In this course, students will explore canonical texts in Western political thought as well as political works borne of (but not limited to) feminist philosophy, philosophy of race, queer theory, and crip theory. In conversation with these varying perspectives, students will grapple with questions concerning equality, opportunity, rights, and justice. By investigating and destabilizing the canon, this class will offer students a critical history of Western political philosophy, with an emphasis on thinkers often overlooked within the field. The course will include lectures, discussions, student presentations, and long and short form writing assignments.

 Elective

How we die says as much about us as how we live. As a result, much can be learned by exploring America's changing attitudes toward death and dying, funeral rites, burial practices, and mourning rituals. Part personal tragedy, part communal experience, and part political event, our individual and collective responses to death should be treated as socially constructed artifacts, offering valuable insight into complex cultural, historical, and socio-economic forces. Buried within the American way of death are clues to understanding how this nation's physical, spiritual, economic, scientific, and political landscapes have changed over time. Rituals and practices surrounding death reflect the realities of class conflict, gender politics, race relations, and an increasingly diverse population. So often, deathcare has often been at the forefront of major cultural shifts and national debates over who belongs here, the role of government, the shape of our cities and towns, patterns of consumption, and, more recently, the future of our planet. Growing interest in green burials suggests not only a burgeoning concern with the carbon footprint of human remains, but shifting ideas about our individual legacies and what we leave behind. A discussion-based course, student engagement and active participation are key. Each student will be required to select a portion of the assigned reading to present to the class. In addition, students will work in small groups to craft a 20-minute oral presentation that examines and contextualizes the funeralization practices of a particular segment of the American people. Finally, each student will complete a 5 - 7 page research paper using a combination of primary and secondary sources (to be approved by the instructor) that elucidate and interrogate a specific aspect of the American way of death.

Elective

Native American oral traditions, which include storytelling, teachings, family and tribal history, and contemporary Indian literature, lie at the heart of tribal culture. It is mainly through oral tradition that American Indian cultures have been preserved and transmitted through the generations. American Indian stories, teachings, and oral histories are rich in cultural context. They provide great insight into the worldview, values, and lifestyle, which are an integral part of the heritage of American Indians. This course examines the cultural and historical contexts of Native American and Indigenous oral traditions with a focus in North America and other Indigenous traditions.

Elective

Feminist writers and filmmakers have used their utopian/dystopian fiction and films to comment on the politics of gender and to imagine worlds where the standard systems of male/female (or even human/machine) do not work. In this course we will examine feminist utopias/dystopias across historical periods and within the context of feminist and queer theories about gender, race, sexuality, environmental justice, reproductive rights/justice, colonization, capitalism, and the connections between humans and other animals. The course will be primarily discussion based. Students will be asked to keep and hand in informal journals, give occasional presentations, and produce two research papers/projects.

Elective

This seminar looks at images and representations of black women in American films. Students will trace, discuss, critique, and analyze films that feature black female leads and tell stories of Black womanhood to interrogate how these representations reinforce and/or defy stereotypes. Students will learn the common tropes placed on Black women (Mammy, Sapphire, Jezebel), situate them historically, and learn how they affect how Black women are portrayed. Students will assess aspects of film such as director's gender and race, camera angles, script choices etc. Students will consider issues including, but not limited to, who is writing the scripts, who is directing/producing the films, whether or not the film is based on a true story or novel, when the film first premiered (and the social/cultural climate), etc. A minimum of 7 films will be watched during the course and each film will be supplemented with required reading to help contextualize the film. Written film reviews and screening sketches will be required throughout the course.

Elective

Set within a transnational and transdisciplinary feminist framework, Writing Resistance will unfold and examine the ways traumatic, lived experiences of gender and structural violence, systematic oppression and precarity, incarceration, racism, and colonialism, have been silenced or submerged in canonical writing and official history making. As an antidote, we will attempt a queering of this patriarchal and "colonial archive" (Stoler), by shedding light and focusing on diverse forms of writing, autobiographies and biomythographies, poetry and fiction, and theoretical readings that are either produced by or centered on the lived experiences, psyches and bodies, of women, people of color, dissidents and incarcerated people, queer, transgender, and non-binary individuals, refugees and other historically and systematically marginalized voices and identities. Students will familiarize themselves with various forms of creative and testimonial narratives, feminist and queer theory texts, while being exposed to a series of case studies and various political and historical contexts. The course requires several one-page reflections, one short paper, as well as an individually designed creative final project at the end of the term. As always, classroom participation is important.

