Cultural Studies Course Offerings

2024/25 Course Offerings

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

Fall 2024

• KS100: Studying Popular Culture
• KS101 (online): Exploring Cultural Studies
• KS203 (online):  Popular Culture & Ideology
• KS205 (online): Cartoons and Comics
• KS220: Networked & Digital Cultures
• KS240A: TBA
• KS333: War, Memory & Popular Culture
  (Crosslisted with GS333-taking both GS333 and KS333 would be considered repeating)

Winter 2025

• KS101: Exploring Cultural Studies (T 1600-1750 + tutorial)
• KS210: Cultural Studies Popular Music (M W 1430-1550)
• KS240B: Doing Cultural Studies (T R 1130-1250)
• KS340k: Hip Hop Publics (R 1130-1420)
• KS400r: Embodiment and Identity (R 0830-1120)

2024/25 Special Topics Descriptions

KS240A Toward Freedom
Crosslisted 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.

KS240B Doing Cultural Studies
Cross-listed with CS240D (taking both CS240D and KS240B would be considered repeating).

This course aims to engage cultural studies as a practice of everyday life. Together we explore different approaches to encountering lived experience, narrative and storytelling, production and consumption, place and space, time and memory, representation, and relations of power. Students will have the opportunity to explore a variety of methods and case studies, including but not limited to culture jamming, auto-ethnography, textual analysis, oral history, fieldwork, archival research, and digital humanities.

KS340k Hip Hop Publics
R 1130-1420
Using Drake as the focus of study, this course explores hip hop in Canada, its underground and commercial successes, and the intersection of hip hop and public discourse in Canada. In this course, we will be treating Drake as an exemplar to understand firstly, what it means to occupy the subject position of a commercially successful Canadian (Black, male, middle-class etc.) rapper, and secondly to understand what a successful Canadian rapper can tell us about Canada. To explore the latter, we will analyze Drake, his celebrity, his body of work, and the discourses produced about his person and work. We will examine these discourses to understand what it means to perform not only hip hop, but also blackness, masculinity, class, and sexuality in the public spaces of Canadian popular culture. Of course, Drake is not bound to Canada. He has, perhaps uniquely, made much of his success in the US and has also enjoyed global fame. Looking through the lens of Canadian hip hop culture, we will examine what Drake’s negotiation of borders and belonging can tell us about Canada’s relationship to US popular culture (and hip hop in particular), Canada’s intersection with Caribbean popular culture, and how Canada is ideologically understood as a ‘multicultural’ nation.

KS400r Embodiment and Identity
R 0830-1120
The body is a site in, on, and through which identities are expressed, articulated, performed, and governed. It is a medium for communication and culture, a focus of intervention and discipline, and a location of both struggle and pleasure. It is a locus of sets of sometimes contradictory cultural meanings that are negotiated in systems of power and social, cultural, and political practices and institutions that can both support, limit, transform, and contest them. In this course our aim will be to trouble or problematize dominant norms, practices, procedures, and ideas about bodies and embodiment through the lens of cultural studies. This senior seminar will look to embodiment not as singular and fixed but as plural and ongoing processes that are representational, material, and affective. We will discuss diverse bodies, and modes of embodiment, focusing primarily on cultural discourses in which bodies and identities appear and are made to appear, are fashioned and refashioned, and give rise to understandings of identity at the overlapping and sometimes competing critical intersections of gender, race, sexuality, disability, class, and age, among others. How do we understand diverse bodies and embodiment practices in the larger contexts of culture and society? What cultural discourses shape and are shaped by these understandings and with what material consequences? How do these cultural discourses influence the stories we tell and that are told about ourselves and others in the worlds of our experience? And who is the “we” that speaks and is spoken in these discourses, constructed through these practices, governed through these procedures, and creatively fashioned and transformed through these cultural resources?