Prerequisite: Photography & Imaging: Multimedia or permission by the department. This is an intense design class for the crossover creature who yearns to design their own exhibit, create a street poster, develop an ad campaign, design titles for a film, invent a visual identity for a musical score, etc. This will be a hands-on process-driven class that will push you to imagine, create, and produce. Students must know InDesign.
Yoruba is a language spoken in West Africa by approximately 20 million people. This course is an introduction to Yoruba language, people and culture and is designed for students without prior knowledge. The main goal is to develop elementary communicative competence in the language. It is designed to enable students read, write, listen to and talk about simple concepts, ensuring that they can minimally understand and be understood in the language, while developing a fundamental knowledge of the Yoruba culture. Emphases are on Yoruba as used by contemporary native speakers in the present day West Africa. Skills are developed through intensive interactive conversations, grammar exercises, and classroom activities designed for a learner to use the language in various daily activities.
At this level, when the basic skills and working vocabulary have been mastered, emphasis can be placed on the linguistic rules to enable the student to communicate with more competence. There is also a focus on translation. Lessons use a holistic approach and incorporate discussions on history, current events, literature, pop culture, and native values. To observe and experience the language at work, the course includes field trips to Filipino centers in the New York/ New Jersey area, as well as invited guests who converse with students in Filipino about their life and work.
An introduction to Filipino with an emphasis on mastering basic grammar skills and working vocabulary. Lessons incorporate discussions on history, current events, literature, pop culture, and native values. Open to beginning language students, and lessons are modified according to the needs of individual students. Because language is key to connecting with community concerns, the course includes field trips to Filipino neighborhoods in Queens and Jersey City.
Provides students with an elementary understanding of Swahili, a Bantu language with a rich oral and written tradition that is spoken by about 100 million people from Somalia to Mozambique and Zanzibar. After a short presentation of Swahili?s history, codification, and relation to other languages, students are drilled in phonetics and grammar. They are also introduced to poems, songs, and oral narratives.
America is not always the answer. This class offers an introduction to the many and varied fictions that have been produced by diasporic South Asians across the globe over the last 150 years: in Australia, Africa, Europe, Caribbean. Our exploration of the poetics and politics of immigration will attend to different types of traveller (inc. soldiers, students, athletes, medics, cosmonauts) and draw on a wide range of media (inc. literature, cinema and music). Particular attention will be paid to the diverse geographies of Asian migration – be they plantations, dance Floors, restaurants, call centres. Themes to be addressed include coolietude, globalization, the impact of 9/11 and techno-servitude.
Designed to interest and challenge both the student new to the study of gender and sexuality and the student who has taken departmental courses focusing on women, gender, and/or sexuality. Through a focus on particular issues and topics, explores the construction of sex, gender, and sexuality; gender asymmetry in society; sexual normativity and violations of norms; and the interactions of sex, gender, sexuality, race, class, and nation. This interdisciplinary course engages materials and methodologies from a range of media and disciplines, such as literature, the visual arts, history, sociology, psychology, and anthropology. Examines both feminist and nonfeminist arguments from a variety of critical perspectives.
Historically, education has been the most accessible and effective means for groups to achieve social mobility in American society. However, access to public education has never been equal for all segments of society, and there continues to be considerable variability in the quality of education provided to students. As a result of both explicit and subtle discrimination, racialized minority groups have at various times been denied access to education or been relegated to inferior schools or classrooms. Yet education has also been the arena where the greatest advances in social justice and racial equality have been achieved. Understanding the contradictions created by the hope and unfulfilled promise of American education is a central theme of this course.
Introduces theories, methods, and political trajectories central to the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis (SCA). SCA 101 addresses how individuals and populations structure their worlds and navigate the resulting social, cultural, and political terrain. It privileges scholarly work with an intersectional approach, drawing on theoretical insights from such fields as social geography, feminism and queer studies, ethnic studies, urban and metropolitan studies, critical race theory, labor studies, and cultural studies.
Marcel Mauss developed a concept of an alternative, non-market type of economy, based on a nonmonetary exchange of such symbolic values as social recognition, sovereignty, and political participation. Today, this concept has acquired a new relevance in relation to the economy of the Internet. Examines various theories of the symbolic that expand the original Maussian model and encompass multiple aspects of culture.
Iampolski. Offered every year. 4 points. An examination of the history of Russian cinema from its beginnings. The main focus is on landmarks of cinematic art and on the cultural specificity of Russian cinema. The survey also includes questions of cinema and politics (cinema as a propaganda tool), and cinema and the market. Artists discussed include Eisenstein, Vertov, Pudovkin, Kuleshov, Barnet, Shub, Kozintsev, Trauberg, and Tarkovsky. Topics include cinema and revolution, the cinema of the Russian avant-garde and constructivism, cinema and totalitarianism, and socialist realism in film.
Designed for students who speak some Russian at home but have virtually no reading and writing skills. Does not satisfy the College Core Curriculum language requirement.
Explores the relationship between religion and American identity. We will analyze the role of religion in American culture, politics, and law and question if the United States has a secular government, what the separation of church and state means, and if religious freedom exists for everyone. Considers the role of religion in slavery, settler colonialism, Native American and immigrant assimilation, and also how religion has influenced the U.S. political system. Examines the role of religion within movements for racial justice, reproductive choice, and LGBTQ equality.
Offered in the fall. 4 points. Focuses on fundamental theoretical and methodological issues pertaining to the academic study of religion. Exposes students to, and familiarizes them with, some of the more important theories of the origin, character, and function of religion as a human phenomenon. Students are given an opportunity to encounter and test an assortment of the main scholarly approaches to understanding and interpreting religious phenomena, including psychological, sociological, anthropological, and hermeneutical perspectives.
Students experience current thinking in hypothesis formulation, experimental design, data analysis and research communication. Experiments are performed in the fields of Cognition and Perception and can include visual processing, auditory processing, learning, memory, and decision making. Students complete research projects and gain experience in writing research reports that conform to APA guidelines.