This course is cross-listed with Theater and Geography.

This course focuses on a local social group—MU students—to better understand how undergraduate and graduate students experience the MU campus and the mid-Missouri region more broadly. A key assumption of this course is that the MU campus—its geography, architecture, social, and discursive foundations—has embedded, structural disparities that cause students to experience our shared campus in different and unequal ways. To explore students’ varying relationships to and with the MU campus, this course features three units that are rooted in “critical place inquiry” (Tuck & McKenzie 2015). In Unit 1, we examine geographies and histories of the University of Missouri that expand its traditional narrative—reading and reflecting upon Indigenous, Black, and women’s histories of the campus and region. In Unit 2, we examine identity and citizenship at MU by drafting personal narratives and engaging in reflexive interviewing to explore a range of student experiences with the MU campus. In Unit 3, students will identify a MU site to research and present on in a culminating public tour project.