DxD Grant Courses | Dialogues Across Differences

First Year Seminars

Banned Books Instructor: Susan Perabo (Creative Writing) Course Description: The issue of book banning is an artistic one, a political one, a cultural one, a spiritual one, and a personal one. No wonder it’s so fraught… it touches on all the things that define us as individuals and as groups. Increasingly over the last several years, very difficult – and very public -- discussions about book banning are happening in classrooms, libraries, churches, and government offices. This class will explore the past, present, and future of book banning in the United States. Through our close reading and conversations about four frequently banned books, and responses to these books, we’ll explore the causes and effects of challenging and banning books… from the local level to the national. We’ll talk to experts – teachers, librarians, administrators, and school board members – who must navigate complex, and sometimes hostile, conversations about book challenges, and then deal with the consequences of their professional and personal decisions. Throughout the semester, we’ll also be dealing with critical questions about how to best approach discussions and disagreements surrounding the issue of book banning. How can we have productive dialogues when so many of us hold strong beliefs in our positions? How can we remain civil when there are such intense differences of opinion? Is there a way to talk about challenged books without immediately taking sides, digging in, and getting stuck?
Calling Bullshit: Fighting for Facts in a Post-Truth World Instructor(s): Jackie Campbell (Associate Dir. of Quantitative Reasoning Center) & Rui Zhang (Psychology) Course Description: We live in a post-truth world in which the line between truth and falsehood is increasingly blurred. This may be because there are more insidious methods of deception that mix truth with sloppy reasoning. In this seminar, we’ll discuss the differences between “bullshit,” misinformation, disinformation, and fake news and learn strategies to detect and defuse unreliable information. We will explore common and often subtle ways in which information is presented by those who wish to influence our thinking and behavior. The information skills fostered in this seminar – detecting, defusing, and refuting bullshit – will be further developed through knowledge of statistical traps, misleading data visualizations, and the role of the internet and social media. After learning how to detect unreliable information, understanding its growth and development, and developing strategies to refute it, students will be asked to apply their skills to study both sides of a topic of interest.
I Am Not Who You Think I Am: Fictions of Self, Identity, and Difference Instructor: Amaury Leopoldo Sosa (Spanish & Portugeuse) Course Description: How do we embrace, fashion, and embody our identities and differences? Can others imitate and falsify our unique personal experiences? If so, what does this appropriation say about our authentic sense of self? Through readings of literary, cinematic, and pop culture narratives, we will closely analyze how individuals and groups accept, resignify, or reject their social categorizations, and we will unpack how they perform and negotiate these subject positions. Through academic, creative, and personal dialogues, activities, and assignments, we will examine and contextualize key ideas such as self-fasioning, cross-dressing, passing, stereotyping, assimilation, code-switching, and disidentifcation. Through observations of the Dickinson College community, conversations with its members, and explorations of our present and future place and journey in and beyond the institution, we will articulate what it means to belong, fit in, be included.
Race, Science, Nature, Socialism, Feminism, and the Human Condition: The History of Ideas that We Still Ponder Instructor: Karl Qualls (History) Course Description: In this seminar, we examine the ways in which WEB Du Bois, Karl Marx, Charles Darwin, Mary Shelley, Sigmund Freud, and Emmeline Pankhurst, identified and expanded fields of intellectual study (race, capitalism and exploitation, evolution and genetics, technology and ethics, psychology and psychoanalysis, and feminism) and new ways of thinking about scientific and social issues. The works of these thinkers had – and in many ways continue to have – tremendous influence on the ways in which societies have been organized and understood. While our primary focus will be on the ideas that these writers examined and the historical context in which they arose, we will also concern ourselves with the ways in which 20th- and 21st-century societies grapple with their complexities.
State of Denial: Understanding and Engaging Science Denialism Instructor: John Katunich (Director of Writing Program) Course Description: First-Year Seminar, the first tier of the Dickinson Writing Program, is designed to help students make the transition to college-level academic culture. The First-Year Seminar teaches students the habits of mind that will enable them to enter a community of inquiry. The seminar emphasizes the critical analysis, writing and information literacy skills that are essential to learning in a liberal arts curriculum. Throughout the seminar we will be critically examining the phenomenon of denialism, which can be described as persistent denial of the validity of scientific or empirical claims on the basis of ideological or financial interests and in contradiction to the expert scientific consensus. Although the origins of contemporary denialism can be traced to efforts from the 1950’s by large tobacco companies to obscure the health effects of smoking, science denialism has since come to take a major role in political debates over climate change, as well as the public health response to vaccine efficacy and safety.  In this seminar, we will examine some of the reasons why these kinds of post-truth arguments have come to dominate the public discourse:  the rise of political polarization, a changing media landscape, cognitive biases in human psychology, and the very nature of scientific inquiry itself.  We will also learn and practice strategies for recognizing the characteristics of denialist arguments while also building skills to engage in effective dialogue with individuals across different “epistemic niches” (Ben-Perath, 2023), to promote clearer scientific understanding in both public and personal spheres.
Wade in the Water Instructor: Jennifer Blyth (Music) Course Description: This seminar asks us to “Wade In” to uncharted waters with the presumption that we will feel our footing shift. Only when we displace what flows towards and around us can we begin wake work. This class encourages such moments of edgelessness in spaces of flux, where we can catch a glimpse of the mainland from a new perspective. To help pool our thoughts each week we will turn to art, music, poetry, prose, sculpture, or film related to the subject matter at hand because like standing on a rock at lake’s edge, art mediates between the world of what we know and what we don’t know. It illuminates and places us in intimate relationship with both worlds. If we are fortunate, it also engenders awe instead of just analysis, to the point that it subsumes us. It is in this liminal space that we are best poised to deepen our understanding of the world and the lived experiences of others. Through the lens of art and our two foci (Robert Smalls in antebellum South Carolina Lowcountry, and James LeTort in Pre-revolutionary Carlisle), we visit historical moments embedded in Black, Indigenous and White history. Absorb those moments as they crash, ripple, and wash up against us, ask whose voices are drowned or submerged and examine what is left on the edge of the shoreline!

