Sustainability

If your career plans involve working with the nation’s 63,000,000 Latina/o/xs—especially the

nearly 20,000,000 of the age to be entering college or high school, this is the seminar for you.

Latina/o Studies 571 offers you a graduate-level introduction to the field, confers eligibility to

teach Penn State undergraduates, and counts toward the Latina/o Studies graduate minor.

This course provides a foundation in U.S. Latina/o/x Studies Literature and its contexts, with two related goals. The first is to get a grasp on the U.S. Latina/o Studies canon that integrates humanities and social science approaches in order to analyze critical historical contexts that have shaped the emergence and evolution of the field of Latinx Studies in U.S. higher education and academia, such as early colonial enterprises in the South and the Southwest, Spanish and U.S. imperialism, the Chicano and Young Lords movements during the 1960s, immigration patterns from the Caribbean and Latin America, and government policies towards Latina/os. The second goal is to explore pedagogical theories and practices in Latinx Studies and critical race scholarship more broadly, in order for students to become conversant in the theoretical debates that underlie the design of curriculum and classroom practice in Latina/o Studies at the undergraduate level.

The course will incorporate some of the major lines of research in Latina/o Studies from different disciplines in order to address some of their most relevant discussions, internal critical debates, and major schools of thought. The seminar will provide a solid foundation in the development of a very timely and marketable research and teaching minor.