This course focuses on the study of Education through the lenses of the social sciences. By deciphering the ways in which Education is written about according to discipline-specific paradigms and theoretical commitments, students will then organize and write manuscripts about a topic in education through the lenses of the social sciences: focusing, specifically, on the topics of instruction, school culture, and teacher and student identity.

In this writing-intensive sequel to CC106: Markets and Morality I, we will explore how micro-level behaviors affect macro-level outcomes. We will explore how economic policy works (and how it doesn’t), the inevitability of difficult tradeoffs, and most importantly, how to write a policy proposal to empower social change. We will focus on identifying and describing specific imperfections in the world, ranging from social injustice to environmental concerns, then learn how to communicate effectively in order to inspire, educate, and create prototypes while respecting the importance of inertia, context and cultural norms. We will learn how to use disciplinary forms of communicating, from writing to spreadsheet skills, to convey our messages.

CC120 Russia: Introduction to the Language, the Literature, and the Film is an emphasis-on-writing course focused on exploring and practicing written expression through an analysis of Russian culture, particularly its literature and film. By the end of this course students will be able to demonstrate in their research essays a contextualized understanding of samples of Russia’s prominent writers, film directors, and politicians, as well as a familiarity with Russian intellectual movements from 1840s to the present.

This course will offer a variety of approaches for thinking about how to write about film and media, by starting with the (often underappreciated) role an audience plays in making a film. During this course, we will not only watch films but learn about different ways in which audiences have given meaning to films, including instances where just being in a film’s audience is a kind of activism and where audiences have reimagined films and their afterlives in ways that contradict the intentions of their so-called creators. We will especially consider this in terms of how queer, Black, brown, and disabled audiences disidentify with representations of their identities and use (mis-)representations for their own ends. As we consider these relationships between film and audience, students will attune to their own ways of being an audience by practicing different styles of writing on film and media, including personal essay, film criticism, formal analysis, and research-based writing. Ultimately, students will use these assignments to reflect on how these different styles of writing, rooted in active audienceship, are foundational for both disciplinary writing in film and media studies (and filmmaking), as well as many other disciplines, including literary, cultural, and visual studies.

“The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak.' This famous quote from Jesus of Nazareth is but one example of what seems a natural division between mind and body, one common not only in many religions but as a mainstay in everyday cultural thinking, globally. In what ways does this bipartite framework get articulated? Inform views of life's purpose? Views of an afterlife? How is it established in secular culture? What reasonings support it? On what bases can it be critiqued? Most importantly, how can both philosophical and scientific inquiry help us construct alternative models of our world? Readings and writings will focus primarily on this last question.

In this class we will think about—and practice—academic writing in the Humanities through studying Plato’s Symposium, one of the most fun and fascinating works to reach us from ancient Athens. The Symposium follows the philosopher Socrates as he crashes a drinking party where leading intellectual and artistic figures discuss the nature of love, particularly sexual desire between men. The work provides important evidence for everything from Athenian social customs, the history of sexuality, philosophy’s competitive relationship with the arts and science, and emotional life 2500 years ago. It therefore gives us a chance to discuss how scholars from various disciplines have written about a single work in a variety of ways, bringing different questions and methods to bear on the same text. This will let us reflect on what is the same and different between academic writing in related Humanistic fields, while also seeing how our own voices as writers change depending on the kind of investigation we undertake—and what audience(s) we wish to address. Students will become comfortable with the conventions of academic writing in the Humanities, all while tackling an accessible work that asks deep questions about love and companionship in a good-humored manner.

Beginning with conceptions of the body, health and medicine from the sixteenth century Mediterranean world, this course explores changing medical practices in historical contexts. What constituted medicine and who had medical authority? What role did exploration and colonization play in the economic and intellectual development of medical practices? How might we think about our own moment in conjunction with the 1918-19 Influenza Pandemic? We’ll share our findings and collectively work to develop research questions and techniques for future study in this field. In so doing, we will critically engage ethical dimensions of the study and uses of medicine and history. In this writing course, we will use the history of medicine to practice and reflect on the role of reading, drafting, revision—that is to say, all the elements of writing—in developing our own thinking and understanding and also communicating effectively to an audience. Your engagement and reflection on this process is a vital component of the course.

