civically and democratically engaged citizen and to develop knowledge and skills in leading positive and transformative social change.


    Section 002 (DelgadoV/Hines)
    Culture, Sustainability and Everyday Life

    Given the challenges of global conflict, migration, climate change, infectious disease, inequality and other threats to human sustainability, how should we design for the common good? This is a complex question that calls for scholars in the humanities, engineers, designers and other change makers to collaboratively identify, design and implement creative solutions to human conflicts – solutions that can radically transform and improve both human and planetary well-being. Part of RCAH’s Peace Engineering Initiative with the College of Engineering, students will explore the latest in the rapidly developing field of community design and consider the relationship between these new ideas and building community using reflection, social responsibility, community voice and identity, and transparency. Such work will require students to learn about:

    • the latest research on community participatory, social innovation and pluriversal design
    • the employment of critical community engagement knowledge, skills, and values
    • approaches for sharing these ideas in a transformative way with engineering students and community members in Costa Rica – and among one-another.

     

    RCAH 335: Methods in Language and Culture

    Section 001 (Plough)
    Methods of Sociolinguistic Research

    Methods of Sociolinguistic Research is a general survey course that builds on content covered in RCAH 235 (Introduction to Sociolinguistics or Language as a Social and Cultural Phenomenon). Combining lecture, seminar, and fieldwork, the course introduces students to generating original data through ethnographic fieldwork, interviews, and written questionnaires. Readings include sociolinguistic studies on different world languages. Throughout the course, the advantages and disadvantages of different methods are critically examined with attention to the relationship between sociolinguistic phenomena and the selection of a particular research methodology.

    RCAH 336: Topics in Language and Culture

    Section 001 (Torrez)
    Am I My Language?

    Engaging in meaningful inter/intra dialogue has never been more important than right at this moment in time. In this course, we will engage in topics relating to language loss, regeneration, and impact of language on one’s identities. We consider the educational system’s role in sociolinguistic practices and the ways in which youth have (and continue) to reclaim cultural identities through language. Additionally, we will discuss the relationship between language and power as they relate to newcomers and Indigenous communities.


    RCAH 346: Topics in Humanities

    Section 002 (McCarthy) 

    Remote Work and Estranged Labor

    Millions of workers around the globe shifted to remote work at some point during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. Yet most people who work remotely today did so before the pandemic. And efforts to somehow remove work to a remote location, often although not always the home, have been central to capitalist modernity, from the mushrooming of India’s now $39 billion business process outsourcing industry in the 1990s, to the emergence of the white-collar “telecommuter” in the 1970s, to the commodification of housework during the 1950s, even as far back as the proliferation of “piecework” mainly performed by women and children at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution.

    This class will take an interdisciplinary and expansive view of remote work. Participants will examine critical literature on such interrelated topics as “estranged labor,” the “cybertariat,” the “degradation of labor,” and K-12 homework. And they will read this literature against an eclectic assortment of primary sources, including optimistic depictions of an emergent global “network” in the pre- and early-internet era, managerial handbooks, software such as speech-to-text, technologies such as the audio coupler, and representations of remote work in advertising, film, novels, popular music, and social media.

    In classroom discussions and independent projects, students will use their developing skills and knowledge to address major social problems in the world today. Particularly with the rise of the Military-Industrial-Academic complex after World War II, remote work has been invested with high hopes. Its most sanguine proponents have persistently offered it as a solution to a wide gamut of social problems, promising a better “work-life balance,” less congested motorways, dedicated workers, a more efficient use of resources, flexibility, mobility, and a richer public sphere. Yet in practice remote work has often appeared alongside 24/7 capitalism, the centralization and concentration of wealth and power, degraded work, heightened surveillance, and loneliness. Why this yawning chasm between high hopes and dismal reality? What can we learn about labor under capitalism from studying remote work? And can we discern the seeds of a different sort of society in utopian visions for or resistance to remote work?

     

    RCAH 492: Senior Seminar

    Section 001 (Rivera)

    Ecological Humanities: How art and culture can help us make sense of a changing planet

    Environmental humanities combine the humanities and sciences and serves as a bridge between other humanities disciplines. Without understanding and curiosity, environmental studies is just experimenting and collecting empirical data, lacking human meaning. This course synthesizes skills and knowledge from previous RCAH courses to explore the human dimension of past and present ecological challenges. Students will apply a Problem-/Project-based Learning (PBL) approach to examine ways in which artists and humanists have addressed challenges of sustainability, ecological fragility, and technology and the environment.

