In the course, we couple theoretical readings with case studies. Our challenging and rewarding goal in this course is to learn how and why to communicate with greater insight and understanding across differences.
Along with many advances in our country and world, we also face crises with inescapable ethical dimensions where communication plays a key role. Communication can contribute to aggravating and to resolving most crises, creating an urgent need for us to understand the art and the ethics of communication. How can we responsibly use our powers of communication, personhood, and citizenship to deal constructively with crises?
Faculty: Dr. Amy Gutmann and Dean Banet-Weiser
In the course, we couple theoretical readings with case studies. Our challenging and rewarding goal in this course is to learn how and why to communicate with greater insight and understanding across differences.
Fall 2025
Podcasting has become one of the most popular ways of disseminating the voice, supplanting radio. It has even been a primary driver of the growth of music streaming services like Spotify. This creative-critical seminar situates the podcast historically, analyzes current instantiations of the genre, and teaches hands-on skills to create your own podcasts. The course also frames podcasts as a form of asynchronous dialogue that can be critically engaged with and utilized as a mechanism to comment on societal issues.
Fall 2025
This course will engage students in questions of slavery, indentured labor, migration, and repair through the conceptual frameworks of middle passages and returns. We will collectively investigate the routes and roots through which and from which people have traveled back and forth between African, Asian, and American sites in order to ask complicated questions about travel, conscription, labor, spirituality, and self-narration. How do we think about the complex trajectories that brought Africans and Asians to the Americas? How do we excavate lesser known inter- and intra-continental circulations? In what ways is return theoretically and methodologically im/possible? How has repair been envisioned?