LIFELONG LEARNING COURSE

Course Description

The Yaqui, Hiaki, or Yoeme people have had a long and complex history in the southwestern region of the United States and the northwest of Mexico. Straddling both sides of the US-Mexico border, their cultural imprint in the Sonoran Desert extends from their ancestral lands in the valley of the Río Yaqui in the Mexican state of Sonora to the federally-recognized sovereign Pascua Yaqui Tribe in Arizona. Over six one-hour sessions, this course will examine the historical and contemporary contexts that shape Yaqui life, identity, and culture. The class will look into a diversity of historical benchmarks, including Yaqui origin narratives, Spanish and Catholic influences, enslavement under Mexican rule, and migration to the United States. Contemporary topics such as water rights in Sonora, Indian gaming, and the importance of maintaining culture and language for the Yaqui people will also be explored. 

Course Format

Registered community members will meet with Professor Gaxiola in six live online sessions on the following Fridays from 9 to 10 AM: October 29, November 5, 12, 19, December 3 and 10. No meeting during Thanksgiving weekend.

Attendance & Participation

This course will be delivered via the University of Arizona Zoom platform. All class sessions will be LIVE ONLINE and will be recorded. The recordings will be shared with registered students after each session to facilitate access for those who cannot make the live sessions. 

Registration

Online registration for this course opens on Monday, August 16, 2021, at 10 a.m. After registration, participants will receive instructions about how to access the course online.

Refunds

Refunds are available and need to be requested before the second class meeting (November 5). To drop a class, please contact us at 520-626-6694 or sbs-communitymatters@email.arizona.edu.  A $25 administrative fee for each cancellation will apply.

Course Description

Understanding realities of contemporary crime in the US can be confusing (and misleading) due to the myths and politics that have come to inform our perspective. In this accessible five-week course taught by University of Arizona cultural geographer Stefano Bloch, we will learn about the realities and geographical context of crime and policing in a way that provides critical understanding, not the perpetuation of popular assumptions. As an expert on gangs, graffiti, and urban development, Professor Bloch will discuss neighborhood-based criminality and criminalization, while also focusing on how processes of urban development such as redlining, suburbanization, and gentrification effect our perception of criminal activity, from small-scale disorder to high-level street violence. Students will complete this course with an understanding of historical crime trends, crime statistics, and the ability to see how the city is not simply a container for crime, but a co-creator of what constitutes crime and how it is policed.

Course Format

Registered community members will meet with Professor Block in five live online sessions on the following Mondays from 5 to 6:30 PM: October 18, 25, November 1, 8 and 15.

Attendance & Participation

This course will be delivered via the University of Arizona Zoom platform. All class sessions will be LIVE ONLINE and will be recorded. The recordings will be shared with registered students after each session to facilitate access for those who cannot make the live sessions. 

Registration

Online registration for this course opens on Monday, August 16, 2021, at 10 a.m. After registration, participants will receive instructions about how to access the course online.

Refunds

Refunds are available and need to be requested before the second class meeting (October 25). To drop a class, please contact us at 520-626-6694 or sbs-communitymatters@email.arizona.edu.  A $25 administrative fee for each cancellation will apply.

Course Description

We invite you to join Distinguished Outreach Professor Tom Sheridan for a six-week virtual course on the Native Peoples of the Southwest, particularly those of southern Arizona, and their interactions with the Spanish empire, the Mexican republic, and the United States over the last 500 years. The Southwest is a region that remained a frontier in the most basic sense of the term---a place where no group had a monopoly on violence---until the 1880s, when Geronimo and the Chiricahua Apaches surrendered for the final time. During those centuries, Native peoples living in the region like the Hopis and O’odham encountered two waves of newcomers---Athabaskan-speaking peoples from the north and Spaniards from the south. This class will focus on those encounters as well as the contemporary struggles of Native peoples to reclaim their tribal sovereignty and take control of their own destinies in the 21^st century.

Readings and Syllabus

Sheridan, Thomas E. and Nancy J. Parezo, eds. Paths of Life: American Indians of the Southwest and Northern Mexico. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1996. ISBN-13: 978-0816514663.

Attendance & Participation

This course will be delivered via the University of Arizona Zoom platform. The six different class sessions will be LIVE ONLINE and will be recorded. The recordings will be shared with registered students after each session to facilitate access for those who cannot make the live sessions.

Registration

Online registration for this course is now open. After registration participants will receive instructions about how to access the course online. 