  • Spring 2021

    RCAH 112: Writing Research Technologies

    Section 001 (MacDonald)
    Global Fan Practices:  Translation, Subtitling, Fanfiction and Fanart

    This section of RCAH 112 explores the processes by which fans of film, theatre, literature, television, and music overcome linguistic difference and geographic distance to engage with the cultural texts they love. Including but not limited to remediation, translation, and distribution, global fan practices will inspire us to research and write about a multitude of cultural exchanges. As fandoms are often social, the course will investigate how communities are formed and maintained around a shared interest in a particular object of fandom or a particular nation’s popular culture, both physically and virtually. We will research the origins of fandom, considering sports and theatre celebrities of the 19th and early 20th centuries, film and television fandoms around brands such as Disney and franchises such as Star Trek, and literary fandoms around authors such as Jane Austen and characters such as Harry Potter. We will also study how digital technologies and online platforms facilitate fan practices today, considering, for example, Chinese fans who subtitle across a firewall. Students will formulate their own research projects and working with a range of printed and digital sources, they will develop their writing skills through in class writing tasks, peer review, transformative works, essays, and presentations.

    Section 003 (McCarthy)
    America’s Second Reconstruction, 1954–1973: Culture and Society

    Popular images of the 1960s in the United States frequently depict activists, artists, and critics willing social change into existence by sheer moral force. Yet often deep structural changes in economies, institutions, laws, policies, and technologies were the cause of radical dissent just as much as they were its consequence. Activists fought for decades to secure Brown v. Board of Education, the 1954 Supreme Court decision mandating school desegregation. Yet many activists saw it as a mixed victory. By preparing new grounds for the emergent Civil Rights Movement—an antagonistic coalition of civil rights activists, laborites, professional-class liberals, and radical students—the decision helped set a specific and deeply fraught course for future civil rights activism. Feminist critics such as Simone de Beauvoir and Betty Friedan found a popular audience for their writings when married women around the world, for economic reasons mostly unrelated to feminist criticism, found themselves compelled to seek wage labor. Magnetic tape and the transistor radio, new technologies forged within the military industrial complex, made possible an epochal shift in popular music from jazz to rock and roll.

    Students in this section of RCAH 112 will improve their ability to appreciate and investigate interrelations between culture and society such as these. They will read cultural texts from America’s Second Reconstruction, including advertisements, books, experimental compositions, “happenings,” magazines, movies, paintings, plays, poems, popular songs, and television shows. They will consider current historical interpretations of these texts. And in weekly consultation with other course participants, each student will develop an independent research project on a cultural text of their choosing, adapting theories and methods cultivated in class and contributing new knowledge to ongoing class discussions. Students who complete the course should leave better prepared to think critically about the contradictory and compromised nature of human activities grounded in evolving historical situations.

    Section 004 (Hamilton-Wray)
    Writing Research Technologies: Daughters of the Screen and Black Women’s Film Practice 

    Long before the “#Oscars So White” and “4% Challenge” campaigns, Black women artists have asserted their voices in the medium of film – creating, what some might call, a Black female gaze. What is the Black female gaze in film? This course interrogates the social, political, economic, and artistic implications of Black female-centered cinema. Students are introduced to Black Feminist Film Theory in the study of Black women’s film practice. Thus, students will draw on Black women’s literary practice and activism, and consider the politics of production, distribution, and exhibition in their investigation of Black women’s film practice. This research process course asks students to undertake an original research project that incorporates primary and secondary texts and requires them to use their newly acquired media literacy skills. Class assignments typically include oral presentations, interviews, and creative presentations.

    Section 005 (Torrez)
    Activist Literacies: Writing for Change

    "One of the strategies which Indigenous peoples have employed effectively to bind people together politically is a strategy which asks that people imagine a future that they rise above present-day situations which are generally depressing, dream a new dream and set a new vision. The confidence of knowing that we have survived and can only go forward provides some impetus to a process of envisioning.” Taking Linda Smith’s words as central to activist work, we will explore various ways in which youth voices have engaged in various forms of literacy practices to envision a better future. Examining texts from children’s books to Twitter to protest signs, we will discuss how, when and why certain literacy practices have pushed for change. The course is structured to encourage students to examine, explore, and participate in practices covered in class.

