CONN

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 examines the politics underlying the societal decisions we make regarding the environment. It is more ambitious than a survey of environmental problems in the U.S. because problems do not speak for themselves. While environmental problems reflect certain empirical realities about our physical world, they come to our attention through human contests over values. Environmental problems are strategically defined, managed, promoted, and challenged by a complex array of social actors.

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.

This course examines the rise of nationalism in continental Europe from 1789 to 1918, a period beginning with the French Revolution and ending with World War One. Drawing on interdisciplinary scholarship, the course explores a period when modern nationalism emerged as a coherent way of seeing the world and then emerged as the principle ideology for organizing states and societies in Europe. Primary focus is on highly interrelated nation-building projects in five parts of Europe: France, Germany, Hapsburg Austria, Poland, and Russia.

This class takes a penetrating look at the burgeoning scholarly interest in Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and its possible relevance to ancient combat in Greece and Rome. Extensive readings include selections from Homer's Iliad, Odyssey, the tragedies Aias and Herakles Mainomenos, and Roman battle accounts. Students then look at how various of these works have been interpreted as proof of PTSD in the ancient world, most notably by psychologist Jonathan Shay, but also by an increasing number of classical scholars.

This course uses South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission (established in 1995) as a starting point for considering questions around historical trauma, transitional justice and the production of knowledge. Students analyze the TRC in terms of South African history and identity, examining ways in which it both replicated and sought to remake relationships of power within that country, and also explore points of comparison with TRCs in other countries. As a Connections core course, the course introduces students to a variety of disciplinary perspectives.

Germans are still asking themselves the question: "What does it mean to be German?" Throughout its recent history, Germany has repeatedly turned to Berlin, its re-designated (and re-designed) capital, in an attempt to find its own identity. In this way, Berlin could be seen as a mirror of German affairs.

Ways of identifying vary and are informed by both lived experience and aspects of biology. Our language around identity, gender identity in particular, has grown and evolved over time. Yet there remains a critical gap in understanding the contribution of biology and the biological sexes to this deeply personal psychosocial construct. There is, however, a growing body of literature that demonstrates that the sex of the brain itself (i.e. sex-typical patterns of neural organization), genetic sex (i.e. chromosomal sex), and phenotypic sex (i.e.