BLKS 101      Introduction to Urban Studies
Introduction to Urban Studies is a lecture and discussion course that provides the undergraduate student with an overview of the interdisciplinary field of urban studies. The student who successfully completes this course will have a broad understanding of the major issues, theories, key concepts and vocabulary, basic methods, and prominent scholars in urban studies. We will explore current events of relevance, including the opportunities and problems facing major cities in the United States, especially Kansas City and New Orleans.
Credits: 3 hours
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BLKS 201      Global Systems and the Origins of Black American Culture and Institutions
This multi-disciplinary course examines global capitalism, European contact with Africa, the development of the African Diaspora, and the origins of Black American institutions and culture. Applying a Black studies perspective, the course explores such themes as cultural and gendered oppression, institutional destabilization, economic dislocation, liberation struggles, and creative impulses and aesthetics.
Credits: 3 hours
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BLKS 302      Conceptual and Theoretical foundations in African American Studies
This course will provide an in-depth examination of the theoretical and conceptual parameters of African American studies. We will study the evolution of the field, key scholars and creative intellectuals, and seminal categories of thought.
Credits: 3 hours
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BLKS 315      The Arts of African and New World Culture
The historical survey of ethnographic arts includes two diasporas: 1) African art and the influences of Africans on the arts of new world cultures (in Brazil, Surinam, Cuba, Haiti, and the United States); and 2) Meso-American art and the influence of Meso-Americans on the arts of the Native North American cultures. Emphasis us placed on interdisciplinary theoretical approaches drawn from Art History, Anthropology, and folklore, as well as the importance of geography and trade. These ethnographic arts are examined from aesthetic, political, religious, and economic perspectives, in comparison with arts made in these countries in Western European traditions, including the cross-cultural impact that these various art traditions have on each other. This course satisfies the College requirement for a course in cultural perspectives. Cross-listed with Art-Hist 315.
Credits: 3 hours
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BLKS 320      Critical Health Issues in Black Communities
Beginning with the African context and the opposition of chattel slavery, this course examines social, cultural, and historical factors affecting the health status of African Americans to the present era. It explores a variety of health-related issues including the interplay between environment, biology, and culture; folk and popular health practices; structured inequality and oppression; lifestyle, beliefs and values; and the organization and delivery of health care.Moreover, this course moves well beyond the idea that medical care-its presence, absence, or quality-is the singular or most critical factor determining the health of a people, community, or society. It reveals the importance of social phenomena in disease resistance and health promotion. Historical shifts from the prominence of infectious to chronic diseases; the implications to health of chattel slavery, sharecropping, segregation, poverty, and structured inequality; the relationship between psychosocial factors and disease, i.e. destabilized social settings that compromise resistance to disease; environmental racism; and the health status of African Americans as it relates to the organization of work, family structure and function, religious beliefs, the organization of medical care, lifestyle, consumer manipulation, and post-industrial society are major issues addressed by the course.
Credits: 3 hours
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BLKS 321      The Black Family and Male-Female Relationships
This course examines the historical evolution and current status of the African American family in the United States. Utilizing the African experience as its starting point the course conveys a broad understanding of the role of the family in human survival and progress. We investigate such issues as male-female relationships, sexual practices, dating, marriage, single parenting, the education and socialization of children, and so on. We also examine an array of social and economic issues, including institutionalized inequality, that affects the viability of today's African American family.
Credits: 3 hours
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BLKS 325      African American Busienss Development
This course investigates the various challenges to African American business development and entrepreneurship on the united States. We study the lives of successful, pioneering African American businesswomen and men in order to assess how they managed to transcend the barriers of racism and structured inequality. We explore why certain kinds of enterprises emerged among African Americans and why others did not, and we scrutinize the traditional business problems for African Americans of capitalization distribution market penetration, and wealth creation.
Credits: 3 hours
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BLKS 331      African American Literature I
This course provides a survey of African American literature from its beginnings to the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and 1930s. Areas of interest will include abolitionist literature (especially Slave Narratives), turn-of-the-century literature and the Harlem Renaissance. This course will examine any or all of the following literary forms: fiction, poetry, drama, autobiography and essay. It will view African American literature in its historical and cultural contexts.
Credits: 3 hours
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BLKS 332WI      African American Novel
This course will examine the African American novel in the 19th and 20th centuries; the emphasis will be on the period from the 1920s to the present. The novels will be examined in their historical and cultural contexts.
Credits: 3 hours
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BLKS 333      African American Literature II
A survey of African American literature from its beginnings to World War I. This course will cover a range of authors, several genres, and culture forms, which may include fiction, poetry, drama, autobiography, essay, oral, contract and/or slave narratives, folklore, and songs.
Credits: 3 hours
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BLKS 334      From Field Shout to Hip Hop: African American Poetic Traditions
This course examines the development of African American poetry from its early forms as field shouts, ballads, and blues to present forms including spoken word and hip hop. Includes authors such as Phillis Wheatley, Paul Lawrence Dunbar, Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Brooks, Tupac Shakur, and Jessica Care Moore.
Credits: 3 hours
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BLKS 335      Stages Toward Freedom: African American Dramatic Traditions
This course explores the development of African American dramatic traditions from the eighteenth century through the Harlem Renaissance Black Arts Movement, to current postmodernism. Includes authors such as W.W. Brown, Zoran N. Hurston, Amiri Baraka, Sonia Sanchez, August Wilson, Suzan-Lori Parks.
Credits: 3 hours
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BLKS 337      The Civil Rights Movement in African American Literature
This course examines how African American literature shaped ideas about freedom, rights, citizenship and race in the civil rights movement. It draws on a variety of literary forms-speeches, essays, autobiographies, fiction, drama, poetry and film-to explore the movement's impact on communities and cultures as well as its various debates and competing visions.
Credits: 3 hours
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BLKS 403WI      Writing for African American Studies
This course instructs students in how to produce advanced knowledge in the field of African American studies. It provides training in the construction of quality research papers for graduate, scholarly, and professional work and exposes students to a wide array of scholarly journals, databases, and authoritative resources in African American studies. Each time the courses taught, students will develop their research around a specific topic defined by the instructor.
Credits: 3 hours
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BLKS 404      Research Seminar
This course introduces the logic, theory, and techniques of empirical research and applies them to African American Studies. It exposes students to a variety of research approaches in order to examine their utility for producing knowledge within the field.
Credits: 3 hours
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BLKS 480      Special Topics/Seminar
In-depth exploration of special topics in Black Studies. When available, topics will be announced prior to registration. Course may be repeated for up to six credit hours.
Credits: 1-3 hours
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BLKS 490      Directed Study/Research
Individual research and learning projects supervised by a faculty member. Course may be repeated for up to six credit hours.
Credits: 1-3 hours
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