DO NOT TAKE THIS COURSE UNLESS YOU ARE SKILLED AT WRITING AND YOU ARE LUCKY ENOUGH TO HAVE A GOOD TA. Lectures and assignments are totally unrelated. Your grades are entirely based on your TA. My TA, Rebecca Glassberg, is totally a piece of shit. You have no idea about her standard. Even you have written tens of versions and met her several times she would still give a shit score and say "this is a solid work" when meeting. Reading materials were fun, but this won't change my view on this course as a shit. If you want to take it, cross your finger that you will have a good TA and avoid to get in Glassberg's class. You will die without knowing the reason.

TLDR: One of the best + easiest classes at UCLA. Take Steve Cucharo as TA.
Breakdown:
20%: Response Papers
25%: Participation
25%: Final
30%: Social Science Paper

The class is new thus workload and grading is light, hardly 2-3h of work per week.

Response Papers: simple 400 word papers commenting on specific interesting lines or paragraphs from the readings (stuff you find interesting, confusing, or just disagree with - anything). Super easy to get full (specially with Steve)

Participation: show up to discussion, talk for a few minutes and you'll get full on this (at least with Steve Cucharo)

Final: Keyword definitions (30pts) and 2 essays (35 pts each). Probably the only challenging bit of the class, but needs max 1 week of work for an A.

Social Science Paper: 5pg paper with EXTREMELY CLEAR guidelines on the format, structure, content etc. Easy to get an A on this too. I worked on it for a week and got a 93%

Super straight forward class, easy A, AND covers 4 GEs + Writing 2 + Diversity.
PS: Steve Cucharo is a fucking godsend. Amazing man, wants you to do well, extremely helpful throughout, and a fucking gem.

Text me on 4244409516, giving away notes and study guides, more than enough to get you an A on the class.

Please do not take this class if you are thinking of taking a cluster. I walked into this class thinking it was easy and light as stated by previous bruinwalk reviews but it is an actual pain in the ass. They keep changing the syllabus but the case studies we did for fall 2021 were: Holocaust, French colonialism and the Armenian genocide and the Armenian case study is the most difficult one to comprehend. During the first quarter, you write a response paper each week for 4 weeks based on readings you've been assigned, then you work on a visual studies paper which is a 6-7 page paper (not the easiest thing to write just btw) and then on top of that you have 2 final essays that are supposed to be 3-4 pages each. They don't think before they assign the readings, there were weeks where we were assigned over 100 pages of reading and some weeks where we'd have to watch 2 hour-long documentaries along with reading the material assigned for the week. This material was not only disturbing to read but also so so so hard to understand because most of it was aimed towards an expert audience and ofc I am nowhere near an expert. And oh, don't even think about missing a discussion section because you get participation points by attending AND being active and if you don't, they dock a few points off your participation grade total. The grading is the worst part, I still don't understand how they grade, each TA has different requirements and grading patterns. If you can, take Steve, Bradley or Yair. I had Yair first quarter, loved him but I hate my current TA. She gave me an 88 on my first paper this quarter but her comments were "really strong analysis, great job". I hate this class with a burning passion pls don't take it if your writing skills arent the best. take some cluster like the interracial dynamics or biotech and save yourself from this misery

The reviews prior to fall 2021 are very deceiving. This was BY FAR my least favorite class this quarter. In fact I hated it. Everyone said this cluster was lightwork/easy but this was not the case for me at all. There was a ton of work in the form of weekly readings, although theoretically you could skip them and BS your section participation (I am not good at doing this so this wasn't an option for me). Also, Sharon (my TA, who is new this year) graded my essays pretty hard and her suggestions to improve them were not helpful. I would seriously spend so much time on my response papers and would still not get an improving grade. Her discussions were hell--almost 2 hours every Wednesday of boring group activities and awkward silence. She was also a slow grader. We were supposed to receive grades for our visual studies paper a few days before our final was due, but I never even received mine at all lmao (I only saw my final overall grade of A-).

The bad parts of this class had all to do with my TA and discussion section. The lectures themselves were pretty interesting for the most part. I was especially engaged in Rothberg's lectures on the Holocaust. Nevertheless, the bad parts far outweighed the good.

I think your experience in this class is entirely dependent on which TA you have. Take someone like Cucharo if you can as I have heard great things about him.

The class itself was my favorite one this quarter. For this year, we studied the Indonesian Mass Killings (Prof. Robinson), the Armenian Genocide (Prof. Sengel), and the Holocaust (Prof. McBride and Rothberg). I had Alexis Coopersmith as my TA. The grade breakdown was section participation (20%), active reading-Perusall (10%), 4 response papers (20%), history paper (25%), and final essays (25%).

