African Am. St. 101-6-21 Black Creativity in the Digital Age
New Media Black Aesthetics. This course will examine the many ways Black artists, writers, and cultural workers have responded to the aesthetics and politics of the internet age. Over the quarter, we will address the question: how have Black art and aesthetics changed (and what continuities remain) over the past three decades of vast technological, economic, political, and cultural transformations? This class will examine how the internet/new media has shaped Black artistic production across a range of fields: literature, film, visual art, theater and performance, music, and comedy. Additionally, we will study how social media platforms can themselves be understood as artistic/aesthetic forms (i.e. the meme, the GIF, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, #BlackTwitter). Particular attention will be paid to the relationship between contemporary Black art/popular culture and social movements such as #BlackLivesMatter, Black feminism, abolitionism, internationalism, and #RhodesMustFall.
Anthro 101-6-21 Madness and Media: Culture and Mental Health
In an age of unprecedented global distress, what is the role of media in shaping discourses, representations, and experiences of mental illness? Western psychiatric frameworks are increasingly defining mental health/illness around the world via multilateral health organizations that intervene across cultural contexts to treat mental distress, and are also circulated via Western media narratives that shape the meanings people associate with mental health and illness. What other narratives of mental health might be told? What experiences of distress and resilience are obscured by these dominant frameworks? In this course, students will learn about the ways in which cultural meanings and social structures shape mental distress and how it is expressed and experienced by people across time and context. We will critically examine dominant U.S. models of mental health and illness, and trace the global spread of these models. We will ask what underlying cultural assumptions and expectations about self, personhood, emotion, mind, body, well-being and success are embedded in these narratives and explore how representations in film and television serve to reflect, reinforce, or re-imagine such assumptions. Through a combination of engagement with scholarship on culture and mental health, media studies, and our own critical analyses of media objects from film and television, we will explore these questions and work to generate creative and collaborative ideas about how to rewrite media narratives in order to better reflect the broad spectrum of experience.
Anthro 101-6-22 Biocultural Perspectives on Water Insecurity
The first objective of this course is to introduce students to the many ways that babies and young children are fed around the world, including breastfeeding, bottle feeding, and complementary (non-milk) foods. We will discuss the health and social consequences of each mode of infant and young child feeding (IYCF), and what the international recommendations, i.e. best practices are. The second objective is to explore why there is such variety in infant feeding worldwide. These discussions will be guided by the socio-ecological framework, in which biological, socio-cultural, and psychosocial characteristics of the individual, household, community, and national policy are considered. Influences on infant feeding will be broadly considered. To do this, we will draw on literature in global health, ethnography, evolution, and public policy. We will also consider the representation of infant feeding in popular culture. The third objective of this course is to develop critical thinking and writing abilities. These will be developed through a series of short weekly writing assignments and an in-class presentation on a recent infant feeding news item.
What is a more important predictor of how long you will live, the genes you inherit from your parents, or the zip code of where you grew up? This course aims to answer this question, as well as others, regarding the origins of social disparities in health in the U.S. The course will also consider the broader global context, and ask why the U.S. spends so much money on health care but lags behind many nations in key indicators of population health. It will examine how social stratification by race/ethnicity, national origin, sexual orientation, education, and neighborhood quality shapes our biology and the health status of individuals, families, and populations; and, conversely, how health itself can be a fundamental determinant of key social outcomes such as educational achievement.
Economic anthropology refers to the anthropological study of political economy. The term political economy itself first appeared in in eighteenth century debates in industrial revolutionary England over the economic policies the state were to pursue. While classical economists such as Adam Smith formulated arguments for free trade in that particular context, they assumed that the hand of the state, whether to encourage free trade or to suppress it through colonial monopolies, was always in the game. By contrast, late nineteenth century neoclassical economists posited a pure, independent realm of the economy and economic behavior, which could be understood apart from politics and the modern nation-state. Most contemporary anthropologists of economic life retain the earlier, classical meaning of political economy, understanding economic facts and behavior to be embedded in larger socio-cultural contexts and firmly tie to politics, kinship and family, race and ethnicity, gender relations and colonial rule.
This course provides an anthropological introduction to four organizing concepts in political economy, namely commodity, labor money and property through close readings of foundational thinkers like Karl Marx, Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Polanyi, Adam Smith and their current interlocutors in anthropology and allied disciplines. The course tracks how the political life of economic phenomena and the economic contours of political life have been understood dynamically and in radically varying ways over time and space. The course attends in particular to the development of political economic thought and practice in the context of European colonialism's "primitive accumulation," and to ongoing cross-pollination among Marxist, postcolonial, and anthropological critique in the study of "the economy."
All humans have similar nutritional requirements, yet the diversity of food preferences across the world is virtually unlimited. In the first part of this class, we will explore why people choose to eat some foods and not others. The second portion of the class will examine change and continuity in foodways through the lenses of identity and inequality. Rather than being arranged by world region, this class is arranged topically in order to bring different cuisines in conversation with one another. Case studies cover a wide stretch of the world, from Africa to the Americas to Asia and Europe.
Anthro 390-0-32 How Art, Images and Senses Shape Science
What does gentrification sound like? What is the role of smell or color in shaping ideas of racial difference in contemporary cities? Does public art challenge or reinforce social hierarchies in urban spaces? This course examines how aesthetic expressions and practices such as urban design and architecture, public art and graffiti, and public performances shape struggles over rights to the city. For example, we will learn how indigenous migrants from Latin America paint murals to challenge anti-indigenous racism and erasure in Los Angeles and how urban developers in Delhi use aesthetic judgments of the working poor to justify their forced removal from public spaces. While aesthetics are commonly associated with the visual qualities of people and things, this course will explore multi-sensory aesthetic experiences and judgments, such as noise control initiatives in Tapei and the racial politics of smell in New York City. Students will have the opportunity to develop arts and media-based final projects that examine urban aesthetics through methods that include but are not limited to sound/smell maps, comics, podcast episodes, performances, or art installations. By the end of the course, students will be able to critically analyze the aesthetic politics of the urban built environment within and beyond dominant visual-centric approaches.
Art History 369-0-1 Media Archeologies of Art and Science
At key moments throughout the intertwined histories of art and science, the emergence of new technologies transformed the possibilities of perception, representation, and knowledge alike. The field of media archaeology seeks to reconstruct the social contexts, cultural impacts, and imaginary horizons of these moments by investigating obsolete media technologies like the X-ray or the hologram.
Grounded in the Block Museum's exhibition, The Heart's Knowledge: Science and Empathy in the Art of Dario Robleto, the course positions Robleto's creative practice as an entry point into the field of media archaeology. Robleto's inquiries into the histories of medical visualization, sound recording, and 19th-century visual culture will dovetail with readings and course materials that showcase various critical and artistic approaches to scientific media. Combining lectures, discussions, and student presentations, each week will examine a different set of objects and topics, such as maps, magic lantern projectors, silent films, early computer animation, planetariums, and virtual reality. Through film viewings, archival/study room visits, and guest lectures, students will enjoy the opportunity to materially engage with analog media technologies, and to interface with artists and scholars practicing diverse forms of media archaeology.
Course requirements include short written assignments, an in-class presentation, and a final paper (with option for creative component). Students will be asked to individually attend at least one exhibit, archive, or screening outside of class.
"Sexuality"—as potential, productive, perverse, political, and pleasurable— is taken up in this course as a profoundly dynamic node of power and knowledge. This interdisciplinary course interrogates how "Asian American sexualities" are taken up as a problematic and/or analytic in history, performance, public health, film, sociology, anthropology, literature, and art to discuss diaspora and migration, activism and HIV/AIDS, intimacy and pornography, gender and labor. This course asks, "What are the possibilities and potentialities of Asian American sexualities? How do Asian American sexualities inform our thinking about how we understand, relate to, and imagine the world and what we want it to be?"
Please be aware some texts and media might be too explicitly violent, graphic, or sexual for some students.