Instructor: Susan Perabo (Creative Writing)

Course Description:

The issue of book banning is an artistic one, a political one, a cultural one, a spiritual one, and a personal one. No wonder it’s so fraught… it touches on all the things that define us as individuals and as groups. Increasingly over the last several years, very difficult – and very public -- discussions about book banning are happening in classrooms, libraries, churches, and government offices.

This class will explore the past, present, and future of book banning in the United States. Through our close reading and conversations about four frequently banned books, and responses to these books, we’ll explore the causes and effects of challenging and banning books… from the local level to the national. We’ll talk to experts – teachers, librarians, administrators, and school board members – who must navigate complex, and sometimes hostile, conversations about book challenges, and then deal with the consequences of their professional and personal decisions.

Throughout the semester, we’ll also be dealing with critical questions about how to best approach discussions and disagreements surrounding the issue of book banning. How can we have productive dialogues when so many of us hold strong beliefs in our positions? How can we remain civil when there are such intense differences of opinion? Is there a way to talk about challenged books without immediately taking sides, digging in, and getting stuck?

Calling Bullshit: Fighting for Facts in a Post-Truth World

Instructor(s): Jackie Campbell (Associate Dir. of Quantitative Reasoning Center) & Rui Zhang (Psychology)

Course Description:

We live in a post-truth world in which the line between truth and falsehood is increasingly blurred. This may be because there are more insidious methods of deception that mix truth with sloppy reasoning. In this seminar, we’ll discuss the differences between “bullshit,” misinformation, disinformation, and fake news and learn strategies to detect and defuse unreliable information. We will explore common and often subtle ways in which information is presented by those who wish to influence our thinking and behavior. The information skills fostered in this seminar – detecting, defusing, and refuting bullshit – will be further developed through knowledge of statistical traps, misleading data visualizations, and the role of the internet and social media. After learning how to detect unreliable information, understanding its growth and development, and developing strategies to refute it, students will be asked to apply their skills to study both sides of a topic of interest.

