CAS: Literature
GSB: D1, Humanities Core
CALS:  Social Sciences
CEMS:   Engineering Students - Gen Ed Elective; Math/Stat/CS/DS students check with your advisor
RSENR: Consult with academic advisor
CNHS:  Consult with your academic advisor
CESS: Consult with your academic advisor

Syllabus: HCOL_86B_S18-Turner.docx

In an interview several years ago, Nobel Prize winning author Toni Morrison stated that racism is a scholarly affair and one that is useful for whites.  In the 1998 movie American History X, Ed Norton's character claims that all problems in this country are race-related.  The late poet and activist Maya Angelou envisioned a time when “ideally, race should be [only] as important as the color coordination of one’s costume.” In her TED Talk, Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie details the dangers of the single story and how one-sided and therefore problematic stereotypes and limited perspectives are. What do these statements mean?  And what relevance do they have for us, in 2016, as this country experiences the end of the second term with its first biracial president?

This course considers a variety of contemporary texts -- novels, short stories, movies -- written by and about non-hegemonic groups living in the United States today that explore the intersections of race, class, socioeconomics, racism and institutionalized racism.

CAS: Humanities
GSB: Humanities Core
CALS: Humanities
CEMS: Engineering Students - Gen Ed Elective; Math/Stat/CS/DS students check with your advisor
RSENR: Consult with your academic advisor
CNHS: Consult with your academic advisor
CESS: Consult with your academic advisor

Syllabus: HCOL_86C_S18-Ashooh.docx

This course surveys a number of philosophical themes related to the environment and our understanding of it.  The course will be divided into roughly two categories of questions.  On the one hand, we will ask:  What do we mean by “the environment” and nature generally and what are we referring to?  What do the various sciences tell us about the state of the environment?  How accurate and reliable is our knowledge of the environment?  We will explore some philosophical and scientific approaches to answering these questions.  We then explore our moral obligations to the environment broadly construed.  What are our moral obligations to ecosystems, animals, species, future generations, and to the just treatment of those disproportionately affected by environmental threats?  By investigating these issues, the course aims to investigate the intersection of environmental ethics and environmental philosophy.

 “Representing Race” is a follow-up to the fall semester of the FY Honors College seminar (“The Pursuit of Knowledge”) in which the students read three philosophers—Descartes, Hume, and Aristotle—who gave them three different perspectives on how and what we know: rationalism, empiricism, and a kind of humanistic thinking that we referred to as narrativism.  In the reading that followed our exploration of those philosophical texts, we looked, sometimes directly, often indirectly, at the ways in which subjectivity can play a role in the construction of knowledge. Following on that experience, “Representing Race” narrows the focus to consider questions of knowledge (what do we know?), persuasion (how do we know it?) and power (who decides?) in the field of race and race relations. These are exceedingly vexing questions which play out across disciplinary boundaries. How biologists consider race is likely different than how a legal scholar thinks of the issue and distinct once again from how a poet, a painter, or philosopher thinks about the question. At the turn of the twentieth century, the issue of racial representation was further complicated by the births of cinema and the mass media, which offered spectators images of race that were at once “authentic” pictures of reality while at the same time culturally-determined fabrications. Hence in the first half of Representing Race, we will take a broad view of racial representations across a variety of disciplines, (biology, legal theory, visual arts, literature, philosophy, etc.) dating from antiquity to the present-day. In the second half of the semester, we will examine how these various types of knowledge play into representations of race in the mass-media from early silent films to television shows to the Internet, and beyond. In addition to traditional assignments, the course will culminate in the opportunity to a creative, collaborative project incorporating materials and ideas from the class.