This course offers an introduction to one of the earliest forms of the African American literary tradition. Students will engage with select readings from the Slave Narratives to contemporary autobiographies reflecting different facets of African American life worlds and lived experience.

In this course, we will explore place-based writing about, from, and between cultures and landscapes of the Greater Southwest (including Mexico). Using interdisciplinary perspectives on texts, writing, orality, testimony, and genre, we will investigate how the multiple cultures of the region write about experience, place, power, equity, and difference. Building on CC100 Power, Place, and the Southwest Borderlands, we will explore how primary and secondary sources converge in multiple forms of narrative, story, and genre in defining the peoples and places of the region.

“Mathematics for Sustainability” will cover topics connected to resource assessment including measurement, estimation, equilibrium and flows. We will also study energy stocks and ecological systems/networks; in particular energy flows in the climate system. Various models for growth will be discussed. Exponential and logarithm functions will be used as first approximations of growth (decay) behavior, and logistic models will be studied when considering environmental limits to change. Systems, connections and feedbacks will be focused on in specific case studies selected from (depending on the interests of students) control of wildfires, recycling, population growth and questions of control, genetic engineering and the future of food, nuclear power, efficient use of electricity at home, solar energy, the ecological impacts of electric vehicles, and federal predator controls in the service of the livestock industry. Basic statistics and probability theory will be used to understand and measure risk, payoffs, and when possible, to make careful predictions. Students will complete an individual research project presented at the end of the course that will make use of mathematical tools to better understand a topic in sustainability.

Investigates the foundation and aims of politic rule as well as fundamental debates over the meaning of justice, liberty, power, authority, law and rights through an examination of basic but competing perspectives drawn from ancient, medieval, and modern texts. Thinkers include, but are not limited to, Aristotle, Aquinas, Machiavelli, and Locke.

This course proposes that serious learning depends on a frequently neglected skill: play. Play cultivates our capacity to make new discoveries, to imagine alternative possibilities, and to contend with setbacks, failures, and challenges. The course explores many types of play, including children’s play, rule-based games, improvisation, and combat sports. Reaching across disciplines, we will speak with scholars and scientists about how they experiment with ideas and possibilities in their research. The course also introduces methods and materials that theatre artists use to write plays and hone their skills as actors. While taking inspiration from theatre, this course is primarily a writing seminar and does not require prior experience on stage. Students should expect to play and experiment with writing in daily in-class exercises that draw on an unruly combination of scholarly and non-academic readings drawn from philosophy, sociology, performance studies, literature, and journalism.

This course examines the ways in which discourse surrounding sports influences culture, politics, and identity. Using the tools of media and cultural studies students analyze the discourses surrounding topics such as the rhetorical construction of the athlete, sporting events, athletes as racialized and gendered bodies, the commodification of the athlete, athletes and activism, as well as fandom and identification. This isn’t a class about the rules or the appreciation of sport. It’s about how sport is commemorated, how its heroes and villains are constructed and represented, and most importantly what that tells us about how contemporary popular culture values different racial, gendered, and class identities. The aim of the course overall is to introduce students to the kinds of questions scholars ask in studying sport and to enable students to improve their writing by learning to assess and analyze sources more carefully, and to position their own perspective among others in a way that is informed, critical, and civil.

In this course we’ll analyze the innovations, novelties, and major themes that spawned from Marxism and Feminism in the Italian context. Specific attention will be given to the concepts of hegemony, autonomy, antiwork, the commons, and reproductive labor. We’ll look at both historical and contemporary authors inspired by and working out of these traditions including Franco Berardi, adrienne maree brown, Silvia Federici, Angela Davis, CLR James, Selma James, Fred Moten, Stefano Harney, Jenny Odell, Federico Campagna, Nick Srnicek, Mark Fisher, Astra Taylor, and many others. The authors we read transcend the disciplines of Italian Studies, Political Science, Philosophy, History, Religious Studies, Women & Gender Studies, Economics, and Comparative Literature. We’ll analyze the ways in which these authors utilize interdisciplinary and anti-disciplinary writing and research practices, transgressing the stable boundaries of disciplines and weaving together rigorous scholarly methodologies with bottom-up knowledge practices, to disrupt the authoritarian enclosures of knowledge production making writing a tool for autonomy and liberation. The thinkers we’ll explore transcend their identifications of Marxist, Feminist, or Black Radical Theorist, and in the words of Fred Moten consent “not to be a single being.” These authors are poetic in that they “exceed the field of signification,” according to Franco Berardi and create new possibilities of meaning through what Italo Calvino called the “ars combinatoria”: the combinatory machinic practices of literature. In this light we’ll also consider what possibilities for liberation and autonomy are inscribed or foreclosed by recent developments in AI writing technology. A primary goal of this course is for students to develop their own unique writing practice by exploring a variety of techniques and philosophies from exemplary authors.

