Winter 2004

This information effective for Winter 2004. Check with instructor the first day of class for any changes.

Community Studies

[CMMU-080Q] [CMMU-100J] [CMMU-148] [CMMU-168]

80Q. Asian American Health Issues

*Note: Syllabus from Winter 2003

Instructor: Deborah Woo
Office: 324 College Eight
Office hours: TBA
Office phone: 459-2625; Messages: 459-3516
E-mail: dwoo@ucsc.edu

Course Description:

The topic of Asian American health will be approached by introducing key "issues," i.e., matters that are disputed but that have important implications for policy and practice. Examples include the issue of whether Asian Pacific Americans (APAs) are a "healthy minority"—a widely held perception even though there are little data on their health status. Another issue is whether health is affected more by "race," "culture," or "social class." Still another issue is whether health should be treated as a "civil right." The quality of contact that minority populations have with medical institutions is itself an issue, especially in California, where scale is matched by the diversity of communities being served. Because issues are by definition controversial, students are encouraged to raise questions and voice their views to help clarify any different perspectives or experiences can be heard.

Information in the health field tends to be statistical, and the context thereby is frequently lost. An effort therefore has been made to include readings that situate the illness experience in some context, whether that context be familial, cultural, historical, community, economic, or institutional. We begin by examining certain health problems from a social justice perspective—from the legacies of war, "internal colonialism," environmental racism, and poverty—to the role of culture and how it influences, filters, or interacts with these and other experiences.

Course Requirements

Both required and recommended books are available at SlugBooks, 224 Cardiff Place. Electronic readings on reserve can be accessed at http://media.ucsc.edu/classes/woo. You will need a password, which will be given to you upon enrollment. Readings are to be completed by the date under which they are listed. Regular attendance is required for passing the class. Get to know several of your classmates so that in the case of unavoidable absence, you can keep abreast of the materials covered, important announcements, or any handouts distributed during class.

Individual performance will also be evaluated on the basis of two exams (Feb. 19 and Mar. 12).

Optional: Students are strongly encouraged to write weekly response papers to the readings as these will help prepare you for the exam. These response papers (where noteworthy) can make the difference of a half a grade, or more, depending on the quality of the writing. Response papers (1-2 typewritten pps./week) should include (a) a brief "fact sheet" bulleting important points from the readings and (b) reflections about their significance, relevance, or meaning. They will be collected on Feb. 12 and Mar. 5. Late submissions not accepted.

Required Readings

• Otsuka, Julie, When the Emperor was Divine (Knopf), 2002
  
• Electronic Reserves (ERes), also available as a reader from SlugBooks, 224 Cardiff Place
  

Recommended Readings:

• Fadiman, Anne, The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux), 1997
  
• Fumia, Molly, Honor They Children: One Family's Journey to Wholeness (Berkeley, CA: Conari Press), 2000
  

Recommended Videos (McHenry Media Center)

• Toxic Tour (VT6652)
  
• Becoming Americans (VT1107)
  
• Split Horn: The Life of a Hmong Shaman (VT8357)
  
• A Family Gathering (VT1879)
  
• Whose Going to Pay for These Donuts Anyway? (VT2296)
  
• Children of the Camps (VT 6346)
  
• When You're Smiling: The Deadly Legacy of the Internment (VT 8252)
  
• Young Asianz Rising: Breaking Down Violence Against Women (VT8103)
  
• Honor Thy Children (VT7582)
  

Syllabus

Jan 8: Introduction and Overview

Jan 15: A Healthy Minority?

Hu, "Asian Health: The Dirty Secret is That Asians Really Are Healthier," 7 pp. (ERes)
Staveteig and Wigton, "Racial and Ethnic Disparities: Key Findings from the National Survey of America's Families," 8 pp. (ERes)
Fong, "More than 'Family Values': Asian American Families and Identities," 47 pp. (ERes)
Bau, "Voices: We're Not All a Picture of Health," 3 pp. (ERes)
Scully, "Asian Ailment: Unfocused Research in U.S.," 3 pp. (ERes)