Refunds

Refunds are available and need to be requested before or by March 31. To drop a class, please contact Kerstin Miller at 520-621-5111 or kbmiller@email.arizona.edu. A $25 administrative fee for each cancellation will apply.

Course Description

In this seven-week online course community members will study, without pressure of graded assignments, alongside University of Arizona graduate students enrolled in the Human Rights Practice Program. Join cultural and medical anthropologist Dr. Mette Brogden as she explores the phenomenology of migration:  the experiences of people undertaking the migration journey, as well as the participation of other stakeholders and players who are facilitating, trying to prevent, and/or otherwise participating in these journeys and arrivals. Dr. Brogden will introduce course participants to the field of refugee and migration management/deterrence and will host weekly virtual lectures with guest speakers from areas that are part of migrant journeys from Central America to the U.S., and from West Africa to Europe. 

Course Format

Registered community members will meet with Dr. Brogden in seven live online sessions on the following Mondays from 5 to 6:30 PM: March 22, 29, April 5, 12, 19, 26, and May 3.

Both registered Community members and University of Arizona graduate students will meet together in weekly live online sessions with invited guests. Time and date of those sessions will be announced a soon as they are finalized and confirmed with the invited guests. 

Attendance & Participation

This course will be delivered via the University of Arizona Zoom platform. All class sessions will be LIVE ONLINE and will be recorded. The recordings will be shared with registered students after each session to facilitate access for those who cannot make the live sessions.

Registration

Online registration for this course is now open. After registration participants will receive instructions about how to access the course online. 

Refunds

Refunds are available and need to be requested before or by March 26. To drop a class, please contact Kerstin Miller at 520-621-5111 or kbmiller@email.arizona.edu. A $25 administrative fee for each cancellation will apply.

This course will focus on the Native Peoples of the Southwest, particularly those of southern Arizona, and their interactions with the Spanish empire, the Mexican republic, and the United States over the last 500 years. The Southwest is a region that remained a frontier in the most basic sense of the term – a place where no group had a monopoly on violence – until the 1880s, when Geronimo and the Chiricahua Apaches surrendered for the final time. During those centuries, Native peoples living in the region like the Hopis and O’odham encountered two waves of newcomers – Athabaskan-speaking peoples from the north and Spaniards from the south. This class will focus on those encounters as well as the contemporary struggles of Native peoples to reclaim their tribal sovereignty and take control of their own destinies in the 21st century.

Course Description

Just 15 years after the birth of the moving image, the first film was shot in Tucson. Sunshine, railroad access, and exotic flora, fauna, and faces made Tucson an ideal movie location. Images of the frontier, the Old West, and the New West have been shaped in the public imagination by our celluloid desert. Join film scholar and cultural critic Jennifer Jenkins as she discusses some of the many iterations of film in Tucson, including early silent films, Hollywood westerns, melodramas, mysteries, television series, commercials, and homemade films about the region. Participants will  gain an understanding of the mechanics of the early moving image,  the ways in which cinemagoing changed as the medium evolved, and an historical understanding of the visual and cultural thematics of films shot in our desert region. 

This online course is offered in partnership with The Loft Cinema.

Course Format

In each of the five weeks, a one-hour asynchronous pre-recorded session will introduce topics and films for the week. One-hour live Zoom sessions on Tuesdays will incorporate viewings of clips and shorter films, some lecture, and discussion.

Participants may wish to view full-length movies discussed in the course on their own time via a streaming platform of their choice.

Registration

Online registration for this course is now open.  After registration participants will receive instructions about how to access the course online. 

Refunds

Refunds are available and need to be requested before or by March 15. To drop a class, please contact Kerstin Miller at 520-621-5111 or kbmiller@email.arizona.edu. A $25 administrative fee for each cancellation will apply.

Course Description

This six-week online course provides an archaeological overview of American Indian societies in the Southwest from the earliest occupation at least 12,000 years ago through the colonial period, including where, when, and how they lived. Join University of Arizona Regents Professor Barbara Mills as she explores the great diversity of societies that occupied the Southwest. Learn to understand changing adaptations of southwestern peoples while looking at current debates and interpretations of the unwritten history of the past.  Taught by one of the world’s leading experts in our region, the class will also look at how archaeologists piece together information from field and laboratory work, the intersection of archaeological and American Indian oral histories, and the relevance and uses of archaeology for contemporary communities.

Registration for this class has closed.

Readings and Syllabus

Required textbook:

Plog, Stephen. Ancient Peoples of the American Southwest. 2^nd ed. Thames & Hudson, 2008. ISBN-10: 0500286930. ISBN-13: 978-0500286937. This text is available from Amazon or Barnes & Noble 

Other supplementary materials will be provided to registered participants electronically.  