This course requires attendance events outside of the scheduled class time
This course explores the interaction between cybernetic technologies and cultural production in modern Japan. We focus on how visual and literary media have been used to represent such technologies (robotics, cybernetics, and the Internet) as well as how these technologies have shaped Japanese culture in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. The notion of the "cyber" - its origins in cybernetics and ensuing proliferation of meanings - forms the conceptual core of the course. After considering early definitions of this term, we turn to how Japanese manga, animation, film, and cultural theory explore the ways in which cybernetic technologies, like cyborgs and cyberspace, have expanded our understanding of human subjectivity and agency, transformed social relations, and blurred boundaries between the human and the animal, the biological and the artificial, and the physical and non-physical.
Comm St. 394-0-20 Power and Inequality in the Digital Age
In this seminar course, we investigate the relationship between technology, specifically the Internet, and social inequality. The advent of the Internet has brought along opportunities for positive societal impact, from collective production and sharing of resources to social interaction between physically distanced members of marginalized groups. Yet, the Internet has also proven to have consequences that increasingly affect individuals' opportunities and life outcomes in terms of mental, physical, and social well-being. In this course, we explore how the Internet leads to the (re)production of systemic inequalities and think critically about the roles of various actors involved, such as governments, big tech firms, and end users. Throughout the course, you will learn about, analyze, and discuss key theoretical approaches and conceptual tools at the intersection of social inequality, power, and the Internet. Between in-class discussions and the research paper, you will have plenty of opportunities to apply class concepts to social issues as well as your own experiences. Ultimately, the topic of this course is a medium through which we will learn about consuming and producing academic writing. The essence of this course lies in building writing skills through a combination of lectures, workshops, and individual work cumulating in a long-form research proposal. It is important to note that our starting position will be that so-called "good writing" is a fallacy. Instead, authoring a coherent text is hard work that mainly consists of getting ideas onto paper and editing in an iterative fashion. Through the act of workshopping, the community of this class will prove to be vital to pushing all our thinking and writing. You won't leave this class "a good writer," but you will leave with the skills necessary to provide and receive high-quality feedback.
Comm St. 395-0-21 Social Media, Technology and Mental Health
This course will examine the relationship between social media, technology, and mental health. Students will explore and critically analyze social media platforms (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, and blogs) and technology (apps, online therapy, video games) used to address mental health concerns. Conversely, students will scrutinize social media, technology, its impact on mental health and wellness, with special attention paid to topics such as social comparison and online self-presentation.
Comp. Lit. St. 305-0-1 Studies in Film, Media and Visual Culture
In this course we will study literary and critical writings about cinema during the 1920s and 30s, learning about the global circulation of films and of ideas about cinema in the historical context of the period. In addition to France, we will also consider (and students will have the opportunity to do research on) texts and films from elsewhere in Western Europe, the Soviet Union, East Asia, and Latin America. We will read several classics of early film theory that try to define cinema and its potential as an art and/or a mass medium. Beyond film criticism in the narrow sense, these texts ask broader questions about the relationship between art and technology, entertainment and politics, perception and reality. We will also read several works of poetry and fiction that responded in formally innovative ways to the experience of cinema. Films may include: The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), The Kid (1921), A Page of Madness (1926), Un Chien andalou (1929), São Paulo, Symphony of a Metropolis (1929), A Propos de Nice (1930), and An Amorous History of the Silver Screen (1931). Literary authors may include Blaise Cendrars, Patricia Galvão, and Carlos Oquendo de Amat; critics and scholars: Walter Benjamin, Sergei Eisenstein, Jean Epstein, Miriam Hansen, Imamura Taihei, and Liu Na'o
This course explores the interaction between cybernetic technologies and cultural production in modern Japan. We focus on how visual and literary media have been used to represent such technologies (robotics, cybernetics, and the Internet) as well as how these technologies have shaped Japanese culture in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. The notion of the "cyber" - its origins in cybernetics and ensuing proliferation of meanings - forms the conceptual core of the course. After considering early definitions of this term, we turn to how Japanese manga, animation, film, and cultural theory explore the ways in which cybernetic technologies, like cyborgs and cyberspace, have expanded our understanding of human subjectivity and agency, transformed social relations, and blurred boundaries between the human and the animal, the biological and the artificial, and the physical and non-physical.
This course examines the representations of care in a wide range of films from Iran, Turkey, Egypt, Pakistan, India, and China among others. Through close readings of these films, we will consider the ways through which care intersects with gender, race, nationality, and class. What does care mean? What is the relationship between care and narrative? How does film shape or challenge our understanding of care? To respond to these questions, the seminar brings together cultural products and critical texts across time, languages, and geographies. Ultimately, our objective is to think critically about how care is culturally constructed and represented.
Earth and Planetary Sci. - 180-0-01 Fantasy Worlds - How to Build Your Own Planet
The formation and evolution of rocky planets. Introduction of physical concepts common in the lives of planets as they are in our everyday lives: gravity, heat transport, magnetism, and others. Students will apply these concepts to build their own unique planet, and will present their creation at a culminating poster presentation.
This class will help students understand the key economic forces that have shaped the US health care and health insurance industry. What role do the particularities of health care and health insurance as economic goods play in explaining the size and growth rate of the health care sector? What's the effect of private incentives, adverse selection, moral hazard, and regulation? What's the effect of different organizational structures of health care provision? What can we learn from comparing the US health care / health insurance system to other countries' systems? Students will learn that these issues are important in the current public policy discussion.
This course examines economic development over the long-run, with a focus on the transition to modern economic growth in the Western world. Topics include Malthusian stagnation, the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, the demographic transition, and globalization and the great divergence. Along the way, we will discuss long-run changes in inequality, technology, and labor force participation, as well as the role of institutions in economic development, and the interaction between economic conditions and political power. Much of the class will be focused around analyzing recent research on these topics. The class will also involve a writing component aimed at improving students' ability to write critically and concisely about economic topics.
In this course, we will look into the many different facets of the economics of gender. We will study economic decisions that individuals and households face from a unique gender perspective. The topics we will cover include, among others: the status of women around the world, education, marriage, fertility, labor supply, household decision-making, and discrimination. The class will put an emphasis on applied microeconomic theory and empirical analysis. A combination of econometric techniques and theoretical models will feature prominently in the course. For each topic, we will study concrete examples emanating from all over the world, and make an intensive use of statistics and econometrics. We are also very much interested in understanding the relationship between research and public policy. By the end of the quarter you hopefully will have a solid microeconomic framework within which to analyze important issues in economics from a gender perspective.
The environment and our natural resources are scarce yet their values are quite hard to determine. Furthermore, there are a variety of problems with the incentives to use them well. Using the tools of microeconomic analysis and some econometrics, this course will define and examine "environmental problems" in terms of economic efficiency. We will also discuss the methods (and shortcomings of these methods) used by economists and policymakers to place dollar values on environmental amenities (since such valuations will determine what policy options are deemed "efficient"), such as benefit-cost analysis. Then we will apply these tools to look at a particular set of environmental problems caused by negative externalities transmitted through naturally occurring amenities, and the effects of the policies we construct in response to these problems. NOTE: This class is not open to students who have taken Economics 370: Environmental & Natural Resource Economics.
Whether you come from a small town or rural area, or have always lived in Chicago or some other large city, you likely have heard cities both praised and scorned. Great restaurants and violent crime, economic opportunity and political corruption, music festivals and homelessness, cities seem to embody all of the prevailing social divisions and contradictions. In this course, we will think critically about cities by examining how they are represented in fiction and film. What is the city's relationship to the surrounding area? What types of thoughts and behaviors does it seem to call for? What kinds of encounters are typical? In short, what happens when we treat cities more as "characters" than "settings," when we think of Las Vegas as a party animal (What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas), or New York as a cultured gadabout (The city that never sleeps), or Detroit as pugnacious and defiant (Detroit vs. everybody)? We will begin with two cities that are sharply defined by internal divisions, those in the television series Derry Girls and the film Blade Runner 2049. From there, we will compare two representations of Las Vegas (The Hangover and Fear and Loathing), and ask what kind of freedom is on offer and what is the cost of such freedom? Finally, we will visit post-Katrina New Orleans (Treme) and the multicultural London of filmmaker Steve McQueen and author Zadie Smith (Small Axe and NW).
