Graduate Course Innovation Grant

CRE² Graduate Course Innovation Grant (Credits, variable) 

The submission cycle for the Graduate Course Innovation Grant is now closed.

Course Description

This graduate-level seminar will be offered by a CRE² Faculty Affiliate. Team-taught courses are also eligible and encouraged to apply. CRE² will fund the course in an amount up to $5,000. Course funding may be used to create a dynamic, innovative, and collaborative graduate experience. Examples include invitations to leading scholars from across the country and world to engage with their course; creating a lab experience with local organizations and stakeholders; generating a range of collaborative outcomes that go beyond the traditional seminar paper, such as an exhibit, media (podcasts, op-eds, revised Wiki entries), a database, etc. The Course should follow the mission of CRE² to develop insurgent methodologies, new vocabularies and grammars, and expand conversations about the study of race, ethnicity, and/or equity.

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Fall 2026 Graduate Course Innovation Grant

Segregation By Design: Inequalities through Planning, Policy,
and Design

Course Description:

This course will delve into the historical role of policy, planning, and design in perpetuating climate inequalities in the urban landscape as a result of systematic racism. SBD expands the University’s curriculum by bridging the study of race and ethnicity with environmental justice and urban resilience. It addresses a critical gap by situating race and equity at the center of conversations on climate change, an increasingly urgent global issue.

By placing these debates in a historical and local context, students will explore how planning, policy, and decision-making are entrenched in racial, cultural, spatial, and socio-economic segregation, which have led to the emergence of climate-related challenges in the city over time. The primary objective of the course participatory approach is not only to familiarize the students with the interconnected social, ecological, and economic forces that have shaped neighborhoods throughout history but also to equip them with the ability to identify opportunities to disrupt entrenched inequities and create adaptive strategies that center justice and regeneration as foundational principles for rethinking urban futures. The ultimate goal is to produce an action plan for vulnerable communities that can initiate the path toward climate equity. Because of the course’s interdisciplinary nature, SBD is open to undergraduates and graduates from disciplines outside of architecture.

Bullet Related Injury and Policy in St. Louis and the United
States

Course Description:

The United States holds some of the least desirable superlatives of any nation on Earth when it comes to Bullet Related Injury (BRI), including having one of the highest rates of BRI deaths in the world. Globally, the U.S. ranked 7th for rates of BRI homicides in 2021, and among high-income countries with populations of at least 10 million, it ranked first. In 2022, nearly 50,000 Americans died from BRI, and as of 2020, BRI was the leading cause of death for American children and adolescents. BRI is also the leading cause of death among Black men from birth to middle-age. Locally, from 2017 to 2023, St. Louis had the highest rate of fatal BRI of any city in the United States, and in 2022, Missouri ranked 5th in the nation for its rate of fatal BRI, with nearly 1,500 deaths.

This course, co-taught by Dr. LJ Punch, a St. Louis trauma surgeon, and Dr. Caitlin McMurtry, a Brown School assistant professor, asks students to reconsider everything they know about “gun violence.” It upends the way we think about firearms, trauma, and violence in our communities by using Bullet Related Injury as a framework to consider the wounds that bullets create – “the physical, emotional, social, and spiritual impact a bullet has.” The injuries seen and unseen, in individuals, families, communities, and our society. In addition to learning about the history and politics of BRI and modes of BRI transmission (including intentional and unintentional injuries and those inflicted by oneself and by others), we will center the experiences of those most affected by BRI, hearing from patients and their loved ones. We will consider gun positive and gun negative attitudes in Black Americans and how those perspectives impact perceived risk of BRI and attitudes toward firearm ownership. We will explore how BRI in one person can create a self-perpetuating cycle of injury and what it means to treat BRI at every level – how we practice medicine, how we care for the whole person, how we change the social determinants of BRI, and how we un-break broken trust in our communities.

