ALICE KAPLAN INSTITUTE FOR THE HUMANITIES

Co-listed with SOCIOL 220-0-20
Fulfills FD-SBS / Distro 3, Social and Behavioral Sciences

We are told constantly, “take care of yourself!” and we do our best to eat well, sleep well, and stay healthy. Our bodies are important to us. They are also important to the institutions we are a part of, including our families, our schools, our jobs, and our country. They are all invested in keeping our bodies healthy and productive. However, the array of institutions interested in the value of our bodies often have additional incentives—our health is surrounded by a hoard of controversies: Why do some people get better medical care than others? How should the healthcare system be organized? How do we balance the risks of new medical treatments with the benefits? What makes the stigma associated with disease and disability so enduring? What happens when no diagnosis can be made? This course offers conceptual tools and perspectives for answering these controversies. To do so it surveys a variety of topics related to the intersections of health, biomedicine, culture, and society. We will analyze the cultural meanings associated with health and illness; the political debates surrounding health care, medical knowledge production, and medical decision-making; and the structure of the social institutions that comprise the health care industry. We will examine many problems with the current state of health and healthcare in the United States and also consider potential solutions.

Co-listed with POLI_SCI 390-0-31
Fulfills FD-SBS / Distro 3, Social and Behavioral Sciences

This course delves into the profound impact of civil war on individuals and communities. We explore how civil war shapes behavior and social interaction, both during conflict and in its aftermath. In the first part, we scrutinize daily life in war zones, examining not only violence but also the emerging rules and norms that shape human interaction in war zones and analyze the transformative effects of war on societal life. Moving to the second part, we delve into the post-conflict stage, exploring the legacies of these experiences. Relying on a curated collection of films reflecting life during and after civil war, we explore the human experience of conflict in a nuanced and personal manner. Additionally, we examine social scientific research, drawing from political science, economics, and psychology, to understand and explain these legacies. By the course's end, students will gain a deep understanding of the complex impacts that civil war can have on individuals and communities and the challenges and opportunities that arise during the post-conflict stage.

Co-listed with ENVR_POL 390-0-25
Fulfills FD-SBS / Distro 3, Social and Behavioral Sciences

Environmental Justice in Modern South Asia is an undergraduate class on the unequal experiences and effects of environmental change in South Asia, drawing primarily on case studies from India. Since at least the early 1990s, rapid economic growth, massive infrastructural projects, democratic transformations and global threats of climate change have characterized the South Asian region. Such political, economic, and ecological processes come together to worsen the lives and livelihoods of marginalized people typically. They tend to intensify their vulnerability to environmental degradation, with historical structures of inclusion and exclusion profoundly shaping how natural resources are accessed and distributed. While the regional focus is on South Asia, at the heart of this course is a broader concern that environmental questions are always questions of equality and social justice.

The class will examine how issues of justice and nature are framed within law and official policy debates, within social movements and right-based struggles, as well as within people’s moral imaginations and everyday lives.  The following questions will guide the class:

• What environmental problems arose in South Asia through accelerated economic development across the  20th century and early 21st century?
• Who suffered the most, why, and how were they affected, socially, culturally, and materially?
• What strategies for justice and sustainability emerged?
• How is environmental justice understood across activists, policymakers, and ordinary people whose lives are most in danger?

Co-listed with HISTORY 300-0-30 and ENVR_POL 390-0-26
Fulfills FD-HS / Distro 4, Historical Studies

In 2016, thousands of Indigenous water protectors and their non-Native allies camped at the Standing Rock Indian Reservation in an effort to block the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline. That movement is part of a long history of Native activism. In this course, we will examine the individual and collective ways in which Indigenous people have resisted colonial domination in the U.S. and Canada since 1887. In addition to focusing on North America, we will also turn our attention to Hawai‘i. This course will emphasize environmental justice, and highlights religious movements, inter-tribal organizations, key intellectual figures, student movements, armed standoffs, non-violent protest, and a variety of visions for Indigenous community self-determination.

Co-listed with ART_HIST 319-0-1
Fulfills FD-HS / Distro 4, Historical Studies

Griffins, sphinxes, demons, and other fabulous creatures appear frequently in the art of ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, and the Eastern Mediterranean world. They stand at the intersection of the normal and abnormal, the natural and unnatural. Why did these images become so widespread, and what cultural functions did they serve? Can we connect their invention and dissemination with key moments in human history and cross-cultural interaction? What was the role of material representations of the supernatural in preventing and healing disease and other human misfortunes?