     

    RCAH 202: The Presence of the Past

    Section 001 (Aerni-Flessner)
    Global Slavery

    This class looks at how slaves in many places around the world have produced not only goods and services, but also shaped a wide range of societies. We will look at Africa, the Caribbean, North and South America, and places in the Indian Ocean to examine and compare different forms of slavery across time and space. We will be looking at how these systems of involuntary labor were similar and different—and debate what exactly qualifies to be called “slavery.” The globalized world we live in is shaped, in many ways, by the past and the present of slavery. By bringing the story into our present contexts, we will better explain why knowing the history of enslavement is important, and help you better understand why debates about monuments, reparations, and human rights continue to be contentious.

    Section 002 (Miner)
    The (Visual) Presence of the Past – DOCUMENTARIES AND COMICS

    As humans, we cannot escape the way that history continues to shape our contemporary lives.  History is not a singular Truth waiting our discovery; nor is it meaningless, as our contemporary moment seems to indicate. By critically understanding “history,” and our shared roles in constructing it, we may begin to construct a more democratic and egalitarian society. This class will focus on non-fiction films (documentaries) and non-fiction graphic novels (comics) to understand how meaning is constructed and the role that the artist places in this process.  Students will begin to see how the past remains central to our everyday activities, how artists and filmmakers represent it, and how we are individually and collectively active in constructing the past. 

    Section 003 (Esquith)

    Peacebuilding through Art, Humanities, and Engineering

    According to some, peace is achieved when one side wins a war and then all sides abide by the terms of a peace treaty that are dictated by the winning side. This is called victor’s peace and it is typically temporary, as the losing side looks for ways to regain what it has lost or sometimes even take revenge. Victor’s peace does not address the root causes of war. That takes more time, effort, and mutual understanding, which is why it is called peacebuilding. To build peace, we must look at how the arts, humanities, social sciences, and engineering play complementary roles in the peacebuilding process. Each of these disciplines poses different questions about the peace building process. For example:

    • What stories can we tell that will reconcile the warring sides?
    • What moral principles and values can and should guide the process of reconciliation?
    • What new social institutions and structures for education, health, transportation, communications, energy, and security should be built around these stories and according to these principles and values?

    Students will work in interdisciplinary teams on projects that contribute to the goal of peacebuilding. Each team will choose its own peacebuilding project to cope with an urgent problem that has led to violent conflict (e.g., immigration, climate change, pandemics, inequality) and collaboratively design a strategy so that the project will be technically effective, culturally meaningful, and morally acceptable to the opposing parties.                      

     

    RCAH 203: Transcultural Relations

    Section 001 (Thobani)
    At Home in the World?: Identity and Diaspora in Transnational Contexts     

    What happens to the idea of ‘home’ when people migrate and settle elsewhere? In what ways are identities produced in the context of migration? How do these diasporas (communities of people who now live outside their ‘homeland’) engage with questions of race, class, gender and nationality? We take up these questions by studying the relationship between ‘those who moved’, ‘those who stayed put’, and ‘those who are already there’ – or in other words, the relationship between ‘homeland’, ‘diaspora’ and ‘host society’. Rather than take the diaspora as a given, we will study how diasporas are made, paying particular attention to the role of cultural production (media, literature, the arts, etc.) in this process. So doing, we will also interrogate questions of belonging, nostalgia, and authenticity. Our focus will not be limited to one particular diasporic community, instead our aim in this course is to study the connections that exist between and across different cultural groups in the transnational present.

    Section 750 (Delgado, V/Hinds)
    Designing for Peace (EGR/RCAH Peace Engineering Initiative)

    Given the challenges of global conflict and sustainability, how should we design for peace and human security? This is a complex question that calls for designers, artists, ethicists and others to imagine, design and implement creative solutions to human conflicts – solutions that can radically transform and improve human and natural wellbeing. In other words, it challenges us to design technologies, programs and even murals and movements differently. As a response, we will explore: global challenges to sustainability; the role of design, technology and development in their creation; and the promise of new ideas in the arts and humanities about sustainability and design. Students will collaborate remotely with an education center working with campesina and indigenous girls in Hone Creek, Costa Rica, and use their learning in a March 7 – March 13, 2021, education abroad program to complete engaged design projects on education with residents. Maximum program fee $450, plus airfare.


