Humanities

Ethnic Studies emerged in the United States in the 1960s and 1970s to address patterns of inequality through education and social justice mobilization. In this course students learn the history of Ethnic Studies, including its relationships to Third World Feminism, global anti-imperialism movements, and other critical approaches to the past and present. Classes focus on multiple media, discussions, lectures, and student presentations. We consider how ethnicity, race, and indigeneity intersect class, gender, disability, and sexuality to create complex and nuanced relations of power. How do ethnic studies approaches help us study migration, popular culture, education, imperialism, war, and peace? Students attain an understanding of core concepts and the growing global turn in ethnic studies. Students hone their communication skills through discussion posts, a midterm presentation, and a final project focused on any ethnic studies topic of interest, anywhere in the world.

Experimental critical writing is a slippery genre that challenges and breaks down traditional genre distinctions, sidestepping and/or transforming conventional expository protocols. A hybrid form, experimental critical writing challenges disciplinary boundaries and borrows, as it pleases, from various genres – personal essay, historical writing, memoir, non-fiction, drama, diary, autobiography, fiction, reportage, poetry, rant, and manifesto. Exceeding genre and discipline boundaries, experimental critical writing produces new epistemologies not possible within forms bound by conventional constraints. This course will uncover some of the rhetorical possibilities traveling under the name “experimental critical writing;” explore emergent “alternative” theoretical and methodological frameworks related to the production of knowledge; blur the boundaries between disciplines, genres, the academic and non-academic; and consider what it means to produce new knowledge as a socially and ethically responsible global citizen.

This course satisfies the advanced writing skills course requirement.

Visual rhetoric can be understood as visual argument (or an argument using images). This course encourages students to explore and write about non-traditional forms of rhetoric drawing from a wealth of topics related to film genres, ancient rhetorical genres and film studies. This is not a film appreciation course but rather, a writing and rhetoric course, which encourages students to engage with the way in which visual culture communicates and makes arguments. Each week, we will explore and write about a different film genre and its particular concerns. Our analyses of movies in this course will turn on the fundamental examination of how meaning is created through the power of artistic vision and visual technology.

This course satisfies the advanced writing skills course requirement.

This course will explore the development of the cinema of Japan over the past 120 years, with particular reference to its cultural relevance and aesthetic principles, as one of the only global film traditions that has emerged independent of a Western model. We will investigate its historical origins and the different genres created by the growth of the film industry in Japan, as well as various influences on its forms from literary and artistic sources.

This course satisfies the advanced writing skills course requirement.

Media have a long history. The term refers to the means of encoding and transmitting information beyond its original setting. It covers all technologies of inscription, not only the latest ones: from rhyme and writing to the Internet and virtual reality. "Mediology" (or the science of the media) argues that transmission alters the nature of the message -- the world encoded is the world reconfigured to be otherwise than it used to be. Do media function as prosthetic enhancements of our senses? Or do they bend hearing, seeing and sensing into shapes that would never emerge in the first place? Does the experience of the media obscure the nature of their impact? Who is the media subject: Narcissus or Orpheus? In addition to classic theories of the media (Marshall McLuhan, Walter Benjamin, Niklas Luhmann), this advanced seminar will also consider the emerging environmental media theories.

This course satisfies the advanced writing skills course requirement.

The course aims to study the ideology and Programs of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (1869-1948) on peace and non-violence, in the context of British colonial rule. The emphasis of the course is on concepts such as colonialism, imperialism, nation, community and nationalism, in the light of historical, religious and political environment. Students will learn to analyze primary and secondary sources as well as pre-conceived notions using multidisciplinary approaches.

A product of the Indian reform and nationalist movements, Gandhi’s philosophy highlighted the importance of peace, human dignity and social inclusion. This has allowed other societies elsewhere to adopt his methods to resolve political, economic, and social disputes. Gandhi stirred the social conscience of his nation and the world through his use of non-violence (ahimsa) and active civil disobedience.

Experimental critical writing is a slippery genre that challenges and breaks down traditional genre distinctions, sidestepping and/or transforming conventional expository protocols. A hybrid form, experimental critical writing challenges disciplinary boundaries and borrows, as it pleases, from various genres – personal essay, historical writing, memoir, non-fiction, drama, diary, autobiography, fiction, reportage, poetry, rant, and manifesto. Exceeding genre and discipline boundaries, experimental critical writing produces new epistemologies not possible within forms bound by conventional constraints. This course will uncover some of the rhetorical possibilities traveling under the name “experimental critical writing;” explore emergent “alternative” theoretical and methodological frameworks related to the production of knowledge; blur the boundaries between disciplines, genres, the academic and non-academic; and consider what it means to produce new knowledge as a socially and ethically responsible global citizen.