2016-2017 Scripps Catalog THIS IS AN ARCHIVED CATALOG. LINKS MAY NO LONGER BE ACTIVE AND CONTENT MAY BE OUT OF DATE!
Core Curriculum in Interdisciplinary Humanities
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Scripps College has a long and distinguished tradition in teaching in the humanities. New students must fulfill their general education requirement in the Humanities by taking the Core Curriculum in Interdisciplinary Humanities (Core). The Core is a closely integrated sequence of three courses designed to encourage increasingly sophisticated and focused interdisciplinary investigation of a broad range of historical and contemporary issues.
During the first semester, all first-year students take Core I which consists of a lecture/discussion format. Team-taught by 15-18 faculty members drawn from each of the College’s academic divisions (arts, letters, natural sciences, and social sciences). Core I is unified by a single syllabus and a particular focus that is approached from multiple perspectives. In the second semester of the first year, students choose from a range of Core II courses, each of which is taught by an individual professor or team-taught with two professors. Core II courses are devoted to more intensive study of some of the methods, issues, and problems introduced in Core I. In the first semester of the sophomore year, students continue their interdisciplinary work in Core III, in which they choose from a large number of options which focus on more specialized topics and in which students develop independent research and projects; each Core III course is taught by an individual professor.
The theme of the Core Program as a whole is “Histories of the Present”. With this inquiry Core faculty and students explore the ways in which our contemporary self-understandings emerge from and express commitments and categories that are often taken as given—as so “natural” and “obvious” that they prevent us from thinking clearly about their complexities and ambiguities, and hinder us from seeing our world in other ways.
Core Curriculum in Interdisciplinary Humanities
Core I: Histories of the Present: Community
Core I takes up this task through an examination of communities. Starting with the question “What is a community?” we look at both large imagined communities such as modern nation-states and religious groups and smaller, more intimate groups that we regularly label as a “community.” We ask: How are communities formed and transformed? What role does historical memory and forgetting play in the creation of community? How are communities at once inclusive and exclusionary? What role do performance and memory play in the formation and transformation of communities? And when are communities beneficial and when are they potentially harmful?
In this course, we examine the ways in which communities are created and transformed through political acts, religious practices, military intervention, cultural performances, social networks, and bonding. In conjunction with this, we critique the ways in which practices of overt and implicit exclusion along the lines of birth, class, race, gender, sexuality, ability, and religious beliefs limit the possibility of belonging. We explore the ways in which individuals and communities define and represent themselves in accordance with and in resistance to the dominant powers that often determine a community’s boundaries. We also explore how communities work in resistance to transform their own and other’s political, economic and social condition.
Core II: Histories of the Present
Core II continues—with sharper focus and through an array of course offerings—the interdisciplinary investigations begun in Core I. That is, we develop our examination of the ways in which our contemporary self-understandings (political, moral, economic, aesthetic, etc.) emerge from and express commitments and categories that are often regarded as given—so “natural” and “obvious” as to prevent us from thinking clearly about their complexities and ambiguities. Core II courses are taught by a faculty member with interdisciplinary research interests and may be team-taught by faculty whose complementary research interests make for fresh interdisciplinary dialogue. Consult the Scripps Portal for CORE II offerings for the current semester. Core II offerings vary each year and may include:
Becoming Someone Else in American Culture
Constructions of (Dis)Ability
Death
Decolonizing: First Nations Musics and Literatures
Desire and Decadence: Interdisciplinary Contexts in Fin-de-Siecle Europe
Doing Queer Histories
Eat the Rich! Capitalism and Work
Ecological Justice
Feminisms and Anti/Nonviolence
Geographies of Militarization
Hunger
Investigating Humor in Literature and Mass Media
Lights, Camera, Murder! Crimes and Trials in France and the U.S
Misrepresentation of Women in Society and Science
Nerds and Geeks
Old New Media
The Question of the Animal, Ancient and Contemporary
Riotous Americans: Los Angeles and the Poetics of Unrest
The Self and the Origins of the State in the Western World
Troubles in Paradise: Brazil Through Ethnography & Fiction
Shakespeare’s Tragedies Then and Now
Terms of Modernity
Travel, Encounter, and the History of Religion
Urban Nights: Gender, Work, and Experiences
Why Punish?
