Michael B. Kim Institute for Ethical Inquiry and Leadership

ANTH H275: Race and Representation in Documentary Filmmaking

Instructor: Zeynep Sertbulut

This is an introductory cross-listed (Visual Studies/Anthropology) production course on the theory and practice of documentary filmmaking through an exploration of race and gender onscreen. The objective of the course is to enable students to build a critical awareness of the ways in which film and media perpetuate racialized representations and explore how students can challenge such representations through their own filmmaking practices. As inspiration, we will watch and study a wide variety of innovative documentary films that bring alternative voices and histories to the screen and read/watch filmmaker interviews. Classes will combine elements of a studio (sharing and critiquing filmmaking work in progress) and seminar (discussing weekly themes). Students will view assigned films on their own and post weekly responses to films and readings. During the first part of the semester, students will work on their own shooting and editing exercises. During the second half of the semester, students will work in teams to develop a short film (approximately 5 min.) as their final project for this class.

In addition to discussing documentary films and working on production assignments, we will also discuss ethical considerations and power relationships in nonfiction filmmaking. Students will write responses about course readings and films screened outside of class, develop a film proposal for their own film idea, engage with readings about nonfiction film history and technique, complete documentary production assignments, and keep a production journal about the making of their own film. Due to the required readings, films, and intensive film production components, this course will require a substantial time commitment.

LEARNING OBJECTIVES

• To gain a basic understanding of the documentary filmmaking process
• To explore ethical considerations and power relationships in nonfiction cinema
• To deconstruct and challenge racialized and gendered gazes in film and other cultural forms
• Demonstrate an ability to describe and analyze filmic form, style, and content
• Refine ability to give and receive (and implement changes based on) constructive feedback

Key ethical questions the course will address

• What are the (inherent) power discrepancy between observers and observed?
• What are stereotypes, and what are some cinematic techniques to subvert them?
• What are the basic ethical considerations for documentary filmmaking? How do you establish trust and rapport with people you'd like to appear in your film -- even if you’re telling your own story? What is your responsibility beyond the screen?
• What role does narration/voiceover play in the documentary? What are some ways it can be used? What makes an effective, just narration?
• What's collaborative filmmaking? What is the role of collaboration in challenging power dynamics in film?
• What is the power of humor in cinema -- especially when dealing with serious topics? What are the differences between laughing AT and laughing WITH?

ANTH 302: Oil, Culture, Power

(cross-listed with ENVS)

Instructor: Zainab Saleh

The discovery of oil in Titusville, Pennsylvania, by Colonel Edwin Drake in 1859 ushered in new realities whose consequences have reconfigured and reshaped the world. On the one hand, the oil industry has engendered spectacular innovations and tremendous wealth. On the other hand, the rise of oil monopolies, concerned about profits, have wreaked havoc upon oil-rich communities in terms of environmental collapse and destruction of local industries. Moving between different registers, this course explores how oil has shaped local, regional, and imperial politics in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. As the single most important commodity in the world, the story of control over this highly prized resource is a violent one. While oil revolutionized modern life, its rise has been associated with unethical practices, dispossession, and corruption. This interdisciplinary course addresses the ways in which oil has defined the fates of empires and nation-states, the rise and fall of local political movements, neoliberal governmentality, and knowledge production. In addition, it explores migration and citizenship, gender dynamics, racial relations, social inequalities, and weaponization of the justice system. Finally, this course examines global processes across different regions, such as Nigeria, Russia, Ecuador, Venezuela, the United States, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and Iran.

Key ethical questions the course will address

• This course delves into oil companies’ interventions in the legal systems in different countries in order to suppress any efforts by local communities to hold them accountable for environmental degradation and dispossession.
• It chronicles how oil companies have resorted to policies of divide-and-rule, through the mobilization racial differences, in order to prevent workers from unionizing.
• It details oil companies’ involvements in coups and civil wars, in collaboration with their governments, all over the world.
• It examines how the oil industry, from its inception, has led to the rise of monopolies and destruction of any competition through the use of different illegal practices.