I Am Not Who You Think I Am: Fictions of Self, Identity, and Difference

Instructor: Amaury Leopoldo Sosa (Spanish & Portugeuse)

Course Description:

How do we embrace, fashion, and embody our identities and differences? Can others imitate and falsify our unique personal experiences? If so, what does this appropriation say about our authentic sense of self? Through readings of literary, cinematic, and pop culture narratives, we will closely analyze how individuals and groups accept, resignify, or reject their social categorizations, and we will unpack how they perform and negotiate these subject positions. Through academic, creative, and personal dialogues, activities, and assignments, we will examine and contextualize key ideas such as self-fasioning, cross-dressing, passing, stereotyping, assimilation, code-switching, and disidentifcation. Through observations of the Dickinson College community, conversations with its members, and explorations of our present and future place and journey in and beyond the institution, we will articulate what it means to belong, fit in, be included.

Race, Science, Nature, Socialism, Feminism, and the Human Condition: The History of Ideas that We Still Ponder

Instructor: Karl Qualls (History)

Course Description:

In this seminar, we examine the ways in which WEB Du Bois, Karl Marx, Charles Darwin, Mary Shelley, Sigmund Freud, and Emmeline Pankhurst, identified and expanded fields of intellectual study (race, capitalism and exploitation, evolution and genetics, technology and ethics, psychology and psychoanalysis, and feminism) and new ways of thinking about scientific and social issues. The works of these thinkers had – and in many ways continue to have – tremendous influence on the ways in which societies have been organized and understood. While our primary focus will be on the ideas that these writers examined and the historical context in which they arose, we will also concern ourselves with the ways in which 20th- and 21st-century societies grapple with their complexities.

State of Denial: Understanding and Engaging Science Denialism

Instructor: John Katunich (Director of Writing Program)

Course Description:

First-Year Seminar, the first tier of the Dickinson Writing Program, is designed to help students make the transition to college-level academic culture. The First-Year Seminar teaches students the habits of mind that will enable them to enter a community of inquiry. The seminar emphasizes the critical analysis, writing and information literacy skills that are essential to learning in a liberal arts curriculum.

Throughout the seminar we will be critically examining the phenomenon of denialism, which can be described as persistent denial of the validity of scientific or empirical claims on the basis of ideological or financial interests and in contradiction to the expert scientific consensus. Although the origins of contemporary denialism can be traced to efforts from the 1950’s by large tobacco companies to obscure the health effects of smoking, science denialism has since come to take a major role in political debates over climate change, as well as the public health response to vaccine efficacy and safety.  In this seminar, we will examine some of the reasons why these kinds of post-truth arguments have come to dominate the public discourse:  the rise of political polarization, a changing media landscape, cognitive biases in human psychology, and the very nature of scientific inquiry itself.  We will also learn and practice strategies for recognizing the characteristics of denialist arguments while also building skills to engage in effective dialogue with individuals across different “epistemic niches” (Ben-Perath, 2023), to promote clearer scientific understanding in both public and personal spheres.

Wade in the Water

Instructor: Jennifer Blyth (Music)

Course Description:

This seminar asks us to “Wade In” to uncharted waters with the presumption that we will feel our footing shift. Only when we displace what flows towards and around us can we begin wake work. This class encourages such moments of edgelessness in spaces of flux, where we can catch a glimpse of the mainland from a new perspective.

To help pool our thoughts each week we will turn to art, music, poetry, prose, sculpture, or film related to the subject matter at hand because like standing on a rock at lake’s edge, art mediates between the world of what we know and what we don’t know. It illuminates and places us in intimate relationship with both worlds. If we are fortunate, it also engenders awe instead of just analysis, to the point that it subsumes us.

It is in this liminal space that we are best poised to deepen our understanding of the world and the lived experiences of others. Through the lens of art and our two foci (Robert Smalls in antebellum South Carolina Lowcountry, and James LeTort in Pre-revolutionary Carlisle), we visit historical moments embedded in Black, Indigenous and White history. Absorb those moments as they crash, ripple, and wash up against us, ask whose voices are drowned or submerged and examine what is left on the edge of the shoreline!