Attendance & Participation

This course will be delivered via the University of Arizona Zoom platform. The six different class sessions will be LIVE ONLINE and will be recorded. The recordings will be shared with registered students after each session to facilitate access for those who cannot make the live sessions.

Registration

Online registration for this course is now open. After registration participants will receive instructions about how to access the course online. 

Refunds

Refunds are available and need to be requested before or by February 9. To drop a class, please contact Kerstin Miller at 520-621-5111 or kbmiller@email.arizona.edu. A $25 administrative fee for each cancellation will apply.

Course Description

How can we understand and solve the challenges of climate change in ways that acknowledge the unequal responsibilities for climate change, the uneven impacts of climate change on different places and people, and the need to develop responses and solutions that reduce the risks of climate change for everyone without undermining other goals of sustainable development? In this five-week course taught by University of Arizona Regents Professor Diana Liverman, we will consider the origins of calls for climate justice from researchers, poor and vulnerable countries, women and youth, communities of color, and policy makers. We will discuss the debates within and between researchers, activists, communities and countries about who is most responsible for climate change, who is most vulnerable to it, and who should respond and how. Taught by a world-renowned expert in climate and environment, the class will make complex ideas accessible to a general public and will offer a comprehensive look at both the perils and promise of the defining issue of our time.

Registration for this class has closed.

Attendance & Participation

This course will be delivered via the University of Arizona Zoom platform. The five different class sessions will be LIVE ONLINE and will be recorded. The recordings will be shared with registered students after each session to facilitate access for those who cannot make the live sessions.

Registration

Refunds

Refunds are available and need to be requested before or by February 9. To drop a class, please contact Kerstin Miller at 520-621-5111 or kbmiller@email.arizona.edu. A $25 administrative fee for each cancellation will apply.

Join Political Science Professor Paulette Kurzer, a specialist in European politics, as she examines the rise of radical rightwing populist parties. Virtually all (West) European countries nowadays possess a rightwing populist party, defined as a political group that claims to represent the people against the elite and espouses nationalist, anti-immigration, and anti-EU rhetoric. This course will explore why rightwing populism has spread in Europe since the early 2000s. We will compare the political dynamics in three West European countries: France, Germany, and the Netherlands. Special attention will be given to the domestic electoral system and how this enables (or not) the rise of anti-establishment challenger parties.  In our final meeting, we will discuss whether Covid-19 has or will arrest the growth and appeal of rightwing populism.  

Students do not need any prior knowledge.

Attendance & Participation

This course will be delivered via the University of Arizona Zoom platform. The five different class sessions will be LIVE ONLINE and will be recorded. The recordings will be shared with registered students after each session to facilitate access for those who cannot make the live sessions.

Registration

Online registration for this course is now open. After registration participants will receive instructions about how to access the course online. 

Refunds

Refunds are available and need to be requested before or by October 13. To drop a class, please contact Kerstin Miller at 520-621-5111 or sbs-communitymatters@email.arizona.edu. A $25 administrative fee for each cancellation will apply.

If you want to engage more actively in your community for positive change, here is your opportunity!  In this five-week course taught by Jeannette Maré, Founder of Ben's Bells in Tucson, participants will explore and evolve their understanding of “kindness” through readings, videos, and class discussions about fundamental concepts and common misconceptions of kindness. Using a social science lens, participants will engage their curiosity about the complexity of humans to identify their own barriers to kind action.  Jeannette Maré will provide the tools for participants to develop a thoughtful and detailed plan for putting their kind intentions into action, including plans for confronting their own misconceptions and fears so that their kind intention will be more likely to result in positive outcomes. Anyone who is committed to kindness and who wants to feel more confident in putting their kindness into action in their personal, professional, and community lives should consider taking this course.

Attendance & Participation

This course will be delivered via the University of Arizona Zoom platform. The five class sessions will be LIVE ONLINE and will be recorded. The recordings will be shared with registered students after each session to facilitate access for those who cannot make the live sessions. In addition, the participants will also watch on their own a one hour pre-recorded lecture each week.

Registration

Online registration for this course is now open. After registration participants will receive instructions about how to access the course online. 

Refunds

Refunds are available and need to be requested before or by October 6. To drop a class, please contact Kerstin Miller at 520-621-5111 or sbs-communitymatters@email.arizona.edu. A $25 administrative fee for each cancellation will apply.