Questions about the courses or the DSSC minor program? Contact Karen Brown at [email protected].
Fall 2021
DSSC 8111: Ways of Knowing
Credits: 3
Instructor: Dr. Elizabeth Sumida Huaman, Department of Organizational Leadership, Policy and Development
Course Schedule: Fridays, 9:30 a.m. – 11:30 a.m.
Who takes this course? ICGC Scholars in their first year of the program should enroll in DSSC 8111. ICGC Scholars from earlier cohorts who have not yet taken Ways of Knowing due to scheduling conflicts should also enroll in this seminar.
DSSC 8211: Doctoral Research Workshop
Credits: 3
Instructor: Dr. Karen Brown, ICGC
Course Schedule: Mondays, 11:30 a.m. – 2:00 p.m.
Who takes this course? ICGC Scholars in their third year, or in the year prior to their dissertation research year, should enroll in DSSC 8211 in Fall semester.
DSSC 8310: Topics in Development Studies and Social Change
Section 1: Agroecology and Social Change
Credits: 1
Instructor: Dr. Julie Grossman, Horticultural Sciences
Course Schedule: Thursdays, 2:00 p.m. – 3:30 p.m., first half of semester
Who takes this class? ICGC Scholars in their second year of the program should enroll for a minimum of 2 credits of DSSC 8310. DSSC 8310 is a variable credit course, typically offered for one credit. Students are welcome to enroll in multiple sections of DSSC 8310, and must complete at least two credits.
Course Description
This course is an introduction to the field of agroecology, which is often framed aspirationally as a synthesis of “science, practice, and movement”. Agroecology aims to directly engage
complex challenges in agricultural, food, and environmental systems by complementing scientific inquiry with work in practical and political domains. As such, agroecology is an effort to increase the agency of science in the face of grave and complex problems. As a rapidly growing field of practice, Agroecology has many nodes of activity wherever agriculture is practiced. This course will use readings, guest lectures, and inter- and trans-disciplinary dialogue to examine agroecology as science, practice, and movement, with a goal of better defining course participants' personal and collective identities.
Spring 2022
DSSC 8112: Scholarship and Public Responsibility
Credits: 1
Instructor: Dr. Rose Brewer, Department of African and African American Studies
Course Schedule: Fridays, 9:45 a.m. – 11:30 a.m.
Who takes this course? ICGC Scholars in their first year of the program should enroll in DSSC 8112.
ICGC Scholars from earlier cohorts who have not yet taken DSSC 8112 due to scheduling conflicts should also enroll in this seminar.
DSSC 8310: Topics in Development Studies and Social Change
Section 1: Comparative Indigenous Research and Learning: Methodologies, Social Movements, and Local and Global Interconnections
Credits: 1
Instructor: Dr. Elizabeth Sumida Huaman, Department of Organizational Leadership, Policy and Development
Course Schedule: Thursdays in April, 12–2 p.m.
Who takes this course? ICGC Scholars in their second year of the program should enroll for a minimum
of 2 credits of DSSC 8310. DSSC 8310 is a variable credit course, typically offered for one credit. Students are welcome to enroll in multiple sections of DSSC 8310, and must complete at least two credits.
Course Description
In Linda T. Smith’s seminal Decolonizing Methodologies, first published over two decades ago, she argued that the supposed natural link between “indigenous” and “problem” remained a prominent legacy of imperial strategizing across colonies, which had resulted in research being framed “in ways that assume that the locus of a particular research problem lies with the indigenous individual or community rather than with other social or structural issues…For indigenous communities, the issue is not just that they are blamed for their own failures but that it is also communicated to them, explicitly or implicitly, that they themselves have no solutions to their own problems” (Smith, p. 92, 1999). However,
Smith also pointed out that Indigenous peoples were working to reverse this pattern while engaged in a larger global social movement of solution-seeking.
This seminar addresses this link between notions of “Indigenous problems” and their reframing and investigations by Indigenous researchers and the ways in which they are learning and sharing across
nation state, cultural, and linguistic borders. Focusing on four cases where the instructor has developed relationships with Indigenous-serving higher education institutions, community-based organizations, Indigenous community members and researchers, we explore sets of issues that are both place-based and that have global interconnectivities.
Working with researchers in Kanaka Maoli (Hawai‘i), Pueblo Indian (U.S.), Quechua (Peru), and Ainu (Japan) lands, we focus on local interpretations of food systems, land and art, climate change, and self-determination that also have broader implications for Indigenous knowledge systems, Indigenous sovereignty, Indigenous self-determination and development, and Indigenous governance. Centering the role of learning—in school, out-of-school, lifelong, and the myriad ways of engaging knowledge to serve Indigenous priorities—students will build on and contribute to how we understand comparative Indigenous research and our roles as researchers.
DSSC 8310: Topics in Development Studies and Social Change
Section 2: Global Childhoods: History, Politics, and Contemporary Discourses
Credits: 1
Instructor: Dr. Kelly Condit-Shrestha
Course Schedule: Wednesdays, 10 a.m. – 12 p.m., second half of spring semester
Who takes this course? ICGC Scholars in their second year of the program should enroll for a minimum of 2 credits of DSSC 8310. DSSC 8310 is a variable credit course, typically offered for one credit. Students are welcome to enroll in multiple sections of DSSC 8310, and must complete at least two credits.
Course Description
East African mission students; Bengali child laborers; transnational Korean adoptees; Peruvian youth activists; enslaved African American children; border-crossing, unaccompanied minors. This course examines historic and contemporary understandings of children and childhood through intentional, multidisciplinary readings across time (mid-seventeenth century through present day) and space (the Americas, Africa, Australia, Asia, and Europe) in order to interrogate the global implications of young people’s lived experiences as youth subjects, objects, and agents. Students will engage with scholarship and primary sources that center the study and experiences of children and youth through a wide array of materials (diaries, graphic memoirs, blog posts), self-reflective research methodologies (archival readings, ethnography, transnational collaboration, longitudinal designs), disciplines (sociology, anthropology, education, history), and that highlight different frameworks of analysis (migration, child rights, emotion, gender, policy). This course will lend insight into one of the most basic human experiences—childhood—and provide an exciting opportunity to understand the contemporary state of global youth politics within broad historical context.