ER&M 5200b / AMST 6635b / HSHM 7570b / WGSS 5520b, Applied Research in Feminist Science and Technology Studies  Kalindi Vora

In this seminar, participants conduct applied research on projects with the primary investigator/instructor. Structured as a lab, we learn research methods, design research activities including building bibliographies for scholarly review, and collecting data through surveys and interviews. Topics vary but are linked to active research by instructor in feminist science and technology studies. Permission of instructor is required. Undergraduates may enroll by permission of instructor.
W 1:30pm-3:25pm

ER&M 6520a / AMST 6619a / HSHM 7920a / WGSS 6620a, Enduring Conditions: Chronic Illness, Disability, Care, and Access  Kalindi Vora

This interdisciplinary course brings together scholarship on access and care that bridges concerns in the fields of disability studies and humanistic approaches to chronic illness. Scholarly texts are drawn from the fields of critical race and ethnic studies, gender and sexuality studies, anthropology and sociology of medicine, history, and feminist science and technology studies (fSTS). Seminar participants also engage with the arts and media as critical sites for understanding culture work bringing together knowledge in disability and chronic illness spaces. To embrace community-based research and knowledge sharing, the course features regular guest lectures from grassroots disability justice organizers and culture workers. The course is offered in a hybrid format. To consider what disability studies and work on chronic illness can build together, we explore the work of Moya Bailey, Aimi Hamraie, Jina B. Kim, Sami Schalk, Akemi Nishida, Ryan Cartwright, and Arthur Kleinman, among others. Permission of instructor is required. Undergraduates may also enroll with permission of instructor.
W 4pm-5:55pm

ER&M 6525a / AMST 7725a, Writing the Academic Journal Article  Fatima El-Tayeb

Graduate students are often told that publishing a journal article is a crucial part of their professional development. This course helps students get it done. Students come to class with a piece of writing—seminar paper, dissertation chapter—that we workshop as a group throughout the course of the term. In addition to personalized feedback, we also have broader discussions about the nuts and bolts of this genre of academic writing: organizing your argument, revision, clarity, framing interventions, etc. We complement this structured approach to writing with discussions aimed at demystifying the process by which an article gets published—the art of selecting the right journal, how to read and respond to reader reports, and general timelines. The goal is for all students to submit their article to the journal of their choice by the end of the term. Students are required to have a piece of writing ready to workshop into an article at the very beginning of the class. Students interested in the course should contact the instructor at albert.laguna@yale.edu.
T 9:25am-11:20am

ER&M 6547a / CPLT 5070a / SPAN 7705a, Carceral Disability Studies: The Case of the Philippines  Aurelie Vialette

This seminar examines the racial, ethical, political, environmental, and social implications of the penal colonization process in the Philippines through the lens of disability studies. Carceral disability studies is in great need of exploration and that is the aim of this seminar. We analyze archival documents (manuscripts) from the Philippines and engage with theoretical and historical texts on disability, prison labor, racial capitalism, ecocriticism, Indigenous studies, carceral studies, gender studies, and law and the humanities. Overseas incarceration was a method employed by empires to dispose of criminals, the poor, sex workers, and vagrants. In the Philippines (a Spanish colony until 1898), the dispossession of indigenous people of their land and the implication of intensive farming were also consequences of the colonial project. We see that labor and procreation were crucial to using prisoners to build the colonial structure and strengthen the Spanish presence in the archipelago. We discover the centrality of this transnational and transhistorical approach to understanding the contemporary treatment of imprisoned people and the centrality of disability studies to understand mass incarceration today. Course in Spanish or English depending on the students enrolled. Spanish reading knowledge is mandatory.
W 1:30pm-3:25pm

ER&M 6555a / AMST 7040a / HIST 7440a, American West and Its Borderlands  Stephen Pitti

This reading seminar examines historical scholarship on the US West and the US-Mexico border region with particular attention to recent works. It also attends to the development of the region's historiography. Topics include colonialism, migration, labor, urbanization, segregation, and political activism, and we pay careful attention to writings on the region’s Latinx, Indigenous, Asian American, and Black communities. The seminar is designed for students pursuing graduate work in history, and in particular for those preparing for oral examinations or dissertation topics on the region or one of these key topics.
W 1:30pm-3:25pm

ER&M 6606b / ANTH 7818b / SPAN 9718b / WGSS 7718b, Multi-Sited Ethnography: Methodological Pivoting Under Duress  Eda Pepi and Ana Ramos-Zayas

