Time Schedule:
Leslie Ashbaugh
BIS 222
Bothell Campus
Uses historical, scholarly and popular sources to explore the purposes and forms of travel. Asks how travelers meet and understand other people, and how they explain those encounters. Travelers studied may include pilgrims, migrant, refugees, missionaries, merchants, scientists, colonial administrators, and tourists.
Class description
Using a wide variety of historical, scholarly and popular sources, including diaries, field notes, missionary accounts, research findings, literature, film, letters and travel guides, we will explore the topic of how humans encounter other humans, and how those encounters are represented on the home front. Our investigation includes the various purposes and forms of “movement” (colonial travel, pilgrimages, displacement and migration, and tourism). We will uncover the relationships that are created, across place and space, when people encounter the “other” and interpret and create knowledge about local inhabitants. We discuss the commoditization of travel itself, as a source of power and prestige, both at home and abroad. Finally, we highlight how “encounters” are represented to those back home and how such representations make their way into the popular imagination.
Student learning goals
Students will be introduced to concepts of positional power, when researchers and “travelers” encounter and construct knowledge about “others.”
Students will be introduced to basic concepts of anthropology—and the relationships of power embedded in any social science research.
Students will be introduced to the history of ideas about race.
Students will be introduced to ideas about the “consumption” of culture.
Students will be engaged in various communities around Seattle, working with and becoming acquainted with the experience of those who have “traveled” here.
Students will be introduced to the concepts and skills associated with research literacy. This course will introduce students to the process of retrieving information from a variety of sources, assist them in evaluating information and sources, and acquaint them with the organization of a research library.
General method of instruction
Lecture, discussion, film, field trips and small group work make up the bulk of our class time.
Recommended preparation
This is a 200 level course in IAS. Students qualified to enroll at this level are welcome!
Class assignments and grading
Classroom participation, in-class writing assignments, reading journals, four formal writing assignments, and one formal presentation on the outcomes of a writing assignment are used to evaluate a student's contribution to the course.
A grading rubric is made available to students on the first day of class.
