New Fall 2018 MALAS Class! WMNST 580/MALAS 600B Woman, Development, and the Global Economy with Dr. Doreen Mattingly

WMNST 580/MALAS 600B

Woman, Development, and the Global Economy

Dr. Doreen Mattingly

Wednesday 4:00-6:40, Adams Humanities 3110

                                                                              

Although women’s paid and unpaid labor is invisible in many theories and descriptions of politics, economics, and geography, women are, in fact, central actors in economic development and political change.  In this course we will examine the connection between women’s lives and economic change.  To do so, we will look at theory, descriptions, and the “real world.”  From the vantage point of women’s lives, we will also question what is meant by “economic development” and “globalization.”  We will analyze the effect of these processes on women’s lives, as well as the ways women have shaped and challenged national and international economic processes. 

 

Learning outcomes:

·      Demonstrate an understanding of conflicting ideas of development and globalization.

·      Explain how economic and legal structures affect women’s opportunities

·      Contrast the position of women in different countries

·      Articulate a way of looking at the world from the standpoint of diverse women internationally

·      Analyze feminist debates about development and empowerment

Dr. Doreen Mattingly is Professor and Chair of Women’s Studies. Since coming to SDSU in 1995, she has taught a total of sixteen different courses, including her popular classes on women and politics, women’s movements and activism, and globalization and development.  In 2016 she was the recipient of the College of Arts and Letters Excellence in Teaching Award. Her most recent book, A Feminist in the White House: Midge Costanza, the Carter Years, and America’s Culture Wars (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), chronicles the political career of a feminist who served as assistant to the president for public liaison under President Jimmy Carter. Dr. Mattingly’s current research investigates the California feminist movement of the 1970s, especially in its engagement with political institutions. Behind the scenes, Dr. Mattingly serves the university as the Vice President of the SDSU chapter of the California Faculty Association. She has been on the board of the Bread and Roses Center for Feminist Research and Activism at SDSU since 2014. 

A New MALAS Class! Contemporary Legacies of Colonialism, in the 20th and 21st-Century Brazilian and Portuguese Novel | Professor Ricardo Vasconcelos

Portuguese 540 — Luso-Brazilian Literature | MALAS 600A

Contemporary Legacies of Colonialism,

in the 20^th and 21^st-Century Brazilian and Portuguese Novel

Fall 2018 | Wednesdays, 4 p.m. to 6:40 p.m.

Prof. Ricardo Vasconcelos

rvasconcelos@mail.sdsu.edu | https://sdsu.academia.edu/RicardoVasconcelos

 

This course studies different lingering legacies of the colonial past in the Portuguese and Brazilian societies, as described by contemporary novels from those countries.

            In Brazil, these include namely the economic inequalities and racial asymmetries that continue to plague the country, in a relation that in many ways is still reminiscent of the historic dialectic of the Casa Grande (the big house) and the Sanzala (the slave quarters), even when set in contexts of modern, cosmopolitan spaces, such as São Paulo or Brasília. We will discuss Luiz Ruffato’s* Eles Eram Muitos Cavalos (2007), which portrays a day in the life of a broad range of inhabitants of the city of São Paulo — an unofficial capital of South America, with its 21 million dwellers — and depicts side by side both the experience of the resident of the periphery and that of the member of the upper classes. The course also studies João Almino’s Entre Facas, Algodão (2018), a subtle x-ray of the current state of affairs in Brazil, with regard to the emancipation of disenfranchised social classes in recent decades. The novel displays several contrasts between utopia and reality, the rural Northeast and the idealized avant-garde capital of Brasília; ultimately questioning whether the subaltern will ever see recognized their claim to the legacy of the privileged in contemporary Brazil.

With regard to Portugal, the course will study novels that address the process of gaining awareness about the country’s colonial and imperial rule, as this came to an end, as well as discuss the subsequent implications for the nation. We will study Lídia Jorge’s* A Costa dos Murmúrios (1988), in its portrayal of the Portuguese loss of innocence with regard to the colonial war waged in Africa (namely Mozambique), to preserve an imperial vision; and focus on the perspective of women with regard to the conflict, and the consequences of the war upon those women. We will likewise study Dulce Maria Cardoso’s O Retorno (2012), a coming-of-age novel that represents the traumatic and highly symbolic repatriation to the mainland of Portuguese citizens, in 1975, upon the independence of Angola. The novel focuses both on the conditions of life in pre-independence, colonial Luanda, and on the perception of the Portuguese retornado, the repatriated, as a symbol of the nation’s colonial past, one Portugal was eager to eschew, in its path to join the European Union.

All readings in Portuguese. Portuguese undergraduates will complete all class work in Portuguese. Graduate students will develop their class work in their language of specialization (typically Portuguese, Spanish, or English). This course meets the Spanish MA requirement of “Knowledge of Portuguese.”

*Award-winning authors Luiz Ruffato and Lídia Jorge are expected to visit SDSU during the semester, for public lectures and class workshops.

MALAS Fall 2018 Course Description: RWS 543/MALAS 600D: Rhetoric of Visual Composing with Professor Jennie Sheppard

RWS 543/MALAS 600D
Rhetoric of Visual Composing

Visual messages are a powerful way to inform, persuade and educate. Within professional settings, the ability to communicate effectively with supervisors, co-workers, clients, and public audiences through combinations of visual, textual, and technological elements is an invaluable skill. This course takes a rhetorical and professionally-oriented approach to analyzing, organizing, and communicating ideas, educational content, complex data, and specialized information through visual and multimodal means. 