Other Courses

Changing Same: Creating Dialogs on the Unspeakable Instructor: Nadia Alahmed (Africana Studies) Course Description: This course is a 300-level seminar that will revolve around some of the most debatable and controversial issues of modern and contemporary African-American society. Specifically, we will study and discuss issues surrounding mental health, homophobia, reproductive rights, colorism, the right to protest and free speech, and violent resistance and nonviolence as paths to Black liberation. The course will focus on developing listening and oral skills, debate skills, and the ability to negotiate contested issues identified above from several points of view.
Dialogue and Difference Instructor(s): Jeff Engelhardt (Philosophy) & Peter Schadler (Religion) Course Description: The first section of the course is dedicated to introducing students to dialogue skills in the context of democracy. We’ll read “Disruption, Dialogue, and Swerve” from the faculty learning community workshop, and we’ll prepare our own ‘handbook’ that introduces students to the dialogue skills we’ll refer to throughout the course: Connect Before Content, Connect During Content, Questions of Curiosity/Understanding (rather than Questions of Persuasion), Sustained Dialogical Openness (including both Interpretive Openness and Emotional Openness, as described in our grant proposal). After working through content that explicitly concerns dialogue skills (and democracy), the course content is organized in terms of how it bears on public dialogue under democracy. Two sections are on apparent complications for public dialogue and trust: (1) polarization and (2) differences in social positioning and knowledge. In the first section, we’ll read works on polarization and its history, locally and globally, and we’ll encourage students to consider how, if at all, dialogue skills can help address the challenges posed by polarization. In the second, we’ll read works on social epistemology, exploring how social positioning can affect knowledge and how differences in knowledge can affect public dialogue. We’ll see how some authors think we should navigate public dialogue in light of such differences, and we’ll encourage students to develop their own ideas on this topic—reminding them they have surely already navigated such situations in their social and family lives. In the last section of the course, we’ll consider how dialogue might transform various relationships, especially by building trust. We’ll read work on solidarity and mutual aid, existential commitments, and the role of group affiliations that aren’t based on trust.
Environmental Problem Solving through Inquiry and Dialogue Instructor: Kristin Strock (Environmental Studies) Course Description: Tackling rapid environmental and social change, driven by an interwoven system of human activities and natural processes, requires practitioners with critical thinking and problem-solving skills appropriate to the challenges ahead. As local peoples, decision-makers and scientists often perceive changes and impacts differently, they can fail to communicate efficiently to adequately respond to these changes. In this senior seminar, students will utilize the many interdisciplinary approaches they’ve explored during their time at Dickinson to engage in innovative, real-world, environmental problem solving. We will discuss a range of topics, many of which are chosen by students. Recent articles in the literature and peer presentations will set the stage for group discussions and hands-on activities. Activities will foster the development of skills necessary for collaborative interdisciplinary research, normative case studies to explore the ethical and moral dilemmas inherent in environment-society solutions building, and lastly, dialogical skills that will allow environmental studies and science students to engage in constructive conversations when those at the table have conflicting values and worldviews. Students will put these skills into practice while engaging with various stakeholders to complete a capstone project of their choosing. This course is the required capstone experience for environmental studies and science students.
Foucault Instructor: Dan Schubert (Sociology) Course Description: Michel Foucault was perhaps the most influential social thinker of the late 20th century. His arguments about the panopticon, historical epistemes, the medical gaze, governmentality, sexuality, and power now permeate the social sciences and humanities. He once wrote, “Do not ask me who I am and do not ask me to remain the same: leave it to our bureaucrats and our police to see that our papers are in order.” These words will inform our semester of reading and discussing a variety of his primary works, including Madness and Civilization, Discipline and Punish, and The History of Sexuality, v.1, as well as some of his lectures and interviews. While our primary focus in this WID course will be Foucault’s work itself, we will read a small selection of secondary literature that explicates and critiques some of his arguments.
Mapping the Global Middle Ages Instructor: Chelsea Skalak (English) Course Description: From England to Jerusalem, Morocco to Rome, Ireland to India, the medieval traveler encountered and came to terms with varieties of cultures, religions, and races. The maps and written records of these travelers, imagined and real, both described and created moments of connection across vast distances, shaping larger cultural narratives about nationalism, race, religion, and personal identity. This course seeks to understand the dialogue enacted between these regions from 900-1500 CE and uncover the diverse cultural work performed by reports of encounters with other cultures. How did these travel narratives strengthen or question faith, critique or support nationalism, and establish or sustain gendered and racial identities? We will also use digital mapping software to improve our understanding of these travels.
Marketing for Social Impact Instructor: Forrest Watson (International Business & Management) Course Description: Private, public, and third sector firms increasingly use marketing strategies to create social impact among their stakeholders. In this course, students will learn how social marketing techniques are used to influence individuals or groups to change their behavior in ways that benefit society. We will address global issues that impact society (e.g. environmental sustainability, health behaviors, racial inequalities, etc.), consider the complexity of systemic problems, and dialogue about our identity in the community and the ethics of behavior change. We will also consider corporate social initiatives to engage their customers in social good. Students will develop a real-world social marketing plan to benefit the community.
