Our worlds are infused with communication—our personal and professional lives, our lives online and offline. We have so many communication outlets and platforms that it is difficult to break through the clutter, to find our own positions and possibilities, to think critically about who and what influences us and why. Yet, it has never been more important to do this kind of work, to listen to varied viewpoints, to take different perspectives, and to be empathetic to those who have differing ideas.
Faculty: Dean Banet-Weiser
This course asks what it means to listen critically, and to think about how communication technologies shape, reshape, and affect fundamental questions about democratic practice and ideals. We will explore what it means to “critically listen” to others, in the context of not only politics, but also friendship, culture, and our social lives.
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?