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Fall 2024 STL Courses 

L98 AMCS 308S   The Racialized Sporting Landscape of St. Louis: Athletics,  Aesthetics, Bias, and Opportunity

L98 AMCS 308S   The Racialized Sporting Landscape of St. Louis: Athletics,  Aesthetics, Bias, and Opportunity

Instructors:Noah Cohan, John Early

This interdisciplinary course considers the racialized landscape of St. Louis through the lenses of sporting cultures and creative practices. Co-taught by John Early (Sam Fox) and Noah Cohan (American Culture Studies), this seminar will examine the history of sports and race in St. Louis, illuminate the realities of access and inequity in the sporting landscape of the city, and imagine more equitable futures. In addition to writing bi-weekly reading responses and one historical paper, students will maintain a research sketchbook, design and print a zine, and create a public-facing creative project. Students in the College of Art and in the AMCS program will be given enrollment priority. Prerequisites: None

Days: M-W---- 11:30a-12:50p 

 

A picture of a street in St Louis

L98 AMCS 314M Topics in St. Louis: Engaging the City: "Hidden" St. Louis

L98 AMCS 314M Topics in St. Louis: Engaging the City: "Hidden" St. Louis

Instructor: Heidi Kolk

Geographer Peirce Lewis had argued that "our human landscape is our unwitting autobiography," giving tangible form to our shared tastes, values, aspirations, and even fears. It also reveals efforts to exert control--over people, space, resources, and collective identity. St. Louis represents an especially challenging case study: much of its historical fabric has been altered or destroyed, and bears the imprint of White control and a history of racial segregation. This fieldwork course explores the city's "hidden" history, focusing on lost, endangered, or forgotten sites. Some are associated with vexing or violent histories, or contested memory; others are a product of disregard, "benign neglect," or worse--wholesale erasure, as is the case with a series of Native American burial mounds that once stood on the Arch grounds and in Forest Park, not to many immigrant and African American neighborhoods cleared in the name of urban "renewal." Drawing on a range of sources and disciplinary methods, students will engage creatively with elusive features of the cultural landscape, seeking to "locate" them spatially, materially, and historically, and to understand their sociopolitical significance, especially in relationship to better-known landmarks and celebrated sites. How have such features contributed to public culture and identity in the past? How might they yet be reclaimed, and incorporated into the public imagination, whether through storytelling and preservation or public history/memorialization? The course requires individual and small-group site visits; fieldnotes and short analytical / reflections papers; and a more speculative final project on a site of students choosing. AMCS 314M fulfills the fieldwork requirement for AMCS majors/minors.

Days: -T-R--- 2:30P-3:50

A picture of the Cahokia Mounds

L98 AMCS 330C Topics in AMCS: Place, Space, and Power: Indigenous St. Louis

L98 AMCS 330C Topics in AMCS: Place, Space, and Power: Indigenous St. Louis

Instructor: Balraj Gill

What is Indigenous St. Louis and why don't we know about it? And who is the "we" who doesn't know? In this course, we will study Indigenous presence in St. Louis and how Indigenous geographies overlap and coexist in tension with settler-colonial geographies. While St. Louis began as a French colonial settlement, established by fur traders in 1764, the lands that the city occupied were and continue to be Native lands. What we call St. Louis was a geography shared by many Indigenous peoples. The region was a major urban center between the 11th and 14th centuries-today referred to as Cahokia. It then became a territory shared by many tribes, including Ni Okaska (Osage), Niúachi (Missouria), Illiniwek (Illinois Confederacy), and others. In the nineteenth century, some of these tribes were coerced into leaving their homelands and sent to reservations in Indian Territory (also known as Oklahoma). A century later, St. Louis was one of the urban centers where Indigenous people were relocated as part of an effort to break up tribes and the reservation system. And today Indigenous peoples from all over the continent inhabit St. Louis as a place of family, friendships, community, of livelihoods, education, and creative practices; but also, as a place of contestation, as a city structured by systems of domination, such as race and class, and Indigenous erasure. Loosely following this historical timeline, we will study how this erasure happened and engage with different sources to study St. Louis as an ongoing Indigenous place and space.

Days: M-W---- 1:00P-2:20PM

 

L98 AMCS 330D Culture and Identity: St. Louis Boundaries and Borders

L98 AMCS 330D Culture and Identity: St. Louis Boundaries and Borders

Instructor: Joe Bartzel 

St. Louis is widely reputed to be a region defined by its boundaries and borders: north side vs. south side; the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers; the city/county border; boundaries within and between school districts; boundaries between neighborhoods, municipalities, parishes, tax districts, wards, and ZIP codes; and boundaries defined by the region's streets and highways. These physical and spatial boundaries often demarcate divisions between people, particularly along the dimensions of race, social class or economic status. In this class, we will examine a variety of the borders and boundaries that shape and define the St. Louis region, investigating their origins, and interrogating whether and how the distinction between fenced-off corners and the wider setting helps us to understand those boundaries-or whether that distinction reflects an outdated set of concerns and thereby limits our vision about the city and what it can be.

Days: -T-R-- 8:30AM-9:50AM

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