Race & the Rights of Citizenship Instructor: Kathryn Heard (Political Science) Course Description: In the United States, citizenship is often described in idealistic terms. Not only are all American citizens meant to have equal standing before the law, but so too should those who desire to become American citizens have equal access to the procedures, protections, and promises of citizenship. Citizenship, in other words, is meant to signal a sense of recognition and belonging free from differential treatment on the basis of one’s identity or status. Yet when attention is paid to the legal, political, and social histories of American citizenship practices, it is possible to see that these ideals are marked by the colonization, domination, and disenfranchisement of groups defined as racially “other” – and therefore outside the bonds and boundaries of citizenship. In this course, we will think deeply and critically about how the law draws upon shifting notions of race to condition who can claim status as a citizen and whether that status provides access to lived experiences of equality, liberty, and freedom. We will ask: How do we understand the coexistence of claims to equal citizenship in the United States given the historical realities of enslavement and race-based exclusion? What does it mean to be an American citizen and how has that meaning been shaped by the construction of racial identities across space and time? How might considerations of race in matters of citizenship also be shaped by other factors like sex, gender, national origin, religion, and class? Is citizenship actually a universal concept – that is, a concept that is open, in principle, to anyone at any time? Or is it an exclusive concept – reserved for a select few? And if racial injustice is not separable from citizenship, then is it possible to remake American citizenship among more egalitarian lines? To answer these questions, we will draw from a rich array of legal texts, political philosophy, history, sociology, first-person narratives, and Black, Asian, and Indigenous literature. This course takes place during a complex political, social, and legal moment in American history. In order to enrich our understandings of the assigned materials in this course, and the questions that drive our analyses, we will make regular interventions into what is known as “lived experience.” This means that – each week – we will foreground a first person narrative of an individual seeking – and likely denied – citizenship in the United States. This narrative is meant not only to urge us to resist theoretical and legal abstraction, but also to use the lived experience it captures to challenge the seeming neutrality and objectivity of the law itself. Narratives will come to us through essays, through poetry, through podcasts, through field trips, and through ourselves – and, ultimately, they will provide a way for us to consider whether, and how, American immigration and citizenship law can ever be democratically just.
Solidarities Instructor: Say Burgin (History) Course Description: Solidarity is a concept with highly presentist tones but deeply rooted histories. It resonates across today’s events – in public discussions around what white people can contribute to the Movement for Black Lives, in political rhetoric supporting Ukraine, and among those who agree with the Palestinian push for boycott, divestment and sanctions with Israel. As such examples show, today “solidarity” has become such an elastic concept that practicing it can mean anything from posting a Tweet or being selective about which products one buys, to putting one’s body between police and others or providing billions of dollars in weaponry. Has “solidarity” always been such an elastic concept? How did people at specific places and moments in time understand what it meant to be in solidarity with someone or something else? This capstone class tackles these questions. We’ll grapple with a range of historical case studies as we learn how to take a historical approach to the study of solidarity. While we’ll examine many examples from modern US history, it will not be our only focus, and students will be able to choose a research topic from any temporal or geographic field for which a solid source base can be built. Historians working across a range of geographic and temporal fields study solidarity, but it is not yet a clearly defined subfield of history. Thus, we will all be conducting experimental work, in a way, but it will be guided by our study of the historical methods and approaches that historians bring to their own work on solidarity. Students will begin their own original research on an approved topic related to solidarity for their final paper.
Spanish for the Health Professions Instructor: Jorge Sagastume (Spanish) Course Description: This course aims to study the use of Spanish in healthcare and healthcare education. The course has a service-learning component embedded in it, and its focus will be to use Spanish-language skills to practice the vocabulary, grammar, and cultural knowledge needed to function in an environment where English-speaking healthcare providers interact with Spanish-speaking patients. Our partner agency is Keystone Health, and we will participate in their Keystone Agricultural Worker Program in Cumberland and Franklin Counties. We have received a grant from The Center for Civic Learning & Action (CCLA) for the Agricultural Workers Program Outreach, and we will use these funds for purchasing and delivering what we call "Healthy Packages". Each student will have an evening service assignment for the service-learning component every week during September and October. In addition to studying medical terminology and grammar, we will converse and reflect on this experience during class. During part of November, students will also reflect on what they have learned through the service provided and will write a proposal for a final project, which, once approved, will be presented to the class for evaluation.
Teaching Community: Pedagogies of Connection and Change Instructor: Kirk Anderson (Educational Studies) Course Description: In educational studies courses, we teach you to analyze and critique the ways in which various systems of marginalization, dehumanization, and oppression work to undermine the ability of all students to survive and thrive in our educational system. In this course, we, along with bell hooks, will explore “what works” when it comes to addressing the various forms of inequity and disconnection that plague our world. While we will touch on theory, the focus of this course is on understanding and practicing evidence-based strategies that allow educators (of all forms) to form relationships with and work alongside others to transform our world.