In the face of resurgent authoritarianism, nativism, and assaults on academic freedom, this course examines ethnographic pivots under conditions of duress that are not exceptions but constitutive of the method itself. “Fieldsites choose us” as much as we choose them, pressing ethnographers to move with the currents of empire, capital, and knowledge production while reckoning with their limits. We retrace the genealogies of ethnographic practice and “turns” tethered to geopolitical demands: from the long shadow of “the native,” carried forward in avatars such as “the welfare queen” and “the terrorist,” to World War II–era area studies, Cold War intelligence collaborations, and the backlash against codified ethics in fieldwork and classrooms. Equally formative are the bureaucracies of academia—funding cycles, time-to-degree mandates, thematic calls, and the logics of publishing and tenure—that shape how ethnographers pose questions and frame methods. As some field sites become foreclosed and others newly thinkable, the very concept of “the field” splinters across multiple scales. What is “multi-sited” is not only movement across places but the doubleness of sites themselves—at once local and global, discrete and imbricated in imperial and transnational formations. Securitized borders, shrinking budgets, and the weaponization of academia leave open the question of whether these frictions will consolidate into a new “Americanist turn,” yet they press us to imagine the ethnographic otherwise. What becomes possible when archives, digital platforms, and mapping technologies are brought into conversation with participant observation and thick description? How might studies of diaspora, migration, enclaves, personhood, and neoliberal subjectivities be pursued not as fallback designs but as deliberate strategies? A flagship offering of the interdisciplinary Yale Ethnography Hub, the course welcomes graduate and undergraduate students across the humanities and social sciences—those preparing dissertations, senior essays, or fieldwork-driven projects, as well as those curious about ethnography’s possibilities and limits.
T 4pm-5:55pm

ER&M 6671a / RLST 6610a / SAST 5710a, Hindu Worlds Through Narratives  Shiva Sai Ram Urella

This course introduces students to the vast and varied world of the Purāṇas, a genre that has shaped Hindu thought, practice, and imagination for over a millennium. Encompassing cosmology, genealogy, theology, ritual performances, and narrative art, the Purāṇas defy easy classification. They have been written, recited, performed, painted, danced, engraved, sung, and translated across languages, regions, and centuries—and they continue to be living texts in contemporary South Asia. Through a combination of primary sources in translation and scholarly analyses, we will examine how Purāṇic narratives construct worlds: how they organize time and space, articulate notions of power, imagine the nature of the divine, conceptualize distinct devotional theologies, advertise pilgrimages, and negotiate questions of gender, caste, and regional belonging. We will move between Sanskrit, Telugu, Tamil, Bengali, Kannada, and Marathi contexts and attend to the material and performative lives of these texts as scroll paintings, temple myths, oral performances, manuscripts, and ritual repertoires that informed lived religious contexts. The course asks not only what the Purāṇas are but also how they have been used, by whom, and to what ends they have been mobilized in both pre-modern and modern times.
TTh 11:35am-12:50pm

ER&M 7001a, Advanced Practicum in Ethnicity, Race, and Migration  Hi'ilei Hobart

This course is open to graduate certificate students in their third year and beyond. The seminar provides support for designing or writing the dissertation and for other professionalization matters (including publication, pedagogy, and conference presentation). Students complete an essay of thirty-five pages based on original research. This paper can develop from an assignment in one of their elective courses. It can take the form of a research paper, dissertation prospectus, draft dissertation chapter, or journal-length article. Students present their paper to the ER&M community as part of this requirement. Or, students may choose to complete a research project that departs from the format of the traditional academic essay or thesis. This project should be based on original research and may culminate in an annotated syllabus, exhibit, webpage, documentary, or other multimedia project. Students present their project to the ER&M community as part of this requirement. Prerequisite: admission into graduate certificate program/completion of qualifying exam in home department.
Th 1:30pm-3:25pm

ER&M 7100a, Pedagogies in ERM  Ana Ramos-Zayas

Faculty members who have a 2:2 course expectation may develop a pedagogy seminar associated with their undergraduate introductory lecture course if it enrolls at least seventy-two students and has at least three teaching fellows leading discussion sections. The course’s TFs must enroll in the pedagogy seminar; they receive full course credit but not toward their degree requirements. This course intends to properly recognize the additional time required of faculty who offer large lecture classes, especially in the fulfillment of the responsibilities outlined in the start of term memo. Courses with sections require substantive guidance on teaching, including weekly teaching fellow meetings, meetings, section visits, and discussions of course assessment. This course is graded SAT/UNSAT. Two student-teaching fellows are able to submit teaching evaluations of their experience in this pedagogy seminar through the course evaluation process. Prerequisite: TF position in an ER&M undergraduate lecture course with at least seventy-three students.  0 Course cr
T 1:30pm-3:25pm

ER&M 7402a / AMST 7743a, Indigenous Thought and Anticolonial Theory  Tarren Andrews

This seminar, cross-listed as an undergraduate (ER&M 4020) and graduate course (ER&M 7402) provides a comprehensive overview of the theoretical landscape of Native American and Indigenous studies. The readings approach NAIS from a variety of disciplinary perspectives. Throughout the course we explore the major debates, methodologies, and concerns that ground the field, and provide critical context for ethical engagement with Indigenous communities and knowledges. Students learn the disciplinary standards for the evaluation of scholarly sources based on criteria derived from the most outstanding recent scholarship in the field. Students are required to read, write, and think extensively and critically about a variety of issues that are of concern for global Indigenous communities. Mastery of these skills are honed through in-depth discussion and weekly writing assignments.
W 9:25am-11:20am