When Michel Foucault wrote about biopower in the 1970s he was envisioning a society where power was exerted not solely through coercive violence but also through controlling our very bodies--how we think, behave, and even reproduce. Courses in this cluster consider the ways in which our bodies and identities are defined, controlled, and represented. From the contemporary politics of the blood quantum in the United States to 20th century German expressionist film, these courses will consider how we define ourselves and how we ourselves are defined.

Associated Course Pairings:

Course Descriptions

CC100: Finding Yourself: Media, DNA, & Representations of Identity

Instructor: Dwanna McKay
Learning Across the Liberal Arts Designation: Societies & Human Behavior
Format: Primarily In-Person

Who are you? Is your identity socially constructed or biologically formed? How do identities of race, ethnicity, and culture manifest in American society? What are the consequences of social identity politics? This course provides an introduction and overview of foundational concepts of social identity, engages major sociological perspectives of race and ethnicity, and analyzes media representations of racial, ethnic, and cultural identities. We explore the historical trends of meanings and values attached to social identity categories and address the multiple and intersecting ways that the dynamics of these social categories and concepts shape society-at-large, our individual life-chances, and our daily social interactions. We also examine the contemporary rise of DNA as a controversial signifier of racial identity and ethnic belonging. As the public gains access to unprecedented amounts of genomic information, DNA evidence has become increasingly incorporated into political claims about race, ethnicity, and cultural heritage. Within the context of media, we will examine both the historical and contemporary mainstreaming of ideas that race, ethnicity, and culture are biologically driven through the science of genetics, and how these claims are being misappropriated to support racist agendas.

CC120: Finding Yourself: The Literacies of Identity Representation and Human Variation

Instructor: Krista Fish
Format: Fully Remote

Who are you? Is your identity socially constructed or biologically formed? Are identities the result of our ancestry? The culture we grew up in? Using the foundational concepts on identity addressed in CC100, we will begin the course with an overview of the many ways in which humans vary and we will use literature from both the natural and social sciences to explore how humans have attempted to classify this variability (e.g. the concepts of race, sex, and gender). Students will then investigate the biological basis for human variation beginning with the structure of DNA, the process of protein synthesis, cell division, and heritability of both simple and complex traits as well as gene-environment interactions. Finally, we will focus on how mechanisms of evolution shape human variation as a consequence of adaptation to environmental variables such as climate, altitude, disease, nutrition, and even cultures. Building on shorter, informal writing projects and discussions of writing in the sciences, the course will culminate with an in-depth writing project requiring students to link an understanding of their personal identity with studies of human variation.

CC100: Monsters, Robots, and Cyborgs

Instructor: Chet Lisiecki
Learning Across the Liberal Arts Designation: Analysis & Interpretation of Meaning
Format: Fully Remote

What does it mean to be human, and what are the limits of being human? What is "humanism" and what are the (bio)politics surrounding this concept? That is, how have "humanism" and the German concept "Bildung" ("proper" education) been marshaled to construct discourses around civility and civilization, normativity, and propriety? What groups do these discourses target and exclude, and how has the study of literature been complicit in such exclusion? What current trends in "Literaturwissenschaften" (literary studies) have sought to challenge "anthropocentric" modes of writing and reading, how have they done this, and why is it important?

Our class will interrogate these and related questions through both its content (literature, film, history, philosophy) and its methods (close reading, distant reading, literary analysis and interpretation, comparative analysis, digital humanities). We will study representations of the non-human (animals and monsters), the almost human (robots), and the post-human (cyborgs), analyzing how such representations reflect changing cultural attitudes towards and anxieties about being human. We will also reflect on methodological trends in the discipline of German Studies, and literary studies more broadly, which have both embraced; and leveled strong critiques against; humanism. These include hermeneutics, poetics, didacticism, close reading (New Criticism), distant reading, disability studies, animal studies, and the digital humanities.

CC120: Introduction to Journalism

Instructor: Gary Gilson
Format: Fully Remote

This is a course that has as its central learning outcome the ability to write in an accurate, clear, and concise manner whether it be for publication or a news release. Students in this class will gain direct experience of how to gather information effectively and produce clear and compelling narratives for a broad readership in a variety of media contexts. Students will gain experience in producing work in a variety of genres, from news stories, to editorials and to opinion columns, as well as narrative nonfiction. They will also gain critical perspective on how their work operates on different platforms, including social media. The goal of this class is to help students understand the ways in which journalistic writing operates within its own guidelines, ethics, structure, style, and form.

CC100: A Critical Inquiry of Mental Illness

Instructor: Kristi Erdal
Learning Across the Liberal Arts Designation: Societies & Human Behavior
Format: Primarily In-Person

This course will cover the sociological, psychological, religious, and biological contributions to what is called mental illness inside and outside of the United States. Care will be taken to place our current diagnostic system in historical context and to note the Western frame that currently permeates much of the world's attention to mental illness. Select disorders will be chosen to focus on rather than surveying a broad swath of diagnoses, and stigma emanating from medicalization in the west will be addressed.

CC120: Thinking, Feeling, and (Inter)Acting: Core Principles & Diverse Experiences

Instructor: Emily Chan
Format: Hybrid

People from different backgrounds often think, feel, act, and interact in strikingly similar ways. At the same time, there is remarkable diversity in human thought, emotion, and behavior that is tied to the identities we hold, the places we live, the languages we speak, and a host of other cognitive and sociocultural factors. In this CC120, we will use tools and perspectives from psychological science to study the core principles that unite all humans, as well as the diverse experiences that make each of us unique.

We will study how identity (such as race, class, gender) and context (e.g., culture, power) affect social perception and cognition. We will tackle questions of how identities and groups are formed. We will examine how stereotypes affect social perception, performance, and interaction. We will discuss how culture impacts our day-to-day lives, including interpersonal relations, cognition, and issues of multiculturalism and intercultural dynamics.

CC100: Imagining Slaves and Robots in Contemporary American Literature and Film

Instructor: Alison Rollins
Learning Across the Liberal Arts Designation: Analysis & Interpretation of Meaning
Format: Fully Remote

In examining the similarities of human slaves and mechanical or biomechanical robots, this course seeks to gain a better understanding of how slaves are created and justified in the imaginations of a supposedly civilized nation. In doing so, we will challenge those lines of argument which function to disassociate America's past from its imminent future. This interdisciplinary course will present a timely and creative analysis of the ways in which we domesticate technology and the manner in which the history of slavery continues to be utilized in contemporary society. Ultimately, we will explore literature and film that interrogate how the domestic slaves of the past are being re-imagined as domestic robots of the future.

The content of this course will focus largely on literature and film that have been used to normalize as well as complicate the notion of robots in domestic spaces and relationships. We will learn how to use the scholarly tools associated with literature and film studies by utilizing methods of these disciplines such as close-reading, literary analysis and interpretation, film criticism, and rhetoric. This course will center the concept of intersectionality by examining the ways that gender, race, class, and sexuality are interconnected. Furthermore, we will investigate how literary scholarship can uniquely function to exclude particular discourses and marginalized viewpoints.

CC120: Beginning Fiction Writing

Instructor: Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer
Format: Fully Remote

The central learning outcomes of this class are: introduce students to the constitutive elements of literary discourse; craft compelling and clear narrative; the development of effective writing practices and storytelling techniques that are applicable across disciplines. Through the process of crafting, editing, rewriting, and discussing both their own work and the published work of others, students in this class will gain experience of producing clear narratives for a variety of literary contexts.