2024 - 2025 CLIP Courses
Winter 2025
Journeys as Memory: Migration Stories of Knowing and Not Knowing (Choden)
Central to this course is the question: What is known and unknown in the journey of migration? Students
will critically analyze migration and infrastructure precarity, engaging in immersive activities aimed at
fostering critical dialogue and reflection. The goal is to comprehend the broader impacts of migration and
its effects on individuals, domestic, and larger systems. Students in this course will engage with places
and journeys of the Tibetan Himalayan community in Nepal in depth, and more. The class discussions
will be guided by case studies, migration research, and explore and think critically about the various
ramifications of migration. We will explore topics such as infrastructure precarity, migration, memory,
loss, knowing and not knowing.
Journeys of Nostalgia: Public Writing, Memory and Identity (Nguyen)
Students will consider journeys as external across space-time and internal in contemplation, emphasizing
the affect of an individual’s journey in their Self identity making and their Other identity. Looking
towards nostalgia (vital and generative), students will contend with feelings and embodiments of
(un)remembering and forgetting. Students will critically evaluate, present, and respond to a multimedia of
texts to explore identity making throughout journey processes. Students will learn to produce accessible
reflections for academic and public audiences.
Spring 2025
Materiality of Care in Journey Making (Choden)
Students will engage in contemplative practices related to the materiality of care, reflecting on the tools
we use, the values we hold, and the journeys we undertake. This will include exploration of internal
journeys (such as self-care, daydreams, goals, memories, and yearnings) and external journeys (such as
travel to places via trains, planes, and seas, as well as journeys undertaken through internet connectivity
using phones and laptops) through case studies, class discussions, introspection, and journal keeping to
understand not only migration as a form of journey but also the personal journey of living a mindful life
in our overly stimulated world.
Migration and Media: Tools, Information, and Communications of Migrations (Nguyen)
In an exploration of the histories of media as a medium before, during, and after transnational journeys or
migrations, this course aims to address the evolution of tools, information, data, and communication
patterns which diaspora rely upon to process their chosen and forced journeys. Analysis of archival and
contemporary multimedia audiovisual pieces such as films, radio, podcasts, social media pages, and
newspapers will be central to an interdisciplinary understanding of the vast range of information
transmission in between time and place. Students will be encouraged to explore autoethnographic
approaches to connect movement between places and their interactions (or not) with the tools and
information that makes up media.
Past Series:
- 2023-24: Dreams and Nightmare: Shapes and Shadows in Theory
- 2022-23: Nature, Memory, and Belonging
- 2021-22: Abolition & Abundance as Method
- 2020-21: Sensorial Investigations and Praxes
- 2019-20: Indigeneity, Diasporas, and Empire
- 2018-19: Critical Justice Education
- 2017-18: Critical Approaches to Race and Equity
- 2016-17: Food, Environmental, and Multispecies Justice
- 2015-16: Food, Environmental, and Multispecies Justice