SSI1

How do people "do" gender in everyday life and on stage? What histories of gender presentation do plays present, trouble, and remake? Through the reading of play texts as well as contemporary interdisicplinary scholarship, this class widely explores the topics of gender and performance in all their dimensions, including: gender as performance, gendered performance, and the performance of gender within and outside of theatrical contexts.

Hip Hop Theatre will involve the close and critical reading and analysis of a host of plays from the expanding genre of Hip Hop Theater. Students will analyze, discuss, and write about how aesthetics like sampling, layering, non-linearity, flow and rupture, fragmentation, etc. inform the dramaturgy of Hip Hop playwrights. They will also examine how such aesthetics allow playwrights to reference and revise themes and conventions from traditional Western drama in powerful and innovative ways.

This freshman seminar, configured as the gateway course to an LLC (Living Learning Community), is designed for students who are interested in cities and fascinated by urban life.

The anthropological study of prejudice looks critically at the process of "othering" -- that is, the fear-based tendency to regard groups and individuals who are "dangerously different from us" in ways that emphasize ("their)" threat versus ("our)" safety. Logically, this perspective can lead to attitudes, policies, and actions that aim to annihilate the difference between "us" (the in-group) and "them" (the dangerous outsiders) -- either by forced assimilation or even by genocide.

In this first-year seminar, students will deeply engage and explore the ethnographic canon -- the total body of work assembled by anthropologists over the past century that seeks to describe the many different and diverse ways of being in this world that humans have configured. Students will commence with the journals and records of the travelers, writers, and thinkers that predated the formation of the discipline of anthropology. Students will then begin to read original ethnographies -- a set of assigned texts that includes several disciplinary classics.

This seminar examines the apparent, and perhaps genuine, contradiction between the concepts of social order and individual freedom. An ordered society implies that people generally do what they are supposed to do when they are supposed to do it. Our casual observation of society confirms persistent patterns to human behavior. At the same time, however, most of us cling to the notion of our individual freedom and our legal system is indeed premised upon this assumption.

The quarry of the anthropologist--the deep social patterns and cultural meanings that shape human existence--are often disguised, out of sight, or behind the curtain of the world as it appears before us. In seeking a vantage point from which one might glimpse these phenomena, this course follows a well-beaten anthropological path: beginning with a commonplace, everyday practice, students will work outward in scope and backward in time, constructing an informed, analytic, and critical perspective on human society and culture through the seemingly pedestrian substance of food.

This SSI1 Seminar examines the present status and the history of the theory of evolution in modern biology. We will learn about the historical context within which evolutionary ideas have developed and develop a better understanding of evolution, natural selection and learn about, evaluate, and apply recent efforts to apply an evolutionary lens to questions that most people assume have nothing to do with evolution. Affiliate departments: Science, Technology and Society, Biology.

This course focuses on scientific discoveries or theories that have been controversial. How do scientific controversies arise? What factors--rational, psychological, social, and political--shape the debate? How do scientific controversies end? Students learn general methods for analyzing scientific and non-scientific factors that influence the trajectory and outcome of a scientific controversy. Affiliate department: Science Technology and Society.

This course examines several instances of rock celebrity, focusing on the recent tragedy surrounding Michael Jackson, the "King of Pop," which, in many ways, parallels that of his predecessor Elvis Presley, the "King of Rock and Roll." While Jackson's career trajectory is eerily similar to that of Presley, his story involves additional complex issues of race, gender, mental illness, and criminality. Mega-celebrity is a phenomenon cutting across all the performing arts.