    RCAH 215: Introduction to Arts

    Section 001 (Baibak)
    Reclamation Studio Project

    Art thou thinking about our climate footprint? Reclamation Studio Project is a workshop based on gleaning, reuse, and transformation of found, second-hand, or inherited objects. The course is designed to help alter our perception of objects, so we can see them as an available resource for base materials: plastic, metal, wood, or fiber. We will dissect forms to discover their potential frameworks, cavities, openings, and abstractions. We will look at connective materials, including bolts, wires, rivets, interlocking tabs, springs, hinges, and lashings. We will experiment. These methods will aid us in fashioning objects that visually and physically enhance our daily passage. We will examine the utilitarian and abstract, and the importance of both. The class will read articles about reusing materials from “our great abundance”, and we will regularly visit MSU Surplus as a partner and sometimes art studio. MSU Surplus is the hub of the universities recycling and resource management. Reclamation Studio’s goal is to help us to become more aware of available resources and to highlight our own responsibility as consumers.

    Section 002 (MacDonald)
    Introduction to Acting: From the Inside Out and the Outside In

    Using a range of warmups, theatre games, improvisation, and acting exercises, this course introduces different approaches to developing acting skills. We will study practitioners such as Stanislavski and Chekhov, and establish a toolkit for building characters, using our voices, minds, bodies, and emotions. Working as an ensemble, students will learn how to work with their own imagination and impulses, breakdown scripts, develop character psychology and physicality, and apply this to monologues and scenework in class. We will learn how to lead physical and vocal warmups, and how to undertake basic dramaturgical work as an actor. Along with analysing scripts, and developing characters, students will learn basic acting vocabulary and be able to discuss their practice, in class as well as in an oral defence of their work. We will work collaboratively and respectfully, to develop an understanding and appreciation of the craft of acting.

     

    RCAH 225: Introduction to Community Engagement

    Section 001 (Monberg)
    Serving vs. Sustaining Community

    This course introduces students to current understandings and histories of community engagement, with a particular focus on the role the arts and humanities have played in community engagement and social change. We will focus on core concepts and models of community engagement in RCAH and beyond by exploring the differences between serving a community and sustaining one over time. The aim of the course is to prepare students for more intensive community engagement by introducing them to community-based movements, how the contexts surrounding these movements shift over time, and the role the arts and humanities can play in building and sustaining more just, equitable communities and constellations. Students will build on the work and projects of previous community engagement courses.

    Section 002 (Torrez)
    Creating Space for Community Work

    This course will investigate models of engagement with youth from diverse backgrounds. We will consider the complex societal issues directly impacting the lives of their young collaborators, and how we can collaboratively work through community engagement. This course will focus on ways to engage youth, the impacts of various models of engagement, and provide strategies to maintain a symbiotic and collaborative relationship. Visiting with several community organizers across the state, we will discuss best practices for community engagement. 


    RCAH 235: Introduction to Language and Culture

    Section 001 (Plough)
    Language as a Social and Cultural Phenomenon

    This is an introductory course in the study of language and culture. We begin by asking ‘what is culture’ and then explore language as a social and cultural phenomenon. Topics include the linguistic behaviors and attitudes that develop and are questioned as a result of the interaction of language in social contexts, and the sociocultural factors that influence language forms, functions, and use. How language variation (across, for example, regions, age, social class, gender, level education) constructs and is constructed by identity and culture is also covered. A foundation of concepts, terminology, and research paradigms is established.


    RCAH 315: Methods in Arts

    Section 001 (Scales)
    Songwriting and Music Production

    This class involves the creation and recording of popular music, from the initial stages of songwriting through to the recording of those songs. Students will explore the challenges of the creative process, develop their musicianship skills, and become proficient in digital recording technologies, including various kinds of microphones, microphone placements, and some of the basic principles of acoustics.  Part of this process will also include analyzing songs we love and those we love to hate. Students should have the minimum ability to perform in some fashion the music they currently enjoy to listen to and create. 