Syllabus: HCOL_86E_S18-Christensen.docx

Why use such a pejorative term as "madness" for the title of this course? This term has long history and illustrates the stigma often associated with mental health diagnoses. Using historical assessments, cultural differences worldwide, and psychological science research, students will use this multi-perspective approach to understand what is behind mental health stigma and will examine ways to break down such destructive stereotypes and treatment barriers.
 Demonstrate knowledge, comprehension and application of central themes and concepts related to Meanings of Madness, including relevant historical developments, theories, ethical standards, research findings, and the complexity of mental health processes (assessed using weekly written reflective assignments, presentations);
 
Evaluate and apply research methods in mental health, as demonstrated by the ability to summarize, interpret and critically evaluate the research in this area in written and class presentation formats (assessed using article critique, presentation of primary research, annotated bibliography project);
 
Demonstrate the following proficiencies: -select relevant, current research on a topic; -understand and interpret research; -organize and synthesize information from multiple sources; -master APA writing style and format (assessed using literature review project on a topic of your choice, related to mental health outcomes);
 
Apply your knowledge to your own mental health processes (for example, categories of problems, evaluation, client/patient care, treatment methods and strategies, treatment outcomes) through weekly reflective assignments, class discussions and to professional applications such as education, communication disorders, law, clinical psychology/mental health, and social relationships.

Syllabus: HCOL_86F_S18-Ikeda.pdf

Over the past decade-and-a-half anime, manga, video games, toys, J-pop music, and horror movies, among other cultural and consumer products from Japan, have garnered a larger presence in the American, as well as global, popular culture scene. What does the expanding consumption of Japanese popular culture on the global market place tell us about globalization in the 21st century? How do global flows transform popular cultural products when they are consumed in different cultural contexts? What tools of social and cultural analysis help us to better understand popular culture from Japan, and how do scholars of Japanese culture interpret and study Japanese popular cultural products?

Globalization and Japanese Popular Culture looks beyond the glitzy surface of anime and manga to examine how popular culture in Japan has spread beyond its borders, the impact of cultural flows from Japan on patterns of consumption, and the uneven ways in which cultural products find audiences in different parts of the world. Through the course readings and discussions, we will examine the above and other questions concerning Japanese popular culture in the digital age of globalization. Students will be introduced to key concepts and debates concerning popular culture global flows and be given the opportunity to apply insights gained through course readings, lectures, and discussions to a Japanese popular culture research project of their own design.

Syllabus: HCOL_86G_S18-Acquisto.docx

This course takes its inspiration from an essay by Hannah Arendt, “Thinking and Moral Considerations,” which we will read in the course and in which she explores the problem of the move from theoretical discussions of justice to real political action in the world. While all recognize the need to base political action on firm philosophical principles, the life of the mind, in its constant questioning, problematizing, and reconsideration of its own foundations, does not at first glance seem to support political action, which ideally rests on commitment to firmly held convictions. And yet no thinker would want to shut down the possibility of acting for political change, broadly defined, on account of the ever-changing interrogations of what we mean by “equality,” “justice,” and so on.

The course will examine the ways power and privilege have been theorized, with attention to class, gender, race, and other categories, by those who go on actively to support, and also to engage in, activity that promotes political change in the world that is in line with the complexity of their own abstract reflections about engagement with the world. We will spend time looking at the relationship between education and democracy, with readings that trace the necessity of an informed citizenry, the obstacles to cultivating a life of the mind in a democracy and ways to overcome them, and the question of how best to cultivate cosmopolitanism in education. In the second section of the course, we will inquire why the habits of mind encouraged by the formation of intellect (the questioning, creative life of the mind as opposed to the goal-oriented, narrowly focused problem-solving of intelligence) so often lead, not to withdrawn contemplation but rather to progressive political engagement (and to resistance from dominant mainstream culture threatened by intellect). We will then examine theoretical and autobiographical writings by those who have both articulated and lived theories of social change across questions of class, race, culture, and sexuality and how the life of the mind informed, shaped, and altered the course of their political engagement. These figures include a diverse range of intellectuals, artists, and political figures from both within and beyond the United States.

Memory is essential to our understanding of ourselves, of our collective past and present and our existence as humans.  But how does memory work?  Which parts of our brain are responsible for our memories? What happens when these parts do not function?  Can memory be manipulated? What role does memory play for the formation of identity?  These are some of the questions we will address in this seminar.  We will begin with learning about the general mechanisms of memory formation in the brain.  We will take these findings to examine our own experiences and memories.  From there we will proceed to study examples of individual, collective, and cultural memory from a variety of disciplines. We will learn how these memories are shaped and how they, in turn, shape us.

