Courses in this cluster will invite shared inquiry from intersectional feminist modes of knowing, questions of race and religion, and historical perspectives on colonial and anti-colonial aesthetics in order to think critically about questions of power and knowledge. By bringing together perspectives that are too often wedged apart, this cluster seeks to trouble the boundaries between knowledge and art, history and the everyday, material objects and writing.

Associated Course Pairings:

Course Descriptions

CC104: The Empires Strike Back: From Anti-Colonial Resistance to Star Wars

Instructor: Danielle Sanchez
Learning Across the Liberal Arts Designation: Historical Perspectives
CRN# 18252
Block: 1

CC120: Fashionable Revolutions: Clothing, Class, Empire, and Gender in the Eighteenth Century

Instructor: Jennifer Golightly
CRN# 18298
Block: 3

This course will examine the ways in which women’s dress during the Age of Revolutions was a point of intersection for changing ideas about class, race, women’s roles in society, maternity, commerce and empire, and women’s education. Using a cultural historicist approach, we’ll investigate the very drastic shifts in women’s fashion that occurred between 1770 and 1805 and how those shifts are linked to changing global and cultural power structures as well as to a hardening of attitudes about femininity and gender more broadly. We’ll talk about fabrics (how, where, and by whom they were manufactured), shapes (from structured and strictured to loose and flowy), and styles (including the mania for towering hairstyles pre-French Revolution and the fake-pregnancy bump fad of the Regency era). We will use this thematic focus as a lens for exploring writing about historical and cultural topics. We’ll look at models of writing in public history, cultural history, and investigate writing as a process of thinking connected to discipline-based modes of inquiry. We’ll also spend time reflecting on our own writing processes and how to adapt what works for us as individuals to the requirements of specific genres and audiences.

CC104: Race and the Climate Catastrophe

Instructor: Yogesh Chandrani
Learning Across the Liberal Arts Designation: Historical Perspectives
CRN# 18260
Block: 1

The unfolding planetary crisis has led to a resurgence of discourse on the key question of capitalism and its relationship to the climate catastrophe. Thus, the term “capitalocene” has emerged as an alternative to the dominant category “anthropocene,” which obfuscates the problem by indiscriminately assigning agency for the catastrophe to an abstract human. There is a growing recognition that the costs of our climate catastrophe are not evenly distributed and are being largely borne by the peoples of the global south and by racial minorities in Europe and the United States. This course is premised on the assumption that the unprecedented event of a species—“human beings”—emerging as a geological force demands a more fundamental interrogation of the modern human condition (i.e., the historical processes that contributed to the making of modern human beings). In the course, we will investigate the history and system of the “capitalocene,” paying particular attention to the constitutive role of modern colonialism in the birth of racial capitalism and in the violent displacement of understandings of nature that underpin the cosmologies and traditions of indigenous and colonized societies. We will be concerned with exploring the emergence of religion as a site of epistemological doubt and struggle and how religious communities respond to the upheavals caused by the climate catastrophe.

CC120: Humans and Other Animals

Instructor: Marion Hourdequin
CRN# 18303
Block: 2

This course explores relationships between humans and other animals, in theory and practice. Non-human animals play important roles in human lives: we interact with these animals as companions, livestock, experimental subjects, sources of entertainment, wildlife, and food. Human relationships with animals vary across these and other contexts, and this course will examine these relationships from philosophical and multi-disciplinary perspectives, considering topics such as animal ethics, animal cognition, and the political and legal status of animals. Field trips and guest speakers will help us explore human-animal relationships in multiple contexts and perspectives.

The course will include a half-day field trip to Cheyenne Mountain Zoo on the first Friday, a possible full-day field trip to the Humane Society of the Pikes Peak Region or Colorado Wolf and Wildlife Center on the second Friday, and a possible week three field trip to Denver/Boulder to visit the Rocky Mountain Arsenal National Wildlife Refuge.

CC106: Feminist Texts, Feminist Subjects

Instructor: Nadia Guessous
Learning Across the Liberal Arts Designation: Societies & Human Behaviors
CRN# 18247
Block: 1

Introduction to the contemporary Earth climate system that focuses on the roles of the atmosphere, oceans, cryosphere, and land surface, and an overview of how this system has changed in the past and is predicted to change in the future. Includes the use of mathematical models to describe complex systems and the role of policy, economics, and ethics in mitigating human impact.

The class likely will have 2-3 afternoon lab and discussion sessions 1-3 p.m. The class will likely go to visit NCAR (National Climate and Atmospheric Research Center) in Boulder in week 2.

CC120: Musical Embodiment and Ethnography

Instructor: Liliana Carrizo
CRN# 18300
Block: 2

Introduction to humanistic and social science perspectives on global environmental change, engaging with a wide variety of explanatory frameworks and disciplinary lenses. Students will examine the socioeconomic, political, cultural, historical, and philosophical drivers of current environmental conditions. Includes perspectives emphasizing potential responses to climate change and other environmental challenges.

One second week field trip that should return by 3 pm.