Jan 22: Social Justice Issues

Trask, "Introduction," 21 pp. (ERes)
Blaisdell, "Historical and Cultural Aspects of Native Hawaiian Health," 20 pp. (ERes)
Mokua, "The Impoverishment of Native Hawaiians and the Social Work Challenge," 7 pp. (ERes)

Jan 29

Nagata and Takeshita, "Coping and Resilience Across Generations: Japanese Americans and the World War II Internment," 26 pp. (ERes)
Otsuka, When the Emperor Was Divine (Entire Book)

In-class video: "When You're Smiling: The Deadly Legacy of the Internment"

Recommended:
Fiset, Louis, "Public Health in World War II Assembly Centers for Japanese Americans," Bull. Hist. Med. 73: 565-584, 1999
Jensen, Gwenn M., "System Failure: Health-Care Deficiencies in the World War II Japanese American Detention Centers," Bull. Hist. Med. 73: 602-628, 1999
Video: Children of the Camps

Feb 5

Watson, "Minority Access and Health Reform: A Civil Right to Health Care," 10 pp. (ERes)
King, "Commentary: ANew Frontier but the Same Old Problem," 3 pp. (ERes)
Smiles, "Race Matters in Health Care: Experts Say Eliminating Racial and Ethnic Disparities is the Civil Rights Issue of Our Day," 8 pp. (ERes)
The Tomas Rivera Policy Institute, "Study on Asian American and Pacific Islander Communities, Insuring California's Healthy Future, 11 pp. (ERes)
U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, "Civil Rights Issues in Health Care Delivery," 10 pp. (ERes)

Recommended:
Podesta, John and Josh Gottheimer, "Civil Rights: Mixed Messages from the Bush Administrations," 6 pp. (ERes)

Feb 12

"Briefs: Study Shows High Tobacco Use Among Some APA Groups," 1p. (ERes)
Lavilla, "Tobacco Use Rises: U.S. Study Looks at Trends for Minorities," 2 pp. (ERes)
Gambescia and Godshall, "Smokers do not deserve a special status," 2 pp. (ERes)
Callahan, Peter, "Environmental racism; when civil rights are used to protect more than individual liberty," 2 pp. (ERes)
Lavilla, "S.F.'s Toxic Time Bomb: Immigrants are Newest Victims of Bayview-Area Hazards," 3 pp. (ERes)
Nishioka, "Lead Poisoning a Problem in Chinatown," 2 pp. (ERes)
Chun, Jennifer Jihye, "Flexible Despotism: the Intensification of Insecurity and Uncertainty in the Lives of Silicon Valley's High-Tech Workers," 31 pp. (ERes)

In-class video: Toxic Tour

Guest: Terry Valen, Silicon Valley Toxic Coalition

Feb 19: Culture

Fix, "The Dispersal of Immigrants in the 1990s," 4 pp. (ERes)
Reardon-Anderson et al, "The Health and Well-being of Children in Immigrant Families," 10 pp. (ERes)
Shiang, "Does culture make a difference? Racial/ethnic patterns of completed suicide in San Francisco, CA 1987-1996 and clinical applications," 16 pp. (ERes)
Lin et al, "Mental Health Issues for Asian Americans," 15 pp. (ERes)
Fadiman, 77 pp. (ERes)

In-class video: Split Horn

Recommended:
Adler, Shelley R., "Refugee Stress and Folk Belief: Hmong Sudden Deaths," Social Science and Medicine 40 (12): 1623-1629, 1995
O'Connor, Bonnie Blair, "Hmong Cultural Values, Biomedicine, and Chronic Liver Disease," in Healing Traditions, 1995 (ERes)
Video: Becoming Americans

Feb 26

Song, "How Cultural Conflict Affects Wife Abuse," "Theories on Wife Abuse," 36 pp. (ERes)
Benerjee, "Fighting Back Against Domestic Violence: Asian American Women Organize to Break the Silence," 6 pp. (ERes)

Guest: Audrey Kim

March 5

Fumia, 75 pp. (ERes)
Nishioka, "Korean Families Need to Talk It Out," 3 pp. (ERes)
Stoller, "Becoming Visible: Asian Americans," 15 pp. (ERes)

In-class video: Honor Thy Children

Recommended:
Takagi, Dana, "Maiden Voyage: Excursion into Sexuality and Identity Politics in Asian America,"pp. 21-35 in Russell Leong (ed.), Asian American Sexualities: Dimensions of the Gay and Lesbian Experience (NY: Routledge), 1996
Zia, Helen, "Out on the Frontlines," pp. 227-251 in Asian American Dreams (NY: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux), 2000

March 12: Class evaluations

Sadler et al, "Strategies for Reaching Asian Americans with Health Information," 5 pp. (ERes)

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100J. Theory and Practice of Immigration and Social Justice

*Note: Syllabus from Winter 2003

*Although some of the readings will change, the topics and assignments will remain more or less the same.

