Kristin Lindgren's Critical Disabilities Studies course features a partnership with the Center for Creative Works, a non-profit that supports artists who have intellectual and developmental disabilities.
Courses
Courses that include civic and community engagement, Spring 2020
Due to student interest and in an effort to support the college-wide Community Engagement and Social Responsibility Council, The CPGC has compiled a list of community-engaged courses offered this spring.
For students interested in a semester based in Philadephia, visit The Tri-Co Philly Program.
Courses that feature off-campus experience and learning
Biology
- Economic Botany
A multidisciplinary approach to the coevolution and co-domestication of plants and humans. Topics will include the biology, physiology, evolution, and cultivation of key plants, embedded within their social history and environmental effects, and explored at an advanced level.
Environmental Studies
- Economic Botany
A multidisciplinary approach to the coevolution and co-domestication of plants and humans. Topics will include the biology, physiology, evolution, and cultivation of key plants, embedded within their social history and environmental effects, and explored at an advanced level. - Environmental Studies Praxis
Instructor: Sara Grossman
This course offers a cross-disciplinary introduction to community-based learning. Working with local community groups, students will learn the fundamental skills of praxis work applied to environmental issues within an inquiry-based framework.
Political Science
- Bureaucracy and Democracy
Instructor: Zach Oberfield
This course examines the interplay between democratically-elected officials (and institutions) and the people and agencies charged with implementing public policy.
Courses that engage social justice issues and ethical action without leaving campus
African and Africana Studies
- After the Sunset: Lessons in Transition to Peace - The South African Example
Instructors: Zolani Ngwane and Nozizwe Madlala-Routledge
This course will give students an opportunity to engage with issues of nonviolent and violent struggles, peace negotiations, transitional justice, post conflict reconstruction and peacebuilding by looking at a specific example – the South African transition from racial conflict to a constitutional democracy.
Anthropology
- Anthropology of Human Rights: Engaged Ethnography and Anthropologist as Witness
Instructor: Brie Gettleson
Anthropologists have borne witness to human rights violations in a variety of ways: through ethnographic description, through speaking out in the media or human rights campaigns, and through expert witness testimonies in courtrooms. Through course readings about these modes of witnessing, we will ask what anthropology has to offer in cases of human rights abuses and in broadening our perceptions of rights.
English
- The Visual Politics of Bondage
This course examines the visual politics embedded in literatures of bondage from several sites, focusing on colonial Brazil, the cross-temporal Indian Ocean World, and our contemporary moment of globalization. (Additional sites include recent renderings of chattel slavery in North America, such as the graphic novel adaptation of Octavia Butler’s Kindred, and the documentary Servant or Slave, for child labor in Australia.) Our central inquiry across the course will address the visual politics both nascent and full-fleshed in textual and imagistic representations of those extremely uneven power relations definitive of bondage. This means we treat select literatures of bondage as narrating subaltern histories, and we consider a few consistent questions. What visual tropes did writers and artists choose to record and why? How do the politics of what is made visible and/or excluded from the “archive” transpire with bondage? And how do visual turns to pleasure—religious, communal, and sexual—uniquely animate the ways the bonded navigated their lives?
