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. 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:
The Art of Medicine, Medicine in the Arts: the body in Italian Literature
Becoming Someone Else in American Culture
Communities and Faultlines: Militarism and Building Anti-Racist Feminist and Queer Solidarities
The Construction of Kinship
Constructions of (Dis)Ability
Contract Enforcement: Histories of the Mafia, Past and Present
Death
Decolonizing: First Nations Musics and Literatures
Desire and Decadence: Interdisciplinary Contexts in Fin-de-Siecle Europe
The Detective in the City
Discord and Dialog
Eat the Rich! Capitalism and Work
Ecological Justice
Hunger
Incentives Matter: The Economics of Gender and Choice
Investigating Humor in Literature and Mass Media
The Language of Music
Lights, Camera, Murder! Crimes and Trials in France and the U.S
Marginalized Communities
Misrepresentation of Women in Society and Science
Nerds and Geeks
Old New Media
Plantation Empires: Gender, Labor, Race and the Construction of “Difference”
Poetry of the Revolution: The Manifesto
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
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
Bodies in Motion: Representation and Simulation
Building Los Angeles
Capitalism and Critique
Caribbean Women’s Literature
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
Dream Factories: cinema in theory and in practice
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
The Meaning(?) of Life
The Mechanical Eye: Photography from Science to Art
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
Representations of the Male Body in Contemporary Art and Culture
Resilience and Resistance: Women of Color in the United States
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
VIR/GYN GODDESS: The Virgin and the Femme Fatale
What is Happiness?
Wilderness in American Life
Women, Girls, and Mathematical Superstitions
Women’s Rights: Does it Matter?
