2017-2018 Academic Catalog 
    
    Mar 28, 2024  
2017-2018 Academic Catalog [ARCHIVED CATALOG]

HS 010 - Dialogue Seminar


This half-credit course is intended to deepen students’ understanding and experience of dialogue through a small set of readings, short papers, and participation in in-class dialogues. Our conversations will draw from the experiences and issues raised by the public events in the Higgins School dialogue symposium. Students should plan on attending up to seven Dialogue Symposium events over the course of the semester.

 

In Fall 2017, the dialogue seminar will explore the role of the arts and humanities in the pursuit of the “public good.” The notion that arts and (what we now call) the humanities are integral to the public good was a core principle of much enlightenment thought during the founding of the United States. A commitment to the public good premises a system of shared values, even as those values change and, sometimes, come into conflict with each other. Consensus can be elusive, and compromise difficult, but the pursuit continues. Institutions as well as individuals benefit from and contribute to broader social, cultural, and civic goals. This fall, our dialogues will consider how arts and humanities in particular contribute to the public good through acts of advocacy and teaching, creation and critique, and contemplation and scholarship.

 

In Spring 2018, the dialogue seminar will consider the topic “Analog & Digital Conversations.” Knowledge may be power, but so are the practices and technologies by which knowledge is created, systematized, preserved, disseminated, overwritten, forgotten, recovered, and reimagined. Analog processes convey a sense of craft and authenticity, suggesting a more direct relationship between maker, artifact, and beholder, but they may also be perceived as quaint and fetishized, rarified precisely because of labor intensive exclusivity. By contrast, digital processes can simultaneously appear efficient and overwhelming, progressive and impersonal, radically accessible and avariciously monetized. Rather than choosing between backward glancing nostalgia and futuristic innovation, might instead heed the ongoing conversation between analog and digital technologies, the stakes of which are not only cultural and aesthetic but deeply ethical and inherently political. We might begin with the question, what is the relationship between making and knowledge? How does the organization of knowledge and creativity define meaning? Where are the capacities of old and new technologies to recover lost stories and tell new ones? How do we interrogate the ways that systems of knowledge create inequitable structures for access and agency?

 

Prerequisites: By permission of instructor

Anticipated Terms Offered: Spring