Elective

How does the ambience at a gurudwara in London transport visitors to the Punjab? What makes the replica of a Shinto shrine in Hawaii as sacred as its original in Japan? Why are St. Patrick’s Day parades larger in New York than they are in Dublin? Is a Vedic fire ritual conducted in Dubai less efficacious or equal to one in Mumbai? Do the consecrated images of gods need passports when being transported across international borders? Inspired by these questions, this discussion-intensive seminar interrogates the seemingly locked connections between religion and nationality. Both popular and scholarly notions of religious authenticity have frequently distinguished specific geographical locations as uniquely sacred, prizing the doctrinal and praxis systems in these original centers as authoritative models. This course challenges the emphasis upon territorial particularism by highlighting accounts of religion from locations deemed marginal to grand narratives of religious traditions. Through close engagements with numerous case studies centered in the North American context, it exposes students to religious beliefs and practices held by diverse communities–professing identities grounded in histories of dispersion, travel, and movement–that may be variously termed as immigrant, transnational, or diasporic. These perspectives will assist in decentering ideas of homelands as stationary sources of credible religious experience. Instead, they will enable students to better understand definitions of religion that stress dynamism, process, communication, and movement. The final project for this class entails conducting ethnographic fieldwork among a diasporic community to gain a better understanding of religious diversity in the Greater Providence Area. 

Elective

Fitness. Health. Wellness. Spirituality. Kinky Sex. These are only a sampling of the many buzzwords that come to mind when thinking about allied practices such as Yoga, Tantra, and Ayurveda.  With mythologized origins among obscure holy men in South Asia, yoga-centered traditions are presently part of a multi-billion-dollar global business that draws endorsements from celebrities, and common people alike. Indeed, the local popularity of this industry is revealed by the statistic that at least ten percent of the American population today has some kind of regular yoga practice. Our course explores the development of yogic systems through three distinct temporal phases: the classical, colonial, and current moments. This historically situated approach will allow us to closely interrogate continuities and ruptures between yogic philosophies, as conceptualized in ancient times, and more contemporary practices. As such, we will also consider how yoga-related concepts have developed against the backdrops of spiritual liberation, capitalist success, and racial justice. In addition to exploring reading materials from the burgeoning discipline of yoga studies, the course will also feature guest lectures from speakers who have played crucial roles in establishing yoga-focused institutions in the American Northeast. Students may ground their final project in a topic connected to their own work, relating it to their major or any another concentration.

Elective

Queer + Feminist Futures explores critical questions about power, knowledge, body, identity, community, and social change through collective immersion into the intertwined sites of feminist/queer theory and feminist/queer world-making practices. Drawing on the inter/anti-disciplinary methods of gender and sexuality studies, we will ask what feminist and queer futures look like and what histories and legacies (personal, political, ecological) we must reckon with in order to co-create those futures. Our approach will take up the critical tools of reflective writing and creative expression to explore key queer/feminist texts and examine archival and popular sources from art, music, film, social media, and more. By interrogating the past/future binary, Queer + Feminist Futures proposes a non-binary method of thought and action that reflects the nuance and vitality queer/feminist life. 
 

Elective

What is phenomenology, and why does it matter for art? This course will serve as an introduction to phenomenology and some of its central methods, themes, and questions. Working within and between philosophy, art, and design, we will explore how phenomenology can enliven and enrich artistic practices, and how artistic practices can broaden and enrich our understandings of perception, sensation, and embodied experience. We will consider a range of philosophical views, from canonical figures in the field (Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty) to key insights from critical phenomenologists (Alia Al-Saji, Mariana Ortega, Lisa Guenther) who question how socially and historically contingent systems of power shape our experiences in and of the world. Students will be required to complete weekly readings and participate in class discussions. The course will also include long and short form writing assignments as well as student presentations.

Elective

This hybrid seminar/studio course explores the cultural impact of AI writing systems. Computer-generated language has a long history, but the emergence of ChatGPT has transformed public perceptions of what artificial intelligence is capable of. Readings, lectures, and in-class experiments will investigate how AI writing tools are complicating the future of authorship and creating new opportunities for artists. How do Large Language Models (LLMs) work? What do these algorithms reveal about the nature of creativity? And what skills will be lost when machines do our writing for us? Topics include: copyright, computational poetry, early chatbots, voice clones, AI pedagogy, translation, and therapy. Students will submit weekly reading responses and a final project on a topic of their choice.

Employing a cross-cultural perspective, this course explores the historical process as being a dialogue between the cultures of the indigenous peoples of Latin America, Europeans, and Africans. Questions we will raise in this class deal with identity, indigeneity, concepts of social ordering, religion, disease, gender, and the struggle for autonomy in regions of the western hemisphere. Students will read a wide range of sources that incorporate voices from historical persons in order to understand the dynamics of dominance, resistance, and syncretism on multiple levels over the period of early modern interactions in Latin America.

Elective

Leaders, teachers, writers, artisans, laborers, mothers. While this brief list may look like a small selection of roles available to women today, it also represents positions held by women in the Middle Ages. In taking the broadest possible chronological approach to this time period from the years 500 to 1500, this course will examine the lives of medieval women. From queens to peasants, nuns to wives, and mystics to proprietors, we will explore the wide variety of roles and statuses that these women had. Over the course of the semester, we will investigate whether these figures were marginalized members of society, powerful agents, or a combination of both.