As the German-Jewish philosopher Walter Benjamin wrote almost one-hundred years ago, the march of progress is like a storm that leaves ruins in its wake. Whereas some have sought refuge from these storms of progress in nostalgic attempt to retrieve – and, in some cases, return to – lost times, others have eschewed such romantic pursuits, seeking instead to forge alternative ways of being in the world, some modicum of a right life in the wrong one. After examining the destructive dynamics associated with capitalist modernity, this course will turn its attention to the oppositional milieus and defiant voices that have flourished in its ruins. Although the course makes occasional forays into global history, the primary focus will be 19th and 20th Century Europe.

An introduction to the discipline and methods of religious studies focused on gender and sexuality in various religions. As a writing-intensive introduction to the discipline, the course will acquaint students with different genres of religious writing (such as scripture, narrative, and theology) and with scholarship exemplifying gender studies methodologies, ranging from close textual and historical analysis to ethnographic and sociological approaches. Throughout the course, we will explore how religious writing centers the human body and naturalizes inequities based on sex and gender, thereby establishing “authority” on the basis of assumptions about identity that are increasingly challenged today, sometimes in courts of law. We will thus consider how diverse religious discourses continue to inform contemporary social and political debates on issues such as marriage and reproductive rights. The aim of the course overall is to introduce students to the kinds of questions scholars ask in studying religion/s through the lens of gender and sexuality, and to enable students to improve their writing by learning to assess and analyze sources more carefully, and to position their own perspective among others in a way that is informed, critical, and civil.

Primatology, a specialty within biological anthropology, has a rich history of storytelling. From documentaries that highlight the challenges of surviving in a rainforest to books such as Jane Goodall's earliest account of her research with chimpanzees, many people have gained an understanding of our close relatives through narrative. Students will explore primate narratives that are presented in documentaries, books written for the general public, and the scientific literature. In addition to comparing differences in storytelling between these different narrative formats, we will also examine 'multispecies ethnographies', an emerging line of inquiry from cultural anthropology. Students will investigate how these different ways of studying and interacting with nonhumans add to our understanding of ourselves and the world that we inhabit.

Whether writing a news report for publication or drafting a news release on behalf of a nonprofit or public relations client, clear concise, accurate, and error-free copy is expected. Students in Writing the News will learn how to gather information and assemble it to create compelling and engaging narratives for a broad readership in various ways. In this class, students will understand the difference and relationship between journalism, advertising, public relations, and other forms of communication. They will learn how to write news stories, editorials and opinion columns, memos, emails, analysis, and narrative nonfiction. They will also learn how to craft press releases and to tell stories in different ways from different perspectives — and on different platforms including social media. The goal of this class is to help students understand that each kind of writing operates within its own guidelines, ethics, structure, style, and form.

In this course, you will learn disciplinary modes of research, analysis, and writing in religious studies through a consideration of particularly “American” expressions of Jesus. We will consider not only how Christian traditions contribute to critical moments in U.S. history, but also how the figure of Jesus functions foundationally in certain constructions of national history and identity. Encountering significant representations of Jesus in popular culture, visual art, and political discourse, we will examine how Jesus is deployed in diverse, and often divergent, ways. We will especially focus on portraits of Jesus that illuminate notions of race and gender. As a CC120, the course attends to the critical study and analysis of primary texts (of varied media) and scholarly discourse. In addition, it highlights the interdisciplinary nature of religious studies, orients students to how scholars understand the crafting of religious identity, and demonstrates how religion operates in wider social, political, and cultural contexts.