This course explores the supernatural subject in ancient art with new perspectives drawn from art history, history, anthropology, cognitive science, and archaeology. We will examine a wide range of objects and representations (including sculptures, figurines, seals, amulets, and other media) along with ancient texts that help us understand their meaning and function.

Co-listed with POLI_SCI 390-0-20 and PHIL 361-0-20

Fulfills FD-EET / Distro 5, Ethical and Evaluative Thinking

If all seasoned politicians in a fragile democracy are implicated in wide-scale corruption, but if the country is facing an acute economic crisis requiring experience at the helm, what should be done about the corrupt, and who should decide? What compromises, if any, are appropriate when considering kleptocrats who are effectively holding their people hostage - for instance, rulers who systematically abuse loans from foreign creditors, but who rely on the fact that their vulnerable population will suffer if loans are cut off entirely? What compromises, if any, are morally appropriate when dealing with dictators who threaten to unleash violence unless they are guaranteed an amnesty by the democratic forces trying to replace them? This upper-level seminar delves into such fraught political problems, revolving around different kinds of corruption and abuse of political power. In order to grapple with these problems, we examine in detail two ideas related to "the people." The first is the idea of the sovereign people as the owner of public property, often stolen by corrupt politicians. The second is the idea of the people as an agent with its own moral integrity - an integrity that might bear on intricate policy dilemmas surrounding the proper response to corruption. In the process of examining both of these ideas, students will acquire familiarity with prominent philosophical treatments of integrity, property, and - more generally - public policy.  

Co-listed with THEATRE 340-0-21
Fulfills FD-LA / Distro 6, Literature and Arts

This class combines archival research methodologies with critical artistic practice to create artworks out of archives. Designed for advanced undergraduates, the projects created for this class will illuminate the key properties of a given archival collection and animate them for a general audience. This can include projects such as designing an art exhibit, writing a play, creating a digital media project, or drafting a written piece of fiction or creative nonfiction. Students will learn how to combine the skills of archival research with their creative practice. The first half of the quarter is dedicated to locating archives of interest, analyzing their contents, and looking at key examples of archive-inspired artworks. The second half of the quarter focuses on students workshopping and completing their own archival artworks. The archival artworks can be multidisciplinary and of the student’s own design. Every week we will review a combination of theoretical texts, visual art, performance theory, theatre, and theatre history that all critically engage the archive.

Co-listed with PERF_ST 323-0-1
Fulfills FD-LA / Distro 6, Literature and Arts

What are the emotional landscapes of the U.S. settler colonial state, and how do they show up in our own bodies? How does pop music both implicate us as settlers/settler colonial subjects and help us work through these feelings towards decolonial futures? This course will examine these questions via the discography of American singer-songwriter Lana Del Rey, whose body of work mines the emotional history of Americana and reproduces settler colonial imaginaries. Using Del Rey as a case study, this course considers the role of performance in crafting archives of emotion and mobilizing decolonial, abolitionist ethics.

Co-listed with ART_HIST 390-0-4
Fulfills FD-LA / Distro 6, Literature and Arts

This course will consider how and why Whiteness as a racialized construct became correlated with humanity in the late medieval and early modern period within the region known as at the Atlantic, encompassing Europe, Africa, and the Americas. In an increasingly migratory world, medieval concepts of climate-based race were proven false, giving rise to several chaotic centuries in search of a new explanation for visible human difference. As the transatlantic slave trade became a source of wealth for colonizing Europeans, the need to classify people into discrete groups intensified, leading to an array of artworks that used their materiality as an agent of racialization. We will concentrate on the construction of Whiteness, Blackness, and Indigeneity as co-constitutive forms, while using creative methods to consider the perspectives of Indigenous and African diasporic peoples often lost to the colonial archive. We will engage with scholars of critical race theory, Indigenous studies, and decolonial thought as we interrogate themes such as: the Black/White binary and printmaking; monsters and cannibals in cartography; color in Indigenous codices; African sculptures of Portuguese colonizers; Black/Brownface in theater; and more.

