Core I: Histories of the Present: Crossroads
The Core Curriculum in Interdisciplinary Humanities will be a central part of your experience at Scripps College. The Core is designed to introduce you via interdisciplinary study to some of the major debates and concepts that have shaped the modern world. The first semester of Core is a broad foundational course in which students and faculty examine contemporary issues and debates through a historical lens. Ultimately this course will serve as an introduction to contemporary humanistic practice.
The current iteration of Core I takes up this task through an examination of crossroads. It considers the constraints we face both collectively and individually. Often it may seem like we have no meaningful choices left to make, so powerful do these forces appear. One need only recall the political situation or global warming to feel an oppressive sense of helplessness; or, at a more individual level, we may languish under the imperatives of social media or anxiety about success in school (and, eventually, in a career). But are we truly without options? In addressing these concerns, we consider how institutions, categories such as race and gender, and other cultural frameworks influence our sense of possibility. This course considers crossroads in the sense of crisis but also of choice.
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:
“America” in recent music & literature
Animal Rights and Speciesism
Antiracist and Transnational Feminist Coalitions
Art, Ecology, and Fieldwork
Bad Writing
Bodies in Motion: Representation and Simulation
Building Los Angeles
Capitalism/Anti-Capitalism
Caribbean Women’s Literature
Challenges from the global south - “America”
Children’s Literature
Collective Songwriting: Theory and Knowledge Production
Creating and Recreating Genji
Democracy in Theory and Practice
Dream Factories: cinema in theory and in practice
Education and Inequality
Embodying Illness
Essay, Film, and Theory
Fame & Happiness: French Women as Case Study
Forced Displacement, Migration, and Resettlement
Foreign Language and Culture Teaching Clinic
Futuring
History and Memory
Karl Marx: Critic of Everything
Researching Home and Activism in the 19th-Century United States
Landscapes of Plunder
Making Radical Sense of Power
Mobilizing Art
Narratives of Memory: Spain and Latin American
Neuroethics
Not Your Sunday School Christianity
Photography and the Archive
Politics of Commons and Commoning
Postcolonial Anxieties: Unpacking Europe/Unyoking Africa
Prescriptions and Debates on What Contributes to Health
Radical Cartographies
Realism and Anti-Realism
Representing LA: rock ‘n’ roll
Resilience and Resistance: Women of Color in the United States
Shame:Social Stigma/Moral Pain?
Snapshots, Portraits, Instagram
Social Change and Migration
Storytelling in the Sciences
The Detective in the City
The Life Story
The Meaning(?) of Life
The Mechanical Eye: Photography from Science to Art
The Twentieth-Century Music Schism
United: Women’s Work and Collective Action
VIR/GYN GODDESS: The Virgin and the Femme Fatale
Walls, Borders, Fences
What is Happiness?
Women, Girls, and Mathematical Superstitions
Women’s Rights: Does it Matter?
