Overview

Description

CALENDAR DESCRIPTION:

Specific details of courses to be offered will be published prior to enrollment each term.

COURSE DETAILS:

This course introduces students to a discussion on the specific experience of indigenous people understood from a global perspective. Following some of the key debates, we will consider indigeneity as a specific form of ethnicity that also transcends ethnicity’s specificity. Colonization, the expropriation of territories through force and law, the political (in)subordination to settler-colonial populations, are some of the specific experiences of indigenous peoples. Yet the forms and dynamics of these relations, as well as the forms in which indigenous people have recreated their sociability, knowledge, and identities vary greatly across different indigenous nations, regionally and transnationally. The first part of the course will consider debates around the definition of indigenous experience. The second part of the course will unpack the main systems of inequality that have incorporated indigeneity as a dimension of subordination and marginalization, as well as the forms in which indigenous nations not only resist but also interrupt modernity, nation-state, and the claims of capitalism as being completed projects. The third part of the course covers indigeneities that emerge from the growing relevance of transnational relations of people, capital, and ideas. We will consider indigeneity as a result of trans-local fields of tension and collaboration. Throughout the course, we will discuss these approaches as we analyze case studies from Canada and across the globe without disregarding intersections of indigeneity with gender, age, class, and subalternity.

COURSE-LEVEL EDUCATIONAL GOALS:

This course will introduce students to some of the core discussions developed by social theorists and we will discuss their utility for understanding the commonalities and differences in indigenous experience in the present. The course will help students to build a number of skills that are essential to becoming social scientists working in research, teaching or as applied professionals. Through participation in this course, students will
• Become familiar with concepts, theorists, and schools of thought that are central to the study of the colonial systems in which indigeneity has been constituted. Examine the way indigenous thinkers have contested but also co-constructed these perspectives.
• Develop criteria for testing the analytical strengths and weaknesses of different approaches to the study of different social problems of indigenous people from North America and across the globe.
• Approach applied dimensions of the work as part of or alongside indigenous communities and people within and outside academia.
• Refine advanced writing skills. Practice oral communication and presentation skills.

Grading

Materials

REQUIRED READING: