African-American Studies

This course examines the organization of contemporary advertising industry. A special emphasis is placed on the role of diversity and difference, including but not restricted to the ways that race, ethnicity, and other demographic/social difference impact both the profession and the creative process. Advertising is a polyglot organizational field consisting of traditional advertising agencies, but also digital companies and social media firms that use creative marketing techniques, such as crowdsourcing and viral marketing. We will consider the ways that corporations and those in their service produce and consume information and image, in an effort to shape individual and collective identities, and to market goods and services. The course is organized around collective discussion.

This seminar examines the intersection of race, gender, and nation in the formation of hierarchical social systems and their legitimating ideologies. A leading premise of this course is that racial ideologies are, foundationally, claims about the heritability of socially produced and imagined differences—claims that muster, mimic, and articulate notions of differences associated with a variety of social distinctions, including sex/gender, class, and nation-based identities. This seminar will situate the process of racialization within the wider problematic of political subjectivity and direct attention to the symbolic and structural organization of modern, hierarchical social systems.