In this writing course, we will identify pressing questions regarding how we live our daily lives. Our questions will form a compass, helping us navigate course materials, writing, and activities by allowing us to reflect on our own experiences and contemplate how we can exist more purposefully. Contemplative Pedagogy is an approach to teaching and learning with the goal of encouraging deep learning through focused attention, reflection, and heightened awareness (Columbia University’s Center for Teaching and Learning). Through contemplative practices, we will cultivate our attention spans, nurturing habits that allow us to build our strongest relationship to our own writing and build writing stamina. We will use the “Tree of Contemplative Practices” and authors whose work corresponds to various twigs on each branch, such as writing that falls under: journaling, a meditation on, beholding, bearing witness, storytelling, etc. (And brainstorming our own roots, naming them, what feeds a certain desire for contemplation.) We will write our way around the tree—from description, to journaling, to improvising in present moments and thinking, to relational/political, to finding patterns/ritual and establishing philosophies—cultivating a wisdom to live by! We will go for walks or “forest bathe” to increase meditative and sensory function; watch poetic films that slow us down and reflect more nuanced realities; listen to self-mesmerist music to increase “flow” and page length; center playfulness, joy, and humor as overlooked intelligences; study intelligences of plant and animal life; and learn from scientific, sociological, and philosophical articles on human consciousness and living through extreme times. Course projects include a student-designed silent retreat and group pilgrimage. Ultimately, we will write exploratorily, learn to do our thinking on the page, and write towards discovery and meaning-making—in hopes of approaching ourselves and communities with more depth and empathy. These immersive studies allow us to contemplate what “living more deliberately” might mean for each of us, how it can increase learning, and encourage us to think interdependently and towards a greater collective well-being.

The Foundations of Radical Nonviolence examines the theory and practice of radical nonviolence. The course has a cultural and systemic lens, covering a broad range of disciplines including philosophy, religion, art, history, and science, as well as modern day practitioners in order to examine nonviolence as a powerful social force. Students will meet many guests who are practitioners and activists, exploring war and its effects on humans and the planet, strategic nonviolent conflict, prison abolition, civil disobedience, forgiveness, restorative justice, and nonviolent history. This course meets with nonviolence experts that range from anti-war Nobel Peace Prize nominees to Civil Rights leaders, Movement for Black Lives leaders, Immigrant Rights, Environmental activists, and Prison Abolitionist activists. Creativity and independent research are highly encouraged in this course, and there is a heavy focus on connecting theory and practice.

This course examines the ways in which discourse surrounding sports influences culture, politics, and identity. Using the tools of media and cultural studies students analyze the discourses surrounding topics such as the rhetorical construction of the athlete, sporting events, athletes as racialized and gendered bodies, the commodification of the athlete, athletes and activism, as well as fandom and identification. This isn’t a class about the rules or the appreciation of sport. It’s about how sport is commemorated, how its heroes and villains are constructed and represented, and most importantly what that tells us about how contemporary popular culture values different racial, gendered, and class identities. The aim of the course overall is to introduce students to the kinds of questions scholars ask in studying sport and to enable students to improve their writing by learning to assess and analyze sources more carefully, and to position their own perspective among others in a way that is informed, critical, and civil.

Our feelings matter to us in various ways. Emotions such as anger, fear, love, disgust, and embarrassment are complex phenomena that hold a place of great importance in human life – influencing our decisions, coloring our experience, and affecting our mental and bodily health. We have emotions every day, but what exactly are they? Physiological disturbances? Cultural constructions? Expressions or reactions? Judgments, perceptions, appraisals, or evaluations? And why are they such a significant part of human life? Do they serve a personal, social, or biological function? Do they cloud our thinking, or offer us a kind of insight? Can we control them, and should we wish to do so? In this course, we will explore these and other questions, drawing upon evidence and arguments presented by psychologists and philosophers in this exciting area of interdisciplinary scholarship. Students will be introduced to a diverse body of work attempting to explain the matter and meaning of emotion and feeling. Through a critical investigation of the emotions, we will examine what it means to lead a fulfilling life as a human being.

