My courses emphasize activism and community engagement through “Creative Activist History,” “Margin to Center,” “Hip Hop Pedagogy” and Autoethnography projects. Students conduct primary source and ethnographic research and employ digital activism, through podcasts, blogs and websites, to educate their communities about the historical and transnational intersections of racism, sexism, classism and heterosexism.
I both use and teach interdisciplinary methodologies from the social sciences and humanities (interviews, participant observation, ethnographic object analysis, archival research, historical social network analysis) to address the intersections of race, gender, sexuality, class, religion, nationalism, and colonialism.
Race, Gender & Sexuality in Hip-HOp:
Hip-hop pedagogy projects
The “Hip Hop Pedagogy” project inspires students to create their own hip hop content (video, audio, website, and/or lyrics) in response to problems they identify in hip hop culture (related to race, gender and sexuality).
Representations of Women and Feminist Liberation in Hip Hop
Big Girl Speaks: Where Size Doesn’t Matter
Basic Ideas of Sociology: Margin to Center Project
The “Margin to Center” project (Basic Ideas of Sociology) engages students in primary source research about marginalized sociological theorists, especially women of color.
Audre Lorde and Kimberlé Crenshaw: Intersectionality
Race, Gender and Science in the Atlantic: Creative Activist History Project
The CAHP (Creative Activist History Project) promotes primary source research into the intersections of race-gender-science in the African Diaspora in order to raise awareness and conduct outreach (in the form of surveys, for example) related to a problem identified by students within these course themes. Students implement a creative digital project that aims to provide a potential “solution” to the problem and share their product with peers.
Representations of African American Women in Film (student developed website is no longer available)
Societies in the World: AutoethnographY
Autoethnography projects (part of the courses: Societies in the World and World Ethnographies) develop students’ abilities to connect their personal experiences with sociological and anthropological theories and ethnographic research (interviews, participant observation) around themes such as gender, migration, social class, race, religion, labor, and politics.
Dr. Abby S. Gondek 