PANA Institute for Leadership Development

Spring 2007 Course at Pacific School of Religion

RSHR-1070 (3.0 Units)

Instructor: Jaideep Singh, Visiting Scholar-in-Residence for PANA's Civil Liberty and Faith Project

Location: PSR-6, Pacific School of Religion, 1798 Scenic Avenue, Berkeley, CA
94709

Meeting time: Wednesdays 2:10 PM - 5:00 PM

Limited enrollment; auditors with permission of the instructor.

This course examines the daily racialized realities of life for non-Christian
communities of color in the post-9/11 United States, with specific emphasis
on the newly-articulated relationship between the state and these communities,
especially the religious communities of Muslims, Sikhs, and Hindus and the ethnic
communities of Middle Eastern Americans and Asian Americans. Of particular interest
in our analysis will be the role of religion in marking targeted Asian Americans
as "other," and the Christian-centric national discourses which continually
marginalize and suppress the voices of non-Christians of color. Over the course
of the semester, we will utilize lectures, textual resources, videos and films,
media analysis, guest speakers and site visits to engage the complex, serious
issues raised by the experiences of these communities in the wake of the terrorist
attacks of 9/11.

Among the issues explored in the course will be the ominously clandestine mass
detentions, disappearances and deportations in Muslim American communities;
the renewedly aggressive reassertion of racial profiling in law enforcement;
and the numerous errors enacted by the state and news media which exacerbated
the national hate crime epidemic of historic proportions which followed the
terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.

Students will begin the seminar by working in groups to analyze mainstream
news reports in the weeks immediately following the terrorist attacks. The class
will then move to other primary source documents, many from community organizations
working to deal with the horrors of domestic terrorism visited upon their communities
in the wake of the attacks on New York City and Washington, DC. We will examine
news reports, press releases by community level organizations, as well as scholarly
work dealing with the hate crimes and the newly circumscribed civil liberties
resulting from the passage of ostensibly anti-terrorist legislation. Students
will then spend the last portion of the quarter researching a term paper on
a topic of their choosing, ideally on a subject that piqued their interest during
their studies during the semester.

For more information, please contact Jaideep Singh at singhplant@aol.com.