Academic Team:
Andre Sirois (asirois@uoregon.edu)
First-Year Experience Seminar Instructor
Jess Simpson (jsimpso7@uoregon.edu)
FIG Assistant
Skylar Debose (sdebose@uoregon.edu)
FIG Assistant
9 credits
UGST 109 First Year Experience Seminar – 1 Credit
CRN: 16263: M: 12:00 – 12:50 PM, STB 154
MUS 360 Hip-Hop: History Culture, Aesthetics – 4 credits
CRN: 13942: MW: 4:00 – 5:20 PM, LA 115. +DIS CRN: 13944: R: 11:00 – 11:50 AM, MUS 211
ES 101 Introduction to Ethnic Studies – 4 credits
CRN: 12108: TR: 2:00 – 3:20 PM, GSH 123, +DIS CRN: 12109: 10:00 – 10:50 AM, LIL 175
About the FIG:
Hip Hop and the Politics of Race encourages students to explore artistic practices of hip hop and learn how to produce and promote a hip hop music/art event. Students will also learn to situate hip hop and rap music within broader discussions of race, gender, and sexuality in the 20th and 21st centuries. The main focus of this FIG is planning the Annual UO Hip Hop Jam, which we will pair with the Critical Art show produced by the Remixing Media, ©ritiquing ©ulture FIG.
Deep-Dive FIG: Please note this FIG contains a challenging long-term project. This course has been vetted by First Year Programs to ensure first-term students can achieve success. The instructor will be available to assist students along the way.
MUS 360 Hip-Hop: History, Culture, Aesthetics - CoreEd or major satisfying course
In the last thirty years, hip hop has gone from ghettoized music to global phenomenon, reshaping the way millions of people experience the world around them. This course examines the history and evolution of hip hop/rap music, tracing its movements and meanings in different social contexts – from Bronx streets to Madison Avenue and beyond. We will emphasize both artistic and political dimensions of the music. In other words, we will analyze aesthetics-the selection of particular sounds, rhythms, and images-but we will also pay attention to how these choices relate to social issues. Through this course students will gain a better understanding of U.S. history, racial politics, technology, the global recording industry, and of course hip hop itself.
While no previous background in music is required, students will be expected to listen closely to music and lyrics and come to understand the relationship between stylistic changes and the social forces that animate them. With help from the instructor, students will develop a vocabulary for discussing music, politics, and culture, allowing us to consider hip hop as an art form, social text, cultural process, and above all, a potent sonic force animating much of late 20th and early 21st – century life.
MUS 360 stresses issues of cultural diversity (race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality) by tracing the growth of hip hop, a musical culture created by marginalizaed African American and Latino youth, from its humble beginnings to its current status in the early 21st-century as one of the dominant popular music forms across the globe. The course sets this narrative in the larger context of Afro-Diasporic history and cultural practice, drawing upon a body of general knowledge in ethnomusicology, cultural studies, musicology, ethnic studies, area studies, philosophy, and history to better understand the relationship between cultural practices and socio-political formations. The course begins with the emergence of hip hop culture in the post-industrial ghettos of New York's Bronx neighborhoods, explaining how various forms of music, dance, and graffiti arose as a response to urban planning policies that had left underserved communities to fend for themselves.
ES 101 Introduction to Ethnic Studies - CoreEd or major satisfying course
This course is an introduction to the academic field of Ethnic Studies, the interdisciplinary, comparative and relational study of race, ethnicity and indigeneity in the United States. It surveys how the histories and experiences of people of color in America have been shaped by systems of domination, including but not limited to, white supremacy and white settler colonialism, capitalism and heteropatriarchy. Special attention is paid to how domination and acts/arts of resistance create and recreate racial subjects.