This class interrogates "violence" as a lens to examine the racialization of Asian Americans. Manifestations of violence considered in the course include exclusion, forced family separation, historical erasure, hypersexualization, legal infantilization, labor market precarity, intimate partner violence, burden of the model minority myth, and poverty. This class examines these epistemological constructions as a means of identifying the ontologies that embody what it is be an Asian American.

By taking a comparative approach, this course examines the role of social, economic, and political factors in the emergence and transformation of modern cities in the United States and selected areas of Latin America. We consider the city in its dual image: both as a center of progress and as a redoubt of social problems, especially poverty. Attention is given to spatial processes that have resulted in the aggregation and desegregation of populations differentiated by social class and race.