ENROLL

Kelly Connole

This course is focused on the creative possibilities of the pottery wheel as a means to create utilitarian objects. Students are challenged to explore conceptual ideas while maintaining a dedication to function. An understanding of aesthetic values and technical skills are achieved through studio practice, readings, and demonstrations. Basic glaze and clay calculations, high fire and wood kiln firing techniques, and a significant civic engagement component, known as the Empty Bowls Project, are included in the course.

Prerequisite: Studio Art 128, 130, 236 or high school experience with wheel throwing and instructor permission

Extra Time Required

Rou-Jia Sung

The ability to visualize macromolecules at atomic detail has significantly advanced our understanding of macromolecular structure and function. This course will provide an overview of fundamental experimental methodologies underlying structure determination, followed by primary literature-based discussions in which students will present and critically discuss classic foundational papers as well as examples from the current literature that have advanced our understanding of macromolecule structure and function.

Prerequisite: Biology 125 and 126; and either Biology 280, Biology 380, Biochemistry 301 or Chemistry 320

Waitlist only

Victoria Austen

In this course we will explore how the Greeks and Romans conceptualized their own notions of racial difference, and also consider how these concepts have influenced later historical periods, including our own. In doing so, students will be able to identify the difference between the way ancient peoples and modern societies think about race and ethnicity, and demonstrate how contemporary discussions of these topics have been shaped by our encounters with antiquity.

Amy Csizmar Dalal

Prerequisite: Computer Science 200 or 201 or instructor permission

Jenny Bourne

Prerequisite: Economics 110 and 111

Deborah Appleman

This course focuses on the importance of integrating students' cultural backgrounds in all aspects of learning. We will study various theoretical perspectives on culturally relevant, responsive, and sustaining pedagogy and will explore several school sites that incorporate that perspective into their approach to teaching and learning. Students will design and teach culturally sustaining curriculum from their own disciplinary background in K-16 setting.

Prerequisite: Educational Studies 100 or 110

Anita Chikkatur

This course focuses on the respect for human diversity, especially as these relate to various racial, cultural and economic groups, and to women. It includes lectures and discussions intended to aid students in relating to a wide variety of persons, cultures, and life styles. Offered at both the 100 and 300 levels; coursework will be adjusted accordingly.

Prerequisite: 100 or 200-level Educational Studies course or instructor permission

Extra Time Required

Anita Chikkatur

This is a capstone seminar for educational studies minors. It focuses on a contemporary issue in American education with a different topic each year. Recent seminars have focused on the school to prison pipeline, youth activism, intellectual freedom in schools, and gender and sexuality in education. Senior seminars often incorporate off campus work with public school students and teachers.

Prerequisite: Educational Studies minor or instructor permission

Extra Time required.

Adriana Estill

Scholar Michael Davidson has suggested that “perhaps the closest link between poetry and disability lies in a conundrum within the genre itself: poetry makes language visible by making language strange." In this class we will read a wide range of poets who tackle ideas of normalcy and "ability" by centering disability consciousness and culture. We will engage with poetry's capacity as a genre to destabilize our assumptions and generate new imaginaries. Alongside contemporary U.S. poetry, we will study contemporary theory in the field of disability studies in order to better understand the critical conversations around the meaning, nature, and consequences of disability.

Susan Jaret McKinstry

This journalism course explores the process of moving from event to news story. Students will study and write different forms of journalism (including news, reviews, features, interviews, investigative pieces, and images), critique one another’s writing, work in teams with community partners, and revise their pieces to produce a final portfolio of professional work.

Colleen Carpenter

This course is an introduction to the central ethical debates in environmental policy and practice, as well as some of the major traditions of environmental thought. It investigates such questions as whether we can have moral duties towards animals, ecosystems, or future generations; what is the ethical basis for wilderness preservation; and what is the relationship between environmentalism and social justice. The Academic Civic Engagement aspect of the course for Spring 2024 will involve beaver monitoring in the Arb and participation in planning the BeaverFest campus and community event in May.

Colleen Carpenter

This course considers the contrast between the ways various religions conceive of water as sacred, and the fact that today’s intersecting environmental crises mean that drought, flooding, sea level rise, and lack of access to clean water and safe sanitation have made the human relationship with water more fraught and complex than ever before. We will look at specific situations of environmental injustice (including Flint, Michigan; Jackson, Mississippi; and the protests at Standing Rock) as well as reading more theoretical and theological takes on water, water justice, and water activism.

