Undergraduate Course Innovation Grant

CRE² Undergraduate Course Innovation Grant(Credits, variable) 

The submission cycle for the Undergraduate Course Innovation Grants is now closed.

Course Description

This undergraduate-level seminar will be offered by a CRE² Faculty Affiliate or Affiliates (team-taught courses are also eligible and encouraged to apply). CRE² will fund the course in an amount up to $5,000. Grant funding may be used to create a dynamic, innovative, and collaborative undergraduate engagement. Proposals to support the development of new classes are preferred but not required. 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 course paper and expand research and practice experiences, such as (podcasts, op-eds, revised Wiki entries), works of art (e.g., murals, sculptures, galleries), a database (e.g., archiving data), etc. The course should follow the CRE² goal 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 2024 Rotating Undergraduate Studios

The Racialized Sporting Landscape of St. Louis: Athletics, Aesthetics, Bias, and Opportunity in a Divided City

St. Louis is a divided city: ineluctably marked by racism and the legacies of racial segregation in the form of the “Delmar Divide.” St. Louis is also a championship city: host to the title- winning Cardinals, Blues, and, once, Rams and Hawks. And St. Louis is home to Forest Park, its “Crown Jewel” and one of the premier public parks in the nation, full of sporting and cultural amenities, almost all of them free. In this course we will bring those three strands together and consider: How does race and racism mark the sporting landscape of St. Louis? Why are there no basketball facilities in Forest Park? Why did Black tennis legend Arthur Ashe call his time in St. Louis “the worst nine months I ever spent”? What happened to Sportsmans Park? What was the Fairgrounds Park pool riot? Why is Steinberg Rink closed in the summer months? What would have happened if Bill Russell had played for the St. Louis Hawks?

To answer these questions, we will examine the history of sports, race, and St. Louis as we actively engage the physical landscape of the city, traveling to sites to better understand the realities of access and equity in the landscape as it is currently manifested, and imagine alternatives. The course will also introduce visual methods research and contemporary creative practices in the visual arts as viable—and arguably necessary—means of inquiry that generate forms of knowledge that expand beyond text-centric approaches to research. Students will be asked to produce written work as well as creative projects that are intended to be public- facing, allowing a wider audience to better understand how sporting opportunities have been manifested and shaped by politics, culture, and bias in the Gateway City.

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Spring 2023 Rotating Undergraduate Studios

Mapping Art, Race, and-Community on the US-Mexico Border

Course description:

This upper-level undergraduate seminar will delve into the history of “border art” as a category, whether in terms of public art, sculpture, installation, new media, or performance, using the U.S.-Mexico border as an extended in-depth case study. Students will collaborate to add to an ongoing mapping project of community engaged art on the border and create multimedia materials to augment or interpret the data as they see fit. As such, this course builds Digital Humanities practices and methodologies throughout the semester. Students will address some of the major concerns surrounding DH scholarship, particularly those of bias amid the purported “objectivity” of the dataset. Students in the course will also work to map race and population data along with their chosen artworks. In doing so, the course challenges students to think beyond U.S.-centric concepts of race and ethnicity and explore how the “third space” of the border shapes artistic practices and approaches to community.

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Psychology of Black Women

Course description:

This course is designed to provide a critical analysis of the experiences of Black women through a psychological lens. In this course, we will explore topics relating to Black women’s experiences in home, school, and community contexts, such as identity development, socialization experiences, and media portrayals of Black girls and women. The class will also consider how Black women draw on individual strengths and cultural assets to support their personal well being.

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The Racialized Sporting Landscape of St. Louis: Athletics, Aesthetics, Bias, and Opportunity in a Divided City

Course description:

St. Louis is a divided city: ineluctably marked by racism and the legacies of racial segregation in the form of the “Delmar Divide.” St. Louis is also a championship city: host to the title-winning Cardinals, Blues, and, once, Rams and Hawks. And St. Louis is home to Forest Park, its “Crown Jewel” and one of the premier public parks in the nation, full of sporting and cultural amenities, almost all of them free. In this course we will bring those three strands together and consider: How does race and racism mark the sporting landscape of St. Louis? Why are there no basketball facilities in Forest Park? Why did Black tennis legend Arthur Ashe call his time in St. Louis “the worst nine months I ever spent”? What happened to Sportsmans Park? What was the Fairgrounds Park pool riot? Why is Steinberg Rink closed in the summer months? What would have happened if Bill Russell had played for the St. Louis Hawks?

To answer these questions, we will examine the history of sports, race, and St. Louis as we actively engage the physical landscape of the city, traveling to sites to better understand the realities of access and equity in the landscape as it is currently manifested, and imagine alternatives. The course will also introduce visual methods research and contemporary creative practices in the visual arts as viable—and arguably necessary—means of inquiry that generate forms of knowledge that expand beyond text-centric approaches to research. Students will be asked to produce written work as well as creative projects that are intended to be public-facing, allowing a wider audience to better understand how sporting opportunities have been manifested and shaped by politics, culture, and bias in the Gateway City.

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Fall 2022 Rotating Undergraduate Studio

Signals, Data, and Equity

Course description:

This course introduces the design of classification and estimation systems for equity, that is, with the goal of reducing the inequities of racism, sexism, xenophobia, ableism, and other systems of oppression. Systems which change the allocation of resources among people can increase inequity due to their inputs, the systems themselves, or how the systems interact in the context in which they are deployed.

This course presents background in power and oppression, to help predict how new technological and societal systems might interact, and when they might confront or reinforce existing power systems. Measurement theory, the study of the mismatch between a system’s intended measure and the data it actually uses, is covered. Multiple example sensing and classification systems which operate on people (e.g., optical, audio, and text sensors) are covered by implementing algorithms and quantifying inequitable outputs.