Waking Up or Sleep Walking?

Discovery Core Experience: I&S Course

B CORE 107; meets Diversity requirement (DIV)

60-Second Syllabus: Waking Up or Sleep Walking?: Explorations of Wokeness

About This Course:

After the uprisings following the murder of George Floyd in the summer of 2020, many people have started to notice and more readily speak about racial inequity for the first time. Is this raising consciousness substantial? Will it actually lead to change? This course analyzes racial inequity in the U.S. and investigates how individuals, communities, educational institutions, and even businesses respond to systemic racial inequity. The course first aims to develop a cursory understanding of how racism came to be an essential foundation of the US as a nation, and how white supremacy shapes many of our values, our institutions, and priorities as a nation. After this, we move to asking how people respond to racial inequity once they begin to awaken to its reality. By foregrounding the uprisings of summer 2020, we navigate the terrain of varied responses with a special interest in how to best act in order to resist racism and its forces. Most importantly, this course offers us an opportunity for personal reflection around the ways in which we show-up for racial justice and the ways in which we act complicit in racism.

Course Questions

  1. What is performative allyship? How does it perpetuate white supremacy?
  2. What is our individual racial relationship to white supremacy?
  3. How is being a co-conspirator different from being an ally?
  4. How can we transform ourselves in small ways to act for social justice on a broader scale?

What to Expect From Me (Professor Merchant!):

I am genuinely interested in the topics of this course and I struggle to align my actions to my desires for social change. I want this course to be a space where we help each other think through how to work toward social justice with integrity. Most of the texts for this class will come from popular media sources but I will also have a book club where smaller groups of students will read one book and discuss it together. Discussion is also a really important component of this class, and I am committed to working with students who are anxious about speaking-up to build opportunities to share in a way that feels more comfortable. I am flexible and try to be empathetic to my students’ needs but there are things I ask for in return. Please see the next section for more detail.

What I Expect From Students (you!):

Communicate with me. If you have a question about anything, just reach out. Chances are, you aren’t the only one with this question. If you are running late on something or find that you are struggling with motivation, please reach out to me (as soon as you can). As an undergraduate student I struggled a lot and felt shame when I fell behind. I will do everything I can do get you caught-up but this is more possible when you reach out to me early on in the quarter. I sincerely care about your learning and want this course to be one where you find meaning beyond a grade.

Questions?

Have any more questions about this course? Just email me: nmerch@uw.edu

Dr. Natasha Merchant (She/Her/Hers)

School of Education

About Dr. Merchant

Natasha (she.her.hers) is an Assistant Professor of Education at the University of Washington Bothell, situated on unceded ancestral lands of the Coast Salish people. Her teaching, largely in the social foundations of education, involves explorations of structural inequity, resistance and liberation. Her research interests stem from curiosities of how students encounter themselves as othered-subjects in social studies curricula. To learn more about her work, please visit her website.

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