George Vrtis

This course is the second half of a two-course sequence focused on the study of wilderness in American society and culture. The course will begin with an Off-Campus Studies program at Grand Canyon National Park, where we will learn about the natural and human history of the Grand Canyon region, examine contemporary issues facing the park, meet with officials from the National Park Service and other local experts, conduct research, and experience the park through hiking and camping. The course will culminate in spring term with the completion and presentation of a major research project.

Prerequisite: History 306 and Acceptance in Wilderness Studies at the Grand Canyon OCS program

HIST 306 required previous winter term, Extra Time Required

Chloe Fandel

The principles of groundwater flow through the subsurface, and the functioning of aquifers. Topics include the properties of porous media, hydraulic head gradients, contaminant transport, and fractured and karstified aquifers. Labs will include working with physical sandbox models and soil columns, as well as an outdoor pumping well test (weather permitting). We will simulate groundwater flow using simple numerical modeling, beginning with an introduction to Python coding, and develop an increasingly complex groundwater model over the course of the term. No previous programming experience required.

Prerequisite: 100-level Geology course required, Geology 210 recommended

Susannah Ottaway

Designed to give students experiences and skills in public history and history education, this three-credit course offers students a choice among projects connected to local organizations and some partners farther afield. Students will have the opportunity to develop skills connected to archiving, building online materials such as maps and websites, and learning historical methods like oral history interviews or exhibit design. Most projects involve close collaborations with local community organizations, allowing students to become more connected with organizations outside of Carleton.

Extra Time Required

Rebecca Brueckmann

This course focuses on the representation of African American history in popular US-American movies. It will introduce students to the field of visual history, using cinema as a primary source. Through films from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the seminar will analyze African American history, (pop-)cultural depictions, and memory culture. We will discuss subjects, narrative arcs, stylistic choices, production design, performative and film industry practices, and historical receptions of movies. The topics include slavery, racial segregation and white supremacy, the Black Freedom Movement, controversies and conflicts in Black communities, Black LGBTQIA+ history, ghettoization and police brutality, Black feminism, and Afrofuturism.

William North

From churches and monasteries to universities, guilds, governmental administrations, the medieval world was full of institutions. They emerged, by accident or design, to do particular kinds of work and to benefit particular persons or groups. These institutions faced hard questions like those we ask of our institutions today: How best to structure, distribute, and control power and authority? What is the place of the institution in the wider world? How is a collective identity and ethos achieved, maintained, or transformed? Where does corruption come from and how can institutions be reformed? This course will explore these questions through discussion of case studies and primary sources from the medieval world as well as theoretical studies of these topics.

Thabiti Willis

Through lectures, readings, and visits to museums and archaeological and other heritage sites, this course examines the rich cultural heritage of East Africa and Arabia. Students will investigate a range of sites, reflecting on the deep and enduring connections between Africa's and Arabia's historical trading systems and cultures. The course also examines the influence of various European powers.

Prerequisite: 100 or 200 level Africana Studies or History course and participation in OCS program

Requires participation in OCS Program: History, Culture, and Commerce: Africa and Arabia

Meredith McCoy

Carleton's new campus land acknowledgement affirms that this is Dakota land, but how did Carleton come to be here? What are the histories of Indigenous faculty, students, and staff at Carleton? In this course, students will investigate Indigenous histories on our campus by conducting original research about how Carleton acquired its landbase, its historic relationships to Dakota and Anishinaabeg people, histories of on-campus activism, the shifting demographics of Native students on campus, and the histories of Indigenous faculty and staff, among others. Students will situate these histories within the broader context of federal Indian policies and Indigenous resistance.

Mija Van Der Wege

Prerequisite: Interdisciplinary Studies 198 as first year student

Prior registration in IDSC 198

Dave Schmalenberger

Participants will learn basic playing techniques, drum patterns, and polyrhythmic structures by playing in djembe-centered percussion ensembles based on repertoire from Mali. The teaching and learning style will be primarily oral/aural and "by doing". Course objectives include an informal public performance toward the end of the semester. A highlight will be rehearsing and a brief but intense joint performance with a group of professional guest artists from Mali, who will share their concert stage with us for a piece.