While the primary focus of our course will be improving your writing, we will do so by asking questions regarding our evolving relationship with technology and whether it alters the ways in which "race", ethnicity, and culture are performed in society. The primary focus is on the ideology of "race" as a social construction, and how might technological advances in social media, virtual reality, Siri, and Alexa change the way we collectively think about the world and our relationships within it? Does the emphasis in late capitalism on technological design have the power level playing fields and guide us into a post-racial society? Should technological design be working in the "best interest" of humanity? Should a post-racial society even be a goal that we should be aspiring to?
While the primary focus of our course will be improving your writing, we will do so by asking questions regarding our evolving relationship with technology and whether it alters the ways in which "race", ethnicity, and culture are performed in society. The primary focus is on the ideology of "race" as a social construction, and how might technological advances in social media, virtual reality, Siri, and Alexa change the way we collectively think about the world and our relationships within it? Does the emphasis in late capitalism on technological design have the power level playing fields and guide us into a post-racial society? Should technological design be working in the "best interest" of humanity? Should a post-racial society even be a goal that we should be aspiring to?
English 381-0-20 Intro to Disability Studies in Literature
The field of disability studies grew out of the rights-based activism that led, in the United States, to the Americans with Disabilities Act in 1990. Yet, as disability theorists have observed, "western" literature has long been obsessed with disability as metaphor, character trait, and plot device. This course will serve as an introduction to the application of disability studies in literature. We will explore a range of questions: how do we approach the representation of disability in texts by non-disabled authors? How do we differentiate (or should we?) between disability and chronic illness, or between physical and mental disabilities? Can literary representation operate as activism? How do we parse the gap between disability as metaphor and lived experience? What does literature offer disability studies, and why should disability studies be a core method for studying literature? Readings will be divided between theoretical texts and primary sources. Students will learn to grapple with complex sociocultural and literary analysis, as well as to make space for their own primary source readings.
We often think of the humanities and sciences as opposite pursuits. While the humanities seem to focus on subjectivity and feeling, we see the sciences as objective and fact-based. Yet attending to the history of medicine demands a troubled acknowledgement that medical inquiry both shapes and is itself shaped by cultural assumptions about race and gender. Indeed, critics have pointed time and again to how the seeming impartiality of medical fact reveals biases about which kinds of bodies feel pain and who is prone to certain diseases, distinctions that have been assigned moral and social meaning. In this class, we will read literature about medical encounters in order to investigate how ideas about race and gender shape medical experiences. How do these individual accounts reflect larger structural injustices? What kinds of barriers and assumptions do women and people of color face when they receive treatment? What about people seeking gender affirming care? Beginning with the nineteenth century and moving towards the present day, we will examine the surprising history of how medical knowledge often depended on the exploitation of racialized bodies, grapple with the tangled enmeshment of femininity and illness, and explore how claims about medicalized bodies became a metric for citizenship.
Envr Policy and Culture 390-0-20 Environmental Justice in Modern South Asia
Environmental Justice in Modern South Asia is an undergraduate class on the unequal experiences and effects of environmental change in South Asia, drawing primarily on case studies from India. Since at least the early 1990s, rapid economic growth, massive infrastructural projects, democratic transformations and global threats of climate change have characterized the South Asian region. Such political, economic, and ecological processes come together to worsen the lives and livelihoods of marginalized people typically. They tend to intensify their vulnerability to environmental degradation, with historical structures of inclusion and exclusion profoundly shaping how natural resources are accessed and distributed. While the regional focus is on South Asia, at the heart of this course is a broader concern that environmental questions are always questions of equality and social justice. The class will examine how issues of justice and nature are framed within law and official policy debates, within social movements and right-based struggles, as well as within people's moral imaginations and everyday lives. The following questions will guide the class:
• What environmental problems arose in South Asia through accelerated economic development across the 20th century and early 21st century? • Who suffered the most, why, and how were they affected, socially, culturally, and materially? • What strategies for justice and sustainability emerged? • How is environmental justice understood across activists, policymakers, and ordinary people whose lives are most in danger?
Envr Policy and Culture 390-0-21 Sociology of Disaster
The term ‘natural disaster' conjures images of tsunamis, earthquakes, volcanoes, and other powerful forces of nature that strike without warning, inflicting massive suffering on a powerless and unsuspecting populace. We now have several decades' worth of research from the social sciences and humanities showing that so-called "natural" disasters are not very natural at all. Instead, they are deeply political and profoundly man-made. This course adopts a historical and global approach in order to denaturalize disaster. From famines in British India to earthquakes in post-colonial Peru, from floods in New Orleans to nuclear disaster in Japan, we will see how disasters expose and exacerbate pre-existing inequalities, inflicting suffering disproportionately among those groups already marginalized by race, class, gender, geography, and age. These inequalities shape not only the impact of the disaster but the range of responses to it, including political critique and retrenchment, relief and rebuilding efforts, memorialization, and planning - or failing to plan - for future disasters of a similar kind. The course culminates in a unit on the contemporary challenge of anthropogenic global climate change, the ultimate man-made disaster. We will consider how memories, fears, and fantasies of past disasters are being repurposed to create new visions of what climate change will look like.
Envr Policy and Culture 390-0-24 Media and the Environment
With daily reports of super storms, heat records, species declines, and melting arctic ice, there is a global recognition that we are living in an era of environmental crisis. What role does the media play in that crisis? Media production depends upon the expenditure of large amounts of energy and natural resources. Media devices contain toxic materials and take part in a culture of obsolescence that sends increasing amounts of "high tech trash" to the landfill. Media content has often developed in close connection to advertising, and so has taken part in the creation of an unsustainable consumer culture. Despite marketing rhetoric that characterizes digital technologies as weightless, virtual, and environmentally clean, we learn more every day about the energy, resource, and labor costs that undergird the Internet. At the same time, media communication can function to increase awareness about environmental issues, can substitute for other kinds of high-carbon activities like international travel, can foster communication between humans and animals, and can aid in the fight for environmental justice, as well as a host of other social and cultural benefits. How can we make sense of the complicated equation of environmental cost and benefit in media culture? This course will explore intersections of media and environment, considering media about the environment, media in the environment, and media as environment. It will cover a variety of media forms and examine how they shape our perception of the environment and foster environmental action. We will consider topics such as theories of media ecology; definitions of the "Anthropocene" epoch; the materiality of media infrastructure; media's role in raising environmental consciousness and promoting environmental justice; advertising and consumer culture; wildlife documentary; ecocritical aesthetics; environmental history; indigenous media; representations of landscape and soundscape; and animals as media performers. We will assess multiple forms of media (film, television, videogames, podcasting, sound art, infographics, and more) from a range of critical frameworks. We will consider numerous genres of environmental media as well, including apocalyptic and eco-disaster narratives, eco-comedies, "toxic" dramas, environmental melodrama, conspiracy thrillers, documentary, and animation.
Envr Policy and Culture 390-0-25 Water in Arid Lands: Isreal and the Middle East
This seminar will explore how the availability of water has shaped the development of civilizations and driven innovation in water technologies. The course will investigate historical dimensions of water in Israel and the Middle East, focusing on ancient civilizations and the water infrastructures that are essential tools in aiding the development of water-poor societies. We will use this historical context as a stepping-stone to transition into a more recent history of the Middle East, focusing on the challenges that the nascent state of Israel faced following the influx of millions of immigrants. We will then examine efforts to develop the necessary water resources needed to support the burgeoning population as well as the irrigation projects designed to convert barren desert land into cultivated agriculture. This more recent history will help to set the stage for discussions regarding geopolitical conflicts over land and water that continue to this day. We will evaluate regional climate and water in the context of current and future geopolitical conflicts, reviewing recent advances in water technologies spurred by these limitations as well as the potential development of combined social and technological solutions for long-term water sustainability in Israel and the Middle East. We will end the course with discussions regarding opportunities for global translation of innovative water technologies and water-management solutions developed in Israel to other water-poor regions. In addition, the course will host a one-day conference featuring international experts. It will explore how water access and control contributes to trans-boundary politics and how recent advances in Israeli water technologies may serve as a model for sustainable water development in other water-poor regions of the world.
