Courses

From shopkeepers to motel owners, the Asian American entrepreneur is frequently celebrated and offered as proof that the American Dream is achievable and that the United States is a meritocracy. This seminar challenges this view.

This course will focus on plants and their role in sustainable ecosystem stability and food security globally and in the urban setting in the city of Philadelphia. We will explore challenges faced due to environmental and land use change, and access to green spaces. We will examine the role of plants in urban food, ancestral traditions, community, health & wellbeing, also ecosystems benefits. We will discuss plant biological, genetic, breeding as well as ecological solutions for enhancing plant resilience and system resilience. Students will gain hands-on experience, engage in dialog with farm, garden and ecosystem practitioners, as well as city officials and other support systems, NGOs and small businesses. Dialog will occur both on visits to local gardens, farms, or parks with representatives and stakeholders or on campus with guest speakers and each other. Students will develop project ideas, educational materials, plans, or designs that detail possible solutions to problems identified during their investigations. Activities will intersect with to those of PlantARC.

This course uses a biological foundation to explore general issues at the interface of biology and society. We will use both historical and contemporary reading materials, with an emphasis on the primary scientific literature, to inform discussions on often controversial issues in biology as well as the social responsibility of scientists to respond to these issues.

This graduate seminar, we will explore a growing body of work at the intersection of technology and social justice. A range of areas are included under this umbrella including tech ethics, design justice, algorithmic fairness, as well as work on equity, bias, diversity, and representation in computer science and other related disciplines. In this course, students will read and discuss a wide range of this work, through both critical and generative lenses.

This hybrid literature/creative writing course centers on the genre of testimony as a form of life-writing and self-making that is fundamentally dialogic; that is, dependent on what Dori Laub calls “a listening other” to be fully realized.

This course introduces three genres of life writing: Autobiography, Memoir and the Diary. While the Memoir and the diary are older forms of first persons writing the Autobiography developed later. We will first study the literary-historical shifts that occurred in Autobiographies from religious confession through the secular Eurocentric Enlightenment men, expanded to women writers and to members of marginal oppressed groups as well as to non-European autobiographies in the twentieth century. Subsequently we shall study the rise of the modern memoir, asking how it is different from this form of writing that existed already in the middle ages.

The police are one of the most heavily imagined institutions in American popular culture. From Cagney and Lacey to Colors, Law & Order, The Wire and The Watchmen, evolving depictions of law enforcement help us to understand larger socio-cultural shifts that have occurred from the post-1968 riots to the dawn of the Black Lives Matter movement in the mid-2010s and police abolition in the early 2020s.

Free markets excel at producing wealth, but seem to do so at the cost of economic inequality. Is this inequality unjust? Is it a problem economics and public policy should solve? Liberal democracies have traditionally had the protection of private property as a core mandate. But they also have varying degrees of redistribution in order to fund social welfare systems. How can we reconcile these objectives which seem to conflict? Is the protection of individual rights more important than the promotion of the greatest good for all? To what extent can personal liberty and the common good be reconciled?

This course will introduce the student to the many ways in which mindfulness is currently being implemented to support the health and success of students of all ages.  Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR), in particular, which utilizes secularized practices from Asian and South Asian traditions for the remediation of various health concerns, has revolutionized behavioral medicine, and the scientific evaluation of MBSR has shed new light on the bio-mechanical pathways linking mind and body.

“Listening enables us to give democratic shape to our being together in the world,” according to the political philosopher Susan Bickford. In this course, we will explore histories and theories of listening and the power of listening as a means to connect with other times and spaces.

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.

As a pioneer of abstraction in the early 1900’s, Hilma Af Klint channeled a complex and highly original body of abstract symbolic work in secrecy. Using the Hilma Af Klint exhibition that was on view at the Guggenheim as a focus and departure point, this course will explore the ways in which artists have accessed alternative ways of seeing, knowing, and embodying non-visible realities as a source for their work.

This course examines the science of joy as a psychological, cultural, and communicative phenomenon, with an emphasis on how joy can be intentionally designed and cultivated in personal, professional, and social contexts. We will explore the role of joy in human well-being, its potential as an intervention for trauma and grief, and its application in leadership, policymaking, and digital media.

This class addresses the meeting points inside of and between a range of resistant performance practices with a focus on artists using performance to address political and social encounters in the contemporary moment.

What is capitalism? What is democracy? And what is the relationship between the two? Socialist critics, including revolutionaries like the German communist Rosa Luxemburg and reformists Sidney and Beatrice Webb, have long argued that capitalism is a despotic regime. But by the 1940s, new defenders of capitalism—known as “neoliberals”—began to tie political freedoms to free markets.

The 2020 protests about monuments in Philadelphia and across the nation have exposed this truth: Arguments over the past are arguments about the future. This place-based course examines local and national public memory in relation to the built environment. Students will learn about the making of the U.S. memorial landscape in the long nineteenth century, its remaking in the twentieth century, and its possible futures in the (un)making.

“Diplomacy in the Americas” an academically based community service course in which students work with Philadelphia and Norristown public school students to explore solutions to critical problems facing the Americas.

You might think about this seminar as a kind of reflexive moment as you arrive on campus: as undergraduates and members of communities you will think about the relationship between your own recent move/displacement and the work of music/sound as a strategy of individual and collective belonging.

What is oppression? Does it define a subjective experience or a structural condition? Should we understand it in terms of a restriction on freedom? Or equality? Or our ability to fully express our agency? And how can it be resisted?

How do racial and ethnic identities influence political behaviors, policies, and institutions? In this course, we will explore conceptual and methodological issues, focusing on how racial and ethnic groups shape and are shaped in turn by their political system. We will discuss a diverse range of groups, including African, Asian, European, Latin American, Middle Eastern, and Indigenous populations around the world. We will cover topics including the meaning of race and ethnicity, the historical impact of colonialism and civil rights movements, prejudice, group participation and mobilization, political representation, public opinion, the role of the media, political parties, government institutions, and policies intended to address racial and ethnic disparities.

Faculty: Jair A. Moreira

Pennsylvania is a state that varies widely in terms of its demographics, its economics and its geography.  With both urban and rural areas and considered simultaneously part of the northeastern corridor, the Midwest and Appalachia, the state encompasses many different political cultures. In U.S. electoral politics, Pennsylvania is the largest swing state which means the state is flooded with national money and attention as political parties vie for its coveted 19 electoral votes. Since it is a state that unlike say Texas or California, does not hold a strong established political identity as a guaranteed “red” or “blue” state, it provides a way to study specific ideologies as they are present in specific localities that speak to the national context.

The purpose of this course is to provide students with an understanding of how decisions and policy are really made in Washington. Weekly travel to Washington D.C. required.

Free Speech and its First Amendment protections have rarely been as controversial and central to public discussion in the United States as they are today. After a brief introduction to free speech as understood before it became enshrined in the Constitution’s First Amendment, we’ll examine and trace its history in the U.S.—legally, politically, philosophically and socially—from 1791 to the present day.

This course provides students with a rich look at the historical and contemporary factors that have shaped America’s wealth gaps. By studying the economic impacts of systemic forces such as discriminatory housing, predatory lending, and unbanking, students will develop a deep financial understanding of today’s urban communities.

Restorative Justice (RJ) is a new term to describe ancient ways of dealing with harm and being in community which centers our relationships and obligations to one another, as opposed to punishment and retribution. Increasingly popular as a response to a plethora of urban issues, from mass incarceration to gun violence to education inequality, RJ is also sometimes misunderstood or applied without fidelity.

The course focuses on justice-involved veterans who are at the nexus of two of the United States largest, most powerful, and well-funded institutions—the criminal justice system and the military. The curriculum explores the U.S. military, the criminal justice system, race, health, violence, poverty, U.S. policy, trauma, and masculinity.

Art, dialogue theory and cultural differences come together in this experiential course. Students will explore and learn about all three of these components. They will experience true dialogue and learn about it. They will engage in interpersonal encounters with art, the key driver of cultural content for this course. Art will provide a neutral platform for perceiving cultural differences through careful exploration, verbal description, and an exchange of insights into ways artists express concerns, biases, and world views. Students will engage in dialogues to inquire into these and other personal and cultural differences, thereby participating in intercultural communication.