Africana Studies

Methods Courses

Methods courses are those courses developed around interrogating or facilitating new knowledge production. These courses take up methods (the tools used to collect information/data/insights) and/or methodology (how we come to choose certain methods and how we understand those findings).  Students will complete at minimum one course (and no more than two courses in consultation with department chair and/or advisor) from the following approved methods courses: List the revised courses here.  Students must complete at least one methods course.

• AFR 200 - Research Methods in Africana Studies
• AFR 247 - Black Women’s Biography
• AFR 269 - Race and Homelessness
• AFR 271 - Disease and Desire in Black Visual Cultures
• AFR 287 - African American Literature and the Archive (=ENG 287)
• AFR 290 - Oral History: Problems, Perspectives, & Possibilities (=SOC 290/EDU 290)

Cultural Production and Expression Courses

The Cultural Production and Expression requirement assembles courses that focuses on the formal conventions of different cultural objects including, but not limited to, literary genres (poems, novels, essays, etc.), visual culture (film, art, digital media, etc.) and performances (dance, theatre, inter alia) produced in, against, and through Black aesthetic and creative traditions. These courses guide students in their ability to contextualize how African and African diasporic intellectuals and artists revise old and create new expressive forms. These courses also offer students a platform to evaluate and compare myriad aesthetic languages, and the social and political regulation of the senses (sight, touch, smell, taste, hearing) they depend on, within a context that is simultaneously personal and political, public and private, global and local. Students must complete two courses from this category.

• AFR 130 - African American Literature and the Environment
• AFR 221 - Introduction to Caribbean Studies
• AFR 255 - Approaches to African Art
• AFR 282 - African American Literature: 1955 and Beyond (=ENG 282)
• AFR 309 - Consuming Culture: Food & Identity Across the Afro-Americas (=LAS 309)
• AFR 354 - Gender, Power, Spirituality in African Aesthetics
• AFR 355 - Black Feminist Art Practices
• ENG 294 - Harlem Renaissance
• ENG 297 - Caribbean Literature (=AFR 297)
• FRE 365 - African Literary Culture: Prizes, Bestsellers, Celebrity
• MUS 142 - African-American Music
• THE 365 - Black Contemporary Theatre

Geographical and Ecological Investigations

The Geographic and Ecological Investigation requirement brings together courses that take up spatial inquiry, understood as the social, political, and natural arrangement of space and the ecologies that result. Courses satisfying this requirement will broadly examine how African and African diasporic lives are inseparable from the spatial objects (nationalism, borders, neighborhoods, supranational formations, and ecological conditions (health, natural/man-made disaster, climate, technological change) in which they unfold and their efforts to (re)arrange space and establish alternative ecologies. Students must complete two courses from this category.

• AFR 120 - Afro-Latin America
• AFR 224 - Race and Campus Histories
• AFR 233 - Africana Political Economy: Anti-Blackness in Capitalist Development
• AFR 234 - Race, Gender, and Tourism in the Caribbean
• AFR 236 - Black Spatial Politics
• AFR 246 - Black Sexual Geographies
• AFR 283 - Islands, Archipelagoes and Black Women’s Literature
• AFR 330 - Decolonizing Development in Africa
• HIS 267 - Health and Society in Africa
• LAS 221 - Afro-Brazilian Culture and History

Social Thought and Institutions

This area investigates how Africa and the diaspora have created conceptual frameworks for analyzing the organization and transformation of the social world. Courses in this category emphasize dominant power structures (capitalism, patriarchy, nation-states, anti-Blackness, heteronormativity, etc.) consolidate authority and how African and diasporic communities elaborate alternative arrangements that unsettle, redirect, or reimagine those orders to create new institutions. This area highlights how Black communities develop critical modes of analysis that illuminate the operations of power and formulate distinct horizons of social possibility. Students must complete two courses from this category.

• AFR 222 - Race, Policing, and Justice correct title is Policing Black Radical Aesthetics
• AFR 223 - Black Freedom Dreams
• AFR 251 - Thugs, Jezebels, and Contemporary Politics
• AFR 269 - Race and Homelessness
• AFR 270 - Racial Capitalism and Reproduction
• AFR 321 - Special Topics: Black Lives and Black Protests in the Americas and the Caribbean
• AFR 345 - Black Queer Theories
• AFR 350 - History of Southern Black Education
• AFR 371 - Critical Race Theory in Education
• AFR 375 - Anarchy and Social Movements
• GSS 402 - Seminar: Black Sexual Politics
• PSY 269 - Black Psychology

Intellectual History Courses

Courses that satisfy the intellectual history requirement examine core analytical building blocks and major debates in Africana Studies, with a particular focus on the conceptual contributions of major thinkers (individuals and collectives) in the field. These courses are meant to equip students with a solid foundation to evaluate multiple, and sometimes diverging perspectives, and to respond to the ethical inadequacies of majoritarian or normative outlooks. Students must complete one course from this category.

• AFR 301 - Major Thinkers in Africana Studies: Zora Neale Hurston
• AFR 302 - Black Women’s Intellectual History
• AFR 303 - Major Thinkers in Africana Studies
• AFR 305 - Major Thinkers in Africana Studies: “Engaging the Race Question”: Cedric Robinson & Sylvia Wynter
• AFR 306 - Frantz Fanon
• AFR 308 - Toni Cade Bambara
• AFR 331 - African Feminisms

Collection

Throughout the course of majoring and minoring, students will have several opportunities to track their progress towards successfully compiling their portfolio and designing a portfolio that enhances their success in the post-Davidson career of their choosing. Upon declaring the major or minor, students will receive a Google drive link to a personal folder where they can begin to upload materials. Majors and minors will meet with their advisors at the beginning of each academic year to track progress towards completing the portfolio. Majors must have at least four items, not including the reflexivity statement. Minors must have at least two items, not including the reflexivity statement.