Envr Policy and Culture 390-0-26 Hazards, Disasters and Society
This course examines how socioeconomic and environmental factors work together to cause hazards and disasters in human society. In this course we learn the main concepts about disaster such as preparedness, vulnerability, resilience, response, mitigation, etc. We learn that a disaster does not have the same effect on everyone (all groups of people), and factors of social inequality such as race, ethnicity, class, and gender, make people more vulnerable to impacts of disasters. Also, this course, with an interdisciplinary perspective, analyzes disasters in the global North and South. This is a discussion-intensive course for advanced undergrad students. The classes are the student-centered with an emphasis on collaborative learning. The class meetings will consist of lecture, discussion, presentations, teamwork, activities, video/audio materials and projects.
Envr Policy and Culture 390-0-27 Media, Earth and Making a Difference
The central question of this course is: What Makes a Difference? Analyzing a variety of works of media addressing environmental themes, including works drawn from advertising and marketing, we will consider different types of environmental messaging and attempts to mobilize public moral engagement. Specifically, we will be looking at strategies for implementing media interventions as moral interventions. Discussion taken up in this class will include evaluating the comparative value of media messaging that emphasizes individual action and personal responsibility, versus messaging that promotes collective action, policy, and structural changes. Students will consider and debate what constitutes authentic "green" messaging versus mere corporate "greenwashing." Throughout, we will ask what kind of media we need in what has been called the "Anthropocene" (a time when humans are now a major geologic force affecting the future of the planet). When motivating public moral engagement in climate crisis, are the solutions being offered those that the planet will actually "register" or "notice" on a global scale? If not, what kinds of "media interventions" do we need to be making and how?
All humans have similar nutritional requirements, yet the diversity of food preferences across the world is virtually unlimited. In the first part of this class, we will explore why people choose to eat some foods and not others. The second portion of the class will examine change and continuity in foodways through the lenses of identity and inequality. Rather than being arranged by world region, this class is arranged topically in order to bring different cuisines in conversation with one another. Case studies cover a wide stretch of the world, from Africa to the Americas to Asia and Europe.
Envr Policy and Culture 390-0-31 Environmental Anthropology
Environmental anthropology is a more recent outgrowth of ecological anthropology, which emerged in the 1960s and 70s as an empirically-based focus on systemic human-environment relationships, especially as they pertain to patterns of social change and adaptation. Environmental anthropology became more prominent in the 1980s, and is typically characterized by research on communities' engagements with contemporary environmental issues. Environmental anthropology has greater commitments to advocacy, critique, and application than ecological anthropology, but as we'll see in this course, the proliferation of "new ecologies" (as opposed to "new environmentalisms") denotes the continued synergy between ecological and environmental anthropologies. This course is divided into two parts. Part I will provide an historical overview of the development of environmental anthropology. We will cover some of the most influential research trends in the field: environmental determinism, cultural ecology, systems ecology, ethnoecology, historical ecology, political ecology, and post-humanist ecology. Part II will then pivot to the application of environmental anthropology knowledge to some of the most pressing environmental issues facing the contemporary world: population pressure, capitalist consumption patterns, biodiversity conservation, sustainable agriculture, climate change, and environmental justice.
Envr Policy and Culture 390-0-33 Climate Change Law and Policy
"Climate Change Law & Policy" This course examines the potential role of the law in confronting climate change from an institutional and policy perspective, examining the role of treaties, national legislation (in the United States), sub-national responses and judicial and quasi-judicial fora. Among the topics that will be addressed include the science associated with climate change, the role of key international climate treaty regimes, including the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and the Paris Agreement, national and state and local responses to climate change in the United States, the role of litigation in confronting major emitters, and the potential role of climate geoengineering approaches. It will also seek to help students develop critical skills of analysis of treaty provisions, legislative language, and court decisions, public speaking and cogent writing.
Envr Policy and Culture 390-0-34 International Wildlife Law and Policy
"International Wildlife Law & Policy" Many scientists and policymakers believe that we are on the cusp of the world's sixth great extinction spasm, driven almost entirely by anthropogenic factors, including habitat destruction, unsustainable trade, the introduction of invasive species, and the looming specter of climate change. This course explores the role of international law in addressing the biodiversity crisis and efforts to protect wildlife species. An ancillary objective is to provide students with a foundation in international law, including skills in analyzing treaty provisions.
Envr Policy and Culture 390-0-35 Native American Environmental Issues and the Media
This course introduces you to Native American environmental issues, such as treaty-based hunting, fishing, and gathering rights; air and water quality issues; mining; land-to-trust issues; and sacred sites with a particular emphasis on the First Nations in the Great Lakes region. In addition, it will also provide connections to corresponding international Indigenous environmental issues, and the responses and debates across science research, news and international policy contexts. The seminar focuses on how the media cover Native American environmental issues and how that coverage contributes to the formation of public opinion and public policy. The seminar provides the critical tools to analyze current environmental struggles; to understand the controversies within a cultural context; and to make informed decisions about issues that affect us all. The central case study of the seminar will be water and fishing rights for Indigenous Peoples, and how they are part of larger land rights issues. Over the past two decades the issue of tribal sovereignty has become front-page news. From major confrontations over pipelines affecting Tribal Reservations mobilizing Indigenous people and their allies around the world, to battles over whaling rights and mining of tar sands, to sulfide mining adjacent to Tribal Reservations, to disputed land claims in the Northeast and battles in the West over water, fracking, and grazing, the rights of Native governments to exercise their sovereignty remains in the new century at the cultural, political, and legal core of American contemporary history. These and many more issues—air and water quality standards, treaty rights, and land-into-trust—have contributed to tension between Native and non-Native communities, and have become the subject of news reports, in both mainstream and tribal media. The goals of this seminar are to understand how tribal sovereignty and treaty rights inform contemporary environmental issues; to identify source selection, bias, and framing in mainstream and tribal media accounts; to analyze and critique mainstream and tribal media accounts for accuracy and bias; and finally gain intercultural knowledge and competence through a final project that explores the intersection of Native environmental issues and the media.
Environmental science is the interdisciplinary study of how humans interact with the living and nonliving parts of their environment. In this course, we will examine current environmental challenges, such as climate change, the conservation of biodiversity, the sustainable production of energy, and the implications of human population growth. A case study approach will be used bringing in dimensions of ethics, justice, law, economics, policy, culture, and more, in compliment to the understanding of the geosphere, hydrosphere, biosphere, and atmosphere functions and condition.
Gender St 233-0-20 Gender, Politics and Philosophy
This class introduces students to a variety of philosophical problems concerning gender and politics. Together, we'll read classic and contemporary texts that examine questions such as: what is gender -- and how, if it all, does it relate to or differ from sex? What does it really mean to be a woman or a man -- and are these categories we'r e born into or categories that we become or inhabit through living in a particular way under specific conditions? Human history all the way up to the present seems to be rife with asymmetrical relations of power that relegate those marked out as women to a subordinate position -- what explains this? What would it mean to over turn this state of affairs -- and which strategies are most likely to accomplish this task? And to what extent is it possible to grapple with all of the above questions -- questions of gender, sex and sexuality -- without also, at the very same time, thinking about how they relate to questions of class and race? Readings will include selections from Simone de Beauvoir, Iris Marion Young, Sandra Bartky, bell hooks, Patricia Hill Collins, Judith Butler, Talia Bettcher, and others
In this course, we will examine the way gender organizes health and medicine, as well as how the medical system and health practices create and organize gender. Using interdisciplinary research with a focus on sociological studies, we will interrogate the social, institutional, and biological links between gender and health. We will discuss health inequalities between women, men, and trans* individuals from different race, ethnic, and class backgrounds, using sociological research to understand why these inequalities and forms of difference emerge and are sustained. We will explore how modern Western medicine views male and female bodies and defines their health and illnesses accordingly. Students will complete two short research projects over the term in which they use different data sources (interviews and media content) to examine gendered perceptions of health, health behaviors, help-seeking behaviors, and experiences with medical institutions.
