Spring 2021 Class Schedule
Note: Course information may change throughout the year; do check back (and also check CAESAR) before finalizing your plans!
Spring 2021 class Schedule
Spring 2021 course descriptions
HUM 325-4: Cyborg Environmentalism: Technology and the Natural World
Co-listed with American Studies 310 and Environmental Policy and Culture 390
When was the last time you hiked without a smartphone? What can playing video games teach us about interacting with nature? If you didn’t post a picture of a tree in the forest, did you really see it? In this course, digital humanities theory and practice are taught through the lens of environmental studies and political ecology, using cyborg theory to explore how the relationship between humans and the natural world is increasingly shaped by and mediated through digital technologies. This course explores theoretical concepts like connective memory, our relationship to social media and mobile photography, and digital colonialism, grounding them in tangible examples of digital humanities projects. This course will primarily use seminar style discussion with some lecture and workshops.
HUM 325-6: Information Overload! Text Technologies from the Printing Press to the Smartphone
Co-listed with English 385
This course explores the anxiety, exhaustion, and unease brought on by information technologies. We will trace emotional responses to technological change, from the shock of the printing press to the malaise of the present "information economy." How did new text technologies reshape language and society? Who is permitted access to certain kinds of information and why? We will take a hands-on approach to these questions by pairing literature that addresses the anxieties of technology, like the scifi linguistics of Arrival and the postapocalyptic Shakespeare of Station Eleven, with book history and digital humanities techniques designed to manage information. Students will learn how books are made, how search algorithms work, and how to analyze text with code.
HUM 370-3: Fire and Blood: Political Ecologies of the Environment, Energy, and Life
Co-listed with Anthropology 390 and Environmental Policy and Culture 390
What kinds of tools would help us understand urgent global issues we are facing today, ranging from global pandemics and climate emergency, wildfires in California and Australia, hurricanes in Puerto Rico and Louisiana, occupational diseases in South Dakota and Toronto, or urban infrastructure crises in Mumbai and Senegal? Over the past three decades, political ecology has emerged as a powerful interdisciplinary tool for understanding and critiquing global ecological change. Political ecology seeks to unravel the political forces at work in environmental processes on a global scale. It is a powerful strategy for reinserting politics into apolitical or “greenwashed” discussions of ecology and the environment and unsettling common-sense understandings of “the environment” or “nature” as separate from the social and the cultural. It is also an essential tool to understand how disparate-seeming places, events, and living entities in the world are intimately linked to each other in often uneven ways. In this course, we will critically approach topics such as resource extraction, conservation, carbon management, natural disasters, sanitation politics, and human-animal-plant relations. In doing so, we will explore the gendered and racialized ways and the ongoing histories of slavery, colonialism, imperialism, and capitalism through which environmental and energy politics operate in our societies today.
HUM 370-3: Becoming Planetary: Earth, Power, Imagination
Co-listed with Anthropology 390 and Environmental Policy and Culture 390
Understanding our planet as the product of a dynamic planet, self-organizing over deep time, we will explore how social and political processes —fire use, mining, disease, slavery, colonialism, extraction, trade, and extinction— have powerfully shaped and have been shaped by inhuman planetary formations. One main task of the course will be to understand how racialized and economic inequalities have made their mark on Earth through the reorganization of planetary processes. “Planetary” has increasingly come to capture the imagination and apprehension of people around the world. It has also been receiving special attention in the critical social sciences and humanities as a concept that captures the relationship between social life and the Earth. Our planet is going through massive changes in its climate and ecosystems. At the same time, humans have become a major force that has been shaping the dynamics of the planet. Taking this interdependence between social life/humans and the planet, this course explores the ways in which social sciences and the humanities are responding to the entanglement of humanity and our planet.
HUM 370-4: History with Things
Co-listed with History 395
This seminar guides students as they research and write the social history of an artifact of their choice. Students will learn multiple approaches to the study of material culture; the diverse ways that people imbue objects with meaning; and how these objects mediate such differences among people as class, race, gender, age, and national culture—as well as the roles of capitalism, state-power, science, and environmental regulation in shaping the kinds of artifacts we design, sell, buy, and use. The student’s chosen artifact may hail from any time or place, and exist at almost any scale of “materialization” so long as it can be framed as a research question: from the Atlas V rocket to Raggedy Ann dolls, and from police body cams to computer algorithms.