CHEM 310: Seminar in the Social Relevance of Chemistry

This seminar will explore, articulate, and discuss the influence that Chemistry and society have on each other. Participants will develop awareness of the historical, political and cultural context of western science, with specific attention to how chemistry affects, and is affected by, the exclusion of people and ideas based on race, ethnicity, ability, socioeconomic status, and other identities. Participants will connect these topics of study to their current roles at Haverford and future careers.

Key ethical questions the course will address

• What are the outcomes of the profit motive in the chemical and pharmaceutical industries for their practices and the greater society around these industries?
• How is the scientific community of chemistry and chemistry education constructed, for whom and by whom?
• What constitutes "greener practices" in chemistry and how could such practices be implemented in local and more global contexts?

CSTS H257/PJHR H257 Activism and the Law from Ancient Greece to Today: Antigone’s Echoes

Instructor: Ryan Warwick

Where should the law come from, the individual or the state? How can you protest an unjust system, and how can a story from 2500 years ago help you do it? Who owns a “Classic” and what does that category mean? These are just a few questions that Sophocles’ Antigone, long considered to be one of the most important texts in the western tradition, has raised for philosophers and playwrights from the Enlightenment to today. In this class we will read several versions of the Antigone myth from different times and places and explore this character’s enduring relevance to theories of gender, performance, world literature, and politics.

Key ethical questions the course will address

• What is the limit of individual action to effect change?
• What role should the canon of Greek literature play in politics?
• Where should the models for response to the rise of fascism come from?
• What is the role of the family in informing how we articulate our politics?
• What forms of belonging have shaped resistance to hegemony and how might they be adapted for today’s problems?

ENVS H222 / HLTH H222: Heat and Health: Design Action Lab

(cross-listed in Growth and Structure of Cities and Anthropology)

Offered through Tri-Co Philly, Fall 2025

Instructors: Joshua Moses and Anna West

This community-engaged course examines and responds to experiences of extreme heat in Philadelphia. Site visits, guest speakers, and readings will deepen students’ understanding of the intertwined social, economic, health, and environmental challenges facing Philadelphia residents in a warming world. The course centers a collaborative design partnership between artists, community partners, students, and faculty to generate “social practice” art that responds to the health impacts of extreme heat, particularly on those most vulnerable to its impacts.

Key ethical questions the course will address

• How can ethnographic attention to the uneven distribution and impacts of extreme heat inform ethical arguments for investing in urban heat resilience and climate adaptation?
• How do we come to see our daily response to the heat-related distress around us as essential to our conceptions of interpersonal and professional ethics?
• How can making heat's impacts visible work to foreground “everyday ethics” and opportunities for individual, collective, and institutional action toward a more just and equitable city?
• What ethical principles and practices should guide our community-academic-artistic design partnership? What can we learn from collaborators' past experiences? What processes can we put in place that will ensure we are listening, learning, iterating, and reflecting in response to emergent concerns?

HIST H252 History of Haverford College: Conflict, Consensus and the Liberal Arts

Instructors: James Krippner and David Watt

This course introduces students to the history of Haverford College from its origins in the early 19th century through the student strike of 2020. It emphasizes moments of debate, conflict and even crisis, as the successive generations of people who have been “the College” defined and redefined its identity, goals and purpose over time. An underlying premise of the course is that this is an ongoing process you will contribute to during your years as a student and afterwards, when you return full time to the world beyond the campus gates.

Throughout the semester, we will ask many questions. These include what, if anything, makes Haverford College unique? How have the institution’s Quaker origins been significant? Does that legacy remain relevant today? Who has been included and excluded as Haverford College has defined and redefined itself over nearly two centuries? Is there really a 21st century purpose for a values-based, undergraduate, liberal arts college education? What are or should be those values? What has changed and what has remained the same at Haverford College over the years? By the end of this semester, you will have begun to formulate your own answers to these questions. You will also know a substantial amount (though of course not everything) about the history of the institution you have chosen to join.

