Faculty Advisor: Professor of African, American and African Studies, Francophone Studies and Comparative Literature, University of Michigan

Research Practicum Introduction

In looking at the Black Lives Matter era, does it feel like history repeats itself or are we moving forward? To what extent should we look at modern America through the lens of slavery, legal issues, race, inequality, and social justice? What is “epistemic oppression” in modern America? 

Epistemology is the study of the nature and creation of knowledge, evidence, and justification. How should we talk about marginalized discourses in modern America? Here, according to the philosopher Michel Foucault, “discourses” are ways of constituting knowledge, together with the social practices, forms of subjectivity and power relations which are inherent in such knowledge and relations between them. How are discourses on race, racism, ethnicity, gender, and power inscribed in social media? 

These are some of the questions we will attempt to address in this program. We will take a multimedia and interdisciplinary approach to a range of historical, cultural, economic, and social questions crucial to African American and American Studies, as well as to other fields in the humanities and social sciences. Using films, art, podcasts, documentaries, newspaper articles, short stories, and essays, the program will offer a historically grounded but also contemporary, intimate, personal, and artistic exploration of the modern American experience. 

Students will also learn general and subject-specific research and academic writing methods used in universities and scholarly publications. Students will focus on individual topics and generate their own work products upon completion of the program.

Possible Topics For Final Project:

• How do you analyze marginalized discourses produced in social media today? Here, we are talking about Asian American Violence, Black Lives Matter, and other social ongoing injustices.

• How are discourses on race, racism, ethnicity, gender, and power inscribed in social media? 

• Modern America has many minorities in their prisons. How can we discuss how law works, what are legal issues at stake in some of these communities?

• How did the pandemic uncover social inequality? There is a class of people in America who suffered more from this pandemic because of lack of resources. How do you read this social injustice?

• How do you understand discourses on gender and power in modern America? There is an innovative way of conceptualizing practices that effectively “silence” gender and how power suppresses some women’s voices within society.

• How do we discuss slavery in the US today? To discuss this topic, it is important to be informed by the historical background of modern America is talked about with the legacy of slavery.

• Using texts such as Letter to my Nephew by James Baldwin, Amanda Gorman’s poem and other visual material, analyze issues of race, inequality, and social justice.

• Or other topics in this subject area that you are interested in, and that your professor approves after discussing it with you.

Program Goals

1. To engage students in discussion about the legacies of Slavery in recent literary and visual works in the US, and to see how these legacies may extend to other formulations of “blackness” such social injustice, Black Lives Matter, and different issues of diversity, equity, and inclusion.

2. To learn how to “break down” and deconstruct complicated images in the media and literature which represent problematic stereotypes of race, racism, and Ethnicity.

3. To question the epistemological problem of categorization, and to extend it to other areas of their own academic inquiry.

4. To begin understanding how legal issues are a large problem that extends into everyday realities, that it isn’t simply a topic that should be dealt with in “ethnic studies”, but how race creeps into subjects which seem to be divorced from it.

Program Detail

• Cohort Size: 3-5 students

• Duration: 12 weeks

• Workload: Around 4 hours per week (including class time and homework time)

• Target Students: 9-12th grade students who are interested in sociology, history, social justice, law, social media, American and African-American Studies, racial dynamics, comparative literature, and more.