HUM 370-4: Development of American Indian Law and Policy
Co-listed with History 300
In this course, we will conceptualize Native peoples as nations, not merely racial/ethnic minorities. Students will learn about the unique legal landscape in Indian Country by charting the historical development of tribal governments and the ever-changing body of U.S. law and policy that regulates Indian affairs. We begin by studying Indigenous legal traditions, the European doctrine of discovery, and diplomatic relations between Native nations and European empires. We then shift our focus to treaty-making, the constitutional foundations of federal Indian law, 19th century U.S. Supreme Court decisions, and the growth of the federal bureaucracy in Indian Country. The course devotes considerable attention to the expansion of tribal governmental authority during the 20th century, the contemporary relationship between Indian tribes and the federal/state governments, and the role of federal Indian law as both a tool of U.S. colonial domination and a mechanism for protecting the interests of Indigenous communities
HUM 370-6: Modern Art and Spiritual Thought
Co-listed with Art History 390
This course examines the relationship between modern art and spiritual thought in the twentieth century. Though modern abstract art is often assumed to be secular, since its inception in Europe in the early 1900s, many artists such as Hilma af Klint, Wassily Kandinsky, Kazimir Malevich, and Piet Mondrian explained their turn to abstraction in spiritual terms, indicating that modern art is uniquely capable of connecting us to hidden realities. The aim of this course is to learn to read the political, romantic, and aesthetic dimensions of modern art through a spiritual lens and provide students with critical tools to enhance the experience of seeing modernist films, paintings, or sculptures. The course will focus on the work of European and American artists as well as their contemporaries working in the global south. For example, Abanindranath Tagore created anti-colonial paintings that foregrounded India's “spiritual soul” in battle with the “materialist” British Empire. Other topics discussed include Surrealism and magic, spiritual modernism as de-colonial practice, Sufism and Theosophy, American Abstract Expressionism, and Soviet spiritual cinema. We will examine key theoretical texts by Walter Benjamin, Clement Greenberg, and Rosalind Krauss.
HUM 395-0: Writing Ancestry
Co-listed with English 309
This course will examine ancestry as a vector of meaning that has both ancient roots and current relevance. We will frame the course with essays by thinkers including Marianne Hirsch (“The Generations of Postmemory”); Alondra Nelson (The Social Life of DNA: Race, Reparations and Reconciliation After the Genome); Daniel Foor (Ancestral Medicine: Rituals for Personal and Family Healing); adrienne maree brown (Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds); and Resmaa Menakem (My Grandmother's Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Path to Mending our Hearts and Bodies). We will then read works of literature that cross genres and explore the author’s ancestry with both research and imagination. These texts include "No Name Woman" by Maxine Hong Kingston, "Kindred" by Octavia Butler, "The Pink Institution" by Selah Saterstrom, and poems by Seamus Heaney, Joy Harjo, and Tarfia Faizullah. Most of the course will be spent in the dual symbiosis of close reading and creative writing. Students will be guided in how to write into the known and unknown chapters of their ancestry. They will develop a practice of imaginative, meditative writing. They will also learn to do focused research to connect their ancestral stories with historical and cultural contexts. Students will write creatively in response to their readings, and will end the course with a suite of poems, essays, or short stories that combine the personal with the historical, the self with the ancestors. (People unsure of their ancestry are certainly welcome in this course, and ancestry may be fluidly, openly defined.)
HUM 395-0: Storytelling of Place
Co-listed with Radio/Television/Film 379
Storytellers have been inspired by location, landscape, and "communities of place" for generations to situate and explore narratives, from the earliest poetic and fictional works to current visual and interactive digital media forms. This class will explore storytelling across a range of methodologies that firmly situate narrative making within place and community, with a special emphasis on visual storytelling. Additionally, students will explore and situate their own crafted stories within the north Chicago community of Rogers Park, the most diverse neighborhood in Chicago. In the process, we will explore particular ethical and political concerns for media makers when collaborating, researching and working within actual existent communities. Class projects can take any storytelling form and will culminate in a group show staged for the Rogers Park community (either in-person or virtually given current pandemic conditions) for general audience reception and feedback. Alternately, students may also write final essays exploring a particular aspect of storytelling of place. Please note: You will have needed to take RTVF 190 if you are an RTVF major and plan to use RTVF CAGE equipment.