Course Description - Race and Genetics (Katya Gibel Mevorach, Grinnell College)

Course Description - Race and Genetics (Katya Gibel Mevorach, Grinnell College)

 

Drafting Syllabi for Unlearning Race

My comments are anchored by a course under construction, tentatively titled “Racing through/by Genes” to be offered in Spring 2012. I will offer this course as a collaborative project with a molecular biologist. Our project culminates a decade of intermittent and informal conversations over the merit of using race as an analytic tool and our differences of opinion about how to effect change in classroom and in research.  I will discuss sources of tension which we think may be valuable learning moments when the classroom is a site in which students are positioned to hear and participate. It will be noted that difference of opinion and tension are underlined as positive contributions to learning  the imperative for collaboration across disciplines and learning the vocabularies and approaches. A question which we have not yet resolved in terms of our different curricular approaches, and will continue to discuss in the Fall, is the entry point we provide students to engage the idea of race -- do we selectively include in the syllabus only material which historicize and are correctives or do we also incorporate readings which identify race as a credible category for research. If the latter, how do we prepare students to think against the everyday and pervasive commonsensical approach that presumes a link between the social fact of racial categories and corresponding biological categories.

First I map out my pedagogical principles which distinguish race as a noun and race as a predicate. Using my syllabus Anthropology of Ethnicities as an example, I propose an approach for institutionalizing new vocabularies for thinking about difference from the first class meeting. Secondly, with specific reference to the generic categories "race" and "ethnicity," I identify, as a curricular imperative, the need to explicitly raise student consciousness about the history and role of concepts which predispose ways of thinking within both the academic and the popular arena. Third, I propose directed consideration of how students retain and reference a new way of thinking that outlasts the particular course. Here I identify some criteria I use to develop a syllabus which imagines the semester and takes into account probable improvisations needed in the course of the semester (i.e. the abstract plan for the semester confronts the practical, in the classroom discussions).  In this section, I will directly address the relationship between racial identification, racing as verb and adverb (accent is on action: how people are raced and racializing experiences) and students as an audience in the specificity of the private liberal arts college in Iowa in which I am a faculty member.  In conclusion, I will summarize course goals, learning outcomes and principles for assessing this special topics course which are applicable for other courses as well.