The Chloe Center for the Critical Study of Racism, Immigration, and Colonialism is pleased to announce the Fall 2025 Critical Diaspora Studies course roster, including cross-listed courses. All courses are open to all undergraduate students. Anyone interested in the Critical Diaspora Studies major should consider enrolling in Introduction to Critical Diaspora Studies, offered for the first time this Fall, as well as the other course offerings.
Students who would like to learn more about Critical Diaspora Studies should get in touch with Prof. Stuart Schrader or members of the Critical Diaspora Studies working group (cds.jhu at gmail.com).
Faculty who are interested in teaching courses cross-listed in Critical Diaspora Studies should reach out to Prof. Schrader.
Critical Diaspora Studies Courses
Introduction to Critical Diaspora Studies (AS.305.101)
Stuart Schrader
FA 4/5
Introduction to Critical Diaspora Studies will explore the transnational, relational, and comparative approach to racism, migration, and colonialism at the heart of this major. It will introduce students to cutting-edge literature in the major’s four tracks: Migration and Borders; Global Indigeneities; Empires, Wars, and Carceralities; and Solidarities, Social Movements, and Citizenship. Topics covered will include diasporic and indigenous cultures and politics from Asia, Africa, and Latin America, as well as the United States. Students should expect to learn the value of interdisciplinary and transnational approaches to questions of social belonging, activism, justice, and politics. This course will also be useful to students in all humanities and social science majors who are interested in questions of racism, migration, and colonialism. This course may entail travel over fall break.
The Future of Work: AI, Labor, and Migration (AS.305.135)
Josh Todarello
CDS-MB, CDS-SSMC, Writing Intensive, FA3/4
How is the so-called “AI Revolution” altering the landscape of work? This course takes up this question through the lens of underemployment, migratory labor, and diasporic communities. We will read a variety of key works on migration and imagined communities, precarity and alienation, labor, automation, and empire—as well as texts produced in the margins of globalization. In conversation with these texts, we will investigate the dynamics of diasporic communities, migration, and solidarity vis-a-vis the future of work in a global society increasingly automated by AI models such as DeepSeek, ChatGPT, and Qwen 2.5, and the entities that own them. Through a variety of writing assignments and presentations, students engage issues such as race, class, gender, the border, citizenship, and community as they exist for diasporic and migratory workers. This course explores themes relevant to students of Critical Diaspora Studies, as well as the history of science and technology, political science and political economy, international studies, literature, film, and sociology. Readings may include works by Ruha Benjamin, Audre Lorde, Harry Braverman, Benedict Anderson, David Harvey, Edward Said, Mary L. Gray, Octavia Butler, and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o.
Internal Colonialism, Migration, and Migrant Communities (AS.305.138)
tba
CDS-MB, FA4
This course examines how theories of internal colonialism help us understand the recent global migration trends and dynamics within and among ethnic communities. The course has three main objectives. First, it will discuss how the legacy of colonial and postcolonial relations of unequal exchange and domination explain the recent migration patterns from the global south. Second, it discusses how internal colonialism helps us understand how political, economic, and cultural mechanisms reproduce inequalities within and among communities of color. Lastly, how different resistance strategies manifest themselves in marginalized communities would be considered. The course surveys diverse views and perspectives including the work of Gonzalez Casanova, Du Bois, Bonilla-Silva, Blauner, Hechter, and Allen.
Cross-Listed Courses
Environmental Justice Workshop (AS.070.402)
Anand Pandian
CDS-SSMC, Writing Intensive, FA 1/5/6, fulfills one CDS community-engaged learning requirement
The Environmental Justice Workshop is a space for engaged learning and collaborative environmental work, giving students a chance to join in the collective struggle to build equitable and sustainable urban futures in Baltimore. In the fall of 2025, the workshop will be taught by anthropologist Anand Pandian (Johns Hopkins) as a cross-institutional partnership with anthropologist Chloe Ahmann (Cornell University) and the South Baltimore Community Land Trust. Working together as a team of faculty and students at both universities, we will collaborate with environmental justice activists and Baltimore residents to research, write, and produce a four-part digital humanities curriculum about the discriminatory history of waste management in Baltimore and its impact on working-class and minority residents. Students enrolled in this course will gain experience with archival and ethnographic research methods, learn how to conduct time-sensitive research responsive to community needs, and produce media resources for a broader civic audience engaged in the fight for environmental justice. Many class sessions will take place in various community locations in south Baltimore, and meeting times include transportation to/from the Homewood campus.
History of the Global Cold War (AS.100.106)
Stuart Schrader
CDS-EWC, FA 4
The Cold War was a defining event of the 20th century. But what was it? Where did it take place? Who were the major contenders? And what were the consequences? This introductory course will examine the Cold War in a global context, looking beyond the United States and Europe. Students will learn about how the Cold War unfolded in Latin America, Africa, and Asia, in relation to the fall of European empires, the process of decolonization, and the rise of U.S. global power. This course will introduce students to key themes and primary sources in the study of the Global Cold War, as a foundation for further courses in History, Critical Diaspora Studies, International Studies, Political Science, etc.
