Spring 2025 NRES 598 Gender & Environment in the Amazon (3 credit hours) University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign Day, Time Room Turner Hall Instructor: Professor McKenzie Johnson (she/her) Turner Hall S-512 Office Phone: 217-300-8308 Email: mfj4@illinois.edu Office Hours: Wednesday 2:00-3:00 or by appointment  1. Course Description What is this course about? Scholarship across environmental justice, political ecology, gender studies, and environmental politics is increasingly drawing attention to the problem of violence against land and...

This course explores how Mexican cinema, from its beginnings at end of the 19th century through 21st century production, has commented on and participated in major social and national processes such as the Mexican Revolution, the (re)construction of national identity, modernization, as well as the negotiation of changing conceptions of class, gender, and race. We will analyze canonical, landmark films as well as lesser-known works to explore how a variety of directors and genres have engaged the country’s national imaginary through time. As film is an industrial art form, we will examine the...

(CRN 51183) 4 credit hours    In this course students explore how a range of local regulatory agencies invoke international institutions in the governance of urban conflicts. Specifically, we will study and map how urban inhabitants mobilize narratives of international human rights to collectively reclaim collective forms of belonging and social citizenship. WHO Graduate and Undergraduate students interested in how international institutions (II) and universal narratives of human rights shape and are shaped by localized social justice movements in urban environments. WHAT...

Is one form of cinema more truthful than any other? Are realist styles any more ethical with regards to the depiction of marginalized populations? How and why has realism become an idiom of prestige for Latin American films on the festival circuit? For nearly a century, cinemas purporting to offer an alternative to entertainment films have attempted to situate themselves within a privileged relationship to realism in contradistinction to the notions of pleasure, distraction, and deception that critics have identified as inherent to the commercial movie industry. Taking as its point of...