Courses ofInstruction
First-Year Seminars
First-Year Seminars provide a foundation for our students' intellectual lives both inside and outside the classroom by helping them to develop critical thinking, writing and communication skills and practices; to enculturate themselves within the Colleges' intellectual and ethical values and practices; and to establish a strong network of relationships with peers and mentors on campus. The seminar topics vary each year, as do the professors who teach them, so the classroom discussions are always fresh and interesting.
Each Seminar is constructed around a different interest, like magic, social responsibility or country music, and Seminar classes are small – usually about 15 students – which helps students feel more comfortable in a new environment and allows the students and faculty members to develop close working relationships.
First-Year Seminars are graded on a mixed grading scheme, with possible grades of A+, A, A-, B+, B, B-, C+, C, C-, DCR (D Credit), NC (No Credit). Failing and D grades are not calculated as part of the student’s GPA.
Examples of First-Year Seminar courses includes the following:
FSEM 013 Violence in the Sea of Faith During the Middle Ages, the Mediterranean sea was home to people of the three Abrahamic faiths: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. These communities often fought violently for territory, converts, and wealth. This class explores the nature of religious violence in the pre-modern Mediterranean by examining the topics of Islamic expansion, the Crusades, and persecution. In the course, we will also challenge the assumption that all interactions were violent by investigating convivencia in Spain Egypt, and Sicily. We will read , many different types of medieval texts including crusade narratives, travel writings, biography, and chronicles. Lastly we will explore how science, art history, philosophy, and archaeology help us understand the complexity of the medieval world. [Prerequisite: Open to incoming First-Year students only.]
FSEM 019 Archaeological Mysteries: Pseudo-Archaeology & the Battle for the Past Course Did aliens really visit the Egyptians or early Meso-Americans? Could ancient peoples possibly build sophisticated structures like pyramids, or the Nazca lines, or calculate the complex mathematical equations necessary for their astronomical projects, without a more advanced civilization's aid? Has Noah's Ark really been found? Does the Bible include evidence of UFO's? Did Atlantis really exist? How could anyone really verify whether the Piltdown Man was a hoax-doesn't science itself dictate that there are no definite answers? How can you tell when an archaeological or scientific discovery is fraudulent? Are "alternative" archaeologists really plucky, unappreciated champions of a truth that mainstream science wants to conceal? Are academic archaeologists closed-minded, unimaginative, agents of the status quo, intent upon keeping revelatory information away from the public? This course will review famous moments in 'Pseudo-Archaeology' then explain how to differentiate fraudulent/fantastical claims from scientifically supportable conclusions. We will also discuss why individuals might generate hoaxes or cling to unsustainable narratives, and why such misinformation about the past matters. Finally, we will investigate some properly documented/handled archaeological mysteries, in order to: 1) practice distinguishing supported claims from fiction (and maybe offer some responsible explanations of our own); 2) demonstrate that the rigorous application of scientific method does not stifle excitement or mystery; and, 3) marvel at the ingenuity of our distant ancestors. [Prerequisite: Open to incoming First-Year students only.]
FSEM 020 Twenty Questions Are we alone in the universe? Is democracy the best form of government? Where does gender come from? Does social media make us anti-social? Are human rights universal? Can Artificial Intelligence make real artworks? In this seminar we will contemplate twenty fascinating questions drawn from disciplines across the liberal arts, considering the various alternatives on offer and debating their respective merits. Our main purpose in this class is to offer you an introduction to the broad range of subjects that we study in the HWS curriculum. [Prerequisite: Open to incoming First-Year students only.]
FSEM 021 Class Matters I will use the concept of class as the organizing framework or prism through which we will explore social structure, culture, social institutions, and social inequality. My intent is to ensure that from here on out, whenever you want to get to know a new place or a new set of people, you will ask: "What is the class structure here, and how has it changed in the last thirty years? How does class shape the culture and the social rules that govern behavior here? How does class affect people's everyday lives here- their friendships, their work, their family life? How does class shape what is possible for the future of this place? " [Prerequisite: Open to incoming First-Year students only.]
