The digital revolution has made an enormous amount of information available to research scholars, but discovering resources and using them effectively can be challenging. This course introduces students with research interests in Latino and Africana Studies to search strategies and methods for finding materials in various formats (e.g., digital, film, and print) using information databases such as the library catalog, print and electronic indexes, and the World Wide Web. Instructors provide equal time for lecture and hands-on learning. Topics include government documents, statistics, subject-specific online databases, social sciences, the humanities, and electronic citation management.

Full details for LSP 1101 - Research Strategies in Africana and Latino Studies

This low-intermediate course expands Heritage students' confidence and competence in Spanish by providing opportunities to build upon the conversational skills they have. Through literary texts, other readings, music, films and the visual arts students broaden their vocabulary, improve grammatical accuracy, develop writing skills and enrich their understanding of the cultures of the Spanish-speaking world. The heritage student grew up speaking Spanish and finished high school in the U.S. 

Catalog Distribution: (FL-AG)

Full details for LSP 1250 - Spanish for Heritage Speakers I

Designed to expand bilingual Heritage students' knowledge of Spanish by providing them with ample opportunities to develop and improve each of the basic language skills, with a particular focus on writing vocabulary. The heritage student has at least one parent of Hispanic origin and grew up speaking Spanish at home; s/he also finished high school here in the US. After this course, students may take SPAN 2095.

Catalog Distribution: (FL-AG)

Full details for LSP 2020 - Spanish for Heritage Speakers

How are migration dynamics produced? How do states and communities respond to and shape complex migration processes? This course will draw on the United States as a case study, focusing on Latino immigrants. Latinos are by far the largest immigrant group in the U.S., representing about 50% of all immigrants. Additionally, the U.S. has historically received the largest number of immigrants in the world. The class will examine the main debates around migration in fields such as Latino studies, migration studies, and political science. We begin with a historical and contemporary survey of global and regional migration trends. Next, we will review theories explaining why people migrate and how countries manage migration processes. We then focus on the U.S. immigration apparatus, examining past and present changes, including migration public policies. Central to this class is the exploration of multiple systems of marginalization that shape the opportunities, material conditions, and lived experiences of immigrants in the U.S. We conclude with an exploration of historical and contemporary migrant-led forms of resistance, such as the Immigrant Rights Movement, and its linkages to other transnational struggles for social justice.

Catalog Distribution: (SCD-AS) (D-AG)

Full details for LSP 2152 - (Im)migration and (Im)migrants: Then and Now

This class will examine historical and contemporary developments in the politics of resistance, solidarity, and inclusionary policies around migration. We will place a special focus on North and Central America to understand the emergence and development of both the Old and the New Sanctuary Movements, broadly defined, as a transnational and diverse coalition of religious and political groups such as churches, synagogues, NGOs, educational institutions, and pro-migrant states and cities that offer "safe haven" or "sanctuary" to migrants holding various legal statuses. In addition, we will examine the origins, development, and current state of subnational pro-migrant public policies in the region. We will close the class with reflections on what a world without borders could look like. This course draws on a range of interdisciplinary theories and methods from the social sciences and humanities that will allow students to analyze, imagine, and devise creative ways of inclusion toward migrants and marginalized populations.

Catalog Distribution: (SSC-AS) (SBA-AG)

Full details for LSP 3132 - Sanctuary in the Americas: Envisioning a Borderless World

In this course, we interrogate how immigration debates are staged and experiences of belonging are redefined through performance. The categories of "undocumented," "illegal," "displaced," and "exile" collide on international and national stages when governmental bodies decide who gets to be a migrant and under what terms. We assess how bodies marked culturally and legally as "aliens" use performance to navigate complex migration laws and dangerous social terrains that appear to be shifting and solidifying at the same time. We consider performances on stage, as well as performance in a broader understanding. We examine visual, linguistic, and performative representations of migrant experiences. We analyze and write about performances that deal with issues of migration beyond economic and security models.

Catalog Distribution: (GLC-AS) (CA-AG)

Full details for LSP 3215 - Performance and Immigration:Staging the Migrant, Alien, and Refugee in and outside the US

Migrants are a heterogeneous group of people (the term "migrants" is used to encompass different immigrant communities). The reasons for relocating to the United States, or another country, the conditions under which they relocate, whether they are authorized to remain in a country, their cultural backgrounds, their ethnic/racial identities, their education level, their gender identity and sexual orientation, and their socio-economic status are merely a few factors that contribute to immigrants' diverse experiences. Thus, this course will introduce us to different frameworks, research, and practices that can help us understand the important role of communication in different, U.S., migration experiences. On the one hand, communication can help mitigate some of the social and structural barriers that migrants face in the United States and elsewhere. On the other hand, communication can also exacerbate or lead to educational, economic, and health inequities among migrants. We will consider both ways in which communication can function for migrant communities. Overall, migration: (1) is a diverse area of research that can incorporate intrapersonal, interpersonal, community, organizational, institutional, cultural, and policy levels of analysis; (2) is studied using a wide range of methodologies; and (3) is affected by a variety of communication channels. The readings and content of this course primarily focus on the experiences of Latina/o/x immigrant communities in the U.S.

