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Cultural Studies Course Offerings

2026/27 Course Offerings

Please see the academic calendar for more course information or Browse Classes for scheduling information.

Fall 2026

  • KS100: Studying Popular Culture
  • KS101 (virtual asynchronous): Exploring Cultural Studies
  • KS203 (virtual asynchronous):  Popular Culture & Ideology
  • KS205 (virtual asynchronous): Cartoons and Comics
  • KS240A: Toward Freedom
  • KS326: Digital Intimacies
  • KS340M: Being Black in Diaspora

Winter 2027

  • KS101: Exploring Cultural Studies
  • KS210: Cultural Studies Popular Music
  • KS255: Doing Cultural Studies
  • KS326: Digital Intimacies
  • KS400N: Alt.Health.Cultures
NOTE that the following KS courses are cross-listed (a single class offered under two or more different departmental codes or course numbers). Taking both cross-listed courses would be considered repeating.
  • KS240A and CS240C (Toward Freedom)
  • KS255 and CS255 (Doing Cultural Studies)
  • KS326 and CS326 (Digital Intimacies)
  • KS340M and CS340Z (Being Black in Diaspora)

2025/26 Special Topics Descriptions

KS240A Toward Freedom
Cross-listed with CS240C (taking both CS240C and KS240A would be considered repeating).

This Black Studies course highlights Black voices and their cultural expressions to not only think through how the histories of slavery and colonialism inform structures of racial capitalism, but more importantly, to center how the Black imagination offers moments of rupture and possibility. This course considers how freedom is conceptualized and practiced by people of African descent who are located throughout the Americas by exploring questions such as, how is freedom defined, obtained, and/or bestowed? How does one grapple with present-day calls for freedom despite living in an era of post-emancipation? And what is the relationship between Black Studies and societal understandings of freedom? Students in Toward Freedom are routinely encouraged to think critically about the various ways that their own lived-experiences intersect with these discourses which include themes such as, Black Art and Artists, Storytelling, Black feminism and womanism, Freedom Dreams, Allyship, Black joy, and world-building. Together, we will study a range of Black intellectual/creative practices that offer capacious implications for our ability to think, dream, and re/build the world.

KS340M Being Black in Diaspora
Cross-listed with CS340Z (taking both CS340Z and KS340M would be considered repeating).

This course complicates understandings of place and space by thinking through and with various Black and African Studies perspectives to discuss what it means to be Black in diaspora. By considering the ongoing legacies of slavery and colonialism, we will prioritize Black perspectives that are attentive to Black life in ways that illuminate both the overlapping and nuanced experiences of Black people globally. We will also decentre North American experiences, particularly those of African Americans, by prioritizing Black/African cultural expressions emerging out of Europe, the Caribbean, Africa, and the Middle Passage. This course will allow students to think about the dynamic implications of neocolonialism and Black resistance worldwide.

KS400N Alt.Health.Cultures
Alternative health is undeniably popular at the moment. Consumers buy billions of dollar’s worth of alternative health products and services every year. Celebrities are positioned as alternative health experts while alternative health experts become themselves celebrities through the complex mechanisms of popularity, fads, influence(rs), and fandoms. The rise of alternative health practice in the West is a relatively new cultural practice, albeit with historical antecedents, that produces particular ways of understanding the self in relation to bodies, communities, and society as well as abstract concepts such as wellness and sickness. This course examines the broad and far-reaching concept of alternative health and its corollary, alternative medicine, through the framework of critical cultural studies. We will explore what it means for alternative health to circulate in (and out of) popular culture, and various public spheres, as well as the relationship of alternative health to public health. Although focusing primarily on the rise of alternative and complementary medicine in the West since the 1970s, the course will also examine the history of heterodox approaches to health and medicine. The course will explore some of the diverse practices and discourses that fall under the umbrella term of alternative health, including wellness; Ayurvedic and Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM); the anti vaxx movement; Yoga, Qigong, and Tai Chi; complementary medicines (such as chiropractic care, osteopathy, etc.); dietary, nutritional, and herbal supplementation and medicine. We will collaboratively explore the intersection of alternative health and social justice, and the relationship of alternative health discourses to contemporary public health crises.