Place and Displacement in the Americas

A Discovery Core Experience

This course may be taken as either a BCORE 107 (Social Sciences) or as a BCORE 104 (Arts & Humanities) course. It also meets the DIVERSITY graduation requirement.

About This Course

How do people shape the places in which they live and, in the case of immigrants, reshape their new homes? How do things like race, gender, social class, and national heritage affect peoples’ experiences and places? In this class we’ll explore these questions and more through a focus on South, Central, and North American communities. We’ll focus on the way collectives and individuals are shaped through everything from street murals, to mass incarceration, to Native American reservations, to undocumented immigrant status.

Why Should I Take This Course?

I have taught or co-taught a version of this class seven times and become more committed to pre-major students and this course material with every passing year. Students across the board enjoy this class.

Future STEM and Business students are grateful they get to explore subjects they won’t see in their majors while students interested in the subjects are grateful to go deeply into topics and histories that actually matter to them and their own life stories.

Dr. Yolanda Padilla (she/her/hers)

School of Interdisciplinary Arts & Sciences, Faculty Coordinator: American & Ethnic Studies

About Dr. Padilla

My scholarship is animated by two commitments. First, I aim to recover and foreground the voices and forms of knowledge produced by colonized and dispossessed peoples. Second, I am dedicated to examining the transnational and historically informed presence and contributions of Latinx people to the making of the U.S. nation.

  • Ph.D. English, University of Chicago
  • B.A. English, University of California, Davis

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