This class will focus primarily on the fairy tale (“Märchen” in German), a category of folklore containing elements of the supernatural, miraculous, and wondrous. In Germany, the fairy tale is most closely associated with the Brothers Grimm, who collected and transcribed these tales in the early nineteenth century. In 1812, they published the first edition of Children’s and Household Tales (Kinder- und Hausmärchen), which they continued to edit and update throughout their lives. This collection contains many fairy tales that are familiar to us today, including “Hansel and Gretel,” “Cinderella,” “Little Red Riding Hood,” “Snow White,” and “Sleeping Beauty.” Our class will engage with fairy tales and fairy tale scholarship in a variety of ways. We will study the social and political history of fairy tales and analyze their formal structure. We will critically examine how fairy tales represent different aspects of human identity—including gender, race, class, ability, sexuality, and age—as well as how they represent animals, plants, and the natural world. We will also compare different versions of the same tale, including queer, Black, and feminist adaptations and retellings.

From 17th-century curiosity cabinets to A Night at the Museum, artifacts and specimens have offered their collectors, curators, and viewers access to multiple ways of understanding the natural world. In this writing seminar, we’ll explore the history of natural history, collecting, and display in a range of times and places, past and present. Using materials and approaches drawn from history, science and technology studies, and museum studies, we’ll grapple with key questions about American cultures of collecting: How have collections been deployed to produce knowledge—by whom, for whom, about whom? What is curation? How do collections—and exhibits—make arguments? Together we’ll consider dinosaur bones, bird specimens, field books, habitat dioramas, and materials from local collections as we examine the ways exhibits tell stories and offer arguments—and craft our own.

Failure is at the heart of science. Experiments whose results are consistent with expectations do little to challenge our views, practices, culture, or boundaries. Nevertheless, we operate in competitive systems with success-based metrics, participate in culture that elevates those who are deemed successful, and often judge ourselves harshly when we fail. This course will explore what it means to fail and how we tell the story of failure, particularly in the field of physics. Who writes the stories? When and how is failure justifiably framed as success? How can we think and communicate about failing in healthy and productive ways? In the process of considering these questions, we will investigate a variety of scientific genres, texts, and practices. We will also embark on independent projects for students to practice the process of failure and communicate about their work.

“The sociological imagination enables us to grasp history and biography and the relations between the two within society. That is its task and its purpose.” C. Wright Mills described the “sociological imagination” as a quality of mind that compels us to situate our biographies in history and society and enables us to relate our experiences to our location within social structures. By engaging theories of social stratification and reproduction, we will learn how institutions shape our opportunities, our socioeconomic status and our positions of power or powerlessness, and how cultural values and community norms inform our identities and affiliations, our aspirations and pursuits, and our notions of dignity, meaning, and worth. To relate private troubles and public issues, we will ask: What is the role of education in achieving the American Dream? What is the relationship between growing inequality and the rise of meritocracy? What are the implications of meritocratic values and principles for political attitudes and social change and for alternative visions of the common good?

This course draws on sociological and public health literatures to examine the relationship between historical forms of systemic racism and contemporary inequities in environmental health across neighborhoods and communities. Students will develop proficiency in ArcGIS Pro, a leading geospatial software program, to carry out research while learning how theory-informed data analysis and the process of writing can work together to generate critical insights that further the cause of social justice.

Musical Embodiment and Ethnography: Building on the idea of music, performance, and culinary practice as forms of “living history,” this course is dedicated to understanding and uncovering cultural belonging from the perspective of the embodiment and the senses. We will attempt to answer: what do social and individual histories look like, if told from the perspective of music and song? In this course, we will draw from and fine-tune the craft of ethnography – utilizing sensory, culinary, and music-based modes of inquiry in order to explore the human condition – including the world, its peoples, and the transnational movement of people over time. Our investigation will culminate in a larger research-based, written ethnographic project and presentation that creatively represents lived experiences of musical embodiment, culinary belonging, and socio-cultural meaning.

In this course, students will learn to identify and use an interdisciplinary set of academic writing conventions through examining various scholarly approaches to the diverse evidence for both power dynamics in ancient Greek society and the evolution of Greek political thought. The close reading of ancient Greek authors will let us consider various claims to political authority and legitimacy, and how some of these claims were challenged. We will also dig deeper to uncover the ways in which ancient Greeks organized, resolved disputes, and engaged in collective action. At the same time, we will look at the archaeological evidence for ancient social structures and reflect upon the ways in which the material record can complicate, complement, and contextualize literary sources. Finally, we will scrutinize the work of many prominent scholars of the ancient world, asking how historians, archaeologists, anthropologists, and classicists approach the same topic from different disciplinary perspectives, each with its own conventions for research and writing. Throughout, our focus will be on understanding how scholars engage with the evidence and with various audiences inside and outside academia, thereby helping students think through these issues in their own writing for this course and beyond.