Core III: Histories of the Present
Core III courses are small seminars designed to foster innovation and collaboration among students and faculty. The seminars involve considerable student participation and afford the opportunity to do more individualized, self-directed scholarship in association with a single faculty member working in the area of expertise from an interdisciplinary perspective. The work of the seminars culminates in a self-designed project exploring a particular topic through the lens of “histories of the present.” Exceptional student work will be disseminated to the wider College community. Depending on instructor and subject matter, the Core III seminars involve research, internships with fieldwork, exhibits, performances, conferences, and multimedia projects. Consult the Scripps Portal for Core III offerings for the current semester. Core III course offerings vary each year and may include:
Animal Rights and Speciesism
Blues Jazzlines: Past and Present Tense
Challenges from the global south - “America”
Collective Songwriting: Theory and Knowledge Production
Creating and Recreating Genji
Cyberculture and the Posthuman Age
Democracy in Theory and Practice
The Detective in the City
Education and Inequality
Encountering the Middle East: Representations of Race, Gender, and Violence
Fame & Happiness: French Women as Case Study
Foreign Language and Culture Teaching Clinic
History and Memory
The Life Story
Mathematics in Our Culture
Mobilizing Art: Creating Activist Performances
Postcolonial Anxieties: Unpacking Europe/Unyoking Africa
Radical Cartographies
Realism and Anti-Realism
Regarding the Pain of Others: Ethics and Documentary Representation
Reading and Writing LGBTQ Lives
Sites of Seduction: Aesthetic Contexts of the French Garden and its Others
Snapshots, Portraits, Instagram
Southern California and Hollywood Film: Human Dreams, Human Difference and Human Desire
The Twentieth-Century Music Schism
United: Women’s Work and Collective Action
Wilderness in American Life
Women, Girls, and Mathematical Superstitions
VIR/GYN GODDESS: The Virgin and the Femme Fatale
Learning Outcomes of the Program in Core 1
Department Goals and/or Objectives
Goals are broad statements that describe what the program wants to accomplish
1. First-semester students have a shared intellectual experience.
2. Students are introduced to interdisciplinary approaches to studying problems of historical and contemporary interest.
3. Students develop analytical skills in reading and oral expression through small-group discussions.
4. Students develop writing skills that emphasize argumentation and textual analysis.
Student Learning Outcomes
Outcomes describe specific knowledge, abilities, values, and attitudes students should demonstrate
SLO1: Students demonstrate comprehension of key terms from texts and lectures.
SLO2: Students are able to examine a variety of issues from different disciplinary perspectives.
SLO3: Students display a comprehension of course materials (i.e., the claims, arguments, interpretations of texts and lectures).
SLO4: Students display a capacity to present and to respond to claims and arguments orally.
SLO5: Student essays emphasize argumentation and textual analysis.
Learning Outcomes of the Program in Core 2
Department Goals and/or Objectives
Goals are broad statements that describe what the program wants to accomplish
1. Understand how and why different disciplines approach seemingly similar objects of contemporary interest and/or historical importance from different perspectives, leading to different conclusions and material consequences.
2. Use various disciplinary methods.
3. Develop their own written and oral arguments in interdisciplinary contexts.
Student Learning Outcomes
Outcomes describe specific knowledge, abilities, values, and attitudes students should demonstrate
SLO1: Demonstrate knowledge of various disciplinary methods.
SLO2: Effectively communicate arguments orally.
SLO3: Effectively present arguments in written form.
Learning Outcomes of the Program in Core 3
Department Goals and/or Objectives
Goals are broad statements that describe what the program wants to accomplish
1. Students independently and creatively develop their understanding of different disciplines and interdisciplinary inquiry acquired in Core 1 and 2.
2. Students explore and interrogate the historical construction of a particular field of inquiry.
3. Students formulate, research, and execute a substantial project of their own design.
Student Learning Outcomes
Outcomes describe specific knowledge, abilities, values, and attitudes students should demonstrate
SLO1: Student synthesizes and critically explains issues.
SLO2: Student articulates a clear and informed argument.
Programs
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