Human society evolves through our interactions with the natural environment. Many of the environmental challenges today derive from the industrialization and urbanization process around the globe in the past three millennia. Focusing on the region of East Asia, this course examines key environmental issues in both historical and contemporary contexts. We will start with discussing people's perception of nature in pre-industry East Asia and its relevance today. Then we will take a closer look at major disasters in recent history, such as draught, flood, earthquake, and plague, and examine how civil societies and state powers responded to those challenges. On infrastructure enthusiasm, we will study the proliferation of mega concrete dams and their environmental and human tolls. On industrial pollution and health, we will focus on the tragedies of mercury poisoning and black lung cancer. In the rapid urbanization process, how the changes of land use and our life style have reshaped our relations with the environment. In the battle with climate change and environmental injustice, how do we evaluate the role of bottom-up environmental activism and authoritarian environmentalism? Exploring those issues would help us contextualize the intimate connections between nature, culture, economy, and political powers in East Asia and thus deepen our understanding of this region's role in global sustainability. This course requires students to do weekly assigned readings, engaging in class discussions, writing short reflection essays, and doing a final research project.

Elective

Topics in History, Philosophy, and the Social Sciences is an introductory course in which students are encouraged to develop the skills in critical thinking, reading, and writing that are common to the disciplines represented in the Department of History, Philosophy, and the Social Sciences (HPSS). Sections focus on the topics typically addressed within the department's disciplines; through discussion about key texts and issues, students are introduced to important disciplinary methodologies and controversies. All sections have frequent writing assignments, which, combined with substantial feedback from HPSS faculty, afford students the opportunity to develop the strategies and techniques of effective writing. There are no waivers for HPSS-S101 except for transfer students who have taken an equivalent college course.

Transfer and upper-level students should register for one of the evening sections.

Major Requirement | BFA

China has been undergoing tremendous changes in the modern era. This course explores the Chinese political and social transformations from the beginning of the Qing Dynasty until today. After a broad survey of modern Chinese history in the past four centuries, including the Manchu conquest, the Nationalist Revolution, the Communist Revolution, the Great Famine, the Cultural Revolution, and the Reform and opening-up era, we will take a closer look at the political and social structure, one-child policy, frontier/ethnic issue, urban/rural discrepancy and other issues in modern China. Through readings and discussions, this course will deepen our understanding of China from a critical as well as an empathetic perspective.

Elective

We live in a complex social and physical world. The goal of this course is to examine how we perceive, process, and use information to interact with the world around us, and how our social partners impact our thinking. Using examples from research with animals and from across the human lifespan, we will explore topics such as attention, learning, memory, and categorization. For example, how does the way your dog approach problem solving differ from what you do? We will also examine each of these topics from a social lens, understanding how mental processes can be influenced by others. This course will help you better understand your own thinking, applying your own experiences to discussions, readings, and experimental design.

Elective

How and why does fear motivate human action? In what ways do we try to address the effects of fear, both individually and collectively? How do things like morality and religion inform our solutions to the problem(s) of fear? To what extent do concepts such as virtue or ethics hold up in the face of fear? In this class we will use literature from the horror genre as well as excerpts from select philosophers, to address these questions. In addressing these questions, this course speaks to how both the horror genre specifically and literature more generally aid philosophy in its attempt to help us understand important aspects of the human experience.

Elective

What is the study of ethics? What does it mean to be moral? What do we owe ourselves, our communities, and our world? Why does it matter? In this course, students will explore what it means to live ethically according to a range of philosophical texts and thinkers. Throughout the course, students will be encouraged to think critically about the terms of specific ethical debates, as well as the social, cultural, and economic frameworks that shape them. Students will be challenged to engage with ethics not simply as a tradition, but as a praxis that extends beyond the classroom into our everyday lives. The course will include lectures, discussions, and student presentations. In addition to three short papers, students will develop a final project investigating ethics within their own areas of interest.

A version of this course was taught previously as an S101: Topics in History, Philosophy, and the Social Sciences. If you took this topic as your S101, please do not enroll in this course.

Elective

What is the study of ethics? What does it mean to be moral? What do we owe ourselves, our communities, and our world? Why does it matter? In this course, students will explore what it means to live ethically according to a range of philosophical texts and thinkers. Throughout the course, students will be encouraged to think critically about the terms of specific ethical debates, as well as the social, cultural, and economic frameworks that shape them. Students will be challenged to engage with ethics not simply as a tradition, but as a praxis that extends beyond the classroom into our everyday lives. The course will include lectures, discussions, and student presentations. In addition to three short papers, students will develop a final project investigating ethics within their own areas of interest.

