AMST 408
Envisioning Urban Life: Objects, Subjects, and Everyday People Spring 2014
Division II Writing Skills Exploring Diversity Initiative
Cross-listed LATS 408
This is not the current course catalog

Class Details

What is the relationship between real life in urban communities and the multiple ways in which they are imagined? What does it mean to be “urban,” to live in an “urban community,” or to be the product of an “urban environment”? Who do we think the people are who populate these spaces? This course takes a critical look at specific populations, periods, and problems that have come to dominate and characterize our conceptions of the quality, form, and function of U.S. urban life. A few of the topics we may cover include historical accounts of the varied ways in which poverty and “urban culture” have been studied; race, class, and housing; the spatial practices of urban youth and the urban elderly; and gendered perspectives on social mobility and community activism. Finally, this course will explore how diverse social actors negotiate responses to their socio-spatial and economic circumstances, and, in the process, help envision and create different dimensions of the urban experience. The course fulfills the Exploring Diversity Initiative requirement as it explores how various forms of urban inequality affect the collective experience of social actors in diverse race and class categories. It focuses on the complex and contradictory ways in which urban residents confront, negotiate, and at times challenge social and structural inequalities and the changing political economy of U.S. cities.
The Class: Format: seminar
Limit: 14
Expected: 14
Class#: 3167
Grading: yes pass/fail option, yes fifth course option
Requirements/Evaluation: evaluation will be based on class participation, a short essay, a series of writing exercises, and a semester-long final project
Prerequisites: prior courses in American Studies, Latina/o Studies, or permission of instructor; not open to first year students
Enrollment Preferences: senior Latina/o Studies concentrators and to senior American Studies majors
Distributions: Division II Writing Skills Exploring Diversity Initiative
Notes: This course is cross-listed and the prefixes carry the following divisional credit:
LATS 408 Division II AMST 408 Division II
Attributes: AMST Comp Studies in Race, Ethnicity, Diaspora
AMST 400-level Senior Seminars
AMST Space and Place Electives
ENVP SC-B Group Electives
LATS 400-level Seminars

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