ENROLL

Luis A Herran Avila

This course looks at Latin America as a site of global migrants and migrations. Alongside better-known cases of Latin American migration to the United States, we examine the long history of African, European, Asian, and Middle Eastern diasporas in the region. The course stresses the global interconnections of the region’s circuits of mobility, as well as the various economic, political, and cultural factors informing the movement and settlement of diverse populations throughout the hemisphere.

Luis A Herran Avila

This course explores the history, memory, and legacies of Latin America’s Cold War through a global lens. The course stresses the agency and autonomy of Latin American actors vis-à-vis U.S. and Soviet influence, and looks at the region as an active participant in larger global struggles over reform, revolution, and counterrevolution. Combining recent scholarly interpretations of the period and the use of primary sources for student projects, the course provides a grasp of how Latin Americans experienced the Cold War through resistance, consent, and negotiation in the realms of politics, culture, and the economy.

Claire M Griffin

Friedrich Nietzsche is famous for his scathing criticisms of both conventional morality and academic philosophy. He developed a mode of historical research, genealogy, which takes a perspective “beyond good and evil” in order to expose our moral ideals (including altruism, personal responsibility, and equality) as the products of contingent historical formations and struggles for power. Michel Foucault, writing in the second half of the twentieth century, submitted the values of ‘normal’ and ‘pathological’ (in diverse areas of the human sciences including mental illness, criminology, and sexuality) to a genealogical method modeled on that of Nietzsche. This course will be devoted to a comparative reading of Nietzsche and Foucault’s genealogical works and the relation of these to their larger philosophical systems. Our guiding questions will be: What is the nature of power? What is the nature and value of truth? What bearing do the histories of our normative and scientific claims have on their truth-value? What is the status, in all of this, of the critical perspective of the genealogist? Where do the insights of Nietzsche and Foucault leave us in our own attempts to lead meaningful lives?

Anna Moltchanova

What is important to individuals, how they see themselves and others, and the kind of projects they pursue are shaped by traditional and moral frameworks they didn’t choose. Individual selves are encumbered by their social environments and, in this sense, always ‘biased’, but some forms of bias are pernicious because they produce patterns of inter and intra-group domination and oppression. We will explore various forms of intersubjectivity and its asymmetries through readings in social ontology and social epistemology that theorize the construction of group and individual beliefs and identities in the context of the social world they engender.

Prerequisite: One Previous Philosophy course or instructor permission

Sonja Anderson

Mara G Block

This course explores the relationship between religion and science through a focus on imagination. Throughout history, science and medicine have animated the theological imagination (and vice-versa). In many shared cultural contexts, scientific and religious thought rely on shared conceptions of time, space, nature, and the infinite. We will examine images, analogies, and metaphors that both scientific and religious writing use to visualize unseen realities and to depict visible subjects. At the same time, we will use imagination as a lens to consider questions of power through examining assumptions about gender, race, and sex that undergird conceptions of the human self.

Mara G Block

What do economic practices like investing, shopping, and consuming have to do with American religion? This course takes up this question through exploration of economic practices in contemporary American religious communities and of secular notions of ritual, value, and desire that some argue fulfill needs traditionally met by religion. Topics include: prosperity gospel, religious investments, consumer rituals, God and the market, the commodification of “Eastern spirituality,” and global media and the performance of wealth.

Asuka Sango