Dec 04, 2024

2017-2018 Scripps Catalog

2017-2018 Scripps Catalog THIS IS AN ARCHIVED CATALOG. LINKS MAY NO LONGER BE ACTIVE AND CONTENT MAY BE OUT OF DATE!

Core Courses

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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