Advising, Timeline, and Departmental Support:
Upon declaring the Africana Studies major or minor, students will receive access to a departmental portfolio handbook outlining portfolio requirements, timelines, and evaluation criteria. The handbook is intended to support long-term planning rather than end-of-program assembly.

In addition to advising, the department will provide collective support for portfolio development through departmental programming, including activities sponsored by the Sankofa Society. This programming may include workshops, writing sessions, and forums focused on revision, collective writing practices, development of the reflexivity statement, and reflection on ethical, methodological, and intellectual growth within Africana Studies. These activities are designed to support the portfolio as a cumulative, reflective, and collaborative process.

Portfolio Requirements

Majors and minors select portfolio items from the list below. Majors must submit at least four items and minors at least two items. For majors, the selected items must collectively represent work from at least three of the department’s four curricular categories (Cultural Production and Expression; Geographic and Ecological Investigations; Social Thought and Institutions; Intellectual History) and must include at least one item produced in a designated Africana Studies Methods course. For minors, the selected items must represent work from at least two different curricular categories.

Evaluation

The ensemble of items in the portfolio must meet the following criteria: 1. Convey the student’s ability to craft arguments through multiple media; 2.  Explain and apply Africana theories to a given social dilemma or cultural object; 3. Engage in the act of revision; 4. Uses one or more primary sources. No item can count for more than one category. Each spring, Africana department members will collectively evaluate senior portfolios. Seniors will have the opportunity to present items from their portfolio at the Sankofa Induction Ceremony in April.

Portfolio Items

1. Grant proposal
   1.    Grant proposals can be for internal or external grants. Proposals must have various elements of a viable research project (research question, problem, literature review, proposed methods). Students must have submitted the grant proposal; however, it is not necessary to have received the grant to include the proposal in the portfolio.
   2.  Courses: AFR 200
2. Principled community engagement
   1.     Evidence of sustained principled community engagement in a historically marginalized community. This may be documented through a course assignment that required community learning and/or a letter of service from the community or organization should the service move beyond the length of a semester-long class. The item should demonstrate a praxis of community engagement corresponding with the Africana tradition.  
   2. Courses: AFR 270, AFR 233
3. Public-facing piece:
   1. An item that aims to engage broader audiences with debates, theories, concepts, questions, and/or solutions derived from Africana Studies. The item can be a published blog, podcast episode, campaign documents, zine or visual aids op-ed, or an interview.
   2. Courses: AFR 101, AFR 269, AFR 222
4. Visual presentation:
   1. A presentation that includes both a visual component and a public speaking component. Evidence of the public speaking component might include notes from the presentation or the talk. Visual components may include PowerPoint, Prezi, collage, infographics, charts, handouts, etc.
   2.    Courses: AFR 269, AFR 332, AFR 233, 
5. Revised scholarly paper:
   1. A sustained analytic paper that has undergone substantive revision beyond its original submission, demonstrating conceptual development and engagement with Africana Studies scholarship.
6. Short Research, Policy, or Project Proposal/Prospectus:
   1. A short proposal or prospectus developed as part of a course assignment that articulates a clearly defined research question, policy problem, or project objective. The proposal should explain the significance of the problem or intervention within Africana Studies, situate it in relation to relevant scholarship, debates, or institutional contexts, and outline proposed methods, approaches, or strategies of analysis or action. Proposals may be exploratory in nature and need not represent a completed research or policy project.
   2. Courses: AFR 236, AFR 246, AFR 331
       
7. Intellectual Genealogy or Literature Review
   1. An intellectual genealogy, literature review, or conceptual synthesis developed as part of a course assignment. This item should trace key thinkers, texts, debates, or frameworks relevant to an Africana Studies question, tradition, or problem, and demonstrate the student’s ability to situate their work within ongoing scholarly conversations. The item may take written, visual, or hybrid form and should reflect engagement with multiple perspectives, points of convergence and divergence, and the ethical or political stakes of the ideas under consideration.
   2. Courses: AFR 345, 
8. Reflexivity statement:
   1. This self-assessment allows majors/minors to discuss their growth and progress through the program, connecting courses to their growth, and allows for consideration of accomplishments, and future goals of how Africana Studies will shape their post-graduate lives. 
      
      
      In addition to the portfolio items, all Africana Studies majors and minors must submit a reflexivity statement that situates their portfolio within the Africana Studies curriculum. The reflexivity statement should be approximately 1,500-1,800 words for majors and 600-800 words for minors.
      
      The statement should explicitly address how the selected portfolio items reflect the student’s engagement with the department’s core areas of study, including methods of knowledge production; cultural production and expression; geographic and ecological investigation; social thought and institutions; and intellectual history. Students should reflect on how their thinking developed across courses, how revision shaped their work overtime, and how Africana Studies frameworks informed their analytical, ethical, and political commitments. The reflexivity statement must also include explicit reflection on the ethical and political stakes of the student’s work, including questions of positionality, responsibility, ethical accountability, and the kinds of futures, social arrangements, or forms of collective life that Africana Studies scholarship works toward.
      The reflexivity statement is intended to be synthetic and reflective rather than a traditional research paper and should focus on integration, analysis, and critical self-positioning rather than the production of new research.