A version of this course was taught previously as an S101: Topics in History, Philosophy, and the Social Sciences. If you took this topic as your S101, please do not enroll in this course.

Elective

This course is designed to invite students on an exploratory journey to the basics of Buddhist history, culture, philosophy, psychology, ethics, and logic in the part of the world known as Tibet. Through the in-depth study, the students will acquire a more profound understanding of the Buddhist worldview. The course will examine Buddhism's origins, the chronology of its introduction into Tibet, and influential figures and events in its development over the past 1500 years. Students will be invited to explore fundamental Buddhist teachings and practices to achieve well-being, meditation, enlightenment, and happiness. Specific attention will be given to how Buddhist forms of compassion, meditation, and wisdom traditions can contribute to peace and happiness in a chaotic and politically conflicted world. The course will conclude with an analysis of the rapidly growing interest in Buddhism in the west, for example, its potential for neuroscientific research on mind-body connections. Note: Students should understand that this is a course exploring one of the world's great belief systems and should be viewed as a course in religious studies, not a religion course. Therefore, there will not be any form of proselytizing, and there is no expectation for students to adopt Buddhism as their belief system.

Elective

Ever feel sleepy or sleep deprived? Been to a city that never sleeps? As our immediate worlds speed faster and faster, and work becomes 24/7, this course asks what role do sleep, rest, and dreams play in our societies today? This course examines the social dimensions of resting or sleeping in different cultures across the world. It will introduce students to anthropological studies of sleep and dreaming. We will think through sleep science, psychologies related to sleep, religious stances on sleep, and the economics of sleep from a social science perspective.

As artists and designers we will also brainstorm about the ways in which sleep objects and environments affect sleep and rest. Students will produce comparative studies of sleep environments and practices across cultures. As with most anthropological courses, special attention will be paid to questions of equity, rights, and cross-cultural understandings. Contrary to popular expectation there will be no napping in this course.

Elective

Many people, across cultures, have experienced an enthusiasm that changes them. In this course, rooted in the interdisciplinary field of fan studies, we will investigate various histories of such passion, especially how groups of people, over time, have used ardent beliefs and practices to shape new identities and communities and how others, often in authority, have sought to suppress or manage those identities and communities. We will study early instances of fandom, from 19th-century social manias to various groups of lovers, fanciers, buffs, and kranks, as well as modern fans of media, music, and sports. Students can expect advanced reading in cultural history and media theory, as well as several short papers.

Elective

For millions of people today, music is experienced less in marked events, like concerts, and more in the unmarked or mundane moments of each day: commuting to work, going for a walk, shopping at a store, cleaning the kitchen. In this course, we will explore different aspects of everyday musicality, from common acts of making and listening to the communities of learning and psychological affordances they create. Throughout, we will pay close attention to the diverse functions of musicking, including self-making, motivation, social control, and healing, as well as the changing music technologies and institutions that have shaped musical experience. Assignments include readings in ethnomusicology, sociology, and history, as well as fieldwork observation and interviewing.

Elective

It was an American automobile maker, Henry Ford, who invented the assembly line. When he decided to pay his workers a five-dollar-a-day wage, he also invented America's middle class, by providing a wage that allowed autoworkers to enter the ranks of the nation's consumers. Cars have come a long way since those first Model T's rolled off of Ford's assembly line. Through their ever-changing styles, from the streamlined interwar years to the tailfins of the postwar years, we can trace both the evolution of American modernism and its connection to Cold War politics and ambivalence towards the Atomic Age. More compact designs and an emphasis on fuel economy heralded an era of increased foreign competition. For more than a century, the auto industry's need for petroleum and rubber has fueled American imperialism in Latin America, Asia, and the Middle East. From coast to coast cars created a new cultural landscape, one filled with highways, suburbs, shopping malls, police, and roadside oddities. Throughout its long history, the car has been a shifting symbol of innovation, prosperity, consumerism, and the American Dream; youth culture, rebellion, and sex; both liberation and oppression for women, people of color, and immigrants; and, more recently, environmental degradation, deindustrialization, the decline of labor unions, and America's struggle to compete in an increasingly globalized economy. Now, in the twenty-first century, the rise of Uber and ride-sharing, the advent of self-driving vehicles, a renewed emphasis on public transportation and walkability, and an entire generation that appears uninterested in driving, one cannot help but wonder whether we are witnessing the end of America's long love affair with the open road.

Elective

This course exposes students to the key figures, texts and concepts that constitute Black Feminism. In this course we will establish a solid understanding of Black feminist thought and related theoretical concepts by exploring the lived experiences of Black women. We will develop a historical understanding of Black feminism and how it supports intersectionality. We will assess new schools of thought like hip-hop feminism and trace the influence of Black feminism in critical race theory and Women's Studies as a whole.