Key ethical questions the course will address

• What is the point of a Haverford education?
• How has the college defined and redefined its core values as the world has changed over nearly two centuries?
• How has our community excluded as well as included people over time?
• How has the college community recognized individual conscience, academic freedom, free speech and political dissidence?
• How has the institution handled political conflicts of all sorts, from the daily mundane to the globally significant?
• When has the institution failed to live up to its stated ideals? Why did it do so, when it did so?

HLTH215: Sacrifice Zones: Empires, Epidemics & Climate Changes

Instructor: Lauren Minsky

In this big picture course, we explore how humanity’s diverse imperial projects have interacted with specific ecologies and climate changes to shape the changing spatial distribution and concentration of human experiences with hunger, famines, droughts, floods, and diseases from pre-historical times to the present. In the process, we reflect upon and question commonsensical (and often mutually reinforcing) historical and presentist logics — of environmental determinism; historical inevitability; Eurocentrism; national becoming; development and growth; modernization and conservation; technological salvation; and of futility, doom and despair. In turn, we consider how fresh perspectives on the past can significantly (re)shape our assessments of contemporary global health and existential challenges, including what we make of the ongoing green growth vs de-growth debate and calls to cultivate “indigenous” understandings and approaches to life.

Key ethical questions the course will address

• What are the ethical implications of identifying a new ecological era within the long history of humanity called “the Anthropocene” and of different ways of periodizing it? What do we make of related projects that reject the “Anthropos” and instead identify a “Plantationocene”, “Capitalocene”, “Africanocene” or “Chthulucene”, among others? What ethical possibilities do these differing concepts open up? What do they foreclose, particularly with regards to “the time before” and understandings of “the indigenous”?
• What is at stake in the long human history of tying political legitimacy and the provision of basic human needs to energy-intensive forms of imperial expansion enabled by the creation and acceptance of “sacrifice zones”? How have projects of imperial growth and the nature of imperial sacrifice zones changed over time? How can the study of sacrifice zones help us re-think and intervene in debates on the “Anthropocene” and “sustainability”?
• What ethical possibilities — particularly those stemming from “non-Western” world regions — can we identify and appreciate by studying the “big history” of human responses to climate changes, from the onset of the Holocene 10,000 years ago to our current era of global warming? What dynamic political institutions and cultural forms did “sacrificial populations” create and what can we learn from these? What, in particular, are the ethical possibilities inherent in understandings of “animated ecologies” and what lies behind “modern” scientific rejections of the “backwardness” of “traditional” vitalism?
• What competing historical understandings and ethical visions are inherent in today’s green growth vs regrowth debate? How did we start the course thinking about this debate and how has our thinking changed by the semester’s end? How has engaging and partnering with residents of local sacrifice zones changed our perspectives?

HLTH315: Cancer & Climate Change

Instructor: Lauren Minsky

n this course, we explore malignant, “self-devouring growth”: a global pandemic condition afflicting both the human and planetary body. We start by studying scientific models of oncogenesis — including infectious, genetic, behavioral and metabolic — and the kinds of connections each makes with climate changes. We then turn to probing the social determinants of rising cancer incidence and mortality during our present era of global warming, including social inequality; biodiversity loss; changing food systems and entitlements; novel and expanding pandemics of infectious disease and industrial air, soil and water pollution. In the final section, we read cancer memoirs that reflect on the deeply human experience of making meaning of existential threats, and the possibilities that exist for hope, caregiving, transformation and healing. Throughout the course, we engage with own greater Philadelphia/Delaware river “cancer center”, as well as consider the many “cancer villages” and “cancer alleys” with which we are interconnected around the world.