     


    RCAH 316: Topics in Arts

    Section 001 (Russell)
    Music Without Full Instrumentation: Poetics of Sound

    In an interview for Hot Metal Bridge, the poet Terrance Hayes says, “Language is just music without the full instrumentation.” The poet, visual artist, permacultarist, and composer Julie Patton complicates that view with visual poems that she describes, in the Jazz and Culture journal, as “sketches which double as open-ended vocal-scores or sound texts.” Patton’s work suggests the immediate question: How do we vocalize a textual image? What do we consider as we commit sound to paper? And how do we perform sound in public? In this course, we will explore those questions and consider how cultural, class, racial, and ethnic background; mono- or multilingualism; disability; embodiment; and public space factor into poets’ practices with sound. We will engage with sound as tool, as material, as constraint, and even as metaphor as it manifests across a number of poetic projects—exploring sound terms, techniques, innovations, and possibilities. Alongside their explorations of poetry published in various mediums, students will work both individually and collaboratively to produce their own written and recorded poems.


    RCAH 325: Methods in Community Engagement

    Section 001 (Brooks)
    Health and Wellness in our Communities

    This course on engagement and reflection assists students with developing a deeper understanding of community engagement and cultivates a commitment to improving personal and community health and wellness. Students will be introduced to various methods in community engagement to address select issues and challenges affecting the health and wellbeing of our communities. Topics explored consist of historical and cultural perspectives on health/wellness, psychosocial challenges to healthy living, environmental concerns, chronic diseases, alternative interventions and resources, and health policy studies. The goals of this course are to improve health literacy, draw attention to health disparities, and encourage greater participation in physical activity. In addition, students will complete experiential learning exercises off campus that build relationships with civic organizations.

     

    RCAH 326: Topics in Community Engagement

    Section 001 (Delgado, G)
    The Prison Poetry ‘Zine Project

    The goals of this course are to investigate the history of mass incarceration in the US; to understand why art and educational programming is critical to the rehabilitation and well-being of incarcerated communities; and to gain the skills necessary to facilitate community engagement projects within marginalized populations. During weekly visits to prisons you will work side-by-side with incarcerated adults and children writing poems and creating ‘zines. You will examine the works by poets who wrote while in prison including Etheridge Knight, Jimmy Baca Santiago, Marilyn Buck, and Reginald Dwayne Betts. At the end of each prison project you’ll co-facilitate and participate in the culminating slam poetry events.

    Section 002 (Rivera)
    Becoming a Community Educator

    This course is an exploratory course designed for students of all backgrounds and interests who have a desire to learn more about nonformal teaching and learning within communities. We will examine key research and theory underlying recent thinking about community education and learning, as well as examine the elements of teaching that transcend the more common formal school-teaching environment. This course is designed to guide students in reflecting upon their experiences to help them better understand the decisions they make as nonformal educators/change agents. Students have the opportunity to pursue their own interests in nonformal teaching and leaning through a community-based learning assignment. The course work and readings are designed to build on these experiences throughout the semester and provide concepts and skills to apply in the field.

    Section 003 (Delgado, V)
    Designing for Community (EGR/RCAH Peace Engineering Initiative)

    How do we collaborate with communities to respond to global conflict, globalization, climate change and sustainability? Finding the answer, will challenge students to explore advanced community participatory methodologies that design and build peace collaboratively using the arts, humanities, reflection, social responsibility, community voice, and transparency. Such work will require students to: consider the latest research on participatory design, community autonomy, and biocultural sustainability; engage in ideas and modalities in the arts and humanities, including storytelling, histories, ethics and others; and develop the critical engagement skills necessary to share these new ideas with community partners in Costa Rica and engineering students at MSU. Together RCAH and engineering students will collaborate remotely with the permaculture coffee farm and environmental education center, LIFE Monteverde, in Canitas, Costa Rica, in their ongoing efforts to develop a center for community resilience.

     

    RCAH 336: Topics in Language and Culture

    Section 001 (Aerni-Flessner)
    Lesotho, Complex Culture in Southern Africa

    A mountainous, landlocked country in southern Africa might not be the first place you think of when you want to explore how language and culture intersect with history, art, and literature. However, the endless mountains and history of being an independent enclave in the middle of the apartheid state make Lesotho a fascinating place to examine all of these issues. The course will look at a wide variety of literature, history, music, and film—all produced in and made about Lesotho—in an effort to see how cultural forces help shape the world that we see around us and live in. The culture of Lesotho extends deep into South Africa as well through the history of labor migration, and even into Europe and North America. We will find ways in which the languages and cultures of southern Africa have influenced the rest of the world.

