ANTH 1702 - MUSLIM POLITICS IN REAL TIME

Minimum Credits: 3
Maximum Credits: 3
Media representations and news stories about the 'muslim world' often project a troubling ahistorical and sensationalist narrative about a region torn by violence, fanaticism and corruption. This information literacy-driven course will teach you how to place current events in the muslim world or involving people of muslim background in their historical context. It will also teach you to discern what constitutes a valid news source and how to find sources you can trust. We'll develop the skills necessary to make sense out of a news landscape that presents conflicting accounts of the same story and that fails to cover some stories altogether. You'll leave this course with a command over how to find news, how to read news, and then how to make sense of it through rigorous historical and social scientific analysis. To that end, you'll learn how to locate and evaluate scholarly sources with the same rigor as you do news sources. You'll be provided with a number of key aspects and developments in the history of the 'muslim world', so that even if you have no prior knowledge of islamic history you will be familiar with the key terms and themes. You will be introduced to the long history of problematic media portrayals of muslims and the muslim world and efforts to both critique and change these representations. We will work intensively with a librarian to master a set of basic information literacy skills at the start of the semester that we will grow and refine as the class progresses. The remainder of the class syllabus will be determined by the current news cycle, which will generate topics to be considered for further historical analysis.
Academic Career: Undergraduate
Course Component: Lecture
Grade Component: LG/SNC Elective Basis

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