Course Designs

2014 – 2016 Courses Designed and Delivered

Course Title: Dance as Activism: Embodying the Push back

First delivered:   Fall 2015 College of Charleston, SC – undergraduates

Structured around a workshop model that calls on auto-ethnography and somatic pedagogies, this course explores the use of dance as a central tool for social activism in late 20^th and early 21^st centuries, drawing critical examples from the US, the UK, and the Middle East.  Each meeting session of the course will explore practice and theory, consisting of one-half dance/movement technique/exploration and one-half theoretical examination.  This is a dance/movement course, students are should be prepared to dance/move with each session; it is also a theory course, students should be prepared to read required articles/texts, watch videos, and engage in critical discussion. Finally it is also a course on social activism, in which dance is a critical praxis; students should be prepared to challenge their boundaries and comfort zones as we will develop dance/movement vignettes as response to pressing social/cultural issues.

Course Title:  Gender construction and performance in environments of conflict: an examination of post enslavement performative articulation of privilege and violence in the re/making of identities

First delivered:   Fall 2015 College of Charleston, SC – undergraduates

This course will examine notions of privilege and violence in two post-enslavement societies, Jamaica, West Indies and Charleston, South Carolina, interrogating gender construction and performance in the establishment ‘new’ spaces of privilege and violence. Highlighting the period immediately following emancipation (Apprenticeship period in Jamaica and Reconstruction in Southern U.S.) the course will calls on womanist and performance studies approaches to compare and contrast the strategies deployed in the construction of post enslavement societies. The course will be guided by following central questions: 1) how did white and black actors performativity re/constitute identities in these highly charged post-enslavement conflicted societies; 2) in what ways did notions of religion and class contribute to and/or intersect with the construction and performance of new gendered identities with regard to privilege and violence; and 3) how did re/articulated and shifting notions of masculinity and femininity inform the staging of individual and community identity in these post enslavement societies.