Gender St 332-0-21 Beyond Porn: Sexuality, Health and Pleasure
Threesomes. Squirting. Vibrators. Butt plugs. Multiple orgasms. You may have seen them in pornography, but have you ever wanted to study and talk about sex, and specifically, how to have a satisfying sex life? Many people look to pornography not just for entertainment, but also for education about what satisfying sexual encounters look like. Unfortunately, much of what people learn from pornography doesn't lead them to healthy and satisfying sexual encounters and relationships. This lecture class isn't actually about pornography. It goes beyond many presumptions about sex and pleasure depicted in pornography and popular culture, in order to equip students with information that can lead to more satisfying and healthy sexual experiences across their lifespan, regardless of how they identify, or who or what they like. The course also familiarizes students with a wide spectrum of human identities, practices, and attitudes towards sex and sexuality. Topics covered include: physiological and biological sex; gender; sexual orientation; homophobia and heterosexism; navigating sexual risks in a sex-positive way; sexual health disparities; sexual desire, arousal, and response; solitary sex & sex with others; sex toys; unconventional sexual practices; intimacy and effective communication; sexuality & aging; sexuality, disability & intimacy; sexual problems and solutions; sexual pleasure as part of sexual health; sexual harassment and violence; selling sex; and yes, a brief unit on problematics and possibilities in pornography.
We often think of the humanities and sciences as opposite pursuits. While the humanities seem to focus on subjectivity and feeling, we see the sciences as objective and fact-based. Yet attending to the history of medicine demands a troubled acknowledgement that medical inquiry both shapes and is itself shaped by cultural assumptions about race and gender. Indeed, critics have pointed time and again to how the seeming impartiality of medical fact reveals biases about which kinds of bodies feel pain and who is prone to certain diseases, distinctions that have been assigned moral and social meaning. In this class, we will read literature about medical encounters in order to investigate how ideas about race and gender shape medical experiences. How do these individual accounts reflect larger structural injustices? What kinds of barriers and assumptions do women and people of color face when they receive treatment? What about people seeking gender affirming care? Beginning with the nineteenth century and moving towards the present day, we will examine the surprising history of how medical knowledge often depended on the exploitation of racialized bodies, grapple with the tangled enmeshment of femininity and illness, and explore how claims about medicalized bodies became a metric for citizenship.
Gender St 373-0-21 Gender, Space & Transnational Cinemas
Is the mall the best place to hide during a zombie apocalypse? What might a vengeful spirit wandering the city have to do with postcolonial futures? What forms of queer relationality are generated on the verge of environmental collapse and the end of capitalism? This course explores the relationship between gender and space in both the representations and sociocultural histories of film and media in a transnational context. We will begin by tracing the cinema's indispensable role in constituting women's mobility and spectatorship in urban space in the early 20th century Western metropolis, and consider the continued relevance and limitation of this framework for understanding gender and spatiality in contemporary media cultures. Through a series of dwellings, including the housewife's kitchen, the madwoman's attic, the abandoned mall, and the apocalyptic forest, we will interrogate the dynamics of labor and play, quotidian and fantastic, subjectivity and identification by putting questions of gender and sexuality to the intersectional concerns of race, class, and nationality. Potential texts include: Jeanne Dielman (Chantal Akerman, 1974), Rouge (Stanley Kwan, 1987), A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (Ana Lily Amirpour, 2014), Severance (Ling Ma, 2018), Weathering with You (Makoto Shinkai, 2019).
Gender St 374-0-20 Imagining the Internet: Gender, Sexuality and Digital Technology
Much recent fiction, film and theory are concerned with representing the internet and the World Wide Web. Sometimes cyberspace is depicted as a continuation of previous media such as television, cinema or telephone, but often it is envisioned as a new frontier. This course will examine the ways in which virtual media appears in cultural discourses. We consider how technological objects and tools participate in shaping elements of our culture that may appear natural, logical, or timeless. Our guiding questions will include the following: In what ways are these narratives shaping collective perceptions of the internet? How have virtual technologies challenged experiences of language, gender, community and identity? We will focus on social networking, gaming, artificial intelligence, and literary and filmic representations of these. Following a Cultural Studies model for inquiry, this course will be project-based and experiential. Your attendance and participation are mandatory. No experience needed, only a willingness to take risks and share work.
This course introduces students to pressing disease and health care problems worldwide and examines efforts currently underway to address them. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, the course identifies the main actors, institutions, practices and forms of knowledge production characteristic of what we call "global health" today, and explores the environmental, social, political and economic factors that shape patterns and experiences of illness and healthcare across societies. We will scrutinize the value systems that underpin specific paradigms in the policy and science of global health and place present-day developments in historical perspective. Key topics will include: policies and approaches to global health governance and interventions, global economies and their impacts on public health, medical humanitarianism, global mental health, maternal and child health, pandemics (HIV/AIDS, Ebola, H1N1, Swine Flu), malaria, food insecurity, health and human rights, and global health ethics.
Global Health 222-0-2 The Social Determinants of Health
This seminar in medical anthropology examines the role of social markers of difference including race, class, nationality, gender, sexuality, age and religion in current debates and challenges in the theory and practice of global health. We will explore contemporary illness experiences and therapeutic interventions in sociocultural and historical context through case studies from the US, Brazil, and South Africa. Students will be introduced to key concepts such as embodiment, medicalization, structural violence, the social determinants of health, and biopolitics. Central questions of the seminar include: How do social categories of difference determine disease and health in individuals and collectivities? How is medical science influenced by economic and political institutions and by patient mobilization? How does social and economic inclusion/exclusion govern access to treatment as well as care of the self and others? The course will provide advanced instruction in anthropological and related social scientific research methods as they apply to questions of social inequality and public health policy in both the United States and in emerging economic powers. The course draws from historical accounts, contemporary ethnographies, public health literature, media reports, and films.
Global health is a popular field of work and study for Americans, with an increasing number of medical trainees and practitioners, as well as people without medical training, going abroad to volunteer in areas where there are few health care practitioners or resources. In addition, college undergraduates, as well as medical trainees and practitioners, are going abroad in increasing numbers to conduct research in areas with few healthcare resources. But all of these endeavors, though often entered into with the best of intentions, are beset with ethical questions, concerns, and dilemmas, and can have unintended, and negative, consequences. In this course, students will explore and consider these ethical challenges. In so doing, students will examine core global bioethical concerns - such as structural violence - and core global bioethical codes, values, and principals - such as beneficence and solidarity - so they will be able to ethically assess global health practices in a way that places an emphasis on the central goal of global health: reducing health inequities and inequalities.
Global Health 320-0-1 Qualitative Reserach Methods
This course is designed to provide global health students with the tools they will need in order to design, revise, conduct, and write up current and future qualitative research projects relating to global health topics. This course is experientially driven, allowing students opportunities to actually "do" research, while providing careful mentoring and engaging in in-depth discussions about ethical and methodological issues associated with qualitative approaches and with working with living humans. Students will learn methods such as: writing research proposals, research ethics, writing ethnographic field notes, doing qualitative interviews and focus groups, analyzing and writing up data.
Global Health 325-0-1 History of Reproductive Health
The history of reproduction is a large subject, and during this course we will touch on many, but by no means all, of what can be considered as part of this history. Our focus will be on human reproduction, considering the vantage points of both healthcare practitioners and lay women and men. We will look at ideas concerning fertility, conception, pregnancy, miscarriage, childbirth, birth control, abortion, and assisted reproduction. Because, at a fundamental level, reproduction is about power - as historian Amy Kaler (but by no means only Kaler), pointed out, "[c]control over human reproduction is eternally contested, in zones ranging from the comparative privacy of the conjugal bedroom to the political platform and programs of national polities" - we will pay attention to power in reproductive health. And, since the distribution of power in matters of reproduction has often been uneven and unequal - between men and women, between colonizing and Indigenous populations, between clinicians and lay people, between those in upper socioeconomic classes and those in lower socioeconomic classes - we will pay particular attention during this class to struggles over matters of reproduction as we explore historical changes and continuities in reproduction globally since 1900.
When I was an undergraduate student my "To Be Read" list was always really long and often forgotten. As I have re-established my love of reading for fun I see how literary genres influence and challenge our understanding of well-being/health. Fiction, non-fiction, poems, memoirs, novels, young adult fiction, science fiction, mysteries, fantasy, fairy tales, horror, magical realism, and so many other genres influence our definitions of health or wellbeing. They give us insight into how other folks imagine and understanding situations we may or may not find ourselves in. The best text allow us to empathize with the characters or authors or challenge what we thought we knew. When thinking up this course, books that came to mind included "The Cancer Journals," "The Marrow Thieves," "Crying in H Mart," "Convenience Store Woman," "Medical Apartheid," "What the Eyes Don't See," "All About Love: New Visions," and "We Are Never Meeting in Real Life." Our course will consider some of these and other genres noted above. You'll be asked to propose a book to read/listen to and a list of various text will also be provided if you need guidance in choosing a text. You will learn how these text influence or challenge norms about health and well-being. Professor Reyes will help you access books that aren't easily available or affordable.
