University of London, Queen Mary

This course presents a mix of different sorts of representation of one great historical moment, that of Civil Rights in the US from the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s. The movement for Civil Rights marked a decisive moment in the making of our contemporary world; although the situation of blacks in the USA was not formally a colonial one, the social determination to break the bonds of racial subjugation was part and parcel of the world becoming postcolonial; and it is an unfinished history, which still reverberates. The first few weeks focus on the novels, short stories, and autobiographical reportage of one writer, James Baldwin. Baldwin was pretty much (though not quite) the first non-white American author. Thereafter students branch out to explore different writings and different forms of representation.

This course explores how race is performed in theatre, art, and popular culture. Of particular interest are performances that trouble how we think or talk about race, especially as it intersects with other identity categories like gender, class, sexuality, and disability. Why are race and structural racism such difficult topics to discuss, especially in the context of performance? What does it mean to label a performance racist, and how can we as artists develop anti-racist performance practices? The topics this seminar covers could include histories of blackface minstrelsy, debates over "color-blind" casting, and the politics of cultural appropriation in pop culture.

This course examines how to cultivate an entrepreneurial mind set and turn ideas into business ventures. It covers intellectual property rights, financial planning, business planning, self-promotion, and how to sell an idea.

This course integrates the theory and practice of innovation and entrepreneurship. The course has been organized as a capstone course, to be taken in the final semester of the business and management undergraduate program. The course draws together learning from several functional areas that students have already covered within the program (e.g. marketing, human resources, strategy, finance etc.), and they place these within the larger context of innovation and entrepreneurship in organizations.

This course examines celebrity and the performance of celebrity. It positions an array of celebrities (actors, politicians, musicians, sports-people, for example) within their individual political, social, historical and cultural contexts allowing them to be read as texts through which to think through and around issues of commodification, globalization, virtuosity, stardom, identity, and consumerism, for example. The course refracts these issues through a variety of theoretical and ideological lenses, encouraging an analysis of how celebrity constructions of race, gender, nation, sexuality, and power, for example, function in the public imagination.