Spring 2025 Rotating Graduate Studio

Cahokia to Contemporary: Native American Arts, Past(s) and Future

Course Description:

The arts of Native American communities demand a primary place in both American and global art histories. The historic depth, variety of cultural expression and circumstance of the collection, exhibition, sponsorship and interpretation of Native arts continue to invite our careful and critical attention. We are very well situated in St. Louis to consider both the historic indigenous artistic cultures of our own region, and to observe the vitality of Native modern and contemporary art practice.

We will also consider current museum debates over the ethical and legal considerations of the repatriation of works to Native nations. We will examine a significant range of works—from the Mississippian cultures exemplified by nearby site of Cahokia and Sugar Loaf Mound, to works in private collections in St Louis, to the collections of historic and contemporary objects available for study at the Kemper Art Museum (including R. C. Gorman, Fritz Scholder, Edgar Heap-of-Birds, Juane Quick-to-see Smith, Rose Simpson). At the Saint Louis Art Museum, we will study not only collections on display, but also the special exhibition “Grounded in Clay: The Spirit of Pueblo Pottery” and students will conduct research on objects in SLAM’s collection. We anticipate a research presentation at one or both museums, open to students and the public. We will volunteer at the Brown School’s Buder Center sponsored Powwow in April. We also will conduct a class field trip to Oklahoma City, Oklahoma to visit the First Americans’ Museum.

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Fall 2023 Rotating Graduate Studio

Social and Economic Development Practicum

Course description:

The Practicum Seminar is a fundamental component of the practicum curriculum and allows students to apply theoretical models in the practice setting. The seminar course aims to integrate what students learn in their curriculum and practicum settings through an experiential learning process. Students are encouraged to share their experiences and demonstrate professional development by recognizing skills, competencies, and evidence-based practice models. This format provides the framework to supports socialization into the practicum setting.

The integrative foundation field seminar fosters a supportive learning environment, enhancing social work practice skills through various experiential activities, such as self-reflection, case studies, interactive discussions, and student-facilitated groups. Also, students will build competence in self-awareness, social work practice, diversity, ethical issues, decision-making, and professionalism.

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Fall 2022 Rotating Graduate Studio

The Literature of Black Lives Matter

Course description:

Black Lives Matter has emerged as the most consequential social movement of our time. This course will explore African American writing published since the hashtag blacklivesmatter galvanized a global uprising following the acquittal of Trayvon Martin’s killer, George Zimmerman. As we read contemporary Black essays, memoirs, and poetry, we will consider how aspects of BLM as a political movement are reflected in the literature of this period, specifically its decentralized leadership structure, intersectional approach to identity and social justice, and emphasis on memorializing the dead. This course will also draw upon the experience and expertise of local BLM activists as we engage with issues at the forefront of racial justice in the St. Louis metro area.  

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Spring 2021 Rotating Graduate Studio

Alternative Atlas: St. Louis

Course Description:

This collaborative seminar will intentionally combine diverse epistemological frameworks to broaden the understanding of race and spatial relationships in each of the partner disciplines, and to inform our collaborative development of an Alternative Atlas for St. Louis. Whereas traditional atlases claim some degree of neutrality and objectivity – clearly impossible in any mapping – the Alternative Atlas overtly exposes, decodes and displays silenced truths. Content shared across the three courses will fuel projects and partnerships that emerge from the collaboration. Students in the Sam Fox course will be responsible  for mapping the core of the Alternative Atlas project.

Sites of Wounding / Sites of Healing is the “first page” of an Alternative Atlas for St. Louis, leading to new ways of thinking, seeing, being and thus making the city through fugitive mapping. It accumulates the violent injustices (red) and liberator memory-work (yellow) and overlays them on the changing racial composition of the city to expose the palimpsestic urban landscape of St. Louis.

Sites of Wounding / Sites of Healing illustrates how the history of St. Louis consists of more than just points on a timeline or locations on a map. By collapsing both the past and future into the present, this juxtaposition of sites of racial meaning shows how inheritances of violence, oppression, and pain commingle with the emergent possibilities for liberation, growth, and joy.

Mapping credit: Bomin Kim