January 2-6, 2019

Guest scholar:  Steven Jones, University of South Florida

How have technological changes changed the ways we think about our world and how we interact with people, data, and objects (and the networks that connect them)? Ten to fifteen years ago, according to novelist William Gibson, cyberspace everted—turned itself inside out, as the network spilled out into the physical world we move through every day. Increasingly ubiquitous technologies—smartphones, the so-called Internet of Things, Augmented Reality, 3D printing, cryptocurrency, and Artificial Intelligence—have colonized the world of everyday experience. In this seminar, we’ll focus on some of the cultural, political, and ethical questions raised by that shift, questions about security, privacy, community, and what it means to be human.    

• Enrollment through your home campus
• OSLEP provides all required reading materials at no additional cost - NO books to buy!
• Housing and meals provided

February 14-18, 2019 at the University of Oklahoma  3 credits

Guest scholar:  Julie Guthman, University of California, Santa Cruz

The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization estimates that about 795 million people of the 7.3 billion people in the world, or one in nine, were suffering from chronic undernourishment in 2014-2016. According to the United States Department of Agriculture, 41.2 million Americans lived in food-insecure households in 2016. These are startling statistics, but what do they mean?  And why does hunger persist despite manifold efforts to eliminate it?  In this course we will first discuss how hunger has been defined, measured, and problematized. We will then turn to examining four different approaches to addressing the problem, in the US and elsewhere, in order to reach greater understanding of how “feeding the world” remains such an elusive goal.

• Enrollment through your home campus
• OSLEP provides all required reading materials at no additional cost - NO books to buy!
• Housing and meals provided

March 9-13, 2019 at the University of Oklahoma  3 credits

Guest Scholar:  Monti Narayan Datta, University of Richmond

After the terrorist attacks against the United States on September 11th 2001, policy makers, scholars, and the media scrambled to understand the nature and origins of anti-American sentiment. Why would others want to hurt the United States in such a violent and destructive manner? Why did the United States not fully appreciate that such an attack might result from anti-American sentiment? More fundamentally, what is anti-Americanism and how can we measure it? In this course we will: (1) define what it means to be “American” and “anti-American;” (2) examine survey data and reports from the Pew Research Center’s Global Attitudes Project on foreign public perceptions toward the United States from 2001 to the present; (3) assess some of the best scholarship to date on anti-Americanism; and (4) consider the case of domestic antiAmericanism, with an eye toward understanding the roots of the Oklahoma city bombing in 1995 in addition to other local anti-American movements over the past decade. 

• Enrollment through your home campus
• OSLEP provides all required reading materials at no additional cost - NO books to buy!
• Housing and meals provided

May 13-19, 2019

Santa Fe, NM

Guest Scholar:  Sam Duwe, University of Oklahoma

Few people have captured the imagination of both anthropologists and the public more than the Pueblo Indians of the American Southwest. Pueblo history is very ancient, and traces of this dynamic past are recorded amongst ancestral villages that have long fascinated archaeologists. With the arrival of the Spanish, the Pueblos were the vanguard of European colonialism, both resisting and adapting to new realities. And the Pueblos have managed to continue to occupy the same land as their ancestors in the face of colonial policy to the present day, with many villages continually occupied for the past 700 years. In this course we will explore both continuities and change in Pueblo history, with the understanding that the same philosophical and cultural concepts that guided the actions of Pueblo people in the past continue into the present, and the future. We’ll focus on the Pueblos of northern New Mexico and will visit archaeological and historic sites, Pueblo communities, and places of great natural beauty and cultural significance. As with all OSLEP seminars, all costs for participating other than tuition (including travel, food, housing, and books) will be paid for by the OSLEP program.

Since 2000, Sam Duwe ( University of Oklahoma) has been studying the history of the Pueblo people of the American Southwest, especially to explore the roots of contemporary Tewa peoples’ worldview and identity. His work integrates archaeology, oral history, and ethnography to understand the deep history of the people in the northern Rio Grande region. On the travel portion of this seminar, Sam and local specialists will introduce students to the cultures, history, and places that make this region unique.

• Enrollment through your home campus.
• OSLEP provides all required reading materials at no additional cost- NO books to buy!
• Housing and meals provided.  Travel from Norman, OK to Santa Fe, NM provided.
• Go to oslep.org to apply