Key ethical questions the course will address

• What are the ethical complexities associated with different models of oncogenesis and oncological treatments? How do we navigate our current cultural moment that simultaneously denies and hides, attempts to universalize and cure, and profits from and expands both cancer and climate changes?
• What is at stake in tethering political legitimacy and the provision of our basic needs for food, water, transportation, and healthcare to energy-intensive forms of capitalist growth and development, even when that “self-devouring” form of growth is causing biodiversity loss, species extinction, and pandemics of malignancies that portend the slow death of our own species?
• What are the political possibilities and limitations of the genre of cancer memoirs? What makes a “good” memoir? Are we in need of new genres of writing to capture human experiences of malignancy and to inspire new forms of caregiving? What do we make of the rise of the parable?

ICPR 277: Ethical Leadership in Business and the Professions

Instructor: Neal Grabell

Through an exploration of ethical theory and case studies, we will examine topics such as: the tension between compliance with the law and the profit motive, professional responsibility and detachment, the proper treatment of clients/patients, short-term vs. long-term benefits, the relevance of social benefits claims to business practice, doing "well" by doing "good", and the dilemma of ethical relativism in the world of international business.

Key ethical questions the course will address

• What is the process for one to make a decision when faced with an ethical dilemma?
• Are the ethical obligations of business entities any different from those of individuals, and if so, how?
• Do professionals have ethical obligations that other individuals don't have, and if so, what are they and why do they exist?

MATH H146: Ethics and the Use of Mathematics, With a Focus on Anti-Racism

Instructor: Tarik Aougab

This half-credit seminar will explore what it means to “do math ethically”, to emphasize the ways in which mathematics is inherently political, and to think about anti-racism in mathematical disciplines.

Given the immense impact scientific technologies have over our daily lives, it’s no surprise that ethics have been a part of a standard undergraduate science curriculum for decades. In spite of mathematics underpinning virtually all of these technologies, a space dedicated to thinking critically about the ethics of mathematics is far less common in mathematics departments. The purpose of this course is to address this gap in our collective thinking.

Key ethical questions the course will address

• What are the ethical implications of working alongside law enforcement to supply them with algorithms for predictive policing , algorithms that compute the likelihood of recidivism, or theoretical results that increase the efficiency of robot movement?
• Given the fact that the National Security Agency is, to date, the country’s largest employer of mathematician, how should a mathematician navigate the ethics of designing surveillance technologies (for example facial recognition algorithms, or algorithms for circumventing internet privacy protocols)?
• What responsibilities of a mathematician come with an ambient culture in which mathematics is perceived as both prestigious and opaque by the general public?

PEAC H201: Applied Ethics of Peace, Justice, and Human Rights

Instructor: Prea Khanna

This is a course in applied ethics geared toward 1) introducing students to major schools of ethical thought, 2) helping students understand ethical arguments about peace, justice and human rights, 3) preparing students to formulate their own creative approaches to ethical problems, and 4) facilitating an approach to argument that emphasizes diplomacy, perspective-taking and empathy over the search for the one right answer or the infallible argument. The semester will begin with a survey of major ethical theories, and we will use those theories to help us discuss real-world issues bearing on peace, justice and human rights, such as: civil disobedience, abortion, killing and letting die, animal rights, food ethics, environmental ethics, the garment industry, economic injustice, race- and gender- and sexuality- and disability-based injustice, global capitalism and labor abuse, indigenous rights and culture, settler colonialism, racism and whiteness, sexism and rape culture, punishment, and whether violence is ever justified. Students will be encouraged to bring other issues of interest into the class for discussion.

Key ethical questions the course will address

• How do different ethical theories such as deontology, utilitarianism, teleology, virtue ethics, care ethics, restorative practice, and transformative justice answer ethical questions?
• What strategies are available for dealing with ethical disagreement?
• What does it mean to be a good person, or to do the right thing? Why is this something we can so easily disagree about?
• What are the factors affecting reception of arguments about divisive issues? How can we communicate well across these differences?

