England: Oxford (August)

CIN378Y0 Aspects of a National Cinema: Black Britain 

This course explores Black British cinemas and visual culture while examining categories of race and nation specific to post-Imperial Britain and its Black subjects’ world-making. Institutional practices and networks that have shaped the development and aesthetics of Black British film cultures from the 1960s to the present, will be highlighted, when, in the words of Stuart Hall, filmmakers sought to “find a new language” to challenge post-war norms and culture that led to seismic shifts towards imagining postcolonial Britain. Studying Black British visual culture on UK soil offers the opportunity to be immersed in the cultural and political ethos of Black Britain. We will experience locales and re-visit histories that, in part, inform deeper understanding of the unique moving-image and art practices under study. Topics will include London as a post-imperial migrant city, “political Blackness,” Black Power and black music’s transnational remit, Black film collectives and Black aesthetics, among other topics. Media objects will range from documentary, feature film, television, moving image art, to visual culture, broadly conceived.

Prerequisites: 
Cinema Studies OR humanities-based academic preparation: Book and Media Studies, Art History, Visual Studies, History, English, Critical Studies in Equity and Solidarity, Women and Gender Studies, Sexual Diversity Studies, Philosophy, or Sociology. First-year students, those currently enrolled in CIN 105Y, or Introductory Film courses offered at UTM and UTSC, are eligible to apply.

Due to the course’s compressed nature, and the requirement to write assignments within a short time frame, students in applied programs (such as Art Management) seeking to fulfill a humanities requirement will most likely find the course challenging.

Breadth Requirement = Creative and Cultural Representations (category 1)
2025 Draft Course Outline

Field Trips

In our field trips we will trace Black British entanglement. During our first week we will explore Oxford’s infamous Pitt Rivers Museum, where stolen African artefacts are housed. Our overnight trip to Liverpool will feature a visit to the International Slavery Museum and an Old Dock Tour, as well as the opportunity to experience The Liverpool Art Biennale first-hand. Our two day-trips to London will include a Black History walk, visits to the Museum of London Docklands and various venues that exhibit works by Black artists ranging from Tate Britain to Autograph Gallery, among additional sites that highlight Black Britons

Instructor

Questions of “difference” have inspired Professor Kass Banning’s teaching and research for decades at the Cinema Studies Institute, University of Toronto.  She has taught undergraduate and graduate courses on race, global screen cultures, black diasporic visual culture, film theory, oceanic imaginaries, moving images in the gallery, and interventions in British, Canadian, Irish, and African cinemas. She has published extensively on minor cinemas of Britain and Canada, with a current focus on experimental documentary media and artists’ moving image installation. Publishing on and organizing symposia on renowned Black British filmmakers also indicate Professor Banning’s long-standing engagement with Black British visual culture. Most recently, she co-authored “A Grand Panorama: Isaac Julien, Frederick Douglass and Lessons of the Hour,” in Isaac Julien. Lessons of the Hour. Frederick Douglass, eds. Isaac Julien and Cora Gilroy-Ware, with Vladimir Seput. London: Memorial Art Gallery of Rochester & Delmonico Books, 2022, winner of the 2023 Krazna-Kraus Book Award.

CRI389Y0 Topics in Criminology: Rights, Freedoms and Responsibilities in Criminal Law: Historical Origins and New Directions in England and Canada

This course traces shifts in the rights, freedoms and responsibilities of legal subjects, as they have been defined in criminal law in England and Canada, beginning with the gradual emergence of the common law in England during the Medieval period, right up to the present day, including the history of approaches to political violence in England. Close attention will be paid to recent developments that challenge traditional doctrines. The English legal system has recently adopted a number of innovations and proposals that have not been tried in Canada, including new doctrines regarding police administration, antisocial behaviour, community policing, speech supporting terrorism and jury trials. In all these cases, there is significant modification of established legal doctrines regarding the relationship between the state and its subjects. The new Conservative government has modified some of these policies, partly in light of fiscal challenges. Canada has been at the forefront of other developments that modify that relationship, most notably regarding dangerousness assessment with a view to preventive detention, and the punishment of women offenders, where feminist theories have been influential. Students will have the opportunity to evaluate these developments in light of the history of legal rights, freedoms and responsibilities in the common law tradition. They will present their views of the nature, causes and validity of the developments in the written assignments. The course will be of special interest to students of Criminology, Political Science and History.