Instructor: David Brundage
Office: College Eight 312
Phone: 459-4645
E-mail: brundage@ucsc.edu

Course Description:

Over the last decade, immigration has accounted for about a third of American population growth, with more than one million immigrants entering the United States each year. In year 2000, the number of foreign-born residents and children of immigrants in the U.S. was a record 56 million, about twenty percent of the population. On the one hand, many immigrants and their children have faced, and continue to face, critical problems: exploitation at work, poverty, lack of political power, educational inequality, discrimination, and, particularly, since 9/11/01, denial of basic civil liberties. On the other hand, immigrants and their allies in labor, religious, civil rights, and community groups have developed a variety of strategies to confront these problems and to work for social justice.

The goal of Community Studies 100J, Theory and Practice of Immigration and Social Justice, is to provide students with an introduction to these issues and trends and to prepare prospective community studies majors for a six-month field study in an immigrant advocacy organization or on immigration-related policy issues. After three weeks in which we survey the larger context of immigration, we will turn to a variety of specific issues facing immigrant communities. While studying each of these issues, we will focus first on the nature of the particular problem and then on the theory and practice of specific organizations working to achieve social justice in this area.

Course Requirements:

Since this course will be run as a seminar, the overriding requirement is that students attend every class, having completed all the reading assignments and being prepared for discussion. Class participation will account for 25 percent of your grade in the course. In addition, students will write an analytical paper, approximately 8-10 pages in length, based on the assigned material from the first half of the course. This paper will account for another 25 percent of your grade. Finally, students will complete a research paper, approximately 20 pages in length, which will critically examine a contemporary immigrant-oriented organization, campaign, or program—in light of the larger theoretical concerns of the course (worth 50 percent of your grade). The first paper will be due in class February 11. The final research paper will be due on the last day of class, March 11.

In addition, students who plan to enroll in Community Studies 102 in the spring are required to have both their spring part-time field placement and their subsequent full-time six-month field placement arranged (and approved by me) by the end of the winter quarter. You will receive a list of recommended organizations from which to select your full-time placement in the third week of this course.

Finally, all students in this class are required to attend four workshops led by the department's Field Studies Coordinators, Michael Rotkin and Lisa Mastramico. These workshops, held in 240 College Eight, from 6 to 8pm, will focus on the following topics:

Thursday, January 30: Clarifying goals and choosing a full-time field placement
Thursday, February 6: Students' relationship to the internship environment
Thursday, February 13: Cover letters, resumes and strategies for contacting the organizations
Thursday, March 4: Miscellaneous logistics

Required Texts:

• Alejandro Portes and Ruben G. Rumbaut, Immigrant America: A Portrait (1996)
  
• Carola Suarez-Orozco and Marcelo M. Suarez-Orozco, Children of Immigration (2001)
  
• Ruben Martinez, Crossing Over: A Mexican Family on the Migrant Trail (2001)
  
• Miriam Ching Yoon Louie, Sweatshop Warriors: Immigrant Women Take On the Global Factory (2001)
  
• Mark R. Warren, Dry Bones Rattling: Community Building to Revitalize American Democracy (2001)

The above are available at Bay Tree Bookstore and are on two-hour reserve at McHenry Library.

Course Schedule

January 7: Introduction to the course and each other

January 14: Contemporary immigration: global and historical contexts
Reading: Portes and Rumbaut, Immigrant America, Prefaces, Chapter 1; Suarez-Orozco and Suarez-Orozco, Children of Immigration, Introduction and Chapter 1; Martinez, Crossing Over, Prologue and Book One.