PEAC H325 Law: Settler and Indigenous

Instructor: Jill Stauffer

This course explores theories that underpin various legal systems in settler colonial states. We will study settler legal forms and Indigenous legal forms alongside each other, and think about what gives law power, how that power stays in place, and what law is supposed to be and do for those who are guided by it. By putting Indigenous and settler legal ways on equal footing, we may open up our thinking to new ways of envisioning a way forward, out of and beyond the history of colonial domination. Readings will include classics of settler/western legal theory and of various Indigenous traditions. Assignments will include papers, presentations, research, and moot courts where we make legal arguments in more thank one tradition, to get a sense of what is at stake in different approaches to adjudicating conflict and harm. The aim is to undergo what happens when we study and learn these different approaches of law together rather than isolating them from each other. What does it become possible to think, to imagine, to do, that was not thinkable or do-able before?

Key ethical questions the course will address

• What counts as legitimate law? Who gets to decide what the answer to that question is?
• Why do settlers have more power to enforce legal decisions than indigenous groups do in North America? Are the reasons offered ethically legitimate?
• Sometimes law offers the same answer that an ethical theory would. Sometimes it does not. Why not? What is significant about this?
• What is law? What do we find it doing in common across many traditions? How do these traditions differ? What is at stake, ethically, in how we answer these questions?

PJHR 2XX: Plantation Legacies

(Crosslisted with Asian Studies)

Instructor: Prea Persaud

This course investigates the plantationocene, a term used to describe the connections between the exploitation of natural resources and forced labor on plantations and ecological destruction around the world. Topics discussed include: the history of forced labor systems, such as slavery and indentureship, the consequences of subsequent geographical changes, plantation tourism, land dispossession, the possibilities and limitations of small-scale farming and plantation housing, and what repair might look like in the wake of the plantation.

Key ethical questions the course will address

• How do we address the historical and ongoing environmental damage caused by plantation systems?
• What are the ethical obligations of corporations and nations that have benefited from these systems?
• How do we acknowledge and address the historical trauma and ongoing inequalities resulting from plantation systems?
• How do we reevaluate the value of non-human life, within the context of the damage caused by the plantationocene?
• How can we create more equitable and sustainable food systems that prioritize the well-being of people and the planet?

POLS H224: The American Presidency

Instructor: Zachary W. Oberfield

This course examines the causes of presidential power as well as the tension, faced by all democracies, between deliberation and action.

Key ethical questions the course will address

• How much power should U.S. presidents have in implementing laws and public policy?
• How should democratic publics settle the tension between their desire for democratic control/deliberation and their desire for efficiency/action?
• When is unilateral presidential action right/wrong?
• Should U.S. presidents have different levels of control/input in national versus international affairs public policy?

WRPR 135B: Health and the Humanities

(cross-listed in Health Studies)

Instructor: Jess Libow

Over the last few decades, “medical humanities” and “health humanities” initiatives have been established at health professional schools across the country. In these programs, students study art, literature, history, and philosophy in the hopes that these endeavors will help them become better healthcare providers. But what exactly are “the humanities”? How do they differ from and relate to “the arts” or “humanity” itself? And how does a humanistic education benefit both healthcare providers and their patients? In this writing seminar, we will explore how humanistic inquiry contributes to knowledge about health and healthcare by turning to four foundational humanities concepts: observation, narrative, history, and ethics. Throughout the semester, we will focus in particular on how we might leverage tools from the humanities to promote health equity and create more just systems of care.

Key ethical questions the course will address

• How can humanistic ways of knowing be leveraged to promote health equity and create more just systems of care?
• How can the study of ethics inform our perspectives on topics including the social determinants of health, the future of Medicaid/Medicare, the pharmaceutical industry, the use of AI in research and clinical care, and/or genetic testing and editing?
• How does public writing about bioethical issues engage readers? What rhetorical strategies do writers of op-eds employ and how do these compare to other writing endeavors?