Latina/o Urban Ethnography and the Literacy Landscape Seminar

An engagement with studies that focus on the Latina/o experience in urban enclaves affords us an opportunity to critically address the paradigmatic shifts in the discipline that inform our understanding of the city and its inhabitants. A major goal of this course is to provide students with various theoretical and methodological perspectives and insights regarding the construction of community, ethnic and racial difference, and social inequality in US urban landscape. It builds on approaches to ethnicity and race by offering an in-depth look at the construction of stereotypical imagery of self and other in ethnographic texts. By focusing on the ways by which Latino/Latina identities are constructed as compared to other ethnic and racial groups in an urban milieu, students explore the relationship between symbolic representations and complex social processes in historical and contemporary contexts. The course is structures around four key areas. These include: 1) historical imagery and representation of the urban landscape and its Latino inhabitants, 2) anthropological theory, method and representation, 3) seeking new directions in theory, method and ethnographic practice and 4) multiple ways of representing self/other as Latinos/Latinas represent themselves and the challenges they face in the twenty-first century cities.

Fall, Spring