Global Health 390-0-22 Beyond Porn: Sexuality, Health and Pleasure
Threesomes. Squirting. Vibrators. Butt plugs. Multiple orgasms. You may have seen them in pornography, but have you ever wanted to study and talk about sex, and specifically, how to have a satisfying sex life? Many people look to pornography not just for entertainment, but also for education about what satisfying sexual encounters look like. Unfortunately, much of what people learn from pornography doesn't lead them to healthy and satisfying sexual encounters and relationships. This lecture class isn't actually about pornography. It goes beyond many presumptions about sex and pleasure depicted in pornography and popular culture, in order to equip students with information that can lead to more satisfying and healthy sexual experiences across their lifespan, regardless of how they identify, or who or what they like. The course also familiarizes students with a wide spectrum of human identities, practices, and attitudes towards sex and sexuality. Topics covered include: physiological and biological sex; gender; sexual orientation; homophobia and heterosexism; navigating sexual risks in a sex-positive way; sexual health disparities; sexual desire, arousal, and response; solitary sex & sex with others; sex toys; unconventional sexual practices; intimacy and effective communication; sexuality & aging; sexuality, disability & intimacy; sexual problems and solutions; sexual pleasure as part of sexual health; sexual harassment and violence; selling sex; and yes, a brief unit on problematics and possibilities in pornography.
Global Health 390-0-24 Native Nations, Healthcare Systems and U.S. Policy
In the territory currently called the United States of America, healthcare for Native populations is often experienced as a tension between settler colonial domination and activism among Native nations to uphold Indigenous sovereignty. This reading-intensive, discussion-based seminar will provide students with a complex and in-depth understanding of the historical and contemporary policies and systems created for, by, and in collaboration with Native nations. In order to understand the U.S. government's role and responsibility towards Native nations, we will delve into legal foundations of the trust responsibility and fiduciary obligation of the federal government as outlined in the U.S. Constitution and Supreme Court decisions. To understand how Native nations have worked within colonial settler systems to maintain or expand their sovereignty, students will examine notable federal and state policies that affect Native health, wellbeing, and (lack of) access to meaningful care.
Global Health 390-0-25 (Re)mixing Qualitative Methods
In this upper-level course exploring approaches to meld traditional data collection methods with alternative techniques, students will review decolonizing ways that Black/African American individuals have used to reveal their truths and construct and reconstruct images of themselves. Students will explore how these same processes can be applied in public health data collection to be inclusive and validate the methods and ways of knowing that have assisted underserved, underheard, and underrepresented communities in advocating for justice to survive. Course readings will consist of text that provides a critical lens to view qualitative data collection methods through and will include studies in historical and traumatic violence that underscore how people living in Black bodies work to survive by Joy DeGruy and the negotiating processes that Black individuals use to exercise agency and evaluate systemic oppressions that impede how they navigate life as articulated by authors such as Patricia Hill Collins, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Richard Delgado, and Jean Stefancic.
Global Health 390-0-26 Hazards, Disasters and Society
This course examines how socioeconomic and environmental factors work together to cause hazards and disasters in human society. In this course we learn the main concepts about disaster such as preparedness, vulnerability, resilience, response, mitigation, etc. We learn that a disaster does not have the same effect on everyone (all groups of people), and factors of social inequality such as race, ethnicity, class, and gender, make people more vulnerable to impacts of disasters. Also, this course, with an interdisciplinary perspective, analyzes disasters in the global North and South. This is a discussion-intensive course for advanced undergrad students. The classes are the student-centered with an emphasis on collaborative learning. The class meetings will consist of lecture, discussion, presentations, teamwork, activities, video/audio materials and projects.
Global Health 390-0-27 Global Circulations and Human Health
Human beings and human parts/products are on the move across the globe, shaped by inequities that drive poor health outcomes for many involved in these circulations. More human beings are being forced from their homes than ever before in history; more and more are being turned away as they seek resettlement. Global economic migration is poorly regulated and rife with exploitation. The flow of human organs for transplantation increasingly moves from the poor in the Global South to the rich in the Global North. Even the production of human babies through international surrogacy is driven by economic inequities. This course examines the role of advocacy, law, politics and ethics to preserve dignity and health as human beings and human parts increasingly circulate across global boundaries.
Global Health 390-0-28 Infectious Disease Eradications & Outbreak Control
Despite many efforts across several diseases spanning decades and billions of dollars, global health actors have only been able to eradicate one infectious human disease: smallpox. Why? This course will attempt to answer this question by examining several failed and continuing disease eradication efforts through a multidisciplinary lens. Case studies will include smallpox, malaria, polio, measles, and hypothetical emerging infectious diseases. We will examine the grandiose global health goal of total disease eradication in relation to sociopolitical realities that limit the applications of idealized technological interventions.
History 200-0-20 Sickness and Health in Latin Am. and the Carib
In 1492 the New World became a crucible for the exchange of diseases, drugs, and therapies between people of American, European, and African origin. The region has been central in the circulation of medical knowledge and materials ever since. This course traces upheavals in the history of medicine, from contact to the present. A key angle of inquiry will be to consider how global frameworks help make sense of local practice, and how local knowledge informed transnational, hemispheric, and Atlantic developments in public health and medicine. We will also ask what medical practitioners today stand to learn from a chronologically deep, culturally informed understanding of healing and illness. Topics include pre-Columbian medicine and conceptions of the human body; the "Columbian Exchange" of pathogens, animals, and people; the global commodification of American plants and botanical knowledge; Catholic, shamanic, and lay healing frameworks; disease eradication campaigns, including the discovery of the yellow fever vector; and experiments with socialized medicine.
Our world is awash in predictions: climate models and pandemic models, political polls and betting pools, economic forecasts and scenarios for war, plus the ever-approaching AI utopia and/or hellscape. This is hardly new. For millennia, people have been debating what the future holds. They haven't always been right, of course, but even their mistakes tell us a great deal about the times when they were made. Ironically, studying the future is an excellent way to study the past (and reconsider the present). In this course we will learn about 5,000 years of prognosticators, from Mesopotamian astrologers to today's climate scientists. Along the way we will read sci-fi authors and religious millenarians, socialists and Afro-futurists, eugenicists and risk managers. This course will teach you to better assess predictions of things to come. Come explore the alternative worlds of futures past.
Crimes, deeds, and spoils of drug traffickers have saturated pop culture for the last decades becoming valuable raw materials for the entertainment industry. This course is designed for students to identify, trace, and analyze audiovisual productions on the so-called narcos in the Americas in order to understand: (a) the plot devices and aesthetic mechanisms with which cultural producers have commodified history as entertainment; and (b) the effects of these types of narratives and imageries in the creation of historical understandings regarding one of the most challenging problems of our times. We accomplish these objectives by watching films, telenovelas and TV shows; reading selected works of history, sociology, anthropology, and journalism (film criticism in particular); and using the tools and technologies of digital humanities in a series of individual and collaborative projects. The ultimate goal is to produce together an open-access digital repository on drug history as entertainment in the Americas.
Humanities 325-4-20 Watching Narcos: History as Entertainment
Crimes, deeds, and spoils of drug traffickers have saturated pop culture for the last decades becoming valuable raw materials for the entertainment industry. This course is designed for students to identify, trace, and analyze audiovisual productions on the so-called narcos in order to understand: (a) the plot devices and aesthetic mechanisms with which cultural producers have commodified history as entertainment; and (b) the effects of these types of narratives and imageries in the creation of historical understandings regarding one of the most challenging problems of our times. We accomplish these objectives by watching films, telenovelas and TV shows; reading selected works of history, sociology, anthropology, and journalism (film criticism in particular); and using the tools and technologies of digital humanities in a series of individual and collaborative projects. The ultimate goal is to produce together an open-access digital repository on drug history as entertainment in the Americas.