History
- Modern Latin America
Instructor: James Krippner
History 209b introduces students to modern Latin American history. Throughout the semester we shall examine Latin America from the nineteenth-century emergence of modern republics through the present. Our readings will introduce us to all the major regions and cultural zones of contemporary Latin America, as well as the issues that have been of most concern for historians studying this area. Over the course of the semester, we will develop a thorough understanding of modern Latin American social and cultural history. Special attention will be paid to the themes of political conflict and social change; the negotiation and redefinition of social hierarchies based upon gender, race and class; sexuality and the formation of youth culture; economic, social and political changes wrought by economic liberalism and neoliberalism; and the construction of historical memory in the aftermath of extreme political violence. - Rio de Janeiro, Past and Present
Instructor: James Krippner
This research-oriented seminar invites you to analyze the fascinating history of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, as it is transformed over the centuries by an intricate mixture of local and global histories. This geographic space has been a zone of indigenous settlement from antiquity through the formation of a hybrid colonial culture into the present; a sixteenth and seventeenth century frontier outpost blessed with a beautiful natural harbor utilized by early modern religious dissidents, pirates, smugglers, and adventurers seeking their fortunes; the home of an important whaling industry as the colony matured; a vibrant port city and increasingly massive human trafficking center during the era of mass enslavement beginning in the sixteenth and extending through most of the nineteenth century; the seat of colonial and national governments from the mid-eighteenth through the mid-twentieth centuries; a transregional trade center linking the Americas, Africa, Europe and Asia from the sixteenth century through the present; a site of complex labor, ethnic, racial, gender and sexual politics for several centuries; since the end of WWII a cosmopolitan global tourist destination renowned for its multi-faceted popular culture, especially its beaches, music, dance, carnival, soccer and religious traditions; and most recently the (hopefully temporary) home of an authoritarian, reactionary and violent rightist populism fueled by deep unresolved grievances and twenty first century media. As we shall see, Rio de Janeiro has been all these things and more since its founding on March 1, 1565.
Peace, Justice, and Human Rights
- Anthropology of Human Rights: Engaged Ethnography and Anthropologist as Witness
Instructor: Brie Gettleson
Anthropologists have borne witness to human rights violations in a variety of ways: through ethnographic description, through speaking out in the media or human rights campaigns, and through expert witness testimonies in courtrooms. Through course readings about these modes of witnessing, we will ask what anthropology has to offer in cases of human rights abuses and in broadening our perceptions of rights. - Political Ideologies in a World of Identities
Instructor: Thomas Donahue
Millions have sacrificed their lives, or been killed, for political ideologies like liberalism, conservatism, socialism, populism, or liberationism; millions more have sacrificed or otherwise died for identities, like worker or capitalist, Muslim or Christian, African or European, female or male, trans- or cisgender. Why? What do identities and ideologies offer to people? What are the leading political ideologies’ key concepts and doctrines? What key norms govern attributing the leading identities to self and others? Do some ideologies favor certain identities, or vice versa? We develop tools for judging the merits of any ideology, or any interpretation of an identity. - Quakers, War, and Slavery, 1646-1723
Instructor: David Watt
In the 1640s and 50s, many Quakers believed that Christians should fight in wars; none of them (as far as we know) believed that Christians ought not own slaves. By 1723, most Quakers had renounced war; a good many of them had begun to assert that owning slaves was contrary to the will of God. Students in this course will try to determine how—and also why—Quakers changed their minds about war and slavery.
Political Science
- Political Ideologies in a World of Identities
Instructor: Thomas Donahue
Millions have sacrificed their lives, or been killed, for political ideologies like liberalism, conservatism, socialism, populism, or liberationism; millions more have sacrificed or otherwise died for identities, like worker or capitalist, Muslim or Christian, African or European, female or male, trans- or cisgender. Why? What do identities and ideologies offer to people? What are the leading political ideologies’ key concepts and doctrines? What key norms govern attributing the leading identities to self and others? Do some ideologies favor certain identities, or vice versa? We develop tools for judging the merits of any ideology, or any interpretation of an identity. - Injustices and Resistance
What are the major injustices of our time? Race, gender, class, sweatshops, animal exploitation? What are the harms done by these and other injustices, and how can we resist them? What makes something a social injustice, and who is responsible for dealing with it? This course examines leading theories of injustice and resistance that deal with these matters. Our aim is to give students the tools to build their own theory about these and other alleged injustices, and the merits of various forms of resisting them.
Religion
- Quakers, War, and Slavery, 1646-1723
Instructor: David Watt
In the 1640s and 50s, many Quakers believed that Christians should fight in wars; none of them (as far as we know) believed that Christians ought not own slaves. By 1723, most Quakers had renounced war; a good many of them had begun to assert that owning slaves was contrary to the will of God. Students in this course will try to determine how—and also why—Quakers changed their minds about war and slavery.