WRPR 101A 01,02 Finding A Voice: Identity, Environment, and Intellectual Inquiry
N. Lavda
MW 11:15-12:45, 12:45-2:15
This course considers students fluid relationship to identities that they examine, explore, and take on through course materials. We begin by examining how difference is perceived/obscured/challenged and/or bridged in constructions of identity. We then consider how identities exist in the physical environment and how environment affects these identities. In particular, we will look closely at the debate concerning hydraulic gas fracturing, or fracking. Haverford Colleges location in Pennsylvania, home of the Marcellus Shale and location of many fracking sites, makes this topic especially relevant. The different positions that experts have taken in the debate about fracking serve as a model, finally, for students to enter another scholarly debate within an area of interest in a possible prospective major. In this later stage of the course, students try on the identity of a major and examine how to think and write like someone in that prospective major. This course involves significant reading, writing, and research. You will learn how to move between several different kinds of writing: from writing to express yourself to writing to communicate with an audience, to take a position on a written text, to create arguments and counter-arguments, to learn scholarly research skills, to learn interview and presentation skills, and to develop your own voice through your writing and speaking in order to participate more fully in the work of intellectual inquiry. This is a first-semester course with individual tutorials that prepares students for a second semester writing seminar. Prerequisite: Open only to members of the first-year class as assigned by the Director of College Writing.
WRPR 167A Globalization and Culture in the 21st Century
B. Hall
MW 2:30-4:00
The primary goal of this course is to challenge students as academic readers, writers and thinkers while providing support for continuous growth. We will define and explore global interconnectedness from multiple disciplinary perspectives - political, economic, etc. - but will focus primarily on various complex social and cultural dimensions of globalization including local/global tensions, Westernization, cultural borrowing, cultural imperialism, cultural exploitation, tourism, and pop culture (music, movies, etc.), as analyzed in ethnographies set in various locations around the world. Most of these locations will be outside the US, and we will include a particular case study of Japan. We will consider questions like: Is there a global village? How does the nation-state matter both more and less in a globalized world? How does globalization impact existing socioeconomic inequalities? Who benefits from increasing global interdependence and who does not, and why? This is a first-semester course with individual tutorials that prepares students for a second-semester writing seminar. Prerequisite: Open only to members of the first-year class as assigned by the Director of College Writing.
WRPR 185A Language, Power and Justice
B. Hall
TTH 2:30-4:00
This seminar explores a variety of controversies involving the use of the English language in social and cultural context. Across the course, we will emphasize the experiences and consequences of linguistic diversity for variously positioned speakers and writers. Our inquiry will engage the following questions while surely provoking new ones. How is language related to power? How does language use express or indicate a speaker’s identity? What kinds of language are stigmatized and what kinds are deemed “correct” or socially powerful, and why? What are the consequences of using standard forms in speaking and writing, and what are the consequences of using non-standard forms? How and why might speakers and writers “code-switch”, and with what social effects? In what ways is language inherently political – i.e. embedded within and constituent of unequal power relations – and how might we choose to navigate the implications of our language use? How can changes in language use both reflect and create social or political change? How might language be a tool for inclusion or empowerment for marginalized communities, or a tool for seeking social justice? (May count towards the concentration in Peace, Justice and Human Rights.)