California

3 credits · Undergraduate

California is both the Golden State and a "plundered province”, a place of opportunity and injustice, sanctuary and exclusion, beauty and brutality. This class explores the material places and social spaces that have created both astonishing prosperity and entrenched inequality in California. We focus on the peculiarities of place and the experience of ordinary people but also situate California within broader forces shaping American life, such as settler colonialism, racial capitalism, innovation, gentrification, and more. In doing so, we will discuss the historical contingencies and contemporary contexts that (re)construct race, with attention to how oppression is not only created but also challenged distinctively in California.