Course descriptions

Following Francois Bourguignon?s The Globalization of Inequality (2015), this course will explore the question of whether countries are becoming more inequal and, if so, how and whether globalization has brought this about. Along with looking at economics, we will also explore how different policies create or help to address global inequality.

This writing seminar examines the role of the city in the twenty-first century. In an increasingly urbanized world, the city has been portrayed as both a scourge and a panacea for humans. What constitutes a Global City? Can such a city be determined merely according to its size, or are there are other considerations? This writing seminar considers the phenomenon of the Global City and considers how cities defined as such grapple with numerous challenges while continuing to grow and thrive. The main text for this seminar, Edward Glaeser?s Triumph of the City argues that cities can provide solutions to some of the world?s most pressing problems, and this proposition is examined in great detail.

Few of us stop to consider how we learned to fulfill our very basic need for food. Yet historians, nutritionists, psychologists, and anthropologists tell us that there is nothing about the way we eat that is not conditioned by our culture. In this class, we will explore the fascinating topic of why we eat what we do, and why our tastes dispose us towards certain foods rather than others. Sweet, salty, spicy?how do we learn to appreciate certain flavors, and why do why do we reject others? Bee Wilson?s book First Bite will form the centerpiece of our explorations, but everything from picky childhood eaters (chicken nuggets, anyone?) to the cultural differences that distinguish ?Mediterranean? from ?Asian? or ?Southern? cuisine will be open to investigation. While this class focuses on a topic of relevance to us all and will touch on research from several different academic disciplines, the emphasis throughout will be on analysis, synthesis, and research.

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.