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 […]
The Arts
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 […]
Tactical Urbanism
For a problem of intriguing complexity, look no further than the contemporary city. Home to two-thirds of the worlds population, modern cities — gloriously diverse cultural, innovation, and artistic hubs, and often refuges for those who seek opportunity or escape from restrictive worlds — are nonetheless contested, even violent, grounds, spatially embodying social, political, and economic […]
How to Create Better Worlds
How does art help to advance the work of activists and how do artists enable activists to think more creatively? Social justice movements often use the tools of artwork to support and further their aims; students in this course explore how art works – and works on viewers – by meeting artists and visiting activist […]
Exoplanets in Fact and Fiction
This course will look at the amazing discovery of planets around stars other than the sun. This wondrous adventure is happening right now and showing us much more about our place in the universe. We will look at how these discoveries are made, what the planets being discovered are like, what these discoveries tell us about […]
Podcasts and Persuasion
Have you ever thought about how podcasts influence your knowledge and opinions? Any topic or theme you can imagine has a podcast covering it; they are modern, flexible modes of storytelling. But, the sense of shared experience and bond between listener and host means we are less likely to challenge the purpose, presented information, and […]
Incivility
In our society, divided by inequality and ideology, many demand civil discourse to solve the problem of incivility. This course challenges our assumptions about incivility and “civil discourse.” Course themes may include how ideals of civility connect to language and emotion; how the normalization of civility connects to colonialism, imperialism, and globalization; whether movements employing […]
Inventing Queer Lives
This course examines how dominant understandings of LGBT identity came into being in the Western world at the turn of the twentieth century and alternative paradigms for sexual and gender difference that have been offered by racial minorities, transgender communities, and non-Western cultures. Students use literary texts as well as well as films, historical documents, […]
The Shape of Wonder
What is wonder’s purpose and progress in the human story? Investigating this question, The Shape of Wonder seeks to articulate the purpose of structures, stories, music, drama, and other arts and sciences that are engineered to inspire not fear or instruction but awe. From the Old English wunder, to wonder is to marvel; a wonder is an object […]
Contemporary World Cinema
This seminar examines questions of contemporary world cinema from multiple perspectives by working back and forth between concepts of examining single, individual texts and broader, globally relevant contexts. As part of that project, each student studies in detail a single international film of their choice made between 2002 and 2017. In addition to traditional writing […]