Changing Same: Creating Dialogs on the Unspeakable

Instructor: Nadia Alahmed (Africana Studies)

Course Description:

This course is a 300-level seminar that will revolve around some of the most debatable and controversial issues of modern and contemporary African-American society. Specifically, we will study and discuss issues surrounding mental health, homophobia, reproductive rights, colorism, the right to protest and free speech, and violent resistance and nonviolence as paths to Black liberation. The course will focus on developing listening and oral skills, debate skills, and the ability to negotiate contested issues identified above from several points of view.

Dialogue and Difference

Instructor(s): Jeff Engelhardt (Philosophy) & Peter Schadler (Religion)

Course Description:

The first section of the course is dedicated to introducing students to dialogue skills in the context of democracy. We’ll read “Disruption, Dialogue, and Swerve” from the faculty learning community workshop, and we’ll prepare our own ‘handbook’ that introduces students to the dialogue skills we’ll refer to throughout the course: Connect Before Content, Connect During Content, Questions of Curiosity/Understanding (rather than Questions of Persuasion), Sustained Dialogical Openness (including both Interpretive Openness and Emotional Openness, as described in our grant proposal).

After working through content that explicitly concerns dialogue skills (and democracy), the course content is organized in terms of how it bears on public dialogue under democracy. Two sections are on apparent complications for public dialogue and trust: (1) polarization and (2) differences in social positioning and knowledge. In the first section, we’ll read works on polarization and its history, locally and globally, and we’ll encourage students to consider how, if at all, dialogue skills can help address the challenges posed by polarization. In the second, we’ll read works on social epistemology, exploring how social positioning can affect knowledge and how differences in knowledge can affect public dialogue. We’ll see how some authors think we should navigate public dialogue in light of such differences, and we’ll encourage students to develop their own ideas on this topic—reminding them they have surely already navigated such situations in their social and family lives.

In the last section of the course, we’ll consider how dialogue might transform various relationships, especially by building trust. We’ll read work on solidarity and mutual aid, existential commitments, and the role of group affiliations that aren’t based on trust.

