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Yale University To Introduce Course On Beyoncé’s Cultural And Political Impact

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Yale University is offering a new course for students to study superstar Beyoncé’s legacy. Specifically, the course will discuss Beyoncé’s cultural and political impacts through her music, business ventures, and philanthropic work. The course is entitled “Beyoncé Makes History: Black Radical Tradition History, Culture, Theory & Politics Through Music,” and students can enroll in it for the Spring 2025 semester. 

The Humanities and Arts department of the university stated that the course will specifically focus on her work from her self-titled album, “Beyoncé,” which was released in 2013, and every album that followed, including her most recently released work, “Cowboy Carter.”

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“Cowboy Carter” received 11 Grammy nominations for the 2025 awards, making it the most nominated album in Grammy history, and making Beyoncé the most Grammy-nominated artist of all time, with a total of 99 nominations throughout her career. 

Beyond her contribution to pop culture throughout the past 20+ years, the course will also work to analyze Beyoncé’s work in film, and politics, “using it as a lens to examine black intellectual thought and activism,” according to reports. 

The course description states: “By looking at the 43-year-old singer’s midcareer repertoire, the course will explore scholarly works and cultural texts across black feminist theory, philosophy, and anthropology, as well as art history, performance studies, and musicology.”

Daphne Brooks is a writer, black studies scholar, and co-founder of Yale’s Black Sound & the Archive Working Group, who will be teaching the course. 

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Brooks told NBC News that the course has been in the works for years and follows a previous class she taught at Princeton University called “Black Women and Popular Music Culture.”

“I’m looking forward to exploring her [Beyoncé] body of work and considering how, among other things, historical memory, black feminist politics, black liberation politics, and philosophies course through the last decade of her performance repertoire as well as the ways that her unprecedented experimentations with the album form itself, have provided her with the platform to mobilize these themes,” Brooks said.   

Yale is not the first University to introduce a course about Beyoncé and her impact to culture. Rutgers University introduced the class “Politicizing Beyoncé” in 2010, and the University of Illinois at Chicago introduced “Beyoncé: Critical Feminist Perspectives and US Black Womanhood.” 

The University of Texas at San Antonio, California Polytechnic State University, Arizona State University, and Cornell University have all had courses about Beyoncé as well. 

Girl Vaping

Researchers at Yale use Virtual Reality to Fight Teen Vaping

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The phenomenon of teen vaping has certainly drawn a tremendous amount of concern this year, as a record number of teens report using vaping products and public health officials worry that a generation of kids will grow up to suffer from lifelong nicotine addictions due to the explosion in popularity of e-cigarette brands like Juul. Regrettably, while much of the work that’s been done to discourage young people from smoking cigarettes has been successful, teens are developing nicotine addictions nonetheless due to the marketing success of e-cigarette companies, which have been found to deliberately market tobacco products to young people and non-smokers. While vaping is widely considered to be healthier than other forms of tobacco consumption, it carries with it its own set of health risks, as the long-term effects of consuming nicotine via vapor are as-of-yet unknown and a series of vaping-relating hospitalizations earlier this year demonstrated that some vape products can be dangerous and even deadly.

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Dissuading young people from vaping is a difficult task for a number of reasons. For one, nicotine is one of the most addictive drugs that exists, and vaping products allow users to easily consume very large amounts of nicotine relative to smoking cigarettes or other methods of tobacco use. Additionally, as their brains are still developing, teenagers have difficulty assessing risk and making smart long-term decisions for the future, making it harder for them to appreciate the dangerous impact vaping could have on their lives. Teenagers are also notorious for their resistance to authority, and can have a natural inclination to reject messages from authority figures, instead taking cues from their peers in order to fit in with their social environment. Many young people believe vaping to be safer than other forms of nicotine addiction, and while this could be true, such a belief can cloud a person’s judgment when considering whether to start vaping. As such, researchers and doctors must come up with novel solutions for persuading children and teenagers not to engage in dangerous behaviors like vaping.

Like vaping, virtual reality is a new technology that has taken off in recent years

One such solution was imagined at Yale University, where researchers developed a virtual reality video game with the intent of discouraging vaping among teenagers. Like vaping, virtual reality is a new technology that has taken off in recent years, as display technology and advancements in computer graphics have made a product which for decades has been confined to science-fiction stories a reality. The game is called “Invite Only,” and puts players in the role of a student in a high school environment as they engage in scenarios such as being offered a vape pen at school or at a party and encouraging a friend to quit vaping. In addition to its educational value, the game is meant to be fun, engaging players with various activities and mini-games.

Though the project was developed at Yale, it was funded by Oculus, a virtual reality technology company owned by Facebook, and was created in collaboration with PreviewLabs Inc., a New Haven-based game developer. The game is the subject of an ongoing experiment, involving 300 students, designed to assess whether virtual reality technology holds promise as an educational and public health tool. The educational aspect of game-play involves players choosing from a number of dialogue options when engaging in conversations with in-game characters, which tests their knowledge about the effects of vaping products and the availability of resources to help people who want to quit. For instance, the game teaches players that they can text the word “quit” to 47848 for information about vaping-cessation resources, and that they should consult with a trusted adult, such as a parent or doctor, for help with their nicotine addictions.

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In the past, similar programs that leverage gaming to send an anti-drug-use message have been developed, with varying success. But the researchers hope that virtual reality will do a better job by immersing children and teenagers in a virtual environment that helps them imagine how drug use can impact their own lives as well as the lives of their peers, particularly in a world that is densely saturated with tablets and smartphones, which compete for young people’s attention. While the cost of virtual reality has decreased dramatically in recent years, the price of a virtual reality headset can still impose a burden on some, as the Oculus Go headset for which “Invite Only” was developed costs $150 or more. However, if schools are willing to invest in virtual reality technology, researchers hope that this platform can be leveraged not only to dissuade kids from vaping, but for other educational opportunities as well. The Yale researchers expect to have final results from the experiment by next year.