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
