HL98: Creating Communities: Identity Politics and Liberal Democracy in Urban America

This junior tutorial considers the challenges and opportunities posed by communal affiliation in the 20th and 21st centuries. We will investigate how notions of physical space and government infrastructure shape and define lived experience and how ethnic and racial groups come together or drift apart. Our tutorial will also explore the politics of community in the new millennium, questioning its future. These questions and others will guide our tutorial’s examination of a wide variety of primary sources from literature, film, memoirs, and reportage, alongside secondary readings drawn from history, literary studies, and the social sciences.