Co-listed with PERF_ST 330-0-30
Fulfills FD-LA / Distro 6, Literature and Arts

This course will track tactics and methods through which humans and nonhumans navigate quick moments of drastic social and environmental change. Placing theories of ecological disturbance in conversation with writings on events in the social sciences and humanities, we will ask:  How do plants, animals, states, corporations, and activists variously navigate opportunities and hazards wrought by momentary upheavals? And what does it mean to conduct research and create art amid conditions of deep uncertainty and flux? The course will examine scholarly and aesthetic works addressing abrupt crises and disruptions across a range of scales — including networked protests, fires, storms, infrastructural breakdowns, and, especially, global climate change. Students will hone close reading and listening skills through analyzing multiple kinds of media, including fiction, performance, photography, and video, and will gain practice theorizing and communicating about events and places drawn from their own areas of interest.

Co-listed with DANCE 201-0-20
Fulfills FD-LA / Distro 6, Literature and Arts

This course raises questions regarding different contexts for dance production and ways of discussing this practice within dance scholarship. As a means to explore the cultural production and consumption of dance, we will examine a variety of case studies ranging from popular dances in the 20th and 21st centuries and their circulation on stage and screen in order to investigate popular dance’s relationship to the historical, social, political and economic context in which it arose. We will engage in discussions about appropriation, semiotics, taste and cultural value, embodiment, postmodernism, feminisms, racialization, global capitalism and how dance makes these concepts visible and corporeal.

How did individuals define themselves in the ancient Mediterranean world, and how did they express their affiliation with multiple and diverse ethnic, religious, linguistic, and other collective social identities? How did groups portray perceived differences between themselves and others? What do we know of the construction of gender identities, race, age, and class distinctions? What dynamic roles did dress, hairstyle, body decoration or ornament, and personal possessions play in establishing and expressing individual and collective identities?

This course explores evidence for self- and group-fashioning in Greece, Rome, and their neighbors in Egypt, Mesopotamia, and Persia. We examine a wide range of textual and material sources, including works of art, archaeological contexts such as burials and religious institutions, biographies, autobiographies, and legal documents, including dowries. We also consider culturally significant modes of self-representation and commemoration, such as portraits and funerary monuments, along with the collecting and transfer of objects that represented accumulated social entanglements, such as heirlooms.

Eighteenth-century Britain saw an explosion of interest in aesthetics: many thinkers leapt to investigate beauty and sublimity, imitation and emotion in art, artistic creativity, and so forth. A major reason for this interest was the cynical account of human nature, morals and politics promoted by Thomas Hobbes and Bernard de Mandeville: that human beings are solely motivated by self-interest, and that morals and politics are merely tools of social control, aimed to limit and redirect self-promoting human impulses. Many thinkers argued in response that human attractions to beauty and art were powerful counterexamples to that portrayal of human nature, showing that human beings can love objects and others for their own sakes, and in a way that calls them to social harmony, perhaps through eliciting sympathetic responsiveness. In this course, we will read and talk about central texts and issues in this discussion, moving from Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees to several major responses to his cynical challenge in the British aesthetics tradition: Shaftesbury’s high-minded view of beauty as rational order eliciting disinterested pleasure; Hutcheson’s theory of humor as cognitive and morally corrective (not mockery or ridicule); Kames’ view of art, including tragedy, as arousing sympathetic emotional responses; and Adam Smith’s and Sophie de Grouchy’s views of art, morality, and politics as grounded in sympathetic imagination. In addition to discussing their claims concerning the importance of art for understanding human nature and morality, we will discuss questions such as: does appreciation of art and beauty require education, or contribute to moral and political education, or both? How does representational art (“imitation”) arouse sympathetic emotion or understanding of diverse others? How is taste (for beauty or art) influenced by wealth, social class, or national identity?

Co-listed with POLI_SCI 390-0-33

Are democracy, equality, and human rights universal political ideas or are they Western constructs? What are the historical origins of these concepts and how have they been circulating in the world? How do we understand, compare, and evaluate political ideas that are rooted in different traditions? To address these questions, we will delve into texts exploring a myriad of political ideas and visions. Our exploration will start from the insights of ancient thinkers such as Plato, Aristotle, Confucius, Mencius, progressing to the perspectives of modern thinkers such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Alexis de Tocqueville, and Liang Qichao, and finally, we will reach debates in the contemporary world. Our focus will be on examining key political ideas, including but not limited to human rights, equality, and justice as discussed in these foundational texts, and their circulation between East and West.