Latinos and the American Political Landscape (AS.190.304)
Angie Bautista-Chavez
CDS-MB, Writing Intensive, FA 1/4/4.1/5
This course examines Latinos and the American political landscape – taking seriously the political lives of Latinos to sharpen accounts of American political development. In Part I: Latinos and American Empire, we will examine how American state building, American racial capitalism, and American empire created a varied set of racialized citizenship regimes that shaped the legality and membership of Latinos – depending on the interplay between domestic racial hierarchies and international projects. In Part II: Latinos and the Administrative State, we will examine how the regulation of Latino immigrants and asylum seekers from Latin America and the Caribbean have been an engine for American political development – including the making of border bureaucracies, networked policing that harnesses the institution of federalism, and the development of ocean-spanning detention infrastructure. In Part III: Latinos as Targets, we will examine how Latinos became racialized as ‘illegals’ and became the prime targets of state action – and how state efforts have led to the suppressing of political agency, mobilization of collective action, and even integration of Latinos into the enforcement apparatus. In Part IV: Latinos, Hierarchies, and Power, we will examine the political power of those most marginalized among the Latino population – including Black, Trans, Queer, Immigrant, and Undocumented Latinos – to learn about how these groups contend with intragroup and intergroup hierarchies, their role in intersectional movements, and their organizing under repressive conditions. In Part V: Latinos and Placemaking, we conclude with Latino placemaking across the United States to examine how Latinos – in relation with and to, and in coalition with Black, Indigenous, and Asian organizing – are cultivating and asserting political and policy influence in the face of climate change, policing, detention, and gentrification.
Climate Change Narratives (AS.211.424)
Laura Di Bianco
CDS-MB, FA 3/4.1/5
In The Great Derangement Indian novelist Amitav Ghosh writes that “the climate crisis is also a crisis of culture, and thus of imagination.” Worldwide, climate and environmental change is stirring the imaginary of novelists, filmmakers, and artists who are finding ways to frame, emplot, or even perform, an unmanageable phenomenon like climate change. How is climate change shaping new modes of storytelling and aesthetics? How do film, literature, and environmentally conscious art transform our perception of the world we inhabit and its unpredictable changes? Can climate change narratives help us to imagine futures of possibilities, maybe dystopian, uncertain, or even happy, but futures nonetheless? This multimedia course explores, through a transnational perspective, a variety of contemporary novels, films, and other media that attempt answer these questions.
Reading Korean Literature in Translation: A Survey (AS.220.220)
Kyeong Soo-Kim
CDS-MB, FA 1/3/4
An introduction for students unfamiliar with the Korean language but interested in Korean culture / literature. Students will read a variety of translated texts, especially of works written in the 20th and early 21st centuries by authors including Kim Tong-in, Hwang Sun-wŏn, Pak Wansŏ, Hwang Sŏk-yŏng and Han Kang; there will also be classes on traditional sijo poetry. Students will become familiar with Korean literary genres and formal features, and develop a broad understanding of the historical and sociocultural context of Korean literature.
Refugees, Human Rights, and Sovereignty (AS.230.378)
Ilil Benjamin
CDS-MB, FA 1/4/4.1/5
What is a refugee? Since World War II, states that have pledged to offer protection to refugees have frequently been drawn instead to the dictates of nationalism and communitarianism, which prioritize concern for their own citizens, rather than to the needs of forced migrants. As a result, even those migrants that have been formally recognized as refugees according to the 1951 UN Refugee Convention have not been assured of protection, and other migrants have been even less assured. In this course, we will locate the reasons for this reality in the legal, political, and historical underpinnings of political asylum. What is the difference between an asylum seeker and a refugee? How has the refugee category been redefined and contested by international bodies since 1951? How are the ambiguities of real-life violence and persecution simplified in asylum adjudication interviews that require clear, factual narratives? What kinds of protections are offered to asylum seekers, whether by UN bodies, NGOs, or host governments, and how have such protections varied geographically and historically? Finally, what protections, if any, are afforded to those migrants who are fleeing not persecution but rather “merely” endemic poverty or climate-induced displacement? The course draws on literature from sociology, history, anthropology, and international refugee law in order to understand the capacity (or lack thereof) of human rights discourses and declarations to contravene state sovereignty in the name of protecting the rightless.
Illness across Cultures: The Ethics of Pain in Literature and Film (AS.300.405)
Brahim El Guabli
CDS-GI, FA 1/3/5
Although fundamentally grounded in human existence, Illness, pain, and suffering are also cultural experiences that have been depicted in literature and film. The way different cultures relate to and convey pain is embedded in the cosmogonic ideas each society holds about suffering and its outcomes. Reading through different literary texts from different parts of the world and drawing on movies that portray varied experiences of illness, this course aims to help students think about illness and its ramifications in a more transcultural way in order to understand how illness functions across different geographic, climatic, political, and social conditions. The students will also gain a better understanding of the causes of pain, its symptoms, and the different manners in which the authors and filmmakers whose works we will study mediate it to their readers and viewers. From basic traditional potions to hyper-modern medical technologies, illness also mobilizes different types of science across cultures and social classes. By the end of the course, students will develop an ethics of reading for illness not a as monolithic condition but rather as an experience that has unique cultural codes and mechanisms that need to be known to better understand it and probably treat it.
Introduction to the Museum: Past and Present (AS.389.201)
Jennifer Kingsley
CDS-SSMC, FA 1/4
This course surveys museums, from their origins to their most contemporary forms, in the context of broader historical, intellectual, and cultural trends including the social movements of the 20th century. Anthropology, art, history, and science museums are considered.
Exhibiting Cultures (AS.389.233)
Kristine Roome
CDS-SSMC, FA 3/5
This course critically examines the role of exhibitions in shaping cultural narratives and public understanding of people and places across the globe. Students will explore the history, theory, and practice of exhibiting cultures in museums, galleries, and digital platforms. Topics include curatorial ethics, representation and identity, postcolonial critiques, audience engagement, and the impact of emerging technologies on exhibition design. Through case studies and hands-on projects, students will analyze how cultural heritage is displayed and interpreted, considering issues of appropriation, authenticity, and inclusivity. The course culminates in a final project where students conceptualize and design their own cultural exhibition proposal.