Courses

Since hip hop first emerged in the South Bronx nearly half a century ago, it has grown into a global movement. Youth around the world not only consume hip hop; they also create their own, adapting hip hop music, texts, dance, and visual culture to local realities. This course traces the ongoing connections between hip hop's roots in the cultural expression of marginalized African American and Latinx youth in the postindustrial urban United States, its contemporary relationship to US popular culture, and its routes around the globe, where diverse practitioners mobilize its beats, rhymes, and visual culture to address experiences of oppression and displacement, celebrate life, and agitate for social justice.

Full details for ASRC 2370 - Planet Rap: Where Hip Hop Came From and Where It's Going

The family, as a social institution, is structured according to historical, socio-economic, political, and cultural factors. The course will cover concepts of the nuclear and extended family, the roles, rights and obligations of different age groups, generations, and continental and global migrants; and marriage and its related issues, including parenthood, childrearing, and gender roles. Other issues examined are: reproductive health and broader health challenges including the effects of major challenges such as HIV/AIDS and COVID-19, family planning, fertility with a focus on adolescents, law and politics of sexual orientation, family codes. The course deals also with structural change and continuity, the impact of westernization, urbanization, formal education, the contemporary economy on the structure and challenges of the family in Africa, and ICT, long-distance family connection. The legacy of African family values and traditions in the African Diaspora is also discussed with case studies of the use of scientific/DNA procedure to trace ancestry.

Full details for ASRC 4606 - The Family and Society in Africa and the African Diaspora