UMass Boston

Course Overview

Description

Foundations of TCCS is the introductory theory course for the graduate program in TCCS. This seminar provides an introduction to critical terms, concepts, and issues in TCCS. The processes that lead to the formation of personal and collective identities, real, imagined, or emotional, have historical, material, structural and cultural lineages that must be excavated separately but analyzed holistically through transdisciplinary approaches. This course centers communities of color in the U.S. and the historical and contemporary forces through which they have developed transnational and diasporic relationships individually, structurally, collectively, and culturally. We will explore and analyze debates and approaches to colonialism and empire, development, globalization, migration transnationalism and diaspora, nationalism and nativism, community formation, intersectionality and layered identities, the politics of cultural representation, critical race theory and racial formation, race relations, and political resistance, advocacy, and activism. Finally, we engage with these concepts in the context of power relationships from a humanistic framework grounded in empathy and individual transformation.