Graduate course descriptions
In addition to our regular course offerings, the following topics courses are offered this academic year. For the regularly offered course descriptions, please refer to the official graduate calendar.
Winter 2026 topics courses
Mondays from 11:45 a.m. to 2:30 p.m.
This course examines the theory, ethical questions, and the many practical methods and applications of ethnographic fieldwork in a wide array of contexts and formations. Topics of study include qualitative and quantitative research methods, approaches to data analysis, and ethical research considerations when conducting ethnographic fieldwork. There is a specific focus on topics involving music or sounding practices in minority communities as well as exercising sensitivity when working with minority communities in Quebec or Canada.
There will also be an emphasis on religious ritual and ritual, and performance practices. As part of their classwork, students will observe and document rituals and processes in the world around them, such as, religious practices, musical events, eating and food-related practices and habits, with the goal of connecting these field experiences to the broader theories and discussions in the classroom.
Wednesdays from 2:45 p.m. to 5:30 p.m.
This class explores the categories of caste, race, and indigeneity in terms of their ontological manifestations and reinventions, the institutions invested in their epistemological integrity, and the creative and productive forms taken by them in liminal and liberated spaces and times.
While caste, race, and indigeneity are all categories of meaning-making and social power, they have their own histories and morphologies. By studying the contexts of their formation, the ways in which they evolve, and the circumstances of their interaction, students will understand the vernacular particularities of each category, as well as the transactional, transformative, and transgressive potentials that they possess.
Furthermore, this course will attempt to explore the possibilities and limits of comparative methods of analysis, which can be vulnerable to reductive framing, but can also offer creative extrapolations unencumbered by disciplinary habitus. Students will also consider the interactional aspects of the classifications of caste, race, and indigeneity, and the “out of place” forms that they can take, such as ethnicity, colorism, casta, as well as alternative modalities of known signifiers, such as “Korean whiteness.”