Syllabus: HCOL_86I_S18-Nicosia.docx

This Honors College seminar centers on the Nazi concept of Gleichschaltung, or bringing German society into full conformity with the ideology of National Socialism and the policies of the Nazi state. Hitler’s regime applied this idea to every aspect of life in the Third Reich, politically, economically, socially and culturally. Most importantly, it sought to create a society based on the idea of a singular and racially/biologically-determined Volksgemeinschaft, a German society that was viewed as a single organism, as defined by the racial/biological ideas and teachings of National Socialism. In that society, there was room for just one biologically-defined group of humans, namely “racially healthy Aryans.” During the years following Hitler’s assumption of power in 1933, four groups of people living in Germany were defined as the biological “other,” and targeted for removal from German society altogether. During World War II, the Nazi regime set out to remove these four groups by physical extermination. Three of these “racial others” were the Jews, the Gypsies (Roma and Sinti), and those relatively few Germans and others in Europe of African descent. The fourth group targeted for destruction was Aryan, namely those Germans with mental and physical handicaps.      

Syllabus: HCOL_86J_S18-Gennari.docx

This seminar will examine the theme of multiracial identity and culture in the United States primarily through close reading and discussion of personal essays and narratives (memoir, fiction, film) produced by people of multiracial heritage. To help us interpret and analyze these essays and narratives, we’ll consider how U.S. concepts and ideologies of race have developed historically, and why within that history multiracial people and culture have been considered both a problem (e.g. the “tragic mulatto” figure in pre-1960s fiction and film) and a solution (e.g. the vaunted racial pluralism of jazz, the reformist rhetoric and ideology of post-civil rights era multiculturalism). We will consider how mixed-race identity and experience challenge and complicate racial classification schemes that govern U.S. institutional life, public policy, popular perception, and private imagination. We will reckon with the myriad ways multiracial people and culture point up the massive confusion of American thinking about race – a confusion perhaps best typified by the heralding of a so-called “post-racial” order upon the election of a mixed-raced President, only immediately to see Barack Obama’s racial and national identity become the source of lurid obsession. Indeed, at a time when DNA testing has revealed “mixed” blood to be the norm rather than the exception, millions of Americans who remain blithely confident of their own racial purity puzzle over the identity of racially inscrutable people in their midst, often feeling no compunction in asking them, “What are you?” What lies behind that knotty existential question? How do multiracial people respond to it? How do multiracial writers and artists, by grappling with the intricate challenges of their own experience, sharpen and deepen our understanding of the American experience writ large?  In the broadest sense, what does the “mixed” experience teach us about race and American culture?

Syllabus: HCOL_86K_S18-Nolfi.docx

This course will introduce students to some of the core concepts of feminist thinking and to expose students to both the assumptions and aims of several different feminist theories. We will investigate why the insights of feminist thought are not only historically important, but essential in developing an adequately reflective stance towards our own experiences as members of a gendered society.

Students will develop a set of critical thinking and communication skills that can be usefully applied in a variety of different domains within and outside of academia.  Through written work and discussion, this course will help to develop the capacity to communicate clearly and concisely, to reconstruct arguments for a position or view from a piece of text, and to apply theoretical tools in analyzing current events and cultural phenomena.

Syllabus: HCOL_86L_S18-Cahan.docx

In the digital age, we have the capacity to generate, store, and analyze essentially limitless amounts of information about our physical, biological, and social environments.  Collectively, this storehouse of information is referred to as Big Data: information far larger and/or more complex than our minds can easily comprehend in its entirety.  The advent of Big Data has been alternatively hailed as a tool to solve our most vexing problems, and as a false prophet that deceives us as much as (or more than) it enlightens us.  In this course, we will explore what it means to take a data-driven approach to problems, and how such an approach fits into the larger human quest for knowledge, wisdom, and understanding.  What does it mean to “collect data”?  Do data represent objective truth?  Should they replace or supersede other ways of knowing?  What kind of questions can they answer?  How is meaning created from a bunch of numbers?  Can data be misused, and if so, are they of any objective value at all?  What should we, as consumers of information, trust?