New Course in Ethnic Studies:

Introduction to American Indian Studies
Spring 2024
TuTh 11:30-12:30PM
Mendenhall 125
Instructor: fabian romero

This course is grounded in interdisciplinary engagement with Native scholars and the collective
goals of Native/Indigenous wellness, political self-determination, and cultural revitalization.
This course interrogates the challenges that Native peoples face from ongoing settler colonialism
within what is now the United States, without ever losing sight of Native agency and persistence.
This course will center Indigenous feminist scholarship and look at Indigeneity transnationally by
incorporating Central American scholarship and research. Topics will include gender, sexuality,
white supremacy, environmental degradation, individual and community resistance, anti-colonial
liberation, and embodied ways of knowing and learning.

Race, Colonialism and Data

Spring 2024

Ethnic Studies (ETHNSTD) 5194

Schedule Class Number: 37200 (UG) or 37199 (G)

Tues/Thurs 12:45 - 2:05 pm

Location: 180 Cunz Hall

Instructor: Harsha Bhat

There are no prerequisites!! This interdisciplinary course envisions the possibility of a responsible data science by studying the colonial and capitalist legacies of data analytics and its methodologies. What makes data science global? How is data pervasive?

Explore the how and the why of the injustices enabled by data and AI and the infrastructures and human relations that sustain data science. Drawing on science and technology studies, geography, political science, anthropology and the history of science, we’ll study how data is used in education, land, geology, finance and health. It opens up narratives, histories, contexts and possibilities of a different kind of data.  

Students of diverse backgrounds will read, engage with the readings and be in dialogue with their peers, and work on hands-on activities that will help them think critically about data practices. Regardless of our aspirations, we live in a world that is increasingly mediated by algorithmic, big data and associated technologies. “Race, Colonialism, and Data” offers students the opportunity to think critically about this complex reality and reflect on how to dismantle unjust data practices to imagine and organize better and livable futures.

The course will be taught by Dr. Harshavardhan Bhat, postdoctoral fellow at the Translational Data Analytics Institute and affiliate for the Center for Ethnic Studies. 

For more information on this course, contact Dr. Bhat at bhat.115@osu.edu.