2017-2018 Academic Catalog 
    
    Mar 28, 2024  
2017-2018 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 Spring ‘18
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, we 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 to tell new ones? How do we interrogate the ways that systems of knowledge create inequitable structures for access and agency?
 

Anticipated Terms Offered: Most semesters, beginning Spring 18