A sample of course lectures from UCSD COMM 190 (Making ‘Americanness’ in Popular Culture) covering topics including: Cultural Memory, Speculative Futures and Afrofuturism, Social Construction of Space, Place-based Iconography, Popular Culture, and Critical Cartography.
UCSD COMM 129 (Race, Nation, and Violence in Multicultural California) students tour the developing lab space of Assistant Professor Keolu Fox, (UC San Diego Anthropology), a genome scientist who also uses biological anthropological methods to interrogate the relationship of Indigenous communities to science. This field trip, along with relevant course readings and lectures, helped ground the stakes of a previous long-standing battle between the university and tribal communities over the ownership and use of Indigenous remains and DNA. This experience also added relevance and applicability to course discussions regarding not just physical, but epistemological, forms of racial violence at the heart of the ongoing settler project.
UCSD COMM 145 (History, Memory, and Popular Culture) students engage in an interactive workshop at UCSD’s Geisel Library. In the above photo, students watch with awe as an archivist shows the inner workings of a cassette tape in the library's digitization room. This field trip helped make visible the labor of archive work as well as make plain the sociocultural construction of the epistemological frameworks that shape our understandings of the past.
UCSD COMM 145 (History, Memory, and Popular Culture) Field Notes Excerpts
UCSD COMM 145 (History, Memory, and Popular Culture) Class Tour of the La Jolla Playhouse with Julia Cuppy, Director of Education and Outreach, in front of the Weiss Theater stage set of Kiss My Aztec! The play, which was co-written by John Leguizamo, offers an ‘irreverent’ re-imagining of 16th century Spanish colonization. As such, it presented students the opportunity to examine a relevant popular culture product which overtly interrogates political aspects of hegemonic remembrance. Students were also provided with discounted tickets to the show and were offered extra-credit if they attended and wrote a thoughtful analysis of the piece, including its context and relation to course literature and concepts, and their individual experience engaging with the work and the overall theater-going practice.
2020 Speaker Series designed to enrich course pedagogy during COVID-19 remote learning.