Elective

This course exposes students to the key figures, texts and concepts that constitute Black Feminism. In this course we will establish a solid understanding of Black feminist thought and related theoretical concepts by exploring the lived experiences of Black women. We will develop a historical understanding of Black feminism and how it supports intersectionality. We will assess new schools of thought like hip-hop feminism and trace the influence of Black feminism in critical race theory and Women's Studies as a whole.

Elective

This seminar presents a history of modern natural and physical sciences from the 15th to 20th centuries, by looking at the development of modern astronomy, physics, chemistry, geology, and biology. By looking at the history of science through the scientists and their ideas, the course examines how the methodological, technological, and experimental systems that underpin the scientific fields led to the development of techniques still used today. The course uses conflicts in scientific inquiry, the development of a culture of science, and the scientists over time. Examples of thematic topics include the development of the heliocentric planetary view, the quest for a theory of everything, the age of the earth and its distance from the sun, the search for a means of calculating longitude, and how the Darwinian synthesis compares to 19th century evolutionary theories.

The course includes brief weekly readings and discussion that result in a journal of the readings – there will be three collections of the journals over the course of the semester, three brief presentations on elements of the various themes we look at, a book review of a history of Science book of the student’s choosing and a final summary in-class discussion on the exam day. There will be two to three field trips near campus to see some of the history of modern science around us. Finally, due to the importance of class participation in the course, a significant portion of the grade relies on participation not only in discussions but also in class activities as well as attendance in each class.

Elective

Set within a transnational and transdisciplinary feminist framework, Writing Resistance will unfold and examine the ways traumatic, lived experiences of gender and structural violence, systematic oppression and precarity, incarceration, racism, and colonialism, have been silenced or submerged in canonical writing and official history making. As an antidote, we will attempt a queering of this patriarchal and "colonial archive" (Stoler), by shedding light and focusing on diverse forms of writing, autobiographies and biomythographies, poetry and fiction, and theoretical readings that are either produced by or centered on the lived experiences, psyches and bodies, of women, people of color, dissidents and incarcerated people, queer, transgender, and non-binary individuals, refugees and other historically and systematically marginalized voices and identities. Students will familiarize themselves with various forms of creative and testimonial narratives, feminist and queer theory texts, while being exposed to a series of case studies and various political and historical contexts. The course requires several one-page reflections, one short paper, as well as an individually designed creative final project at the end of the term. As always, classroom participation is important.

Elective

What is knowledge, and how do we know things? How is this "knowing" shaped by relationships of politics and power? This class will serve as an introduction to the philosophical tradition of epistemology with a particular focus on critical epistemologies, i.e., studies of epistemic injustice, ignorance, and resistance. The course will cover some of the central figures and concepts within the field, as well as critical interventions borne of feminist philosophers, critical race theorists, Indigenous philosophers, and crip theory. The course will include long and short form writing assignments, discussions, as well as student presentations. 

Elective

This is a course about how to think, write, and read philosophically. Samples of classic philosophical writings in existentialism on topics such as free will, personal identity, subjective value, the existence of God, and the meaning of human existence will be the launching pads for students’ oral and written analysis. Philosophical and literary texts in addition to class discussions will be used to encourage close scrutiny of underlying assumptions, logical progression, and how well claims are substantiated. By noting the strengths and weaknesses in the arguments of others and practicing the skill of philosophical argumentation, students will be better able to navigate through the thickets of challenges arising from everyday living as persons of careful thought and considered action.

A version of this course was taught previously as an S101: Topics in History, Philosophy, and the Social Sciences. If you took this topic as your S101, please do not enroll in this course.

Elective

From its humble origins in LiveJournal and the woman-rating origins of Facebook, social media has come a long way to reach its current iterations. This course will look at the emergence and development of social media platforms, asking how we construct ourselves online and how being online constructs us. Paying particular attention to race, class, gender, and sexuality, we’ll examine issues such as how attention has become a commodity, the politics of emotion and The Algorithm™, and the benefits and limits of online activism. You’ll never look at your FYP the same way again. 

Elective

Do you think before clicking “Accept Cookies” when visiting a website these days, or is it just second nature? This course will examine the politics of technological and data surveillance, how we have come to consent to it, and what happens once it’s collected. We will engage interdisciplinary critical internet and data studies to explore the politics of information and how it interacts with cultural norms and systems of racialized and gendered surveillance. We'll also look at the status of data politics in the age of AI and ask how we might create digital worlds based in social justice and liberation.

Elective