The open road--a quintessential American image. This first-year seminar centers the American frontier as a thematic framework for exploring narratives of citizenship, nationhood, and mobility in American literature, film, and media from the nineteenth century to the present. It asks: what accounts for the pull of the open road? How has its representation shifted across time? What roles have race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality played in shaping the American frontier? In answering these questions, we will place cultural narratives about movement alongside discourses on nationhood and upward mobility to theorize the coexistence of freewheelers and restricted travelers. Our journey begins with westward expansion in the U.S. during the nineteenth century and takes us through the rise of mass transit, global war, transnational migration, digital media, and science fictional futures, which all shape ideas of identity and belonging in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Along the way, we will understand how American frontiers function both as material spaces and as ideological orientations to sociopolitical developments. Our routes will range vastly, traversing American frontier spaces as they expand beyond the continental U.S. and even into the realm of the digital, before finally turning to imagine the world after the apocalypse.

This course examines the ways in which discourse surrounding sports influences culture, politics, and identity. Using the tools of media and cultural studies students analyze the discourses surrounding topics such as the rhetorical construction of the athlete, sporting events, athletes as racialized and gendered bodies, the commodification of the athlete, athletes and activism, as well as fandom and identification. This isn’t a class about the rules or the appreciation of sport. It’s about how sport is commemorated, how its heroes and villains are constructed and represented, and most importantly what that tells us about how contemporary popular culture values different racial, gendered, and class identities. The aim of the course overall is to introduce students to the kinds of questions scholars ask in studying sport and to enable students to improve their writing by learning to assess and analyze sources more carefully, and to position their own perspective among others in a way that is informed, critical, and civil.

In this course, students will learn to identify and use an interdisciplinary set of academic writing conventions through examining various scholarly approaches to the diverse evidence for both power dynamics in ancient Greek society and the evolution of Greek political thought. The close reading of ancient Greek authors will let us consider various claims to political authority and legitimacy, and how some of these claims were challenged. We will also dig deeper to uncover the ways in which ancient Greeks organized, resolved disputes, and engaged in collective action. At the same time, we will look at the archaeological evidence for ancient social structures and reflect upon the ways in which the material record can complicate, complement, and contextualize literary sources. Finally, we will scrutinize the work of many prominent scholars of the ancient world, asking how historians, archaeologists, anthropologists, and classicists approach the same topic from different disciplinary perspectives, each with its own conventions for research and writing. Throughout, our focus will be on understanding how scholars engage with the evidence and with various audiences inside and outside academia, thereby helping students think through these issues in their own writing for this course and beyond.

Primatology, a specialty within biological anthropology, has a rich history of storytelling. From documentaries that highlight the challenges of surviving in a rainforest to books such as Jane Goodall's earliest account of her research with chimpanzees, many people have gained an understanding of our close relatives through narrative. Students will explore primate narratives that are presented in documentaries, books written for the general public, and the scientific literature. In addition to comparing differences in storytelling between these different narrative formats, we will also examine 'multispecies ethnographies', an emerging line of inquiry from cultural anthropology. Students will investigate how these different ways of studying and interacting with nonhumans add to our understanding of ourselves and the world that we inhabit.

In this course, we will engage in creative practices that contribute to a richly lived life and study creativity as a field of inquiry. The creativity we cultivate is designed to support students in their future academic and professional endeavors and to enrich their personal lives. No artistic ability is required.

This block will center upon a tiered writing project, including tutorial meetings with the professors aimed at finessing each student’s writing and fine-tuning their analysis. Building on scholarly approaches introduced in the first block, additional methodologies will be considered, as well as scholars who combine multiple approaches. Thematically we will consider exchanges in garden design between China and the West in the 18th century, Romanticism and Orientalism, Impressionism and the Japanese print, and artistic responses to war in 20th century China and the West. Approaches will include close visual reading; literary tools as used in art; critical insights based on race, class, and gender; institutional forms of power in relation to normative imagery; colonialism and race; and art used in political contexts—at times supporting, at times critiquing, the nation-state.