    Section 002 (Monberg)
    Shifting Understandings of Literacy, Language, and Culture

    This course introduces students to critical perspectives of literacy with a specific focus on underrepresented forms and legacies of literacy. We will explore how ideas about literacy have changed (or not changed) over time, how literacy has often been used to contain linguistic, cultural, and racial differences, and how community-based forms of sponsorship have sustained diverse forms of literacy. As we move through the semester, we will consider the following questions: How is literacy defined? How are these definitions used? How has literacy been assessed and for what purposes? How do forms of literacy emerge, thrive, or fade? How can robust forms of literacy be sponsored and sustained over time? How can we not only recognize diverse and emergent forms of literacy but also help them thrive in our classrooms and communities? And, finally, how might we shift our understandings of literacy so that we define, judge, and measure literacy differently in school and beyond?

     

    RCAH 345: Methods in the Humanities

    Section 001 (Hamilton-Wray)
    Methods in the Humanities: Film Studies Methods from “Black Face” to Blindspotting

    The cinema emerging from a nation, community, or artist’s movement can provide a rich site for investigating dominant and contested ideologies within society. This course challenges the notion that cinema is “just entertainment” or pure escapism, and instead suggests that racial, ethnic, and other social identities are constantly being defined in cinema and that these cinematic representations have political implications. Thus, with a particular focus on the history of Black representation in two competing industries, mainstream and Black independent film, this course sets out to investigate the dynamics of the shared cultural space of U.S. cinema. Specifically, this Film Studies methods course seeks to investigate the interplay between film practices, film spectatorship, and popular culture through historical, social, political, and economic lenses. Ultimately, the course guides students through a survey of Black Film history and offers them Film Studies theoretical frameworks and research methods to make their own investigations.

     

    RCAH 346: Topics in Humanities

    Section 001 (Yoder)
    Religion without God? – Topics in Religious Naturalism

    “Religious naturalism” is a term that emerged in the 1980s from a wide-ranging conversation between theologians, scientists, and philosophers of religion. Though it is an umbrella term used to cover a range of positions, the intellectual terrain included in religious naturalism is roughly defined by two shared commitments. The first is a commitment to naturalism, to the premise that we should look to the natural world, rather than some supernatural realm to explain and give meaning to our experience. The second is the claim that this commitment to naturalism does not preclude religion, that there can be authentic religious responses to the world that do not depend on the existence of a supernatural realm.

     

    RCAH 492: Senior Seminar

    Section 001 (Thobani)
    Critical Literacies: Race, Gender, Representation 

    Whether we realize it or not, we engage with various forms of representation on a daily basis. As artists, writers, scholars or activists, we also produce representations in and through our work. This capstone course is designed to build on the topics and themes you have studied during your time at RCAH in order to critically reflect on the role that representation has played in your learning, both inside and outside the university. Some questions we will consider are: how does representation shape ideas about race, gender and culture, among other aspects of identity? What role does representation play in creating ideas about belonging and non-belonging? What are the limitations of representation, and what are its transformative possibilities? By addressing these questions, our aim in this course is to develop critical literacies to help us better understand the histories behind, and the significance of, the representations that surround us. 

    Section 002 (Sheridan)
    The Role of Space in Nurturing Community, Creativity, and Learning

    In designing Pixar's headquarters, Steve Jobs famously wanted to limit restrooms to a small number located in the center of the building.  This would force people to congregate in a central spot multiple times during the day.  And when people congregate, they talk and share ideas, fueling the creative process. This anecdote hints at the power of space to nurture two things that the RCAH values: social connections and the creative process.  In fact, our own space is designed with these goals in mind.  We have places like LookOut!, the LMC, Serenity, and many other communal spaces aimed at supporting creativity, community, and learning.  Cities, too, have such spaces.  Nearby, Old Town, Lansing, for instance, has become a creative hub. This class will use a number of lenses to explore the role of space helping us achieve things that we value.  We will examine what scholars and workers have said about work spaces, educational spaces, and civic spaces.  We will visit exemplary spaces around and beyond campus.  Exploratory questions include: What makes a space effective?  Exciting?  Enchanting?The RCAH will serve as a chief example throughout the course.  By this point, all of us have had many experiences in RCAH spaces.  What can we learn from these experiences?  How can we study the way RCAH spaces are used, modified, resisted by students, faculty, and staff?  How can we transform RCAH spaces so that they more effectively support the things we value?

Academics