Cultural Studies Course Offerings

2025/26 Course Offerings

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

Fall 2024

• KS100: Studying Popular Culture
• KS101 (virtual asynchronous): Exploring Cultural Studies
• KS203 (virtual asynchronous):  Popular Culture & Ideology
• KS240A: Toward Freedom
• KS340L: Performance Cultures
  (Crosslisted with CS340X-taking both KS340L and CS340X would be considered repeating)

Winter 2025

• KS101: Exploring Cultural Studies
• KS205 (virtual asynchronous): Cartoons and Comics
• KS210: Cultural Studies Popular Music
• KS240B: Doing Cultural Studies
• KS340M: Being Black in Diaspora
• KS400S: Cultural Politics of Food

2025/26 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.

KS340L Performance Cultures
Cross-listed with CS340X (taking both CS340X and KS340L would be considered repeating).

Performance often describes a specialized domain of aesthetic activity related to the performing arts: we know, for example, that actors, dancers, and musicians perform. But performance also illuminates a wide range of other cultural behaviors and activities: religious clerics “perform” ceremonies, business administrators conduct “performance evaluations,” legislation “acts” upon us as citizens, and as individuals we perform things like our gender, class, nationality, and ethnicity every day through small and often unconscious acts.
This course takes a broad-spectrum approach to the performance concept in order to introduce students to performance as a key concept within culture and communication studies. Throughout the course, we will investigate what performance is, what performance does, and what it means to use performance as a paradigm to analyze culture (“performance as”). We will explore such topics as role-play, ritual, performativity, performative utterances, and state pageantry. The course will be organized in three discrete units: Performance in Everyday Life, Gender and Performance, and Performance and Power. There will be a summative assignment at the end of each unit and a capstone final project.

KS400S Cultural Politics of Food
This course engages the geopolitical cultural politics of food. It examines how culture, experience, politics, and other factors shape our perceptions of food. It considers the local, regional, and global spaces where food production and consumption occur. It will also examine how food becomes an aspect of control society, being used to differentiate between inclusion and exclusion, as well as other political and ethical practices.