Category: Archive courses

Examines how Indonesia, the world’s fourth most-populous country, with the largest Islamic population, weaves together local practices and influences from India and Persia. Offers ways of understanding modern Indonesian performing arts, religion, and polities. Offered: jointly with JSIS A 462.
This course has a twofold purpose: 1) to introduce students to Indonesian religious and mystical traditions, performing arts, and politics and 2) to show how Indonesian Islam has been interpreted and misinterpreted in scholarly and popular literatures of the colonial and postcolonial periods.
Student learning goals
Understand the complexity of the modern history of the world’s fourth most densely populated country.
Understand the ways in which Islam is studied and practiced outside of the Middle East.
Understand how historical information is conveyed in literary texts, films, performing arts, and academic essays.
Understand how to evaluate the ideological positioning of a variety of historical sources.
Understand how the writing of history is conditioned by various factors including memory, politics, religious belief, and identity.
Be inspired to continue the study of Indonesian and Southeast Asian histories.
This course juxtaposes historical, mystical, and literary ways of understanding Indonesian religion, performance, and politics. Through a combination of reading, discussion, films, videos and guest lectures, we will gain an appreciation for the ways in which religion, performance and politics are intertwined in Indonesian histories.
Class assignments and grading
Course Requirements and Readings: Clifford Geertz, Islam Observed Pramoedya Ananta Toer, Footsteps Ken George, Picturing Islam Jean Taylor, Indonesia: Peoples and Histories
Goals Students should prepare the readings conscientiously, take notes on it, ask questions of it, and think deeply about it, all in advance of class. Students should also be willing to participate in class discussion and in-class writing assignments.
Grading The course grade will be calculated as follows:
In-Class Writing and Discussion 40% (8 assignments, 5% each) Group project 25% Final Take-home exam 35%
There will be in-class queries handed out on Thursdays in the last half hour of class in weeks 2 through week 8. Students must cogently answer the question posed. Questions will be based on the assigned readings for each week.

INFX 598 A/B: Digital Media & Community Development
Winter 2017 | T/Th 3:30-5:30pm
Dr. Negin Dahya
The Information School
The focus of this course is to explore the role of digital and social media in the global exchange of information, with a focus on visual culture, digital and social media. The course explores the relationship between popular cultural tools and trends in relation to community development and mobilization, and related to online/offline social action (philanthropy, humanitarian aid, political movements, etc.). Lines of inquiry in this course will focus on how particular forms of digital media can inform, mobilize, challenge, or undermine social and political norms, expectations, and practices. What is the role of digital media in the distribution of information towards community development and social change? How do digital and online campaigns impact on-the-ground social movements? What are the strengths and limitations to using digital media to influence and mobilize people around a topic of interest?  How are digital tools and campaigns impacting public perception, engagement, and (in)action about contemporary and historical social issues?
Contemporary topics such as Black Lives Matter, #NODAPL, and the role of social media in the 2016 election will be topics of discussion. Media and cultural theories exploring practices of looking (visual cultural theory), the culture industry and the spectacle of society (cultural theory) will be included as readings alongside contemporary research studies in education, library and information science, childhood and youth studies, and media studies. Weekly seminar discussions will be structured around topics such as viral videos, ‘clicktivism,’ crowdfunding, online activism and user generated content, youth engagement, and serious videogames. Readings and multimedia viewings will focus on the role of technology in the spread of information and the perpetuation of power and political structures with a focus on issues of equity related to gender, race, class, sexuality, and ability. Students will have the opportunity to complete group projects covering a movement of their choice, tracking and tracing the online and offline history, developments, and impacts of political action related to their topic.  

Our goal will be to look at the intersection of history and theory through a critical investigation of the traumas of colonialism, constructions of identities and subjectivities, and the de-centering effects of postcolonial and feminist theories. Historiography is not only about different methods of shaping historical narratives. Historiography is also about silences and the politics of location. How does postmodern critical discourse affect historical studies? How does one interpret oral testimonies recorded after traumatic experiences? How do we account for beliefs in witchcraft or the supernatural in historical studies? By taking an interdisciplinary approach to “culture,” theory, and history, this course will blend together a number of different methodologies associated with deconstruction, psychoanalysis, feminist theories, postcolonial theories, trauma theories, and literary theories.  The emphasis this quarter will be on different ways of constructing and situating historical archives and how interactions among testimony, memory, and trauma influence the construction and deconstruction of archives. Students will gain familiarity with these different critical approaches through readings, class discussion, and written work.

