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 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 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 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 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 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.