This course explores the classical artistic traditions of early West African kingdoms and cultures, notably Nok, Igbo Ikwu, Ife, Owo, Esie, Tsoede, Sokoto, Benin, Akan, Djenne, Mande, Nabdam and the Bamileke. We examine images in stone, bronze, terracotta and iron, and also investigate the built environment. Based on archaeological, art historical and ethnographic data, we critically analyze the style elements, iconography, purposes and significance of the objects, both as viable tools and as expressions of the history, philosophy, and religious and cultural ethos of the peoples who created them.

Credit Options: Undergraduate, Non-Credit

From tailgating to cosplay and Trekkies, the "face" of fandom is varied and vast in American culture. This course looks at the role of audiences, as we trace the history and development of fan culture; exploring the high/low ideological cultural distinctions that separate "acceptable" forms of fandom, such as Civil War re-enactments, to more "lowbrow" expressions, such as ComiCons. In developing a sense of the capital of fans in today's cultural economy, we look at how the Internet and other forms of new media have given fans more power than ever before. In addition to critical readings, students study a variety of fan expressions, from fan fiction to video mashups. Assignments include an in-depth study of a particular fan community and the creation of a fanzine. After taking this course, students should be able to locate the connections between culture and human values; develop fluency in verbal and non-verbal communication through reading, writing, and presentations about culture; and examine the social and cultural context of popular culture products.

Credit Options: Undergraduate, Non-Credit

US cinema experienced a renaissance in the 1970s that made it the international film influence for years to come. However, this was not a virgin rebirth, but an aesthetic movement based on the changing organization of film production, the emergent status of documentary and the cross-pollination of foreign, art house and B exploitation films. This renewal was also a direct response to the cultural experimentation of the 1970s that was redefining the national eye/I through everything from Lava lamp decor to transactional analysis, communal living to LSD, anti-war to free love politics, and feminist daughters to anti-Oedipal sons of all races. In this course, we examine the dramas of both film history and cultural history to understand how they refracted and reinvented the Hollywood aesthetic. In addition to lifestyle readings from the period, this course compares films from this renaissance by Scorsese, Kubrick, Coppola, Cassavetes, Altman, etc. to films from the movements and directors that influenced them, i.e., foreign and US horror films, Hollywood auteurs John Huston and Orson Welles; French New Wave directors Godard and Truffaut; Italian Neorealists Fellini and Rossellini and post-War Japanese filmmaker Kurosawa.

Credit Options: Undergraduate, Non-Credit

This course examines questions of discipline and punishment in both the private and public sectors. Some of the broader questions which inform class discussion include the following: Why do we punish? Who/what has the ability to determine any individual's punishment? Are we as human beings inclined toward certain types of disciplinary behaviors? Should punishment be contextually constructed or should minimum standards of punishment remain in place for particular kinds of behaviors? What changes, if any, need to be made to the penal system currently in place and/or its methods of exacting punishment? Readings include: James Lerner's You Got Nothing Coming: Notes From A Prison Fish, Michel Foucault's Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, and Melville's Billy Budd, among others. Films to be studied may include The Life of David Gale, Dead Man Walking and Scared Straight.

Credit Options: Undergraduate, Non-Credit

Through a study of documentary films depicting the music, players (musical, military, social and political) and events of the 1960s and early '70s, we investigate key factors that defined the decade that brought us the Civil Rights Movement, the Antiwar Movement, the sexual revolution, and, of course, Rock 'n' Roll, the Vietnam War, the Summer of Love, the assassinations of John Kennedy, Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr., the moon landing, and Watergate. Viewings focus on films that take different angles on the forces at work and provide a layering of perception of an era that made perception its ultimate goal, such as The Right Stuff, No Direction Home, A President to Remember, In the Year of the Pig, The Fog of War, The Weather Underground, Woodstock and When We Were Kings. Selected readings from the period, as well as from the present, illuminate the social and political turmoil, and reveal inspiration for the films. These may include excerpts from The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (Tom Wolfe), Why We Can't Wait (Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.), The Best and the Brightest (David Halberstam), Like A Rolling Stone (Greil Marcus), Boom!: Voices of the Sixties (Tom Brokaw), Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (Hunter S. Thompson), and short pieces by Kurt Vonnegut, Allen Ginsberg, James Crumley and Denis Johnson, among others.

Credit Options: Undergraduate, Non-Credit

One can hardly pick up a magazine, book or newspaper without coming across the word "globalization". The idea that we live in a rapidly globalizing world where a set of diverse political, economic, cultural and technological processes are transforming our lives in the 21st Century has become commonplace. Yet, have you ever wondered how new such processes actually are and who are the winners and losers in these developments? How can we imaginatively capture and explore worlds that seem to be increasingly defined by high velocity flows of tourists and terrorists, slaves, migrants and business people, images, currencies, food stuffs, WMDs and consumer technologies? What are the processes that ensure some are part of the flow and some are fixed in place? What might be the future of global change? This course introduces students to some of the leading contemporary thinkers in sociology that are exploring the making and remaking of our global world. Working our way through some vibrant sociological case studies and making use of documentary film and ethnography, we explore the sociology of "global cities" and explore lives lead in global slums. We follow the trail of various global flows from toxic trade in environmental pollutants to trade in human body parts and the rise of new forms of slavery. Finally, we debate the possibilities that exist for different kinds of global relations.

Credit Options: Undergraduate, Non-Credit

"The city is both a physical unity for collective living and a symbol of those collective purposes and unanimities that arise under such favoring circumstances. With language itself, it remains man's greatest work of art." Lewis Mumford, The Culture of Cities 1938

From Ancient Athens to modern Shanghai, from Gotham to Shangri-La, cities ancient and modern, real and fictional, have held a central role in our imagination and culture. In the 21st Century, a majority of humanity -- for the first time in history -- will live in an urban context. Cities and towns, slums and shanties, suburbs and exurbs increasingly provide the backdrop for modern and postmodern human lives. The built environment is where the human and the non-human collide, with sometimes fantastic and sometimes disastrous results. This course provides students with an introduction to urban studies, one of the most vibrant cross-disciplinary fields in the contemporary social sciences. Drawing from sociological literature, films, ethnography and creative writing, and moving from Athens to Florence and London to New York, we consider the history of the city and its impact on nature. Using the great city of Providence as a backdrop, we explore the diverse ways in which human experience, sensation and embodiment, power, politics and justice, and animals and ecologies are shaped by, and shapers of, the modern and postmodern built environment. Finally, we consider the extent to which we can, individually and collectively, contribute to envisaging and enacting more just and sustainable urban futures.

Credit Options: Undergraduate, Non-Credit

This course explores major contemporary psychological theories through lectures, discussions and artwork. Students are introduced to Drive Theory, Ego Psychology, Self Psychology, Object Relations Theory and Narrative Theory, and assignments are designed to help students gain an introductory understanding of these complex concepts. Lectures, critiques and group discussions analyze historic and contemporary artworks through the lens of these various theories, and a portion of the course is devoted to an exploration of artmaking as a tool for critical investigation. The course provides a forum in which students learn to create meaning in new ways, through a better understanding of both the human mind and their own work. Coursework includes reading assignments, written assignments, an ongoing written and visual journal and various short-term art projects.

Credit Options: Undergraduate, Non-Credit