Critical Conversations Seminar

While Zen is perhaps the most well-known form of Buddhism outside of Asia, it may also be the least understood. This course studies Zen in its Asian contexts, examining the emergence of Chan/Zen within Buddhist history, the interplay between Zen, aesthetics, and philosophy, and the relation between Zen and such developments as nationalism and social discrimination. Our aim is to avoid a romantic study of Zen and instead to develop a more balanced approach, exploring the insights as well as oversights that have appeared within the Zen tradition.

This course examines independence movements and secessionism, focusing on territories and peoples striving for statehood and international recognition. Topics include the historical roots, political dynamics, and future prospects of contested nations. The curriculum covers theoretical frameworks, case studies, and internal governance issues. Alongside a number of case studies, the course will culminate in an extensive simulation of Martian independence, as students attempt to peacefully resolve this conflict. Through discussions, writing assignments, and collaborative projects, students analyze national identity, sovereignty, and the impact of independence movements on regional and global politics.

Focusing on Food -- its production, consumption, and communication about it -- we will engage a variety of types of material: scholarly writings, food essays, reviews, recipes, podcasts, info graphics, and more. We will both learn from these texts and attend to how each format and platform conveys particular types of information or ideas about food. In assignments, you will have the opportunity to convey your learning on multiple platforms to learn the best ways to convey ideas effectively and powerfully.

Students in this Critical Conversations Seminar will develop their abilities as scholars and critical thinkers by examining the entanglement of religion and politics in border regions. First, they will study the detention camp at the U.S. Guantanamo Bay Naval Base in the 21st century. By closely reading the memoir of just one formerly detained individual, the Guantánamo Diary by Mohamedou Ould Slahi, and several related articles, they will consider the multiple ways that religious difference intersects with political boundaries and borders in the modern era. Then, they will look at the role of religion in creating the borderland cultures of Mexico and the United States. They will ask questions like: Do political orders fall along religious lines? How do political borders foster or exacerbate tensions between people of different religions? Can religion provide an avenue through which political borders are crossed or challenged? We will analyze these questions in an interdisciplinary way, through the lenses provide by religious studies, anthropology, legal studies, and history, among other approaches.

Social power and inequalities operate on, and are experienced at, multiple levels of social interaction. From interpersonal relationships to global circuits of production and distribution, people are often subject to the domination of others, and to choices made by others outside of individual control. Wielding this power across contexts happens unevenly relative to culture and geography, and variable social standpoints related to class, race, ethnicity, gender, age, and sexuality in intersecting ways that are structured by a wide range of institutions. Yet, human beings are rarely totally complacent, and engage in a variety of acts of resistance. From informal, everyday acts to concrete social movements organized to change institutionalized power dynamics, power is contested and conflicts emerge. In this class students encounter a range of sociological perspectives that interrogate contemporary sources of power, and examine varieties of inequality, in addition to assessing potentials for resistance and conflict to change social relations in empirical cases.

This Critical Conversations Seminar examines the relationship of humans to nature and the environment. As more and more people live in urban environments, societies worldwide are losing their connections with nature. What are the consequences of being surrounded by increasingly environmentally degraded landscapes to our health, our values, and our environmental ethics? Through readings, in-class discussions, hands-on activities, and a diverse array of writing assignments that culminate in a major research project, you will develop critical thinking skills, learn to craft research questions, develop effective oral and written arguments, and become familiar with concepts and practices of information literacy.

This course examines the Stonewall riots of June 1969 and the impact of this event on the gay liberation movement that grew in the years after the riots. This incident of queer protest has become iconic as a beginning of LGBTQ activism in the United States, but scholars and activists alike debate both the details of what happened in the riot and this incident's significance as a movement beginning. Students will explore a range of popular and scholarly viewpoints about Stonewall, which respond to questions that range from "who threw the first brick?" to "what actually changed?" By engaging these readings, students will also learn how to distinguish between different types of information and how to evaluate sources for biases, reliability, and appropriateness. In a short final essay, students will intervene in these debates with arguments of their own, which will draw from interdisciplinary scholarship about how and why--or why not-- to remember and memorialize the Stonewall riots as part of the LGBTQ past.

In the bid to move from fossil fuels to green energy technology, metals and where we get them is increasingly a critical topic that is embedded with nuanced scientific and ethical issues- mainly who benefits and who is exploited. In this course, students will begin with a chemical overview of the properties of metals and the life cycle from mine to recycling. Students will study one of the oldest known copper mines, the Rio Tinto mine in Spain, to examine how mining and refining metals has evolved over millennia. They will examine the growth of a multinational corporation and learn about the impact of mining on the environment and indigenous peoples. In a short research paper, students will choose a metal vital to the 21st century and investigate why it is used, where it is mined, and what are the major environmental and socioeconomic issues surrounding its excavation.

