Most human beings want and seek romantic love, but is it worth the risks of heartache if love is uncertain, stigma if society disapproves, and heartbreak when love is lost? For answers to this question, we will turn to selections from classical epics, whose myths about Greek and Roman love goddesses and the mortals whom […]
culture
Being Indigenous
Indigenous peoples persist in spite of concerted efforts to exterminate them across many centuries to the present day. What does it mean to be an indigenous person in a society that is built on your erasure? This course explores this question as a conversation with indigenous voices in different settler states, beginning locally in indigenous […]
What’s It Worth? How We Determine Value
How do we, as individuals and societies, determine the value of things, services, and experiences? Questions like the value of a national park, a child well-educated, or a life prematurely lost are central to both government policy and individual commitments. Through careful reading, critical discussion, short integrative essays, and interactions with local organizations involved in […]
What is Legitimate?
The course explores how and why equilibria around questions of legitimate action in the areas of domestic governance, foreign policy, and international interventions form and why they often remain contentious. The course encourages students to understand ideas of legitimacy as bound in time and space, i.e., what is considered legitimate by some societies at some […]
Displaced Lives in the DMV
This course approaches cities and transnational migration in the context of the history and culture of the Washington DC region and its immigrant communities. The first weeks introduce DC; questions about race, gentrification, and displacement in the DMV; key issues in migration studies and in the study of cities; and basic field and library research […]
What Does it Mean to be Educated?
What does it mean to be educated? (3) There are economic, philosophical, sociological, cultural, and political perspectives surrounding the purpose of education and the pedagogical constructs that guide education. Yet, what it means to be an educated individual varies among cultures and is contextually dependent. Through various forms of storytelling, readings, guest speakers, blog posts, […]
A Problem Like Maria
This course examines why nannies are trusted with our dearest possession, our children, yet are viewed with ambivalence and why there has been such little curiosity, in terms of biography, social history, and psychology, about the contribution these “second mothers” have had on the children they cared for. The course traces the historical evolution of […]
Global Hip-Hop & Resistance
This course will explore one enduring question: Why and how has hip-hop become equally a tool for revolution and capitalist expansion across the world? As hip-hop has attained the interest of corporate America, it has gone from being vilified by many in the mainstream to a source of expansion for American ideals. As hip-hop began […]
Dying, Death, & the Afterlife
Few ideas have stirred the human imagination as has the question of the end of life. This course examines visions of the process of dying and accounts of a possible second life from Judaism to Hinduism, Dante to Milarepa, The Wings of Desire to the Book of Mormon, offering a wide-ranging examination of pathways to […]
Navigating Intimacy
The complexity of forming intimate relationships is an enduring topic of research, fascination and questioning throughout time. This course offers the unique opportunity for an intensive exploration of how the current state of navigating intimacy in emerging adults was shaped through the lens of modern history. Navigating Intimacy exposes students to an exciting and timely […]