Humanities 370-3-20 Environmental Justice in Modern South Asia
Environmental Justice in Modern South Asia is an undergraduate class on the unequal experiences and effects of environmental change in South Asia, drawing primarily on case studies from India. Since at least the early 1990s, rapid economic growth, massive infrastructural projects, democratic transformations and global threats of climate change, have characterized the South Asian region. Such political, economic, and ecological processes come together to worsen the lives and livelihoods of marginalized people typically. They tend to intensify their vulnerability to environmental degradation, with historical structures of inclusion and exclusion profoundly shaping how natural resources are accessed and distributed. While the regional focus is on South Asia, at the heart of this course is a broader concern that environmental questions are always questions of equality and social justice.
Institute for Sustainability 230-0-20 Climate Change and Sustainability: Ethical Dimensions
What are our ethical responsibilities in the face of anthropogenic climate change? The course begins with an exploration of how far reaching our ethical responsibilities are. After some introduction to philosophical ethics and the science of climate change, we will question which things matter morally: are future-human beings, non-human animals, and ecosystems morally important? How do they compare morally to humans alive today? In the second half of the course we will focus on how individually specific our ethical responsibilities are. We will focus on a range of common behaviors relevant to climate change and ask whether we can ethically justify our individual participation in these behaviors. We will conclude the course by asking whether there are any behaviors that we might have a moral responsibility to personally adopt in response to climate change
International St. 395-0-21 International Climate Change Politics & Policy
International climate change impacts all of us and in many spaces doom and gloom is the dominant narrative. What are the successes on an international level? How are victories won within the halls of the United Nations' treaty negotiations? What role do non-state actors, like civil society organizations play? This course will focus on climate change challenges and international solutions, the politics of negotiating international treaties, and how intergovernmental organizations operate. The course will specifically focus on the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate change (UNFCCC). In addition, students will design and complete a research project related to a topic, country, or organization of their choice with reference to international climate change politics and policy. To encourage success, the course will focus on building skills in research and writing. Previous knowledge or interest in climate change and additional environmental problems is welcomed, but not required!
Jewish Studies 390-0-1 Water in Arid Lands: Isreal and the Middle East
This seminar will explore how the availability of water has shaped the development of civilizations and driven innovation in water technologies. The course will investigate historical dimensions of water in Israel and the Middle East, focusing on ancient civilizations and the water infrastructures that are essential tools in aiding the development of water-poor societies. We will use this historical context as a stepping-stone to transition into a more recent history of the Middle East, focusing on the challenges that the nascent state of Israel faced following the influx of millions of immigrants. We will then examine efforts to develop the necessary water resources needed to support the burgeoning population as well as the irrigation projects designed to convert barren desert land into cultivated agriculture. This more recent history will help to set the stage for discussions regarding geopolitical conflicts over land and water that continue to this day. We will evaluate regional climate and water in the context of current and future geopolitical conflicts, reviewing recent advances in water technologies spurred by these limitations as well as the potential development of combined social and technological solutions for long-term water sustainability in Israel and the Middle East. We will end the course with discussions regarding opportunities for global translation of innovative water technologies and water-management solutions developed in Israel to other water-poor regions. In addition, the course will host a symposium featuring international experts. It will explore how water access and control contributes to trans-boundary politics and how recent advances in Israeli water technologies may serve as a model for sustainable water development in other water-poor regions of the world.
Legal Studies 376-0-21 Gender, Sexuality & the Carceral State
This course explores the rise of the carceral state in the United with particular attention to ethnographic, sociolegal, feminist, queer, and transgender theoretical approaches to the study of prisons. The course centers on girls, women, and LGBT people's experiences with systems of punishment, surveillance, and control. In addition, students will learn how feminist and queer activists have responded to institutions of policing and mass incarceration; investigate how they have understood prison reform, prison abolition, and transformative justice; and consider the political, ethical, and methodological concerns that policing, and mass incarceration raise.
Medill - Journalism 367-0-20 Native American Environmental Issues and the Media
This course introduces you to Native American environmental issues, such as treaty-based hunting, fishing, and gathering rights; air and water quality issues; mining; land-to-trust issues; and sacred sites with a particular emphasis on the First Nations in the Great Lakes region. In addition, it will also provide connections to corresponding international Indigenous environmental issues, and the responses and debates across science research, news and international policy contexts.
The seminar focuses on how the media cover Native American environmental issues and how that coverage contributes to the formation of public opinion and public policy. The seminar provides the critical tools to analyze current environmental struggles; to understand the controversies within a cultural context; and to make informed decisions about issues that affect us all. The central case study of the seminar will be water and fishing rights for Indigenous Peoples, and how they are part of larger land rights issues.
Over the past two decades the issue of tribal sovereignty has become front-page news. From major confrontations over pipelines affecting Tribal Reservations mobilizing Indigenous people and their allies around the world, to battles over whaling rights and mining of tar sands, to sulfide mining adjacent to Tribal Reservations, to disputed land claims in the Northeast and battles in the West over water, fracking, and grazing, the rights of Native governments to exercise their sovereignty remains in the new century at the cultural, political, and legal core of American contemporary history.
These and many more issues—air and water quality standards, treaty rights, and land-into-trust—have contributed to tension between Native and non-Native communities, and have become the subject of news reports, in both mainstream and tribal media. The goals of this seminar are to understand how tribal sovereignty and treaty rights inform contemporary environmental issues; to identify source selection, bias, and framing in mainstream and tribal media accounts; to analyze and critique mainstream and tribal media accounts for accuracy and bias; and finally gain intercultural knowledge and competence through a final project that explores the intersection of Native environmental issues and the media.
Performance St. 330-0-26 Performance and Technology
In this course, taught by Thomas DeFrantz, Segal Fellow and faculty member in the School of Communication, students will use basic mechatronics to create compelling movement-based performances. The course will involve workshop exploration of technologies embedded in performance: robots, media, computer interface. Students will create performance projects and discuss theoretical and historical implications of technologies in performance. Hands-on making and engineering workshops will be incorporated to develop basic skills in technological crafts such as circuit design and fabrication, toward technologically enhanced performance. No previous experience or programming skills required.
Philosophy 210-3-20 History of Philosophy - Early Modern
The transition from the Medieval to the Modern era in philosophy began, roughly, in the late 16th and early 17th centuries and ended, again roughly, in the late 18th century. New methods of acquiring knowledge, along with a radically different conception of the world, permanently transformed the philosophical enterprise and the broader culture. In this course we will examine the views of some of the most important modern philosophers—especially Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Bayle, Locke, Berkeley, and Hume—on the nature of God, causation, substance, mind, knowledge, and the material world. Additional readings will be drawn from Elizabeth, Galileo, Sor Juana, Masham, Boyle, Shepherd, Du Châtelet, and Cordova.
Philosophy 221-0-20 Gender, Politics and Philosophy
This class introduces students to a variety of philosophical problems concerning gender and politics. Together, we'll read classic and contemporary texts that examine questions such as: what is gender -- and how, if it all, does it relate to or differ from sex? What does it really mean to be a woman or a man -- and are these categories we'r e born into or categories that we become or inhabit through living in a particular way under specific conditions? Human history all the way up to the present seems to be rife with asymmetrical relations of power that relegate those marked out as women to a subordinate position -- what explains this? What would it mean to over turn this state of affairs -- and which strategies are most likely to accomplish this task? And to what extent is it possible to grapple with all of the above questions -- questions of gender, sex and sexuality -- without also, at the very same time, thinking about how they relate to questions of class and race? Readings will include selections from Simone de Beauvoir, Iris Marion Young, Sandra Bartky, bell hooks, Patricia Hill Collins, Judith Butler, Talia Bettcher, and others.
In this class we will investigate several philosophical questions that arise as we think about knowledge. We will consider questions concerning the values that arise in connection with knowledge and other products of inquiry, we will help students recognize and reflect on evaluative questions that arise when we assess claims to knowledge, we will become aware of the standards we bring to bear in such assessments, and we will appreciate how these standards may be misused, abused, or exploited under certain social conditions.
