Course descriptions

What is the role of the city in the 21st century? How do we begin to understand the idea of a city in an age when the world is more ?urban,? with traditionally non-urban areas beginning to ?look? and ?feel? more like places like Mumbai, Tokyo, Nairobi, Cairo, Los Angeles, New York, or London? This writing-intensive seminar looks at the phenomenon of the Global City?a large city that incorporates social, economic, and cultural aspects of other places from around the world. The main text for this class will be Joel Kotkin?s The City: A Global History (2007), a book that looks at the development of Global Cities from antiquity to the present day and will provide students with a toolkit for understanding our increasingly urbanized world. Additional readings will concern international infrastructures, cinematic depictions of cities, suburban densification, military conflicts in urban areas, and other topics, all designed to help students write about cities throughout the world.

Charlie Chaplin?s Modern Times (1936) is one of the best-loved films of the twentieth century. The scenes of Chaplin?s winsome, mustachioed Tramp caught up in the cogs of the vast, industrial machinery are not only comedy classics but have also served as an enduring symbol of the ?modern? condition. Our seminar will consider how this ?silent? film can be so telling. We will examine how the film interrogates what it means to be modern and to be human in terms of politics, aesthetics, class, and technology. We will analyze Modern Times within the context of Chaplin?s biography and oeuvre, as well as from a variety of critical perspectives, from the cinematic to the sociological, as we, in turn, learn to manipulate?and ultimately master?the many moving pieces of our own writing, rhetorical analysis, and research practices (cue applause!).

Downloading copyrighted music and videos. Posting photos of drinking friends to Facebook. Adapting articles found online for an academic paper. These ethical dilemmas arise whether our role is contributor to or audience for online content. Using the cases of privacy, intellectual property, and participation, this seminar will examine the ways in which people, particularly young people, are approaching their online activities. Thinking critically about online activities, we will address what does and does not make the digital environment unique such as constant connectivity, persistence, archivability of digital material, and anonymity. Moving beyond optimism and despair, we will examine whether or not there may be a digital ethics gap emerging. Using scholarship in digital communication and education, the goal of this course is to help you develop as a writer by improving your knowledge of rhetoric, reasoning, research, and synthesis.

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.