From 1919 to 1933, the Bauhaus was a revolutionary German school of art and design that sought to unify the fine arts with craft in order to reshape modern living. Between the devastation of World War I and the rise of Nazi extremism, the Bauhaus provided a refuge where young people were taught, collaborated and agitated for the betterment of society through progressive design and politics. Centered on the activities of the students and teachers of the Bauhaus, this course will focus on the intellectual and artistic foundations of the school, as well as the social and political context of interwar Germany. This course divides its attention between the study of thematic material and the development of college-level research, speaking, and writing skills.

The idea of the wild and the related concept of wilderness informs much of the environmental literature written in English over the past four hundred years. This theme is especially evident in texts from the U.S. and Canada, where the intensity of its presence corresponds with the process of European colonization. Studying texts from Native American/First Nation perspectives as well as those by non-Native writers, this course explores the ways in which scholars, poets, and storytellers have given voice to varied understandings of the natural world-- and to the role that concepts of wild and wilderness play (or don't play) in those understandings. Among the questions this class will consider: How do wild and wilderness intersect with issues of race, gender, sexuality, economic class, and colonialism? Can wilderness be recovered as a useful concept for ecocritical analysis? Is wild a more productive concept for activism in our era of climate catastrophe? Or are new concepts needed?

Migration has been one of the most consistent and elemental themes in United States history. Relying heavily on the first-hand accounts of migrants, this course uses a case study approach to show how the experiences of internal migrants, refugees, and recent undocumented people help explain how migration has shaped the United States in countless ways. A key focus of the class is to analyze how these migrant narratives have been shaped by foreign policy, ethnicity, race, gender, refugee classifications, and other related factors.

Japanese animation (anime) has exploded in popularity over the last thirty years as more people around the world have grown to appreciate not only the technical skill of the filmmakers but also the complex narratives that often tackle difficult questions of identity in nuanced ways. Many anime films feature adolescent characters whose bodies have magical powers or go through some form of metamorphosis. The changes these characters experience may or may not be welcome, but they clearly reflect the difficulties of the passage from adolescence to adulthood, and also raise questions about identity, technology and authority in a rapidly changing world. In this course, students will study several anime films that feature magic and metamorphosis and examine the ways that those changes both reflect and construct adolescent, gendered and national identities.

Wrath, pride, envy, greed, gluttony, sloth and lust are the so-called "seven deadly sins", vices traditionally condemned in the Christian tradition and also in many other religious and cultural contexts. In this course, students start by learning the genealogy of the list, that is, how it historically came about, its classical Greek underpinnings, and some of its developments in the thought of the Fathers of the Christian Church, such as Thomas Aquinas. Then, they compare this Christian approach to the Buddhist and/or Islamic approach to vice, and reflect on the social construction of the notion of sin in general, and these sins in particular. After this introductory period, the bulk of the course consists in the philosophical analysis of each of the vices, in thinking about how they manifest in our contemporary secular multi-religious American society, and in which virtuous ways they can be counteracted, including the theological virtues of faith, hope, and love. Finally, students work on a capstone project aimed at producing a research paper on one or all of the seven "deadlies" from an interdisciplinary perspective.

Medical Narratives explores how the experience of health, illness, and medicine is shaped by language into multiple acts of storytelling, including the complex narrative interactions between patients and health care workers, health and illness, body and mind. The course will examine accounts of how cultural and lived experiences provide different conceptions of health and healing and illness and disease, and what those narratives reveal about knowledge and authority, empathy and belief, metaphor and fact. Readings and other materials for Medical Narratives will include variety of genres, including fiction, poetry, memoir, and drama, essays and other non-fiction articles, scientific accounts, and class materials may include a range of other media, such as podcasts, film, video, and social media.

In the 1980s in New York City hip-hop was born. In basement parties, front stoops, and oversized boomboxes the sound of hip-hop could be heard flooding the marginalized communities that the government abandoned. Since this art form emerged it has shaped and been shaped by United States culture. Hip-hop has also been criticized for its violent, misogynistic, and hyper capitalist content. Despite their presence in hip-hop culture from the very beginning, women are often left out of these conversations unless they're being framed as powerless, exploited figures. This course challenges that framing and examines Black feminist hip-hop cultures. We will consider the ways that Black women understand their own participation in hip-hop culture, as well as the ways they engage in subversive work both within and outside of the hip-hop community. We will also discuss the ways that the violent legacies of discrimination, and hip-hop's resistance, inform the ways that hip-hop culture is understood today.

This course will allow students to trace, understand, and assess the rise of dis- and misinformation in the modern era, including the prevalence of conspiracy theories and fake news. The internet era-- with its lack of gatekeeping and seemingly infinite sources-- has seen a dramatic rise in the public awareness and consumption of conspiracy theories and fake news, as well as the spread of numerous sites dedicated to fact-checking, such as Politifact. Furthermore, the election of Donald Trump gave the world an American president who seemingly has difficulty distinguishing between truth and lies and apparently disseminates his own misinformation. News and social media attempted to live fact-check political speeches and flag sources as "fake news", but the term has been co-opted by those who identify all news with which they disagree as fake. It is essential that citizens of a democratic community be able to identify the psychological, social, and political factors that lead to belief in misinformation, critically evaluate news sources to identify bias, explain why political elites intentionally disseminate misinformation, and understand ways of convincingly advancing their own arguments.

