First-Year Seminar: In(tro)\ Visible St. Louis: People, Place, and Power in the Divided City

3 units

St. Louis has a hard-earned reputation as a divided city – one of the nation’s most starkly segregated and unequal urban communities. But the city is also characterized by vibrant civic and political action directed toward identifying and addressing the historic (and often ongoing) injustices that undergird those realities. Indeed, the long arc of activism, memory work, and other reparative community initiatives in and around St. Louis has long been distinctive and exceptional – from Dred Scott and Freedom Suits to the Ferguson Uprising and #BLM, the city has built a distinctive reputation, as a recent exhibit at the Missouri History Museum trumpeted, as “#1 in Civil Rights!” This First-Year Seminar course engages the history of the city and surrounding metro area you will be calling home over the next few years. It aims to connect you to various key aspects of its people and neighborhoods, adopting a sociological lens to emphasize the lines of power that have defined policies of segregation and inequity, as well as the challenges to those systems that have – and continue to – transform our surroundings and improve the life chances of the region’s residents. Our focus will be on the trajectory of place, spanning the city and region’s past and future to best engage its present. This class also serves as an entry point to the Sociology department’s Urban Studies track. This connection explains our somewhat unusual class title, as this first-year seminar bookends the Urban Studies capstone course experience, also titled (with a bit less flourish) “In\Visible St. Louis.” Under this guise, throughout the semester we will be pairing our classroom explorations with visits and study of places in and around the city.