Environmental Problem Solving through Inquiry and Dialogue

Instructor: Kristin Strock (Environmental Studies)

Course Description:

Tackling rapid environmental and social change, driven by an interwoven system of human activities and natural processes, requires practitioners with critical thinking and problem-solving skills appropriate to the challenges ahead. As local peoples, decision-makers and scientists often perceive changes and impacts differently, they can fail to communicate efficiently to adequately respond to these changes. In this senior seminar, students will utilize the many interdisciplinary approaches they’ve explored during their time at Dickinson to engage in innovative, real-world, environmental problem solving. We will discuss a range of topics, many of which are chosen by students. Recent articles in the literature and peer presentations will set the stage for group discussions and hands-on activities. Activities will foster the development of skills necessary for collaborative interdisciplinary research, normative case studies to explore the ethical and moral dilemmas inherent in environment-society solutions building, and lastly, dialogical skills that will allow environmental studies and science students to engage in constructive conversations when those at the table have conflicting values and worldviews. Students will put these skills into practice while engaging with various stakeholders to complete a capstone project of their choosing. This course is the required capstone experience for environmental studies and science students.

Foucault

Instructor: Dan Schubert (Sociology)

Course Description:

Michel Foucault was perhaps the most influential social thinker of the late 20th century. His arguments about the panopticon, historical epistemes, the medical gaze, governmentality, sexuality, and power now permeate the social sciences and humanities. He once wrote, “Do not ask me who I am and do not ask me to remain the same: leave it to our bureaucrats and our police to see that our papers are in order.” These words will inform our semester of reading and discussing a variety of his primary works, including Madness and Civilization, Discipline and Punish, and The History of Sexuality, v.1, as well as some of his lectures and interviews. While our primary focus in this WID course will be Foucault’s work itself, we will read a small selection of secondary literature that explicates and critiques some of his arguments.

Mapping the Global Middle Ages

Instructor: Chelsea Skalak (English)

Course Description:

From England to Jerusalem, Morocco to Rome, Ireland to India, the medieval traveler encountered and came to terms with varieties of cultures, religions, and races. The maps and written records of these travelers, imagined and real, both described and created moments of connection across vast distances, shaping larger cultural narratives about nationalism, race, religion, and personal identity. This course seeks to understand the dialogue enacted between these regions from 900-1500 CE and uncover the diverse cultural work performed by reports of encounters with other cultures. How did these travel narratives strengthen or question faith, critique or support nationalism, and establish or sustain gendered and racial identities? We will also use digital mapping software to improve our understanding of these travels.

Marketing for Social Impact

Instructor: Forrest Watson (International Business & Management)

Course Description:

Private, public, and third sector firms increasingly use marketing strategies to create social impact among their stakeholders. In this course, students will learn how social marketing techniques are used to influence individuals or groups to change their behavior in ways that benefit society. We will address global issues that impact society (e.g. environmental sustainability, health behaviors, racial inequalities, etc.), consider the complexity of systemic problems, and dialogue about our identity in the community and the ethics of behavior change. We will also consider corporate social initiatives to engage their customers in social good. Students will develop a real-world social marketing plan to benefit the community.

Race & the Rights of Citizenship

Instructor: Kathryn Heard (Political Science)

Course Description:

In the United States, citizenship is often described in idealistic terms. Not only are all American citizens meant to have equal standing before the law, but so too should those who desire to become American citizens have equal access to the procedures, protections, and promises of citizenship. Citizenship, in other words, is meant to signal a sense of recognition and belonging free from differential treatment on the basis of one’s identity or status. Yet when attention is paid to the legal, political, and social histories of American citizenship practices, it is possible to see that these ideals are marked by the colonization, domination, and disenfranchisement of groups defined as racially “other” – and therefore outside the bonds and boundaries of citizenship. In this course, we will think deeply and critically about how the law draws upon shifting notions of race to condition who can claim status as a citizen and whether that status provides access to lived experiences of equality, liberty, and freedom. We will ask: How do we understand the coexistence of claims to equal citizenship in the United States given the historical realities of enslavement and race-based exclusion? What does it mean to be an American citizen and how has that meaning been shaped by the construction of racial identities across space and time? How might considerations of race in matters of citizenship also be shaped by other factors like sex, gender, national origin, religion, and class? Is citizenship actually a universal concept – that is, a concept that is open, in principle, to anyone at any time? Or is it an exclusive concept – reserved for a select few? And if racial injustice is not separable from citizenship, then is it possible to remake American citizenship among more egalitarian lines? To answer these questions, we will draw from a rich array of legal texts, political philosophy, history, sociology, first-person narratives, and Black, Asian, and Indigenous literature.

