Browse Ethnography of the University Initiative by Series/Report

    Series/Report
    A desired outcome of the course was that engagement with both theory and research practice of issues concerning youth, Asian American youth in particular. This course was aimed to allow students to gain a fuller understanding of race, class, culture, diversity, and gender in U.S society, through the research on Asian American youth. Moreover, in conducting research related to Asian American youth on campus such as student organizations, sororities or fraternities, student housing life, religious life, and cultural houses, the course provided students with the opportunity to closely examine issues of student racial diversity at the University of Illinois. Also as part of the EUI project, students critically examined an institution that is closest to their daily experience: their university. As such, students investigated the role of the university in student life and different purposes and outcomes of college education. [4]
    AAS 199 Undergraduate Open Seminar: Discovery Course [4]
    AAS 199, Asian American Chicago, Prof. Junaid Rana: The city of Chicago is home to many Asian Americans defined broadly from those that hail from East Asia to South Asia to West Asia. In this course, students examine the multiplicity of the Asian American experience through specific communities and their history in Chicago. By centering on neighborhoods and communities we look at the populations that constitute places like Chinatown, Koreatown, and Devon Street. Expanding our definitions of the city based on the North side, South side, West Side, etc., and the city and the suburbs, students explore the relationship of Asian Americans across definitions of an imagined Chicago and Chicagoland. The course material cover a wide array of topics to examine the changing contours of Asian American communities such as housing, migration, segregation, and racialization. Further this course examines the relationship of Asian Americans in relationship to the historically racialized groups in Chicago. Each student in this class is part of an important research project to document the role of the U of I in student life and the communities they come from. The course syllabus is available at: www.eui.uiuc.edu/docs/syllabi/AAS199F07.doc [7]
    AAS 258 Muslims in America [6]
    AAS 258, Fall 2011 [9]
    AAS 258; Fall 2011 [1]
    AAS 258; Spring 2016 [11]
    AAS 346, Asian American Youth, Prof. Soo Ah Kwon: This course explores the ways that second-generation Asian and Pacific Islander (API) youth are actively shaping the U.S. landscape in terms of identity formation, youth cultural production, education, organizing, and community formations. These experiences are examined within larger historical, economic, racial, social and political forces in the United States. Rather than approach the study of youth through a developmental psychological model of adolescence, this course will examine youth as a culturally specific social formation. We will engage with texts that draw from different academic disciplines to provide us with theoretical, historical, and ethnographic perspectives of young people. We will also compare and situate the unique (and not so unique) experiences of API youth with young people of different racial and ethnic backgrounds. The course syllabus is available at: www.eui.uiuc.edu/docs/syllabi/AAS346F07.doc [13]
    AAS 346; Fall 2010 [3]
    AAS 346; Fall 2011 [4]
    AAS(LLS)258 Muslims in America [1]
    AAS258 Muslims in America [3]
    AAS258 Spring 2011 Muslims in America [12]
    AAS346 Section A (Asian American Youth) [4]
    ACE 398, Research Methods for Consumer Economics and Finance, Prof. Mary Arends-Kuenning: This course was designed as a critical inquiry course, where students came up with questions that they wanted to answer and then learned how to answer them. As part of the Ethnography of the University (EUI) initiative at the University of Illinois (http://www.eui.uiuc.edu/) students created new knowledge about the university, with the goal that their research would become part of a permanent archive for other students and researchers to use in the future. The research questions they defined focused on the topics of the savings, consumption, and time allocation behavior of University of Illinois students. As a class, students collected both qualitative and quantitative data to answer their research questions. Qualitative data included data from in-depth interviews and from focus group discussions. Quantitative data involved data that could be codified and analyzed using statistical methods. To this end, students collected quantitative data through use of an online survey. Finally, students analyzed their data and produced research papers. The course syllabus is available at: http://www.eui.uiuc.edu/docs/syllabi/ACE398F08.pdf. [3]
    ACE 471 Fall 2016 [4]
    ACE 471; Fall 2015 [4]
    ACES 471; Fall 2015 [1]
    ANTH 411: Methods for Sociocultural Anthropology, Prof. Nancy Abelmann. This course introduced students to a variety of ethnographic methods. Students tried their hand at some of these methods through a focused project. I had students think about their semester-long work as "pilot research"; although they did write up a short paper on their findings (their "discuss" section of the database), the culminating assignment was a research proposal in which they envision building on their preliminary findings in a longer/larger project. In the beginning of the semester, students did some warm-up exercises not directly related to their projects (an observation, an analysis of a university document, and an interview) -- some students elected to remove these from their databases while others left them in because of their connection to the final project. Students' "question" and "plan" sections of the database include multiple entries as I encouraged them to continue to refine these over the course of the semester in dialogue with their own emerging findings. I also asked students to search both the U of I Student Life and Cultures Archives and well as this EUI IDEALS collection to find archives relevant to their pilot/proposed research. All students were asked to "reflect" on the research experience and to make "recommendations" to the University on the basis of their research findings. The course syllabus is available at: www.eui.uiuc.edu/docs/syllabi/ANTH411F07.doc [18]
    ANTH 411; Fall 2010 [16]