2020-2021 Academic Catalog

Nov 26, 2024

2020-2021 Academic Catalog [ARCHIVED CATALOG]

IDND 015 - CLARK COMMONS: SPECIAL TOPICS

Summer & Intersession Topic: PANDEMIC: FROM HORROR TO HOPE —– COVID-19 may be dominating our lives, but it is hardly the first pandemic in human history. Others, like the plague, cholera, smallpox, and influenza, swept across the globe in earlier periods. Our present experience has only reinforced what we have learned from the past -that pandemics are more than the interaction of a disease and the human body. From pushing developments in science and public health, to inspiring artists and writers, to reformatting economies and patterns of spending, to exposing fissures in our social world, pandemics have fundamentally shaped human experience. This course will provide prospective on COVID-19 by looking at pandemics broadly from a multidisciplinary perspective, including contributions from faculty in history, literature, art history, screen studies, biology, geography, anthropology, and philosophy.

Intersession Topic: COVID, POWER, INEQUALITY —— This interdisciplinary team-taught course uses the idea that COVID-19 can teach us not only about power and privilege - that is, illuminate inequities -but also about human possibility, resilience, and resistance. The instructors’ position is that we, as a society, can neither break with the past nor imagine the world anew without social critique and engaging with tools and strategies of activism. The course will focus on power, privilege, and possibility from multiple disciplinary perspectives (sociology, psychology, international development and sociolinguistics and literacy) encouraging students to read broadly and synthesize across disciplines.

Prerequisites: varies

Anticipated Terms Offered: varies