Spring 2027 Courses

⟡ Hip Hop Feminism

• Meeting times: Monday/Wednesday, 2-3:40PM
• Instructor: Dr. M. Nicole Horsley
• Prerequisites: None
• Enrollment: 20
• Credits: 4

What Happens when Black Feminism gets on the mic?

And who is heard, desired, protected, criticized--or left out of the conversation?

Course Description

Hip Hop Feminism examines how Black women and queer artists use lyrics, sound, performance, fashion, dance, music videos, and popular culture to confront gendered power. Beginning with early writings by Black women, we consider Hip Hop feminism’s emergence, contributions, contradictions, and blind spots.

We will study pleasure, sexuality, misogynoir, masculinity, femininity, labor, beauty, respectability, queerness, celebrity, capitalism, and refusal, We will also ask how a culture created through collective expressions and community survival became a global industry--and what feminist accountability requires from its artists, audiences, institutions, and origin stories.

Rather than treating Hip Hop only as music or entertainment, we approach it as a site of theory, cultural memory, political struggle, knowledge production, and movement work.

The Central Questions

• Why is Hip Hop feminism still necessary?
• Can Hip Hop feminism center Black women, femmes, and queer and trans people while also transforming Black masculinity and inviting men into feminist struggle?
• What happens when a culture grounded in community, creativity, and survival becomes a commercial product?
• Who gets to represent sexual freedom--and who pays for that representation?
• What political and activist work should Hip Hop feminism be doing now?
• What does Black queer feminism reveal that earlier Hip Hop feminist frameworks could not--or would not--address?

A note on the course

This course does not presume that Hip Hop feminism speaks for every Black woman, femme, or queer person. We examine it as a living--and necessarily unfinished--framework that must remain accountable to the people it claims to represent.

⟡ Blaxploitation: Black Power, Pleasure & The Movies

• Meeting times: Monday/Wednesday, 12-1:40PM
• Instructor: Dr. M. Nicole Horsley
• Prerequisites: None
• Enrollment: 20
• Credits: 4

Course Description

What happens when Black becomes beautiful, dangerous, desirable--and profitable?

In the 1970s, Black bodies, music, fashion, and sexuality took center stage in a new wave of American cinema. Blaxploitation cinema transformed American popular culture through its unforgettable soundtracks, sexual politics, and visions of Black rebellion. It sold audiences fantasies of Black freedom, pleasure, revenge, and power. But was blaxploitation a cinematic revolution, a commercial exploitation of Black audiences, or something more complicated?

The course explores the pleasures, politics, and contradictions of blaxploitation cinema. We will examine Black stardom, gender and sexuality, capitalism, violence, music, spectatorship, and the struggle over who gets to produce, profit from, and define Black images. We’ll consider how the independent success of Melvin Van Peebles’s Sweet Sweetback’s Baadassss Song helped open a commercial door that Hollywood rushed through--and how Black filmmakers, performers, musicians, and audiences negotiated the possibilities and limits along the way, we’ll consider the genre’s relationship to the Black Power and Black Arts movements and its continuing influence on hip hop, fashion, and contemporary film.

⟡ Reimagine Everything: Race, Power, and Social Action

• Meeting times: Tuesday/Thursday, 10-11:50AM
• Instructor: Dr. Mika Kennedy
• Prerequisites/Restrictions: At least one CSCR, LGST , POLI, SOCI, or WGST course.
• Enrollment: 15
• Credits: 4

Course Description

In this practicum-based course, you will take up race, power, and resistance as generative frameworks for enacting social change. What justice movements and political positions informed the development of Asian American and Critical Ethnic Studies? How can understanding histories/theories of race and movement building support and inform the social action campaigns of today?

You’ll address these questions hands-on by engaging in policy-focused social action campaigns grounded in Asian American Studies and Critical Ethnic Studies praxis. Through team-based work focused on an issue of your choosing, you will learn how to:

• identify community issues

• analyze power dynamics

• conduct campaign research

• communicate effectively with your base and targets

• design campaign actions

• develop sustainable practices for yourself and your communities

Reading list (selected)

• “An Insurgent Manual on Organizing for Asian American Studies,” Amber Lee, Linda Lau, Kevin Park, Mimi Khuc, and Lawrence-Minh Bui Davis
• “How Death and Crisis are Co-Opted into Carceral Reform: Abolitionist Perspectives from No New Jails NYC and Red Canary Song,” Shaun X. Lin and Yves Tong Nguyen
• “Drivers on the Front Lines: The New York Taxi Workers Alliance, Neoliberalism, and Global Pandemic—An Interview with Javaid Tariq”

Notes from Dr. K

The world’s on fire, and it’s time to get organized. This class is a crash course on Asian American community organizing that rejects the myth of the model minority. It’s a living laboratory for developing your own social action campaigns. If you’re new to organizing and want to build your foundation, this one’s for you. If you want to build your leadership skillset and take your organizing vision to the next level, this one’s for you. And if you want to bring the spirit of strong organizing--radical hospitality, collective care--to the places you already live, work, and play, this one’s for you, too.