Catalog Distribution: (CA-AG, D-AG)

Full details for LSP 3250 - Vamos Pa'l Norte: U.S. Migration and Communication

This course focuses on a place and a concept where two of the most urgent issues of our times - migration and environmental degradation - converge, collide, and shape each other. It examines borders not as abstract lines on the map, but as dynamic hubs that connect human societies, politics, and cultures with the natural and built environments that we inhabit and transform. Through scholarly and creative work from an array of borders around the world, we will develop new theoretical approaches and methodological toolkits for rethinking and re-visioning borders in an era of climate change, toxic pollution, and mass extinction. The course encourages multi- and inter-disciplinary projects from students and will feature guests from diverse areas, disciplines, and practices.

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS, GLC-AS) (CA-AG, LA-AG)

Full details for LSP 3336 - Border Environments

This course explores research on race, ethnicity and language in American education. It examines historical and current patterns of school achievement for minoritized youths. It also examines the cultural and social premises undergirding educational practices in diverse communities and schools. Policies, programs and pedagogy, including multicultural and bilingual education, are explored.

Catalog Distribution: (SCD-AS, SSC-AS) (D-AG, SBA-AG)

Full details for LSP 3405 - Multicultural Issues in Education

This course concerns a selection of influential artistic movements in Latin American from the early twentieth century to the present. Attention is given to issues such as the effects of colonialism and imperialism on Latin America's visual arts, the creation of national art, the relation of Latin American art and artists to cultural centers in Europe, The United States and other regions of the globe, the interaction of high art and popular culture, and the role of gender and race in various aspects of artistic practice. Students will also become acquainted with Latin American and Latinx artists working with new technologies.

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS, GLC-AS) (CA-AG, LA-AG)

Full details for LSP 3551 - Modern and Contemporary Latin American Art

This course examines war and revolution as drivers of migration from Latin America and the Spanish Caribbean to the United States and Canada. From the War of 1898 to the wars in Central America, war and revolution have displaced millions of people, prompting internal and cross-border migration. This history underscores how migration is multicausal—that is, produced by a wide and complex range of intersecting drivers. War and revolution disrupt livelihoods, produce scarcity, and create the insecurity that makes it impossible to exercise a basic human right to stay home. The course also examines how Latinos have become actors in U.S. wars and interventions in their countries of ancestry.

Catalog Distribution: (GLC-AS, HST-AS)

Full details for LSP 3801 - War and Revolution in 20th Century Latino History

Interested in Latino Studies and Latin American Studies? This course will explore topics in Anthropology, Art, Economics, History, Literature, Government, Sociology, etc., of US Latino and Latin American contexts. Course features guest speakers from Cornell and other institutions.

Full details for LSP 4000 - Contemporary Issues in Latin - Latino America

Guided independent study.

Full details for LSP 4210 - Undergraduate Independent Study

Exploring a genealogy of Latinx, Afro-Latinx, Black, Indigenous, and Chicana/o/x theorizations of modernity and identity, the course asks, what is the decolonial? Is it a space between the colonial and post-colonial? Is it a creative process, an intellectual theorization, or a historical period? Is it a performance, intervention, or embodied experience? Tracing a historical trajectory of the decolonial in poetry, performance, installation, and visual art, the course examines decolonial modes of making and being from the sixteenth to the twenty first century. 

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS, HST-AS) (CA-AG, HA-AG, LA-AG)

Full details for LSP 4556 - Decolonial Poetics and Aesthetics: Arts of Resistance in the Americas

As Latinx studies continues to expand beyond its nationalistic origins and re-examines its geographical bounds, nuancing the role of borders within the field becomes urgent. This course probes at the primacy of the border in Latinx studies by centering Caribbean waters. As a liquid that refuses to succumb to the violence of fragmentation and instead embodies iterations of radical wholeness, water has an innate capacity to "undo" borders, a quality epitomized by the Spanish verb "desbordar" (to overflow). Through discussion and analysis of key Latinx cultural products we will gain an appreciation for the multiple ways in which water sustains provocative contradictions across borders regarding representations of historical memory, gender and sexuality, migration, race, and religion and spirituality, among others.