The story of Vietnam is told through its music. Situated on the coast of Southeast Asia, Vietnam is a country with a long history of conflict, acculturation, and ancient traditions. This course is centered around culture and identity through musical discovery of Vietnamese popular, folk, and classical music ranging from imperialist time periods to the present day. Students will explore how the Vietnamese diaspora impacted Vietnamese musical development around the globe.

The Russian Revolution was a defining event of the twentieth century. It was in Russia that the Marxist ideology was first implemented, creating a new kind of political and social order that would create a new dividing line in world history. In this course, students examine the Tsarist old regime, the different revolutionary movements that challenged it, the dramatic events of the 1917 revolutions, and the Civil War and new revolutionary order that followed. Throughout, the course asks how we should understand historical upheavals that were marked by idealism and social change but also chaos and violence.

The seminar is concerned with the tension between individual freedom and the order that all societies must create. An ordered society implies that people generally do what they are supposed to do when they are supposed to do it. Our casual observation of society confirms persistent patterns to human behavior. At the same time, however, most of us cling to the notion of our own individual freedom and believe that our actions are driven by our own reasons. The central question then is this: Are we truly free or do we simply follow the path that society has constructed for us?

This seminar investigates a range of issues facing all societies in two modules. The first relates to the commons, or common pool resources. These resources with no property rights, held "in common," frequently result in the social dilemma identified as the "tragedy of the commons" by Garrett Hardin. Namely, they will be overused or underprovided. How can we solve these dilemmas? How do different societies address the commons? Within this module we will encounter examples of fisheries, water resources, land use and more. A second module examines often related issues of distorted markets where the actions of government or other institutions create market distortions, leading to unintended consequences in housing, urban development, and similar areas. Throughout the course, we will engage these materials while concurrently developing the Critical Conversations learning objectives via discussion, speaking, and writing composition.

This seminar examines the aesthetic dimensions of identity, place, and power through the work of Hudson River School founder, Thomas Cole. Broader values embedded in representations of landscape paintings and contested ideas of wilderness will contextualize the critical exploration of his practice. Additionally, this course will introduce the fundamental elements of written and oral communication, approaching writing and public speaking as multi-staged processes. We will cultivate a spirit of open and serious inquiry as we jointly evaluate a range of different types of texts, formulate probing questions and assertions, craft well organized, thoughtful papers, and orally discuss and present ideas and positions.

In this CCS seminar, students will practice varied forms writing for different audiences as they learn about controversies that rocked the art world in Paris of the long 19th-century. In addition to learning essential historical background, developing skills in art analysis and completing research useful to projects in different disciplines, students will participate in a Reacting to the Past role-playing game that pits state-supported art against rogue impressionist and avant-garde artists.

Since Black people arrived in the Americas, their visual representation has been a contested public issue, with representations of one-dimensional images of Blackness enjoying wide popularity, especially among whites. This scenario remained true for centuries with significant improvements since the 1960s. Black people responded by challenging demeaning white representations as the first step in a process of advancing a more complex Black identity. Forums through which this challenge has been mounted include film, museum exhibitions, political campaigns, and other visual forums as part of the production of public culture. Through visual texts, as part of public culture, Black people construct their unique visions of themselves as they counter the images projected by others. Public culture refers to the multiple elements of expression and representation including through histories, invention, performance, circulation, judgments, and reception that form part of a society's notion of its public democratic practices. Using visual texts, this seminar is designed to investigate and analyze the discourse of American public culture on the subject of Black images.

Castles are one of the most recognizable symbols of the medieval past, evoking visions of both romance and violence. In Europe between the ninth and fifteenth centuries, castles served as status symbols and reminders of political and economic hierarchies, as focal points for military conflict, and as domestic settings. The rebirth of castle-style architecture in Europe and the U.S. after 1800 heralded a nostalgic re-imagining of the medieval past that is still underway today. This course introduces students to the castle phenomenon, using work by modern scholars to explore the origins, physical construction, and evolving functions and aesthetics of castles across time and space. Students engage with a range of medieval and modern sources and study castles from the perspectives of several disciplines, including history, archaeology, and material culture.

This course investigates the underlying causes of discrimination and inequality and the resulting experiences of these groups to provide a thorough understanding of the economic constraints facing diverse groups in the economy. This course introduces students to the analytical approaches used by economists to critically assess the causes and consequences of gender and racial differences through the examination of data and research that provides evidence for disparities and inequities in earnings, labor force participation, occupational choice and the division of labor within the home. We also assess the impact of economic institutions and policy on the economic behavior of women, marginalized groups, and the poor.