Philosophy 270-0-20 Climate Change and Sustainability: Ethical Dimensions
This course is an introduction to some central concepts and problems in philosophical environmental ethics, with an emphasis on issues related to anthropogenic climate change. In the first part of the course, we will explore the problem of "moral standing:" the problem of who or what is deserving of ultimate moral consideration. For example, do sentient non-human animals like pigs or polar bears have moral standing? What about non-sentient life, such as plants or fungus? Might whole ecosystems or even nature as such have moral standards? We will examine recent arguments on these questions and their implications for moral theory. In the second part of the course, we will turn directly to the issue of global climate change. We will explore the standard economic analysis of climate change as a collective action problem and the philosophical presuppositions of that analysis. We will consider the question of the fair distribution of the benefits and burdens of climate mitigation globally, and we will discuss the ethics of geoengineering. We will close by considering the issue of "anthropocentrism" in ethics, asking whether and why anthropocentrism might be a problem for moral theory.
Political Science 329-0-20 U.S. Environmental Politics
This course explores the ongoing socio-political challenges of addressing environmental problems. Drawing primarily on research in political science and political ecology, we will analyze the diverse types of social dilemmas that produce environmental problems and the social effects of environmental politics. We focus on contemporary environmental politics to consider emerging frontiers in US environmental politics. We will examine the nature of environmental problems through different theoretical frameworks, including collective action, distributive, and ideational explanations of environmental problems. We will explore core debates in environmental politics that interrogate the role of science, ethics, and economics in shaping environmental policy. We will also consider different approaches and institutions for addressing environmental problems. Throughout the course, we will pay particular attention to the values conflicts that constitute environmental politics, with a particular emphasis on Indigenous and underrepresented communities. The course is designed to give students an understanding of important conceptual issues in environmental politics.
Political Science 349-0-20 International Environmental Politics
Environmental problems that transcend national borders are amongst the most intractable challenges facing our global community. Collective action problems are pervasive in negotiations and attempts to address, monitor, and enforce international environmental agreements are often weak. Yet, despite these constraints, international actors have designed and secured agreement in a variety of policy arenas, aiming to improve global environmental governance. Through a team-based approach to learning, we will explore how, why, and when the international community is able to overcome collective action problems and effectively address global environmental challenges.
The course is divided into three parts. In the first part of the course, we will focus on the problems, institutions, and politics in global environmental governance. The second part of the course focuses on key concepts or themes in global environmental politics that shape our understanding of international cooperation in solving environmental problems, such as science, justice, markets, and security. In the third part of the course, students will participate in an extended negotiation simulation to examine the diverse actors and modes of engagement that define the politics around a particular issue.
Lots of people have beliefs that other people think are just plain weird. Why do people have these beliefs? We'll look at "weird" beliefs within our culture and maybe some cross-cultural examples to understand the social and cognitive processes that lead to development and maintenance of beliefs. Among the specific topics we may cover are: distinction between science and pseudoscience, science denial, superstition, parapsychology, conspiracy theories, ghosts, near-death and out-of-body experiences, witchcraft, alien abduction, and repressed memories of abuse.
Since this is an upper-level research course, we will focus on psychological theories, methodological issues, and empirical research in this area. We'll do some hands-on research and data interpretation activities during class meetings. Students will work in groups to design, conduct, analyze, and write up an empirical research project during the quarter.
Religious Studies 101-6-23 Afterlives and Living After: Envisioning Other Worlds
Humans for thousands of years have documented their visions of other worlds and afterlives. Whether informed by religious revelation, collective trauma, or individual creativity, these visions provide important vantage points for assessing cultural values and experiences. In this class we will explore religious models of "The Afterlife" while also analyzing afterlives constructed in fiction, film, art, and other forms of popular media. We will ask how envisioning other worlds can help us to alternately articulate and blur the boundaries between life and death, trauma and healing, past and present, and reality and fiction. We will also explore what it means to "live after" major ruptures in individual and collective experience. For instance, how do we envision life after pandemic? After climate change? Revolution? Immigration? Utopia? Through speculative fiction, how to we envision the afterlives of humanity as we assess the potential for a post-human world?
Sources will include ghost stories from around the world, medieval visions of hell, purgatory, and heaven, videos of dead celebrities resurrected as holograms, episodes of Upload, The Good Place, and Star Trek, contemporary news releases, and short speculative fiction. Students will develop skills in analytical writing, creative thinking, and classroom collaboration.
Who are we and who gets to say? This seminar explores the tension between the social emphasis on identity (naming who we are and claiming where we belong) and the technological processes of identification (distinguishing people for administrative purposes). Using texts primarily from the social and historical sciences, we will pivot back and forth between considering the many kinds of identity currently in circulation (racial, ethnic, gender, and sexual identities; illnesses identities; political identities; etc.) and the rise of techniques and technologies that seek to identify people and fix them in place (from the invention of surnames, to the rise of forensic techniques such as fingerprinting, to the creation of the "average" person in opinion research, to the role of DNA testing in telling us who we are). The object of the course is to better understand the historical and social circumstances that determine where people fit—how they know themselves and are known—and to trace the diverse cultural and political implications of identity and identification.
This class will explore the nature of race in an effort to understand exactly what race is. It seeks to understand why race is such a potent force in American society. Close attention will be paid to the relationship between race, power, and social stratification. The course will examine the nature of racial conflict and major efforts to combat racial inequality. At the end of the course, students will have an in-depth understanding of the origins of race, the structure of racial hierarchy in the United States, and a fundamental understanding of many sociological theories of race and racial stratification in America.
What makes food social? What is sociological about eating? How does society shape our relationship with food? These are questions at the center of this course. During the span of this quarter, we will learn about the role of food in society, how social norms as well as culture impact our view of food and review the following topic within food and society: Food inequality, food and sustainability, food and gender and lastly, food culture in the US. We will do so by employing a sociological perspective to food that will help is critically engage with something we do every day - preparing and eating food. This is an introductory level class and does not require prior knowledge in sociology or in knowledge production. By the end of the quarter students will view food as a social and community construct that impacts our lives, well-being, and society.
Sociology 220-0-20 Health, Biomedicine, Culture and Society
We are told constantly, "take care of yourself!" and we do our best to eat well, sleep well, and stay healthy. Our bodies are important to us. They are also important to the institutions we are a part of, including our families, our schools, our jobs, and our country. They are all invested in keeping our bodies healthy and productive. However, the array of institutions interested in the value of our bodies often have additional incentives- our health is surrounded by a hoard of controversies:
- Why do some people get better medical care than others? - How should the healthcare system be organized? - How do we balance the risks of new medical treatments with the benefits? - What makes the stigma associated with disease and disability so enduring? - What happens when no diagnosis can be made?
This course offers conceptual tools and perspectives for answering these controversies. To do so it surveys a variety of topics related to the intersections of health, biomedicine, culture, and society. We will analyze the cultural meanings associated with health and illness; the political debates surrounding health care, medical knowledge production, and medical decision-making; and the structure of the social institutions that comprise the health care industry. We will examine many problems with the current state of health and health care in the United States and also consider potential solutions.
Disasters are catastrophic events with human and natural causes and may be gradual or sudden and unexpected. What these events share is their potential to disrupt communities, displace residents, and cause economic, emotional, and social suffering. We know that disasters are on the rise globally and in the US, incurring significant economic and social consequences. The aim of this course is to understand how disasters like pandemics, hurricanes, floods, wildfires, plane crashes, oil spills, and terrorism provide a "strategic research site" where we can examine social life and inequality. In this course, students will be introduced to the idea that disasters are fundamentally social events. We will focus on the social, political, and economic conditions that influence disaster experience and recovery, paying special attention to the ways that social characteristics like race, class, gender, and age structure social vulnerability to risk before, during, and after disasters. In learning to think critically about prevailing media representations of disasters, students will master content analysis methodology by engaging in a term-long research project in which they study one recent disaster event and the associated media coverage. This is an introductory level course without any prerequisites.
In this course, we will examine the way gender organizes health and medicine, as well as how the medical system and health practices create and organize gender. Using interdisciplinary research with a focus on sociological studies, we will interrogate the social, institutional, and biological links between gender and health. We will discuss health inequalities between women, men, and trans* individuals from different race, ethnic, and class backgrounds, using sociological research to understand why these inequalities and forms of difference emerge and are sustained. We will explore how modern Western medicine views male and female bodies and defines their health and illnesses accordingly. Students will complete two short research projects over the term in which they use different data sources (interviews and media content) to examine gendered perceptions of health, health behaviors, help-seeking behaviors, and experiences with medical institutions.
