2022-2023 Academic Catalog

May 12, 2025

2022-2023 Academic Catalog [ARCHIVED CATALOG]

ENG 090 - Technology, Personhood, and the Future

Speculative fiction serves as a vital tool for investigating the contemporary issues we face both as individuals and as a community. In this course, we take up questions and concerns surrounding technology. Technology impact human life in a myriad of ways. It shapes our health, finances, culture, climate, and lifestyle. Technology informs the ways in which we conceptual what it is to a person and the character of our society. We will examine works of science fiction literature as a vehicle for exploring the way technology influences us now and ways it might influence us in the
future. Particular topics we address include questions about artificial intelligence, artificial life, the nature of virtual reality, the effects of technology on our biology, psychology, government, and environment. This is a Clark Commons course for first-year students only. It is an interdisciplinary, team-taught course that approaches a “big topic” from multiple disciplinary lenses and methodologies. Students will have the opportunity to examine the course topics with both the primary instructors of the course as well as several visiting professors from other disciplines.

Course Designation/Attribute: VP

Anticipated Terms Offered: undetermined - pilot course