FSEM 025 Shaping Spaces: How We Design and Understand the World Around Us Why do some places feel meaningful while others seem anonymous? How do landscapes, buildings, and cities reflect power, identity, and memory? This seminar examines the ways in which humans create and interpret place - physical, social, and symbolic - through cultural, historical, and political lenses. Drawing on interdisciplinary readings in human geography, architecture, and design, we will investigate how places emerge through lived experience, planning, and contestation. From the design of neighborhoods to debates over public monuments, students will analyze how spatial practices shape everyday life. Through readings, field observations, creative projects, and discussions, we will critically explore the spaces we inhabit and the broader forces that shape them. [Prerequisite: Open to incoming First-Year students only.]
FSEM 029 Moving Mountains Mountainous terrain looms large in our cultural imagination. Civilizations around the globe have long created narratives about the peaks and valleys of their immediate and distant landscapes. Why are such mountains powerful metaphors for the challenges and triumphs of life? Why do summits provide such fertile ground for both internal reflection and external perspective? How has the sport (and big business) of mountaineering changed our perspective on the relationship between humans and the Earth? How have indigenous communities and other traditionally marginalized groups moved to reclaim alpine environs to make these sacred spaces once again 'free'? This course will examine classic and contemporary texts to explore how mountains have been used to make sense of our world for centuries. [Prerequisite: Open to incoming First-Year students only.]
FSEM 036 Relationships, Happiness, and Service Everyone is talking about "belonging" but what does it really mean to be a part of a community? Students will gain an understanding of the social power structures that support or inhibit community building, and how that impacts individual and collective well-being. In addition to assigned readings and class discussions, students will commit to 20 hours of service-learning (2 hours per week over the course of the semester), through which students will help cultivate community through creating connections with peers on campus and with members of the Geneva community. "Exploring Community" will lead to skill development which will help students navigate their time at HWS and build towards a `life of consequence.' This course will be linked as a Learning Community. [Prerequisite: Open to incoming First-Year students only.]
FSEM 041 CORALations: Connecting through Corals Imagine gliding underwater through the beauty of lush tropical corals and their reefs teeming with colorful life. Now imagine them all gone as anthropogenic causes decimate these reefs that produce oxygen that we breathe, house marine protein that we consume, protect our shores, generate tourism income, and nourish life beyond humanity. Corals and humans are both holobionts: ecological communities made of multiple symbiotic genes. In these communities, micro and macro bionts contribute to the effective performance of the whole, each providing crucial functions in complex, interrelated ways. Earth has also been called a holobiont, whereby organisms in this planetary context interact in multidisciplinary webs that sustain life. Today, concerns that we humans are upending these matrices motivate those from various walks of life to change our thoughts and behaviors. Historians may wrestle to understand this phenomenon as a manifestation of modernity; scientists may research systemic causations or investigate symptomatic details. Media experts may explore its relational symbolisms; legal scholars may scrutinize society's structural mechanisms; ethnobiologists may study diverse modes of knowledge production. Increasingly, we are compelled to borrow from the coral and human ecological model and connect these multiple methods of inquiry to think and act transdisciplinarily-across different fields of learning that are somewhat overlapping and together help us understand our responsibilities as part of holobionts. In this seminar, we mine this strength of liberal arts education as we consider the relationship between humans and corals from various perspectives, thinking holistically by connecting across disciplines, time, space, life forms, and their entanglements. Join our quest to continue swimming on this wondrous planet, reflectively and deliberately. [Prerequisite: Open to incoming First-Year students only.]
FSEM 042 Face to Face: Interrogating Race in the United States and South Africa How do we talk about race after the murder of George Floyd? In this seminar, we'll explore the parallels between South Africa and the United States, their policies of segregation and their ongoing resistant imaginations. [Prerequisite: Open to incoming First-Year students only.]
FSEM 053 Living with AI: Data, Society, and Machines that Learn Everywhere you turn these days, there it is: AI. It talks to us online, creates art, writes code, evaluates job applications, and much more. But how did we get here? Where did these AIs come from? Do they really work? How? Are chatbots really "intelligent" in the ways humans are intelligent? Where is the line between fact and science fiction? What does it all mean for our lives, the environment, and society? In this course, we explore the history of our current technological moment. We look at how data helps us understand the world around us, how it has been leveraged into powerful new technologies, and how computation and humanity collide. We critically examine what can (and cannot) be accomplished with statistics, data science, machine learning, and artificial intelligence. [Prerequisite: Open to incoming First-Year students only.]