Explores the inscription of Indonesian histories and stories. Focuses on oral traditions, oral testimonies, and archives. Investigates how oral and written testimonies enter historical archives. Explores theoretical work on literary and performance traditions as they relate to nationalism and Islam in Indonesia.
Jean Gelman Taylor, THE SOCIAL WORLD OF BATAVIA Pramoedya Ananta Toer, HOUSE OF GLASS James Rush, OPIUM TO JAVA Ann Stoler, ALONG THE ARCHIVAL GRAIN (PRINCETON 2010) Dipesh Chakrabarty, PROVINCIALIZING EUROPE (2nd Ed. Princeton 2009) Mary Margaret Steedly, Rifle Reports Rudolph Mrazek, A CERTAIN AGE Laurie Sears, SHADOWS OF EMPIRE
Student learning goals
Become familiar with important secondary sources on Indonesian history.
Learn about traditional and non-traditional archives.
Learn to think critically about Indonesian sources.
Learn about different methodologies for oral and written sources.
Learn the differences among oral, written, and performance traditions in Indonesian history.
Class will be based on student discussion of readings. No preparation is necessary. Familiarity with Indonesia is helpful.
Class assignments and grading
Three short papers, 2-3 pages, and one longer one, 20 pages, that can be an expansion of one of the short papers. Grades are assigned by evidence of critical reading of assigned books and essays. Grades are based on both written work and class participation.

This course is centered in the diverse and common experiences, strengths, and needs of multicultural and marginalized communities. Through active participation in guest presentations, facilitated discussions, small group work and other dynamic learning we will gain:
a deepening critical understanding of factors that perpetuate power and privilege;
understanding of the impact of power and privilege at individual and systemic levels; and
skills to engage in dialogue and promote just actions that dismantle systems of power
/uwcps/sites/default/files/Engaging%20Privilege_course%20flyer%20Winter%202017.rtf.pdf

Indonesia is the fourth most populous country in the world and has the largest Islamic population of any country in the world.  There are more Muslims in Indonesia than in all of the Middle East.  Yet Indonesian Islam is a mosaic that weaves together threads of local spiritual practices, village rituals, performing arts, and influences from India and the Middle East that have been percolating throughout the archipelago for over 800 years. On the island of Java, where over half of Indonesia’s 260 million people live, oral traditions attribute the spread of Islam to nine sufi saints (practitioners of Islamic mystical traditions) who are believed to have brought Islam to Java. Scholars have long suggested that sufi practices combined with older Hindu-Buddhist beliefs to produce an eclectic religious tradition that was outside of the mainstream of orthodox Islam.  But continued research on Islamic traditions has shown that the idea of “normative” Islamic practice is outdated.  Islamic beliefs and practices have combined with local traditions to produce unique religious systems in every part of the Islamic world. Beginning with the coming of Islam to Java, this course will show how Islam interweaves with politics, performing arts, literature, and history in 19th and 20th century Indonesia.
email histgrad@uw.edu for an add code, or register through JSIS A 586
 

Where, exactly, does blackness take place? Black women? Black queer people? Images, ideas, and assumptions about race, gender, and sexuality are mapped onto our bodies and are enmeshed with how we think, feel, and move about the landscapes we move through—and black people’s, black women’s, and black queer people’s ways of being are often made to be threatening presences that “need” to be policed, contained, and, more often than not, completely excised. In this course, we will consider how black feminist approaches to geographic space—focusing on landscapes, bodies, and affects as real and symbolic geographic spaces—reveal important sites where these restrictive understandings of blackness, gender, and sexuality can be refused and redefined.
This course pays critical attention to contemporary art practices as sites where black feminist geographies are theorized, imagined, and enacted. We read the work of Katherine McKittrick, Saidiya Hartman, Audre Lorde, bell hooks, Hortense Spillers, and others alongside the work of artists including Carrie Mae Weems, Adrian Piper, Wura-Natasha Ogunji, Lauren Halsey, Yetunde Olagbaju, and more. 

 

Explores the inscription of Indonesian histories and stories. Focuses on oral traditions, oral testimonies, and archives. Investigates how oral and written testimonies enter historical archives. Explores theoretical work on literary and performance traditions as they relate to nationalism and Islam in Indonesia.

Explores desire and the politics of sexuality as gendered, raced, classed, and transnational processes. Intimacies and globalization, normality and abnormality, and power and relationships as sites of inquiry into the constitution of “queerness.” Students interrogate queer and sexuality studies using varied media – films, activist writing, scholarly articles.

Examines how Indonesia, the world’s fourth most-populous country, with the largest Islamic population, weaves together local practices and influence from India and Persia. Offers ways of understanding modern Indonesian performing arts, religion, and politics.