My favorite lecturer was Prof. Robinson. I think his were very succinct and engaging. Additionally, the readings for his portion were mostly from the book he wrote, and he labels each section clearly ie "who were the victims" "the army's role", etc. It was so helpful when writing the history paper and final essays. The Armenian Genocide was harder to comprehend for me. The readings, especially the Suny and Bloxham ones, were just huge chunks of text. I ended up spending two days re-watched all the lectures (on 2x speed) and in hindsight, reviewing after everything helped to filter out the extra information included.

This year's history paper was focused on the Indonesian Mass Killings and the US's role. There was more than enough guidance on this. With the final essays as well, the profs released a study guide with possible prompts. In our last section, we were able to brainstorm relevant info to conclude.

Alexis was an awesome TA. For response papers, you could run your topic and structure with her at her office hour. The only con would be that she tend to release grades late. We were suppose to receive feedback from our history paper before we submitted our final essays, but she didn't release them until a few days after. She also grades pretty well; I think she went pretty easy on the history paper and final essays.

Professor McBride was great but this is more of a review of the class itself. Definitely not as easy as the previous years of reviews make it seem like. WOULD NOT RECOMMEND UNLESS YOU WANT TO GET SWAMPED WITH WRITING AND READING. Readings aren't used until the end when the final paper requires you to use past readings. The cluster also traps you by making you take all three quarters to get the extra GE and writing II, but in the end its not worth it, so go with the freedom and take GEs whenever you want. If you get a good TA like Cucharo, then class is manageable but with a worse TA like Glasberg, it's definitely not worth it. Honestly, one of my most regretful decisions so far in college is taking this cluster.

More details about the class if you want to read:
Fall quarter - about 60-100 pages of readings a week along with 4 one page response papers every week in first half, one 5-6 page paper in second half, and two 3-4 page papers given and due within finals week (hated my life when I was writing these).
Winter quarter - roughly the same amount of reading, two 5-6 page papers for each half, same thing for final
Spring quarter - not done yet but its been alright compared to the past two quarters, but still wish I hadn't even gotten to this point.

This class is one of the best classes I've ever taken so far. All the professors are tremendous and their lectures are always interesting. Stephen Cucharo was my TA and he was extraordinarily helpful. He, as well as all the other professors like Prof. McBride, made sure that we knew that they were always available to help. Not only are the topics interesting but the discussions themselves don't feel like you have to participate because you end up wanting to. Professor McBride is a really great professor and his lectures always go in-depth because of how passionate he is to teach. Overall, I don't regret taking this class at all. Professor McBride is truly an amazing professor.

Professor McBride is a fantastic teacher in lecture. He is really engaging and often adds elements of comedy into his slides, for example he brings his dog onto zoom sometimes. He finds very interesting readings for the class and has a unique perspective to the material. Highly recommend.

this class depends a lot on what TA you had. my TA (bradley) graded papers super easily and was in general very nice. during discussion section, we were expected to talk in small groups about one assigned reading and then say one thing we found interesting. generally super easy to get by and skim the readings without much effort. the lectures varied a lot on how interesting they were but they ultimately weren't mandatory and not particularly relevant to the visual studies paper (basically a film analysis) or final essays (i attended one review session and reread a couple assigned readings and wrote the final essays on that).

my easiest class by far this quarter, plus it was pretty nice that it was on the hill (not sure if this is always the case though)

I found the lectures for this class very interesting and I liked the topic itself, but discussions were painful. I had heard so much good things about this cluster but I really got messed up with my TA. I had Sharon as my TA. The discussions are nearly 2 hours of boring hell. Luckily it’s just once a week and you can easily bullshit your way through it, but still. She expects you to of read the readings, and when no one has, the class is just silent while she asks questions about them. It might of just been my specific discussion section not vibing, but Sharon herself lacks a lot of enthusiasm, too. For our major grade paper I had asked her in class about my thesis, which she said was good. But when she graded my paper, she gave me a B and said my thesis had problems. You said my thesis was good when I showed it to you and I didn’t change anything????? I never consider myself to be a great writer so I’ll take my B like a champ but it still sucks. Besides the weekly readings that aren’t assigned (but really are if you don’t want to look like a fool in discussion), at the beginning of the quarter there are 4 response papers over the readings where you basically just talk about the readings and note about something interesting (1 is a rewrite). Don’t overthink these, I got too analytical on one and my grade was worse for it. These response papers are worth 25% of your grade. Participation is 25%, the paper I mentioned earlier is also 25%, but you get 4 whole weeks to work on it with a part of it due each discussion section, so it’s really not a lot of work in the short term. Then our final was 2 essays we picked from 3 prompts worth 25%, but we got a whole week to do it and it was based just on lecture and reading content. Overall, if you get a good TA and a vibey section you’ll be fine.