2019-2020 Academic Catalog

Apr 28, 2024

2019-2020 Academic Catalog [ARCHIVED CATALOG]

HS 100 - Symposium Seminar

Students will explore the Higgins School’s symposium theme in-depth through event attendance, readings and screenings, in-class discussions, and short written assignments. While the symposium program is interdisciplinary by nature, the section instructor will draw particularly from their areas of specialization. This half-unit course may be added to a standard four-course load without fifth course approval, is offered on a “pass/fail” grading basis, and may be repeatable for credit. As with other Higgins School courses, this class is designed to help students to strengthen and enhance their college experience and to forge connections across and beyond conventional coursework.

Topic for Fall ‘19 and Spring 2020 “Bodies” - What if we talked not about “the body” but about bodies? In the shift from singular to plural comes a movement away from abstraction and its claims to universality and toward specific embodiments and diverse lived experience.

To pluralize bodies is to begin breaking down rhetorical binaries-body and soul, mind and body, sickness and health, pleasure and pain, flesh and spirit. To consider actual bodies is to interrogate and re-engage familiar metaphors with new perspective-body as temple, bodies of work, bodies politic, body as machine.

In a social sense, our bodies are how we encounter the world, and how the world first comes to perceive us. Bodies are sites of desire and projection, bias and recognition. How can difference itself become an alternative foundation from which to consider continuities of experience?

In an academic sense, to speak of bodies is to invite interdisciplinary conversations. Scientific and philosophical inquiry seeks to understand what animates bodies. Cultural, social, and political analysis traces the contours of similarities and differences resulting from embodiment. Theoretical paradigms and creative practice can both critique and remake what bodies are, how they signify, and where the boundaries of physical limitation lie.

Throughout, bodies incorporate and synthesize contradiction. They are simultaneously metaphor and reality, machine and sensorium, the mortal coil and the site of transformation and wonder.

Anticipated Terms Offered: Most semesters