Prerequisites: none
Breadth Requirement=Society and Its Institutions (category 3)
Exclusion: WDW389Y
2025 Draft Course Outline

Field Trips

Excursions will include two trips to London. For one, students will visit the Foundling Museum, the British Museum, and the Tower of London, and will be taken on a guided “Jack the Ripper” walk. For the other London trip, students will visit sites of political violence in the city. Students will also meet with Oxford community policing services. The cost of these trips is CAD $560, paid to U of T for all fees and return bus transportation.

Instructor

William Watson received his B.Sc. from the University of Leicester, and his Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge. His academic interests include the practice of forensic psychiatry, psychopathy, the provision of services to sub-populations of mentally disordered offenders who are identified, or self-identified, as having special needs, and the place of critical social science in public policy making. His publications include The Mentally Disordered Offender in an Era of Community Care: New Directions in Provision (co-edited with A. Grounds), and articles in Sociology, The International Journal of Comparative Sociology, History of Psychiatry, The Journal of Forensic Psychiatry, and Social and Legal Studies. Dr. Watson has served as a consultant for the Ontario Ministry of Health, and the Ministry of the Solicitor General, Canada.

HIS389Y0: Britain at War, 1914-1945

How did Great Britain make war, and how did war make Great Britain? 

This course offers an immersive exploration into Britain's wartime history during the First and Second World Wars. 

We will study the war through three overlapping frameworks: 1) the British role in these international conflicts, drawing especially on historiographical debates that problematize and question particular strategic decisions; 2) the experience of war both for combatants and for civilian adults and children in the United Kingdom, including the broader social and political change engendered by the war; and 3) the relationship between war and empire, including movement towards decolonization and independence. 

In addition to classroom discussion, readings, and written assignments, you will engage with history firsthand through field trips that allow us to see and feel parts of the war’s history, and to reconsider and challenge popular myths of the war. 

Field Trips:

1. Imperial War Museum (London) and HMS Belfast. 
2. Bletchley Park, home of the Second World War codebreakers and the Imperial War Museum (Duxford), an airbase from the Battle of Britain. 
3. Imperial War Museum North (Manchester) and the Western Approaches Museum (Liverpool). This will be an overnight trip.
4. Cabinet War Rooms (London) and The Mall and adjacent areas, including the Cenotaph, the RAF Bomber Command Memorial, and other monuments to the First and Second World War. 
5. Various sites in Oxford. 

The cost of these trips is CAD $710, paid to U of T for all fees, hotel accommodation in Antwerp and return bus and train transportation.

Prerequisites: None.
Breadth Requirement = 3
2025 Course Outline 

Instructor

Timothy Andrews Sayle is Assistant Professor of History and Director of the International Relations Program at the University of Toronto. He is an expert on modern global security and his research focuses on intelligence, nuclear weapons, and national security decision-making. 

In 2019, he published two books. Enduring Alliance: A History of NATO and the Postwar Global Order, studies the postwar alliance system and was based on research in 18 archives. Another book, The Last Card: Inside George W. Bush’s Decisions to Surge in Iraq, was based on oral history interviews with over two dozen members of the Bush administration.  He founded “Canada Declassified,” an online web resource for recently declassified documents, and co-founded the Canadian Foreign Intelligence History Project.  

