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This course examines food as a cultural practice, a site of social memory, and a space through which power, inequality, and resistance are produced and contested in Latin America. Drawing on interdisciplinary and critical perspectives, students explore how food is shaped by historical and contemporary processes such as colonization, slavery, migration, racialization, environmental change, and global trade, while also engaging with struggles for food sovereignty and community-based forms of sustainability. The course foregrounds the relationship between everyday life and larger systems of power by examining how food practices sustain identity, respond to inequality, and generate alternative ways of organizing community and care. Particular attention is given to ancestral agricultural systems such as chinampas and to community-based food practices, as well as to locally grounded and transnational contexts that connect Latin America with diasporic communities. This course has local and global experiential components that will connect classroom learning with lived realities through direct engagement with food practices, community knowledge, and social justice issues in the Inland Empire and Mexico City. There will be a field trip to Mexico City during fall break.  Taught in Spanish.  

This course explores the ways in which our earth functions as a system, how climate has changed on recent and geologic timescales, and how humans have engendered the present climate crisis. The course focuses on deepening knowledge of the climate crisis by featuring global case studies, exploring portrayals of climate change in the media, and conducting local climate change research projects. We will read and discuss primary journal literature about climate change, examine climate pieces in the media, and engage with climate change scientists as well as impacted communities with initiatives such as the Cool Pavement Initiative in Pacoima, CA.  

The course is designed to develop problem solving skills in chemistry and environmental science and apply the fundamental ideas of chemistry to environmental concepts and incorporate them into environmental issues faced by communities. We will learn about how the chemicals that we create and use impact our environmental systems. Major topics include water, air, and land pollution, climate change, energy creation and impact on the planet. The course includes a collaboration with faculty and students at University of Technology Thonburi (KMUTT) in Bangkok, Thailand around the community impact of water pollution in the historic Bangkok Canal systems. Students will develop proposals to participate in the Bangkok Design Week with art installations to disseminate scientific findings.