Catalog Distribution: (GLC-AS)

Full details for LSP 4577 - Desbordando: Reading Caribbean Waters in Latinx Studies

This course provides an introductory overview to environmental thought in Latin America and the Latinx diaspora. We will discuss pre-Columbian approaches to the nonhuman and colonialism's transformative impact on ecosystems in the hemispheric America's. We will then turn to contemporary debates about whether nature should be treated as a resource or as a commons, with special attention paid to Indigenous philosophers like Ailton Krenak, Latinx scholars like Laura Pulido, and visual artists like Laura Aguilar and Carolina Caycdo.

Full details for LSP 4690 - Latin American and Latinx Environmentalisms

This course explores nightlife as a temporality that fosters countercultural performances of the self and that serves as a site for the emergence of alternative kinship networks. Focusing on queer communities of color, course participants will be asked to interrogate the ways in which nightlife demonstrates the queer world-making potential that exists beyond the normative 9-5 capitalist model of production. Performances of the everyday, alongside films, texts, and performance art, will be analyzed through a performance studies methodological lens. Through close readings and sustained cultural analysis, students will acquire a critical understanding of the potentiality of spaces, places, and geographies codified as "after hours" in the development of subcultures, alternative sexualities, and emerging performance practices.

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS, SCD-AS) (CA-AG, D-AG, LA-AG)

Full details for LSP 4701 - Nightlife

This course examines Latinx education in comparative perspective, with a focus on transnational communities and cross-border movements that link U.S. Latinx education with Latin American education. We ask: how do legacies of colonialism and empire shape the education of Latinx and Latin American communities? How are race, language, gender, cultural and national identity, and representation negotiated in schools? Drawing on ethnographic studies of education in and out of school, we explore how families and youths create knowledge, do literacy, and respond to cultural diversity, displacement, migration, and inequality. Throughout, we inquire into the potential for a decolonial and transformative education.

Catalog Distribution: (SCD-AS, SSC-AS) (D-AG, SBA-AG)

Full details for LSP 4790 - Latinx Education Across the Americas

Interested in Latino Studies and Latin American Studies? This course will explore topics in Anthropology, Art, Economics, History, Literature, Government, Sociology, etc., of US Latino and Latin American contexts. Course features guest speakers from Cornell and other institutions.

Full details for LSP 6000 - Contemporary Issues in Latin-Latino America

Guided independent study.

Full details for LSP 6210 - Graduate Student Independent Study

This course focuses on a place and a concept where two of the most urgent issues of our times - migration and environmental degradation - converge, collide, and shape each other. It examines borders not as abstract lines on the map, but as dynamic hubs that connect human societies, politics, and cultures with the natural and built environments that we inhabit and transform. Through scholarly and creative work from an array of borders around the world, we will develop new theoretical approaches and methodological toolkits for rethinking and re-visioning borders in an era of climate change, toxic pollution, and mass extinction. The course encourages multi- and inter-disciplinary projects from students and will feature guests from diverse areas, disciplines, and practices.

Full details for LSP 6336 - Border Environments

Exploring a genealogy of Latinx, Afro-Latinx, Black, Indigenous, and Chicana/o/x theorizations of modernity and identity, the course asks, what is the decolonial? Is it a space between the colonial and post-colonial? Is it a creative process, an intellectual theorization, or a historical period? Is it a performance, intervention, or embodied experience? Tracing a historical trajectory of the decolonial in poetry, performance, installation, and visual art, the course examines decolonial modes of making and being from the sixteenth to the twenty first century. 

Full details for LSP 6565 - Decolonial Poetics and Aesthetics: Arts of Resistance in the Americas

This course explores nightlife as a temporality that fosters countercultural performances of the self and that serves as a site for the emergence of alternative kinship networks.  Focusing on queer communities of color, course participants will be asked to interrogate the ways in which nightlife demonstrates the queer world-making potential that exists beyond the normative 9-5 capitalist model of production. Performances of the everyday, alongside films, texts, and performance art, will be analyzed through a performance studies methodological lens.  Through close readings and sustained cultural analysis, students will acquire a critical understanding of the potentiality of spaces, places, and geographies codified as "after hours" in the development of subcultures, alternative sexualities, and emerging performance practices.

Full details for LSP 6701 - Nightlife

This course examines Latinx education in comparative perspective, with a focus on transnational communities and cross-border movements that link U.S. Latinx education with Latin American education. We ask: how do legacies of colonialism and empire shape the education of Latinx and Latin American communities? How are race, language, gender, cultural and national identity, and representation negotiated in schools? Drawing on ethnographic studies of education in and out of school, we explore how families and youths create knowledge, do literacy, and respond to cultural diversity, displacement, migration, and inequality. Throughout, we inquire into the potential for a decolonial and transformative education.

Full details for LSP 7790 - Latinx Education Across the Americas