FSEM 056 Bird Obsessions:Beauty of Beast We are a world obsessed with birds; bird watching is one of the most popular hobbies in the nation and bird enthusiasts spend thousands of dollars on equipment, bird feeders, and on vacations to catch a glimpse of unseen species. Conservationists advocate spending millions of dollars on saving and protecting birds, such as the ivory-billed woodpecker and the California condor, from extinction. Why are we so obsessed with birds? Is it their amazing ability to fly, their almost implausible migrations, their vibrant colors, their curious personalities? What do birds represent to us and other cultures? In some religions, birds have been invoked as symbols of peace, power, trickery, gluttony, and intelligence. Do the lives of birds really embody these anthropomorphic characteristics? Do birds represent hope for spring, for the environment, or for the future? In this course, we'll examine the lives of birds, the people who are obsessed with them, and their interactions from a variety of perspectives. We'll explore birds as models for conservation and science, as religious symbols, and as subjects of art and literature. You'll also have an opportunity to connect with the environment of the Finger Lake region by learning about and observing our local birds. This course is part of a Learning Community. Visit page 19 for more information. Typical readings: Kaufmann, Kingbird Highway: The Story of a Natural Obsession That Got a Little Out of Hand; Cokinos, Hope Is The Thing With Feathers: A Personal Chronicle of Vanished Birds; Gallagher, The Grail Bird: Hot on the Trail of the Ivory-billed Woodpecker; Chi, Songbird Journeys; Heinrich, Mind of the Raven [Prerequisite: Open to incoming First-Year students only.]
FSEM 057 Road Trips Rebel writer Jack Kerouac famously went "On the Road" in postwar America, but what's the story behind Eisenhower's cross-country interstate system, chrome-trimmed car culture, and drive-thru eateries? American movies cast the open road as a symbol of freedom, but what about when the road is a site for social upheaval, as with the Great Migration, or a site of forced removal, as in the Trail of Tears? Have you ever marched down a road in social protest? What would a road to nowhere feel like? If you took an epic road trip, what songs would be on your playlist? The road is a powerful conduit to American culture. It symbolizes national ideals of freedom, mobility, and an endless horizon, alongside a fractured history of exclusion, colonial violence, xenophobia, and misogyny. In this FSEM, co-taught by an English professor and a Media and Society professor, we track how writers, musicians, filmmakers, artists, and scholars have generated and interpreted this particularly American fascination. We will watch road movies, read road lit, eat road food, analyze migrations and forced relocations, and sometimes even take it to the streets, as we build a community of road scholars. [Prerequisite: Open to incoming First-Year students only.]
FSEM 058 Unsinkable In 1912, the liner Titanic sank in the North Atlantic, killing over 1500 people. In 2023, the Titan submarine imploded on its journey to view the wreck of the Titanic, killing four. How do these two incidents magnify how we consider class? Why was traveling to the Titanic wreck compelling enough to risk lives to view it, and why does a disaster from over a century ago hold so much fascination for people worldwide? We will read accounts of the 1912 and 2023 events as we consider how these intertwined stories impacted world culture and became cautionary tales of how humans overestimate their technological capabilities. [Prerequisite: Open to incoming First-Year students only.]
FSEM 060 Human Flourishing in Modern Economy and Society The course will interrogate how our beliefs about what leads to human flourishing has co-evolved with our beliefs about the way we organize our society and economy. This will be explored through the discussion of both ideas and concrete manifestations of how people have defined what it means to be human. Including: What is human nature? What is the meaning and role of the individual in society? What constitutes a community? What is the common good or commonweal? What are the roles of values, moral sentiments, and human capabilities in facilitating human flourishing. We will discuss the nature of social organization, the concept of culture, and possible ways in which we can organize social provisioning in such a way as to promote the flourishing of all people in their many differences. We will do this by reading about how philosophers, social scientists, historians, natural scientists, authors of speculative fiction, and filmmakers have tried to answer these questions, or at least to provoke us to think about these questions seriously and critically. [Prerequisite: Open to incoming First-Year students only.]