This course takes place during a complex political, social, and legal moment in American history. In order to enrich our understandings of the assigned materials in this course, and the questions that drive our analyses, we will make regular interventions into what is known as “lived experience.” This means that – each week – we will foreground a first person narrative of an individual seeking – and likely denied – citizenship in the United States. This narrative is meant not only to urge us to resist theoretical and legal abstraction, but also to use the lived experience it captures to challenge the seeming neutrality and objectivity of the law itself. Narratives will come to us through essays, through poetry, through podcasts, through field trips, and through ourselves – and, ultimately, they will provide a way for us to consider whether, and how, American immigration and citizenship law can ever be democratically just.

Solidarities

Instructor: Say Burgin (History)

Course Description:

Solidarity is a concept with highly presentist tones but deeply rooted histories. It resonates across today’s events – in public discussions around what white people can contribute to the Movement for Black Lives, in political rhetoric supporting Ukraine, and among those who agree with the Palestinian push for boycott, divestment and sanctions with Israel. As such examples show, today “solidarity” has become such an elastic concept that practicing it can mean anything from posting a Tweet or being selective about which products one buys, to putting one’s body between police and others or providing billions of dollars in weaponry. Has “solidarity” always been such an elastic concept? How did people at specific places and moments in time understand what it meant to be in solidarity with someone or something else? This capstone class tackles these questions.

We’ll grapple with a range of historical case studies as we learn how to take a historical approach to the study of solidarity. While we’ll examine many examples from modern US history, it will not be our only focus, and students will be able to choose a research topic from any temporal or geographic field for which a solid source base can be built. Historians working across a range of geographic and temporal fields study solidarity, but it is not yet a clearly defined subfield of history. Thus, we will all be conducting experimental work, in a way, but it will be guided by our study of the historical methods and approaches that historians bring to their own work on solidarity. Students will begin their own original research on an approved topic related to solidarity for their final paper.

Spanish for the Health Professions

Instructor: Jorge Sagastume (Spanish)

Course Description:

This course aims to study the use of Spanish in healthcare and healthcare education. The course has a service-learning component embedded in it, and its focus will be to use Spanish-language skills to practice the vocabulary, grammar, and cultural knowledge needed to function in an environment where English-speaking healthcare providers interact with Spanish-speaking patients. Our partner agency is Keystone Health, and we will participate in their Keystone Agricultural Worker Program in Cumberland and Franklin Counties. We have received a grant from The Center for Civic Learning & Action (CCLA) for the Agricultural Workers Program Outreach, and we will use these funds for purchasing and delivering what we call "Healthy Packages".

Each student will have an evening service assignment for the service-learning component every week during September and October. In addition to studying medical terminology and grammar, we will converse and reflect on this experience during class. During part of November, students will also reflect on what they have learned through the service provided and will write a proposal for a final project, which, once approved, will be presented to the class for evaluation.

Teaching Community: Pedagogies of Connection and Change

Instructor: Kirk Anderson (Educational Studies)

Course Description:

In educational studies courses, we teach you to analyze and critique the ways in which various systems of marginalization, dehumanization, and oppression work to undermine the ability of all students to survive and thrive in our educational system. In this course, we, along with bell hooks, will explore “what works” when it comes to addressing the various forms of inequity and disconnection that plague our world. While we will touch on theory, the focus of this course is on understanding and practicing evidence-based strategies that allow educators (of all forms) to form relationships with and work alongside others to transform our world.