Associate Professor, Liberal Studies Department

 

Joel Wendland-Liu

Associate Professor, Integrative, Religious, and Intercultural Studies Department

Coordinator of the Intercultural Training Certificate

Email: [email protected]                        

Phone: 331-8192 

Office: 248 Lake Ontario Hall

 

Courses:

ITC 100: Introduction to Intercultural Competence

ITC 490: Intercultural Competence Practicum

ITC 495: Culminating Seminar in Intercultural Competence

LIB 301: Interdisciplinary Research Methods

LIB 350: The Immigration Experience in the U.S.

LIB 320: Voices of the Civil Rights Movement

LIB 201: Diversity in the U.S.

LIB 100: Reflect, Connect, Engage

 

Research interests:

 

Prof. Wendland-Liu’s first book project, The Collectivity of Life (released in February 2016 by Lexington Books [https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781498513951/The-Collectivity-of-Life-Spaces-of-Social-Mobility-and-the-Individualism-Myth]), challenges dominant myths of meritocratic individualism through an extensive exploration of spatialized identities constructed in the stories people in the late 20th century U.S. told about themselves.

 

Prof. Wendland-Liu is currently developing a substantial study on racial formation in West Michigan. This project will comparatively study race relations across multiple racial/ethnic communities over time from before its seizure as a French, then British, and then U.S. colony into the present. Rather than a massive compendium of Michigan history, however, the book project will identify and comparatively study particular events that can be used as case studies for re-working theoretical models for understanding race relations. There are three theoretical frameworks that underpin this research and establish my scholarly preparation for this project: racial formation, settler colonialism, and migration regimes. This research combs local history archives in various sites across West Michigan for case studies that exemplify the interaction of these three structures.