Elective

Our understanding of the world is shaped by the news we read, watch, and listen to. But what happens in the face of a monumental paradigm shift, when the lexicon of legacy media—collapsing from breakneck technological changes like Artificial Intelligence and hyper-polarization—becomes one we no longer credibly trust to tell the stories that shape society? "The Future of Journalism" course will explore the unorthodox ways artists, journalists, and technologists disseminate vital stories as we encroach on a post-news world. From non-fiction storytelling efforts like community journalism theatre to puppetry and music-led news reporting in the Global South, transnational investigations employing non-journalist citizens to large-scale interactive art installations that tell the stories of geopolitical crises, students will study the rich landscape of innovating case studies and practitioners working globally to disseminate essential stories that challenge the status quo of decline and mistrust. The class will consist of weekly reading assignments followed by an independent project where students will envision an answer to the question: what is the future of journalism?

Elective

How do indigenous communities and nations express their values?  This is a seminar course exploring the strategic planning, collaboration, and implementation of art as a means of activism, protesting, and mobilizing community-led initiatives to protect ancestral Indigenous lands and public lands spaces in the United States. These art projects include press and media campaigns, social media and low-key local activism, full community-based participatory projects, and national and international art campaigns which cross-pollinate with other sectors of land conservation such as non-profits, wilderness and conservation groups, tribal nations, and federal lands management agencies. This course prioritizes the Native American and Indigenous art contributions through art mediums such as illustration, design, painting, sculpture, architecture, films, music, agriculture, and social media contexts. These indigenous art examples are going to be placed into dialogue with United States western frameworks of conservation, including critiques and case study examples of the application of these techniques, narratives, and artistic projects that have influenced visibility, participation, dialogue, messaging, and policy outcomes on land protection.

Elective

Films have shaped popular perceptions of war in the United States arguably more than historians have. This raises questions such as: What is the relationship between the history presented in these films and the history as interpreted by academic historians? How do the positionalities of movie creators shape the product? How do they portray soldiers and civilians, allies and enemies? How might these movies serve as cultural artifacts offering insight into political discourses at the time of their production? Is Francois Truffaut correct that the appeals of battle make a true anti-war film virtually impossible? Prominent directors spotlighted include Stanley Kubrick, F. F. Coppola, Clint Eastwood, Spike Lee, and Kathryn Bigelow. Work involves brief lectures, screenings, discussions, a film journal, and a final project.

Elective

Many times in our lives ask us to take a moment to pause before moving forward. In this course, we will explore ways of embracing times of pause by considering various practices related to the qualities of reflection, quieting, and rest. This will include topics related to mindfulness/meditation, and self-compassion. Throughout the course, we will visit these topics through the lens of psychological theory and research with readings and in-class discussion. We will also allow for time to engage in reflective practice.

Elective

In this class we compare and contrast various cities of the Global South and examine their relationship to the Global North. We ponder upon the valences and representations of the terms Global South and North, and examine the politics and processes of urban life. We understand global connections as we study the built environment, economies, and experience of cities such as Mumbai, Kunming, Sao Paolo, Bangkok, and Lagos. The course will explore the resonances between these cities and the kinds of challenges they face as they encounter rapid urban growth and renewal. We will ask: What do cities of the Global South tell us about urbanism and urbanization today? What formal and economic similarities do cities of the Global South exhibit? What forms of knowledge, activism, and contestation emerge from urban areas in the Global South? Like most courses in the History, Philosophy, and Social Sciences (HPSS) department, this course builds a critical understanding of diverse cultures of the world, raises ethical questions that arise as different groups interact, and develops an analysis of social situations in the world and highlights forms of power and inequity. Class texts will case study different cities and compare experience in cities in Latin America, Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. Modules in the class will discuss planning and the built environment, commodities and capital, informality and body politics, infrastructure and energy, as well as think through theory from the Global South. This is a discussion-based seminar and active in-class participation is required of all students. Class activities will include mapping sessions, group work, and discussions on films. This course will be taught in a hybrid format. The balance of in person and online teaching will be determined by the instructor in order to optimize pedagogy (in response to changing distancing and safety regulations and the COVID-19 comfort and safety levels of members in the course).

Elective

How do goods/products get from producers to consumers? Global supply chains are involved in the global system of organizations, people, processes, and resources that transform raw materials into finished products. Additionally, these complex processes and networks are responsible for delivering finished products to consumers. In this course, we will first lay a foundation for understanding global supply chains, drawing from political science, economics, and management. Next, we will engage in critical analysis of the process and network with respect to issues that include human rights, gender, the environment, and labor standards. We will correspondingly examine the roles of actors such as governments, firms, consumers, international organizations, and non-governmental organizations involved in global supply chains.

Elective

How do goods/products get from producers to consumers? Global supply chains are involved in the global system of organizations, people, processes, and resources that transform raw materials into finished products. Additionally, these complex processes and networks are responsible for delivering finished products to consumers. In this course, we will first lay a foundation for understanding global supply chains, drawing from political science, economics, and management. Next, we will engage in critical analysis of the process and network with respect to issues that include human rights, gender, the environment, and labor standards. We will correspondingly examine the roles of actors such as governments, firms, consumers, international organizations, and non-governmental organizations involved in global supply chains.

Elective