Term: Winter/Spring 2022
Participating Campuses: Host – The Ohio State University | Receiving – Pennsylvania State University and University of Michigan
Semester Dates: January 10, 2022 to May 3, 2022
Course Dates & Times: Tuesday & Thursday 11:10 am – 12:30 pm Eastern
Course Number & Title:
Students at participating campuses can enroll in the following sections for local course credit:
- The Ohio State University: NELC 3201 “Muslims in America and Europe: Migration and Living Between Worlds”
- Penn State University: RLST 116 “Muslims in America”
- University of Michigan: TBD
Instructor: Dr. Morgan Liu, The Ohio State University | liu.737@osu.edu
What does it mean to live as modern Muslims in western societies? How do they cope with prejudice, Islamophobia, traditions, integration, war, migration, and new opportunities? In this course, we will explore the experiences of religious minorities in the U.S. and Europe for Muslims whose families originate from the Arab world, Iran, South Asia, Turkey, Southeast Asia, and Central Asia.
This course is a multi-disciplinary introduction to Muslim diasporic communities in western countries. It considers historical and structural forces driving migration and settlement, on one hand; and personal negotiations of cultures, identities, and experiences, on the other. Main course themes include the historical, economic, and political conditions for overseas mobility and migration; understanding culture, values, and cultural differences; understanding Islamic belief and practice; tensions between traditions and modern life; considering whether America is (or should be) a melting pot or multicultural society; the importance of (extended) family and generations; ideas about authority and freedom; the meanings of citizenship and national belonging; migration and refugees as a global problem; explaining Islamic radicalism.
Course materials may consist of autobiographies, news articles, films, novel excerpts, graphic novels, web resources, and analytical pieces. Students also work for much of the semester on a small group project of their choosing relevant to course themes. Projects could focus on particular immigrant communities, an ethnic festival or event, historical migration trends, a collection of novels and films, immigration laws and politics, interviews with community members or an organization, or a visit to and report about an institution like the Arab American Museum in Dearborn, Michigan (pictured above). The group projects conclude with student presentations near the end of the semester, whose topics integrate into the main course themes. Class formats include lectures, discussions, debates, film (and possibly event) viewing, and student presentations.
About the Instructor: Morgan Y. Liu is an Associate Professor in Anthropology and Near Eastern Languages and Cultures at The Ohio State University. He is a cultural anthropologist studying the globalization of economic elites in Central Asia, Muslims in former Communist countries, informal social networks as formations of power in Central Asian societies, emergent complexity of interactions between corporation/state/and non-state actors, urban space, and Islamic ideas of social justice. His broadest interests concern how Central Asians make sense of and act on their society’s structural problems. This includes turning an ethnographic lens onto the connections between Central Asia, Turkey, Russia, and China. Dr. Liu’s 2012 book. Under Solomon’s Throne: Uzbek Visions of Renewal in Osh, concerns how ethnic Uzbeks in the city of Osh, Kyrgyzstan think about political authority and post-Soviet transformations, based on research using vernacular language interviews and ethnographic fieldwork of urban social life from 1993 to 2011. This book won the Central Eurasian Studies Society’s 2014 award for Best Book on Central Eurasia in the Social Sciences published in 2012 or 2013.