How has Africa featured in World Politics? In this course we will study the political landscape of pre-colonial African kingdoms, the impact of the Transatlantic Slave Trade, European conquest of Africa, and the establishment of colonial rule. We will learn how independence was achieved and what challenges African countries have faced following independence. The course will shed light on major political conflicts, the effects of the international aid regime, and the impact of great power rivalries on the continent. We will also study the growing role of the African diaspora, with a particular focus on their role in politics and economic development.
This course will include a weeklong trip to Ghana. The trip will relate to the topics of colonialism, Transatlantic Slave trade and post-independence political challenges. We will tour castles, including a UNESCO World Heritage site in Cape Coast, which were major points of the Transatlantic Slave trade, and served as early European outposts on the continent. We will visit sites in the capital Accra, to learn about Ghanaian culture and the political legacy of Ghana’s first post-independence leader, and the father of pan-Africanism, Kwame Nkrumah. We will also focus on the topics of development, with a visit to a national park and informal urban settlements.
This course will have a 1 credit class in Fall 2024 and .25 credit class in Spring 2025. Students in this seminar will live in the HRC.
More About Professor Koter
Novels have the power to immerse readers in another place and time. Through them, we can come to feel a deep affinity for somewhere we have never been. This course will look at several English novels in which the evocation of place is central to meaning. Throughout the term, students will be asked to think about both the means by which authors represent place and the literary effects of their representation. Course texts will include Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto, Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway and Orlando, George Gissing’s The Nether World, and Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles. Each of these novels takes its inspiration from a real location that the authors have imaginatively transformed.
The work of the semester will prepare students to engage thoughtfully with the places that they visit in May. These will include Walpole’s fantastic Gothic home on the outskirts of London, as well as the area of London, now gentrified, where Gissing set his tale of woeful poverty. We will attempt to recreate the paths traveled by the characters of Mrs. Dalloway, who live their interconnected lives in London on a single day. There will be stops as well in the southeast of England, including one at Knole, the estate that belonged to the family of Woolf’s friend Vita Sackville-West and that inspired the creation of Orlando. Travel will conclude with a visit to the area around Dorchester, which Hardy mythologized as “Wessex” in a series of remarkable novels. We will have the chance to walk in the steps of his fictional heroine Tess. Ultimately, the goal of the course and its travel component is to gain insight into the importance of setting to the human imagination.
This course will have a 1 credit class in Fall 2024 and .25 credit class in Spring 2025. Students in this seminar will live in 100 Hamilton
More About Professor Harsh
Constance Harsh is Rebecca S. Chopp Chair in the Humanities and a professor in the Department of English and Creative Writing. Her teaching includes courses such as Victorian Fiction, The Female Protagonist, and The Brontës. She has published a book and numerous essays on a variety of nineteenth-century British writers. Her current scholarly focus is the fiction of the late-Victorian novelist George Gissing.
This course will allow us to question, analyze, and engage with one of the world’s most pressing humanitarian crises since the Second World War: the ongoing refugee crisis. Recent approximate figures suggest that over 115 million people have been forcibly displaced from their homes due to persecution, conflict, violence, human rights violations or events seriously disturbing public order. The bulk of these refugees are women and children. Drawing on human rights frameworks, this course will challenge and expand our understanding of refugee policy and practice, especially as it pertains to education. Through case studies, we will learn about particular refugee crises around the globe. We will explore how education can be reimagined as an essential response to humanitarian crises, alongside providing food, shelter, and other provisions/programs that provide safety and normalcy to those displaced by conflict or disaster. We will focus on the principles that underpin education in emergencies programs and the types of educational policies or activities supported by international and national organizations in these contexts. We will read policy documents, academic articles, first-hand accounts, memoirs, novels, as well as screen films about of those who have fled war, violence, and persecution, to understand the experience of forced migration from a personal perspective.
At the end of the semester, we will travel to Cairo, Egypt, where we will visit and volunteer at refugee community schools, which are run by Sudanese refugee teachers and staff and serve children from their community. We will also be visiting refugee-serving non-profits serving various refugee communities who have been living in Egypt in protracted exile to better understand the lived realities of providing long-term support to refugees in the low-income neighboring countries. Of course, we will also be doing some site-seeing No trip to Egypt without a visit to the Great Pyramids of Giza, a boat ride on the Nile, and a visit to the new museum of antiquities!
This course will have a 1 credit class in Fall 2024 and .25 credit class in Spring 2025. Students in this seminar will live in 100 Hamilton.
More About Professor Bonet
Sally Wesley Bonet is an Associate Professor of Educational Studies at Colgate University. A Sudanese-Egyptian educational anthropologist, Bonet is concerned with the experiences of Arab, Muslim, and African refugee youth and families. Her book, Meaningless Citizenship—a four-year-multi-sited, multilingual study—explores the ways that recently resettled Iraqi, Muslim refugee families’ encounters with and exclusions from various arms of the American state, shaped them into (non)citizens. Bonet’s current project examines the ways that private, faith-based tuition-free schools can provide high-quality education for refugees in the Middle East; particularly for Sudanese refugees in Egypt and Syrian refugees in Lebanon. Bonet’s work has been supported by the Ford Foundation and the Spencer Foundation, and has appeared in top-tier journals including Anthropology and Education Quarterly; Curriculum Inquiry; and the Journal of Education in Emergencies. Bonet loves to cook, travel, read novels, sing, and go thrift-shopping.
What people eat and drink connects them to a global socioecology and a complex exchange of commodities. What’s in Your Cup? uses our daily consumption of beverages to analyze the social and environmental implications of how people live. From the energy used to boil water for a morning coffee to the biota disturbed by farmers across the world, what we drink may be linked to carbon emissions, water pollution, and public health hazards, all of which have implications for consumers and producers alike. Challenges, such as climate change, limited access to land, and market shifts, often leave farmers vulnerable. But there are also many examples of efforts that empower farmers to live well and care for the land, provide consumers access to ethically produced beverages, and initiatives that promote sustainable development. Using examples from around the world – including Coca Cola, Florida orange juice, Colombian coffee, South African rooibos tea and wine, Fiji water, and Central New York beer and cider – the course explores the geography of what we drink.
The fall course is followed by a 10-day trip to Colombia in January where we’ll learn about coffee as well as many aspects of the country. The trip is co-directed by Universidad de los Andes professor and coffee expert, Andrés Guhl. In addition, local coffee roaster Dan Joseph of FoJo Beans will accompany the group. Starting in Bogotá, we will explore museums, graffiti, food, the Paloquemao market, and have a coffee workshop at Varietale (a specialized coffee shop). And we’ll hike at 12,000 feet through the páramo (a unique high-elevation grassland ecosystem). The group will then descend the cordillera and cross the Magdalena River en route to one of the country’s coffee-growing regions where we’ll visit the National Coffee Research Center and coffee farms, discussing the life of caficultores with the coffee growers themselves.
This course will have a 1 credit class in Fall 2024 and .25 credit class in Spring 2025. Students in this seminar will live in 100 Hamilton.
More about Professor Klepeis
Peter Klepeis is professor of geography, and studies people and the environment. Recent projects investigate invasive grasses in Australia, religious-based protection of church forests in Ethiopia, and the history of socioecological change in southern Chile. In his teaching, he seeks ways people can live the good life while allowing others to thrive as well. He has extensive experience guiding students in off-campus study, including semester-long Colgate programs in Australia, England, and South Africa, and three-week “extended studies” to Uganda and Western Australia.