FSEM 063 "X" Marks Your Spot How will you make your place here at HWS? What places will be your comfort zone? How have others made their place at HWS? As humans, we conceive and divide space into places: places for work, places for leisure, places of memory and community. Making places happens in both the present and in response to the past. Traversing the spaces between places is itself an experience of place. In this course, you will learn to navigate your way through the HWS and Geneva communities while we will explore the theme of "place-making" from different academic perspectives. As you search for "your place" we will question what it means to make and belong to places, how we experience places, and how places shape communities. This course will emphasize experiential learning by engaging you with places such as scavenger hunts, nature walks, and mapmaking exercises. At the end of the semester, you will make your own places for future students in the form of geocaches. [Prerequisite: Open to incoming First-Year students only.]
FSEM 083 Monsters in America From the Witches of Salem, to the Alien Invaders of Area 51, to the Vampires of Sunnydale, and the Walking Dead of Atlanta, Americans throughout their history have embodied their deepest cultural and social fears as horrifying, other-worldly creatures. Gender theorist Judith Halberstam argues that monsters are "meaning machines," metaphors through which a community defines itself. In other words, what we fear can tell us much about who we are. This class examines American history by exploring the dominant monster myths of the past four centuries, using the idea of the horrific as unique window into America's past. [Prerequisite: Open to incoming First-Year students only.]
FSEM 091 Earth vs. Humans: Fire, Flood, Environmental Collapse and Other Disasters Humans are part of the Earth system. But sometimes it seems like the planet is out to get us, earthquakes, floods, volcanic eruptions, climate change, environmental collapse and more have affected us from the dawn of Homo sapiens. In fact, climate change may have made us who we are. Natural disasters have wiped out entire cultures and localized events became legends thousands of years old. How have these events shaped human culture? What kinds of disasters can we anticipate and plan for? Has history taught us prudence? [Prerequisite: Open to incoming First-Year students only.]
FSEM 092 Math and Metaphor: Interactions between Mathematics and Storytelling Science fiction authors often draw from mathematical ideas in their stories, and popular science writers use metaphor to communicate complicated mathematical topics to a general audience. In this class we will examine these two modes of story-telling through paired readings (fictional and non-fictional) with shared mathematical content. [Prerequisite: Open to incoming First-Year students only.]
FSEM 093 Ethical Debates in Medicine How do we respond ethically to the problems posed by medical practices and policies? What ethical principles would we use? Should medical decisions take into account the patient's cultural and religious backgrounds? How do different cultures treat health and illness? This course is an interdisciplinary approach to the moral, philosophical, social, religious, and legal dimensions of the theories, policies, and practices in issues regarding the beginning, the maintenance, and the end of human life. We will examine a number of ethical theories ranging from Virtue, Utilitarian, deontological, religious and feminist ethics to approach the topics in question. We will particularly discuss the ethical dilemma of the way in which medical technology offers choices to determine a new life, enhances the maintenance of bodily perfection, and informs the decision to end life. Specific issues covered in this course will include concepts relevant to ethical theories, religion and bio-ethics, reproductive technology, abortion, euthanasia, organ transplant, and plastic surgery. Typical Readings: Tooley, Wolf-Devine, Devine and Jaggar, Abortion: Three Perspectives; Cherry, Kidney for Sale by Owner: Human Organs, Transplantation, and the Market; Liza Mundy, Everything Conceivable; Fadiman, The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down. [Prerequisite: Open to incoming First-Year students only.]
FSEM 101 New Chemistry Meets Old Art Art and science sometimes seem incompatible. In this course, we will challenge that perception. We will begin by using art projects to help understand chemical principles. Using those principles, we then will explore art history to illustrate how science helps us understand art. For example, science can help us uncover lost secrets of past artists, offer us strategies to recognize art forgeries, and advise us on the conservation of art in museums. No previous skills in science or art are needed to enjoy this course. Typical readings: Ball, Bright Earth; White, Prehistoric Art; Woolfson, Colour: How We See It and How We Use It; Wieseman: A Closer Look: Deceptions and Discoveries; Bomford: A Closer Look: Conservation of Paintings. [Prerequisite: Open to incoming First-Year students only.]
FSEM 104 ¡Ay mija!: Childhood and Identity in Hispanic Literature and Culture How do we begin to understand the complicated transition time between childhood to adulthood in diverse contexts? How do we honor our childhood selves while coming to terms with the adults we become? What roles do our cultural, linguistic, and social backgrounds play in the memories we choose to share and the ways in which we share them? ