Course descriptions

Home: at its simplest, home is the physical space of residence, the place we return to regularly, and where our belongings are stored. More broadly, though, home is the feeling of familiarity, comfort, and belonging. It is both something we are born into and something we have to create for ourselves. In this class, we will think about the idea of home as the site of identity creation as well as how the concept of home overlaps with political entities like city, state, and, nation. By studying selected essays and poems as well as the film The Wizard of Oz, and guided by Jan Duyvendak's sociological study on home, this class will encourage students to explore the different meanings of home and think about the politics of identity.

English has emerged as a global language, shared by billions of native and non-native speakers across a range of contexts from international politics to popular culture. But is this, as some have claimed, a form of linguistic imperialism or does this world language attempt to realize the perennial dream of a universal language, universal understanding? Additionally, who controls English? How do multilingual speakers negotiate and contribute to English? And should we speak perhaps, more properly, of Englishes? This course will engage in dialogue with the history, legacy, and experience of the English language itself as we sharpen our rhetorical skills and practice of American English college writing and research. We will examine what constitutes a global language, how English attained its current standing, and whether this will?or should?continue.

In most of the world, multiple therapeutic traditions co-exist, sometimes symbiotically and at others competitively. Many societies have radically different ideas and practices concerning health, the body and disease than in the US. And these ideas and practices are contested both within these societies and between different societies in an emerging global world. In this writing seminar, we will examine several contested topics within the field of medical anthropology in Haiti, Ghana, Eastern Europe, Japan, India, Southern Africa and the US: holistic versus ontological approaches towards disease, the politics of suffering, religious healing and contestation, the meaning(s) of organ donation, biomedicine under conditions of poverty, female circumcision, the ethics of clinical trials in the developing world, and finally, HIV/AIDS. This course is designed to improve students? writing skills via peer review, multiple drafts and revisions of essays, and midterm and final portfolios.

From Facebook pages read by a few hundred ?friends? to YouTube videos with over a billion views, digital media have created opportunities for its users to reach a far-flung and potentially massive following. By allowing, at least in theory, anyone with a laptop, an internet connection, and the necessary degree of digital literacy to access the kind of audience that was previously available only to institutions like television stations or movie studios, digital tools have changed our relationship to media production and consumption. At the same time, they have created new challenges, including the need to manage one?s online image and the inability to predict who will be in one?s audience. In this class, we will consider the power and the contradictions of online audiences, exploring such topics as Twitter etiquette, online memes, and the rise of a so-called sharing economy. In so doing, we will deepen and complicate our understanding of one of the oldest relationships in the study of rhetoric and writing, that between the author and the audience.