This course investigates the theory and practices of restorative and transformative justice and abolition from multiple disciplines including fiction, legal studies, first person accounts, theory and film. The course begins with an introduction to the principles and practices of RJ and TJ, emphasizing the concepts of harm, healing and repair. To present a context for the rise of the Restorative Justice Movement in the US, the course examines the ways in which the US criminal legal system causes, rather than deters or prevents harm and violence.

In modern times, it is hard to go more than a few days without reading or hearing about a pandemic or epidemic. The opioid epidemic is constantly in the news, along with the continued reporting of the long term impacts of COVID-19, and emerging threats like MonkeyPox (MPox). But, how do pandemics and epidemics differ? Is there a way to measure the impact of disease outbreaks? What can be learned from these devastating events? How have past outbreaks shaped culture throughout history?

This course examines the impact of artificial intelligence and emerging technologies on economic, social, and political structures. It explores how AI integration across sectors such as healthcare, education, media, and the arts affects labor markets, democratic processes, and human relationships. Students investigate the ethical challenges AI presents to democracy, safety, and equality, weighing these against potential benefits. The class considers what practices and governance structures

Students in this cross-disciplinary course develop an understanding of both the historical and contemporary experiences of African-American business leaders in the United States. Black business leaders herein are defined as either entrepreneurs or as managers and executives working within for-profit enterprises. Students draw connections and contrasts between critical issues and decisions facing black business leaders past and present by analyzing the influence of racism and prejudice on the evolution of American black capitalism.

In 1872, Prussian-born and longtime Brooklyn resident John Gast painted "American Progress," an artistic rendering of Americans' dominant-cultural belief that they were destined to expand throughout the continent. In the painting, Columbia, an angelic female figure betokening Anglo-American "civilization," drives benighted forces of "savagery" into oblivion and ushers in their replacements, those 19th-century emblems of progress, the telegraph wire, the locomotive, the farmer, the schoolbook.

This course explores the political, cultural, historical, and social footprint of urban life in the contemporary era of unprecedented mobility. Students explore scholarly frameworks used to understand contemporary migration and mobility, and the foundational scholarship that shapes our conceptualization of urban space and the urban landscape. Putting theories regarding state formation of immigration regimes into conversation with the lived experience of migrants in the urban landscape provides a multidimensional vantage point on the patterns and consequences of migration.

This course engages scientific and social scientific disciplinary approaches to environmental issues. While environmental issues reflect certain empirical realities about our physical world, they come to our attention through human contests over values. This course uses environmental science to understand the factors behind and consequences of a wide range of issues like pollution, climate change and declining biodiversity. It also employs social science to understand the relationship of human behaviors to environmental conditions and the important role governments play.

Technological innovations over the past several decades have greatly increased our ability to tell stories in which the reader's choices affect the narrative. These can range from text-based novels in electronic form that contain a couple of branching plot points, to episodes of television shows that require the viewer to select an option to advance the narrative, to sophisticated computer and video games featuring multiple alternative storylines. Historically, the term "interactive fiction" has tended to refer to computer-enabled stories that are text-based.

Seeing (in contrast to mere "looking") involves a learned propensity to notice (or ignore) particular aspects of what is perceived through the lenses of one's culturally filtered perspectives.

The emergence of Islamic fundamentalism and Islamist political thought in the twentieth century has garnered much media attention in the last few decades. This course examines how Islamic fundamentalism developed in the first half of the twentieth century in the wake of Western colonization and why it gained so much support during the second half of the century.