Prerequisite: Prior experience in drumming/percussion is helpful but not required. A division into subgroups (e.g., beginners and advanced) is possible according to need.

Cynthia Marrero-Ramos

This course familiarizes students with major issues and debates within the emerging field of decolonial feminist philosophy. We will start by considering some of the historical, geopolitical, and theoretical underpinnings from which decolonial feminisms emerged. We will then investigate core concepts and problems pertaining to decolonial feminisms as a critical methodology and as a practice to build solidarity between and across anti-racist, anti-colonial, anti-sexist, anti-capitalist schools of thought and/or political coalitions. We will pay particular attention to Latina feminist philosopher María Lugones and her development of the “colonial modern gender system” and her articulation of “decolonial feminism.”

Prerequisite: One prior course in Philosophy or a relevant area of studies or permission of the instructor.

Tun Myint

How do we read news reports, government documents, and follow policy debates? How do we understand public policy process and outcomes? How do we evaluate governmental and non-governmental policies that affect provision and production of public goods? How do we conduct benefit and cost analysis of a public policy? Students will learn how to conduct archival document research, benefit-cost analysis, and public policy analysis.

Victoria Thorstensson

Students will study the history of Russian-speaking immigration to America through readings and discussions of cultural texts which situate it at the intersection of history, memory, and life story narratives. They will listen to Russian-language oral histories and research archival materials that present personal life stories against the background of traumatic experiences of recent history: in the context of historical events and transformations, such as wars, revolutions, repressions, the Soviet era, and its collapse. We will also collaborate with a local community partner to record and preserve the oral history of Russian-speaking Minnesotans. Students will learn basic interviewing skills, and practice transcribing and translating oral texts. Taught in Russian.

Prerequisite: Russian 205 or permission of the instructor

Meera Sehgal

How is it that in specific historical moments ordinary people come together and undertake collective struggles for justice in social movements such as Black Lives Matter, Me Too, Standing Rock, immigrant, and LGBTQ rights? How have these movements theorized oppression, and what has been their vision for liberation? What collective change strategies have they proposed and what obstacles have they faced? We will explore specific case studies and use major sociological perspectives theorizing the emergence of movements, repertoires of protest, collective identity formation, frame alignment, and resource mobilization. We will foreground the intersectionality of gender, sexuality, race, and class in these movements.

Ingrid Luna

Carnivals are frequently associated with colourful crowds, merrymaking and excess. But what role do carnivals play in the construction of national and collective identities? We will try to answer this and other questions focusing on films, paintings, and literary texts from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries that represent some of the most popular carnivals in Latin America: Candombe (Uruguay), Yawar Fiesta (Peru), Blacks and Whites (Colombia), Oruro (Bolivia), and Rio (Brazil). We will analyze them from an interdisciplinary perspective that includes literary criticism, anthropology, and history. Students will engage with debates about nation, popular culture, modernity/modernization, and intangible cultural heritage.

Prerequisite: Spanish 204 or the equivalent

Palmar Alvarez-Blanco

Basic readings in Spanish history and culture in preparation for the program.

Adam Loy

Students will apply their statistical knowledge by analyzing data problems solicited from the Northfield community. Students will also learn basic consulting skills, including communication and ethics.

Prerequisite: Statistics 230 and instructor permission

All interested students are encouraged to add to the waitlist and the instructor will reach out after registration. This course is repeatable, but if the instructor cannot admit every student on the waitlist, priority will be given first to Statistics majors who have not previously taken the course and then to other students who have not taken the course.

Jeanne Willcoxon

This class is an examination of significant artists who use theatre as a tool for envisioning and enacting social change. We will study the justice-making strategies of a variety of artists, including Augusto Boal, Cherríe Moraga, Anna Deavere Smith, among many other contemporary artists whose work continues to shape American society. We will also examine influential methods of using theatre for social change, including documentary theatre, Theatre of the Oppressed, theatre for young audiences, and theatre in prisons. The class will include a number of guest artist visits from people making work in the field. The final project will be an original theatrical creation that uses the strategies studied in class to address a contemporary social issue.

Extra Time Required