ENROLL

Cathy Kowalewski

An in-depth exploration of the dynamic relationship between the arts and popular conceptions of California: whether as bountiful utopia, suburban paradise or multicultural frontier. We will meet with California artists and art historians, and visit museums and galleries. Art and artists studied will range from Native American art, the Arts and Crafts movement and California Impressionism to the photography of Ansel Adams, urban murals and the imagery of commercial culture (such as promotional brochures and orange-crate labels).

Prerequisite: Participation in AMST OCS program

OCS Visions of California Program

Eleanor Jensen

This course involves directed drawing in bound sketchbooks, using a variety of drawing media, and requires ongoing, self-directed drawing in these visual journals. Subjects will include landscape, nature study, figure, and portraits. The course will require some hiking in rugged areas.

Prerequisite: Studio Art 110, 113, 114 or 142 or previous comparable drawing experience approved by the professor. Participation in OCS program

OCS South Pacific Program

Eleanor Jensen

This is a wide-ranging course that asks students to engage with their surroundings and make broad connections during the South Pacific program. It examines ecological topics, such as natural history, invasive species, conservation efforts, and how the physical landscape has changed since colonialism. Students will also study indigenous people’s history, culture, art, and profound relationship to landscape. This course includes readings, films, local speakers, and diverse site visits.

Prerequisite: Acceptance to Carleton OCS program

OCS South Pacific Program

Faress Bhuiyan

Prerequisite: Economics 111

Michael Kowalewski

An intensive study of writing and film that explores California both as a place (or rather, a mosaic of places) and as a continuing metaphor--whether of promise or disintegration--for the rest of the country. Authors read will include John Muir, Raymond Chandler, Nathanael West, Robinson Jeffers, John Steinbeck, Joan Didion and Octavia Butler. Films will include: Sunset Boulevard, Chinatown, Zoot Suit, Boys inthe Hood and Lala Land.

OCS Visions of California Program

Colleen Carpenter

Tsegaye Nega

Daniel Hernandez, Constanza Ocampo-Raeder

A field-based investigation of socio-ecological systems in Oaxaca, Mexico that will allow students to draw compaisons with similar systems in Minnesota. During winter break, we will visit the city of Oaxaca and neighboring villages to document and research systems of agriculture, sustainable forestry, and ecotourism, emphasizing the integration of methodologies in anthropology and ecology. Following the winter break trip, students will complete and present their research projects. This course is the second part of a two term sequence beginning with Environmental Studies 250.

Prerequisite: Prior term registration in Environmental Studies 250. At least one term of introductory Spanish (or equivalent proficiency) is required

Winter Break Program in Oaxaca Mexico

Colleen Carpenter

How are artists today engaging with climate change, pollution, and other aspects of the planet’s environmental crisis? And are their creative works making any difference? In The Great Derangement, novelist and social anthropologist Amitav Ghosh argues that today’s literary fiction has failed to engage climate change in a meaningful and transformative way: we will read several “climate novels” to test his claim. We will also look at visual arts and music, including work by Maya Lin, Patricia Johanson, and collaborative artist/science/community projects such as those led by CALL, City as Living Laboratory.

George Vrtis

Since the nation's founding, the percentage of Americans living in cities has risen nearly sixteenfold, from about five percent to the current eighty-one percent. This massive change has spawned legions of others, and all of them have bearing on the complex ways that American cities and city-dwellers have shaped and reshaped the natural world. This course will consider the nature of cities in American history, giving particular attention to the dynamic linkages binding these cultural epicenters to ecological communities, environmental forces and resource flows, to eco-politics and social values, and to those seemingly far-away places we call farms and wilderness. 

Prerequisite: History 205 is recommended but not required

Barbara Allen

How can we design democratic institutions to deal with environmental and social problems? Are there universal approaches to solving political problems in physically and socially diverse communities? Do people come up with different institutional ways to address shared problems because of environmental or cultural differences? Our seminar considers current thinking about complex social-ecological systems and how we communicate and work collectively to address the problems of local and global commons.  

Jonathan H Dickstein

How “eco-friendly” are Asian religious traditions? What does “eco-friendly” even mean? This course begins with an overview of the major religious traditions of South, Southeast, Central, and East Asia. From this foundation, we turn to modern and contemporary ecological thinkers, movements, and policies and discuss their indebtedness to, and divergence from, various religious heritages. We will also explore how modernity, capitalism, industrialization, climate collapse, and Western environmental movements have influenced eco-advocacy in contemporary Asia.

Constanza Ocampo-Raeder

Food is the way to a person's heart but perhaps even more interesting, the window into a society's soul. Simply speaking understating a society's foodways is the best way to comprehend the complexity between people, culture and nature. This course explores how anthropologists use food to understand different aspects of human behavior, from food procurement and consumption practices to the politics of nutrition and diets. In doing so we hope to elucidate how food is more than mere sustenance and that often the act of eating is a manifestation of power, resistance, identity, and community.

Sophomore priority

Waitlist for Juniors and Seniors: SOAN 233.WL0 (Synonym 64857)