January 21: Immigrant communities today, patterns of settlement
Reading: Portes and Rumbaut, Immigrant America, Chapter 2; Suarez-Orozco and Suarez-Orozco, Children of Immigration, Chapter 2; Martinez, Crossing Over, Book Two and Epilogue.

January 28: Work experiences and worker organizing
Reading: Portes and Rumbaut, Immigrant America, Chapter 3; Louie, Sweatshop Warriors, entire; Ruth Milkman and Kent Wong, "Organizing Immigrant Workers: Case Studies from Southern California," in Lowell Turner, et al., eds., Rekindling the Movement: Labor's Quest for Relevance in the 21st Century (2001), pp. 99-128, on Electronic Reserves (ER) [Password: "immigration"].

February 4: Citizenship, democracy and political activism
Reading: Portes and Rumbaut, Immigrant America, Chapter 4; Warren, Dry Bones Rattling, entire; Paul Johnston, "The Emergence of Transnational Citizenship among Mexican Immigrants in California," in T. Alexander Aleinikoff and Douglas Klusmeyer, eds., Citizenship Today: Global Perspectives and Practices (2001), pp. 253-77, on ER.

February 11: Health and health care, physical and mental
Reading: Portes and Rumbaut, Immigrant America, Chapter 5; Suarez-Orozco and Suarez-Orozco, Children of Immigration, Chapter 3; readings on ER to be assigned.

February 18: Language, education, and the fight for educational equality
Reading: Portes and Rumbaut, Immigrant America, Chapter 6; Suarez-Orozco and Suarez-Orozco, Children of Immigration, Chapter 5; readings on ER to be assigned.

February 25: The second generation: issues and struggles
Reading: Portes and Rumbaut, Immigrant America, Chapter 7; Suarez-Orozco and Suarez-Orozco, Children of Immigration, Chapter 4; readings on ER to be assigned.

March 4: Anti-immigrant violence, civil liberties and civil rights since 9/11/01
Reading: Readings on ER to be assigned.

March 11: Immigration policy: working for change
Reading: Portes and Rumbaut, Immigrant America, Chapter 8; Suarez-Orozco and Suarez-Orozco, Children of Immigration, Epilogue; readings on ER to be assigned.

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148. Women's Health Activism

To view class syllabus from Fall 2002, go to:

http://ic.ucsc.edu/~nancys/cmmu148

Note: There will be some changes in the syllabus and the readings, but the topics will be somewhat similar. The basic daily format and assignments will be very similar to last year's. Small sections (15-20 students maximum) will meet with either a graduate student leader or an undergraduate course assistant who has previously taken the course.

1. Provide a working definition of globalization and describe its constituent elements.
   
2. Discuss the historical origins of globalization, both in terms of the development of capitalism, more broadly, and the specific crises in the post-WWII period that led to the restructuring of the global economy.
   
3. Define and demonstrate appropriate use of key concepts in global political economy.
   
4. Explain some of the ideological and material forces of globalization (but with cognizance that different explanations may be in contradiction with each other).
   
5. Describe several social consequences of globalization, and explain how particular institutional practices and social mechanisms generate them.
   
6. Analyze the origins and efficacy of various movements against globalization.

1. A short midterm examination, focusing on definitions and key concepts, to be held in class on Tuesday, February 10. 20% of the total grade.
   
2. Completion of a group research project, to be organized and discussed in section. 20% of the total grade.
   
3. A short (non-research based) writing assignment, to be discussed in section. 10% of the total grade.
   
4. Informed participation in class and section. 10% of the total grade.
   
5. A final examination that tests your analytical and evaluative knowledge of the course content. The final will take place on March 15. 40% of the total grade.

• Tim Allen and Alan Thomas, editors. Poverty and Development: Into the twenty-first century. London: Oxford University Press, 2000
  
• Knox et al. The Geography of the World Economy. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003

Both will be put on reserve.

• Brecher et al. (2000), Globalization from Below
  
• Castells (2003), The Power of Identity (2nd edition)
  
• Collins (2003), Threads: Gender, Labor, and Power in the Global Apparel Industry
  
• Held et al. (1999), Global Transformations
  
• McMichael (2003), Development and Social Change (3rd edition)
• Course reader
  
• On-line readings