The course readings will introduce students to research on visual communication, basic design and layout strategies for print, presentational, and online contexts, and the use of images and data visualization to convey and support specialized content.

Research and practitioner materials will be used as a basis for evaluating the rhetorical choices in the visual communication work of others and for learning how to apply these concepts to visual composing projects common to the workplace (e.g. a proposal and an infographic/visual data display). The focus throughout the course will be on learning to evaluate and craft texts that integrate effective visual and written strategies to create user-friendly, informative, and persuasive texts for professional audiences. 

Jennifer Sheppard, Ph.D. (Michigan Technological University 2003) is a scholar of multimodal rhetorics and literacies, digital communication, and writing/professional communication. She is interested in how emerging communication technologies can be used to help students and professionals develop critical, rhetorical, and technological literacy practices necessary for success in the 21st Century. Among other publications, she is co-author of Writer/Designer: A Guide to Making Multimodal Projects, (2nd ed.) published by Bedford/St. Martin’s in 2018. She is currently beginning a new project examining tactical communication practices in social media medical support groups that help users to assert greater agency in navigating their treatment.

New MALAS Class, Fall 2018: MALAS 600C: Modern Technology and the Ancient World, 4pm to 6:40pm -- Mondays, AL104 Dr. Danielle Smotherman Bennett

MALAS 600C: Modern Technology and the Ancient World 
Fall 2018, Seminar 1600-1840
Mondays, AL104

In the contemporary world, digital re-creations of sites and objects from the ancient world often appear in movies and tv, such as Ben-Hur and Game of Thrones, and even in video games, such as Assassin's Creed Origins.  Modern technology provides tantalizing prospects for a deeper engagement with the material culture in ancient Egypt, Greece, and Rome.

As technology changes and improves, we can explore the ancient world in entirely new ways, such as scanning for structure walls underground, analyzing the contents that a vessel once held, and creating immersive recreations of the ancient world. In this course, we will explore the emerging scholarship concerning digital humanities for the study of the Mediterranean world in a broad sense.

Even if you are not very familiar with the ancient cultures of the Mediterranean, this course will allow you to engage with the cultures, the materials, and the technology as long as you are willing to participate. This course is a seminar that will include weekly discussions that are led by topic and of the readings, lectures, and workshops for hands-on experience with some of these digital approaches. We will explore geography and mapping, digital dissemination of texts, and visual reconstructions of both sites and objects, including 3-D modeling through photogrammetry.

As part of the course, each student will create their own topic-focused project that incorporates each of these aspects, which will be presented on a webpage. Choose to explore the world of Ramesses II, Alexander the Great, or Cleopatra, among others, through interdisciplinary methods and learn how to integrate these different approaches into a deeper understanding of the ancient world. In this course, we will learn about the material culture of the ancient Mediterranean while also becoming critical consumers of the digital tools for the study the ancient world.

Dr. Danielle Smotherman Bennett completed her PhD in Classical and Near Eastern Archaeology at Bryn Mawr College and has taught at Villanova University, Rutgers University, and La Salle University. Dr. Danielle Smotherman Bennett dcbennett@sdsu.edu Fall 2018 Office Hours: Mondays, 2-3 pm and by appointment

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New MALAS Cultural Studies Seminar, Fall 2018 | MALAS 601: Culture, Desire, Power, & Ideology: An Introduction to Interdisplinary/Cultural Studies

MALAS 601 
Culture, Desire, Power, & Ideology
An Introduction to Interdisciplinary 
Studies/Cultural Studies
MALAS-601
Schedule# 22198
CULTR DESIRE PWR IDEOLGY
3.0 units; Seminar 1530-1810 THURSDAYS
ARTN-300B

How do cultural objects, ideas, practices, and values come into being, gain meaning and significance, get reproduced, and undergo transformations? How do certain cultural ideas and practices both reflect and reinforce the social structures of which they form a part? Who produces culture and who consumes it – and on what basis? Is there a difference between ‘mass’ and ‘high’ culture? Is culture a serious or a playful area of study? Is there room for resistance against oppressive forms of culture? Do forms of culture themselves work to subvert taken-for-granted ways of life? What is the relationship between forms of culture and the intersecting social locations of class, race, gender, and sexuality? What methods or means of exploring are best suited to questions raised in the broad interdisciplinary area that is cultural studies? What is cultural studies? These are some of the questions that our introduction to cultural studies seminar will consider. 

In considering these questions, this seminar has as its master theme the question of culture in relation to ideology, power, and desire. We will consider the significance of how different forms and sources of power – political, epistemological, physical, and psychological – inform culture, and we will reflect on whether and to what extent the role of conscious or unconscious desires are bound up with expressions of power and culture. Simply put, are cultural forms reflecting or expressing something that we need or want? The answers to such questions will then lead us to finally consider if and how cultural ideas, practices, and objects might be transformed in the service of particular political, practical, ethical, and aesthetic aims. Our overall objective is to explore analyses and critiques of culture from a number of theoretical perspectives in order to approach our cultural worlds from both a more critical and a more curious fashion. The topics and viewpoints covered in our seminar provide continuous opportunities for thoughtful reflection and conversation. I look forward to exploring cultural studies together! 

Dr. Christine Payne completed her PhD in Sociology at USCD and has lectured on Cultural Studies and Sociology at SDSU and UCSD. 

Dr. Christine Payne
christine.payne@sdsu.edu
Fall 2018 Office Hours: 2:00-4:00