Inflation is usually associated with retail price increases. While this is a commonly accepted indicator, it only reflects certain symptoms of inflation. The root causes of inflation are deeper and more complex. In this course we will unravel the complexity and examine the main components of the inflation pyramid, from the prices we pay at the store, to the cost of investment goods and labor, to monetary policies, to cultural perceptions, to social forces that use inflation as a vehicle to achieve their goals. We will investigate inflation as a phenomenon that spans economics, politics, and sociology. The purely quantitative aspects of inflation are not included in our discussion, we leave them to econometricians. Instead, we concentrate on social forces, political power, and economic exchange. 

Familiarity with formal economics, while useful, is not a prerequisite for this course. In the first three meetings we will discuss the basics of the economic frame of reference. The remaining time will be devoted to establishing connections between inflation (both visible and hidden), political power, collective action, and normative-value preferences of the social groups that are in position to benefit from inflation.  After taking this course, the students will be able to recognize socio-political changes that are likely to produce inflation or change the existing inflationary regime.

Elective

The Psychology of Aging provides an overview of human development from early adulthood through elderhood and death. Topics include behavior-biology interactions and perceptual, cognitive, and intellectual functioning. The goal of the course is to establish a basis for understanding the processes of change through which humans progress. We do this by reviewing the physical, cognitive, and psychosocial aspects of human development as it applies to others and ourselves.

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

This course will examine the ways that listening can be understood historically. Using North America as a context for study, we will explore changing listening practices and their meanings over the last three centuries, including ideologies of sound and hearing in settler-colonialism; the politics of attention in 19th-century church and theater; sectional reactions to Civil War soundscapes; the emergence of acoustic technologies, from telephony to radio; 20th-century noise abatement movements, and the manipulable auditory experiences of the digital age. Throughout, we will situate listening in culture, law, materiality, and the body. Work will include primary source research and short writing assignments.

Elective

This course will examine the ways that listening can be understood historically. Using North America as a context for study, we will explore changing listening practices and their meanings over the last three centuries, including ideologies of sound and hearing in settler-colonialism; the politics of attention in 19th-century church and theater; sectional reactions to Civil War soundscapes; the emergence of acoustic technologies, from telephony to radio; 20th-century noise abatement movements, and the manipulable auditory experiences of the digital age. Throughout, we will situate listening in culture, law, materiality, and the body. Work will include primary source research and short writing assignments.

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

How we die says as much about us as how we live. As a result, much can be learned by exploring America's changing attitudes toward death and dying, funeral rites, burial practices, and mourning rituals. Part personal tragedy, part communal experience, and part political event, our individual and collective responses to death should be treated as socially constructed artifacts, offering valuable insight into complex cultural, historical, and socio-economic forces. Buried within the American way of death are clues to understanding how this nation's physical, spiritual, economic, scientific, and political landscapes have changed over time. Rituals and practices surrounding death reflect the realities of class conflict, gender politics, race relations, and an increasingly diverse population. So often, deathcare has often been at the forefront of major cultural shifts and national debates over who belongs here, the role of government, the shape of our cities and towns, patterns of consumption, and, more recently, the future of our planet. Growing interest in green burials suggests not only a burgeoning concern with the carbon footprint of human remains, but shifting ideas about our individual legacies and what we leave behind. A discussion-based course, student engagement and active participation are key. Each student will be required to select a portion of the assigned reading to present to the class. In addition, students will work in small groups to craft a 20-minute oral presentation that examines and contextualizes the funeralization practices of a particular segment of the American people. Finally, each student will complete a 5 - 7 page research paper using a combination of primary and secondary sources (to be approved by the instructor) that elucidate and interrogate a specific aspect of the American way of death.

Elective

Native American oral traditions, which include storytelling, teachings, family and tribal history, and contemporary Indian literature, lie at the heart of tribal culture. It is mainly through oral tradition that American Indian cultures have been preserved and transmitted through the generations. American Indian stories, teachings, and oral histories are rich in cultural context. They provide great insight into the worldview, values, and lifestyle, which are an integral part of the heritage of American Indians. This course examines the cultural and historical contexts of Native American and Indigenous oral traditions with a focus in North America and other Indigenous traditions.

Elective

Feminist movements have changed the world in profound ways, despite often radical resistance to and backlash against those movements. Primarily through readings and film, this course will consider the ways in which the various strands of feminism have theorized and acted around reproductive justice, environmental justice, and anti-militarism. We will situate contemporary issues within a historical context and examine and critique the methods by which feminist activists and scholars question, challenge, and reshape structures of power. 

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

Queer + Feminist Futures explores critical questions about power, knowledge, body, identity, community, and social change through collective immersion into the intertwined sites of feminist/queer theory and feminist/queer world-making practices. Drawing on the inter/anti-disciplinary methods of gender and sexuality studies, we will ask what feminist and queer futures look like and what histories and legacies (personal, political, ecological) we must reckon with in order to co-create those futures. Our approach will take up the critical tools of reflective writing and creative expression to explore key queer/feminist texts and examine archival and popular sources from art, music, film, social media, and more. By interrogating the past/future binary, Queer + Feminist Futures proposes a non-binary method of thought and action that reflects the nuance and vitality queer/feminist life. 
 

Elective

What is phenomenology, and why does it matter for art? This course will serve as an introduction to phenomenology and some of its central methods, themes, and questions. Working within and between philosophy, art, and design, we will explore how phenomenology can enliven and enrich artistic practices, and how artistic practices can broaden and enrich our understandings of perception, sensation, and embodied experience. We will consider a range of philosophical views, from canonical figures in the field (Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty) to key insights from critical phenomenologists (Alia Al-Saji, Mariana Ortega, Lisa Guenther) who question how socially and historically contingent systems of power shape our experiences in and of the world. Students will be required to complete weekly readings and participate in class discussions. The course will also include long and short form writing assignments as well as student presentations.

Elective

Leaders, teachers, writers, artisans, laborers, mothers. While this brief list may look like a small selection of roles available to women today, it also represents positions held by women in the Middle Ages. In taking the broadest possible chronological approach to this time period from the years 500 to 1500, this course will examine the lives of medieval women. From queens to peasants, nuns to wives, and mystics to proprietors, we will explore the wide variety of roles and statuses that these women had. Over the course of the semester, we will investigate whether these figures were marginalized members of society, powerful agents, or a combination of both.

Elective

The course examines the human experience of enslavement and bondage in Latin America.  Students will read about pre-Columbian forms of human bondage, the early modern Latin American enslavement and trafficking of Native and African peoples in various forms, and bondage as it existed after the independence movements in Central and South America and the Caribbean nations.   The course also will address current instances of labor bondage and human trafficking in the region in recent decades. The course will include lecture, discussion, and either group or individual research projects on the course topics.

Elective

-What are some differences between classic Western Philosophy and Native American Philosophy?

-How do we tell the diversity and variety of philosophical concepts amongst Native American tribes and regions?

-What kinds of ideas and stories outline philosophical guidelines for culture and background in certain Indigenous communities?

These are some of the questions and ideas that will be explored in this course. This course will examine American Indian philosophy through introductory and culturally specific contexts using a variety of sources, both historical and contemporary. Sources will range from being recorded texts from archives, books, journals, and other audio/visual materials, as well as online websites, journals, and other repositories of knowledge. It is designed to give people who have very little familiarity with indigenous, philosophical concepts, in a broad overview. Interaction with these ideas in conjunction with other western philosophical concept will by no means be a comprehensive coverage of philosophy, but it will be complementary to western academic fundamental philosophical, and well-known European and American philosophy concepts for deeper conversations for people to examine further in class discussions.

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 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