The Big Shift: Demographic and Social Change in America

What are the most pressing and challenging issues facing Americans today? Is the middle class shrinking? How do people who live at the extremes of American society- the super rich, the working poor and those who live on the margins, imagine and experience "the good life"? How does a soldier in Afghanistan¿s Korengal Valley (TRIBE/War), by Sebastian Junger) Valley come to experience friendship, kinship and masculinity? How does an African American researcher¿s experience living in a ¿Whitopia¿ (Searching for Whitopia, by Rich Benjamin) change his preconceptions about race and class? How does modern agribusiness (Tomatoland, by Barry Estabrook) draw immigrants from around the globe and how do we deal with these invisible populations? In ¿Tattoos on the Heart¿ by Father Greg Boyle we learn how a Jesuit priest in Los Angeles is literally turning lives around through compassion, business savvy and community engagement. What creative responses are generated to these problems by normal everyday people such as yourselves? This class uses the methods and modes of ethnographic study in an examination of American culture. Each of these narratives provides a window into the various ways in which Americans approach the subjects of wealth and the good life, poverty and the underclass, and the construction of class, race, and gender in American society. Students will not be required to have any previous knowledge, just curiosity and an open mind.