IRE332Y0: Work and the British Industrial Revolution

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Britain (and, after 1801, the United Kingdom) became a dominant imperial power, its rise given impetus by globe-spanning commercial and financial networks. As the British empire ascended, Britain itself was transformed by new industries, new sources of energy, new technologies, new forms of financing and capitalisation, and new ways of organising and disciplining workers. This process of industrial revolution – though often uneven and incomplete, and far less sudden and ‘revolutionary’ than its name suggests – nonetheless had a profound impact on the world of work. Industrialisation created new models of employment and solidified a model of wage labour that shapes the present in profound and surprising ways. This course explores the history of industrialisation, and draws connections and makes comparisons between the era of industrialisation and the present.

Prerequisite: None.
Breadth Requirement: Society and its Institutions (3)
2025 Course Outline

Field Trips

Excursions will visits to London ("Darkest Victorian London" walking tour; Borough Market; London Museum Docklands), Cotswold ONB (Blenheim Palace), Birmingham and Black Country Living Museum and Cambridge.

Instructor

Padraic Scanlan is an Associate Professor in the Centre for Industrial Relations and Human Resources, cross-appointed to the Centre for Diaspora & Transnational Studies at the University of Toronto. He is the author of three books on the history of free and unfree labour in Britain and the British empire in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.Before coming to the University of Toronto, he was an Assistant Professor in the Department of International History at the London School of Economics. 

PSY306Y0 Special Topics in Psychology Abroad: Disability: Culture and Inclusion

An interdisciplinary seminar on the life-long development of individuals with exceptionalities. Topics include controversial social and educational issues (e.g., inclusion vs. segregation), legal, family, and economic issues, disability across the lifespan, communication disorders, hearing and visual impairment, autism, and acquired brain injury. Special emphasis will be placed on the social and historical factors that play a determining role as to whether impairment leads to the psychological experience of disability.

Prerequisite: Enrollment in any Psychology or Social Science Major or Specialist and completion of 8.0 Full Course Equivalents
Exclusions (unofficial): UTM: PSY345H5, 442Y5 (please discuss with instructor)
Breadth Requirement = Thought, Belief, and Behaviour (category 2)
2025 Course Outline 

Field Trips

We will learn about institutionalization of children by visiting the Foundling Museum, and adults at the Bethlem Museum of the Mind. We will learn about the development of medicine and its impact on reducing the disability experience by visiting the London Science Museum and the Museum of Military Medicine. We will learn about disability images and stigma through the history of eyeglasses at the British Optical Association Museum. We will also visit the Freud Museum, learn about Eugenics at University College London’s Galton Collection and will go on an accessibility walking tour of the University of Oxford. Finally, we will hear presentations from UK experts on Deaf culture and special education. The cost of these trips is  CAD $560 paid to U of T for all fees and return bus transportation.

Instructor

Dr. Stuart Kamenetsky is a veteran Professor with the Woodworth College Summer Abroad Program. He taught this course four times in Oxford, England; twice in Siena, Italy; and once online (during the pandemic) with ten international speakers. A Full Professor in the teaching stream, Dr. Kamenetsky served for many years as the Director of the Psychology Undergraduate Program as well as the Chair of the Academic Appeals Subcommittee of Academic Affairs at the University of Toronto Mississauga. He is cross-appointed with UTM’s Institute for the Study of University Pedagogy. He stepped down from most administrative duties to pursue teaching and research opportunities. He teaches several courses on disability as well as on childhood social development. He carries out research on the perception of disability images, student mental health, and disability accommodation in post-secondary education and related areas. As an advocate for people with disabilities he delivers public talks on social inclusion. He has spent many years supporting people with disabilities in a variety of social service agencies as well as the child welfare system. He is well connected with school boards, provincial residential schools and agencies where his students gain practical experiences in the field. Recently he has encouraged individuals to accept and share their own lived disability experiences – whether severe or mild – starting with himself: https://www.psychologytoday.com/ca/blog/the-intelligent-divorce/202201/my-gifted-shaky-hands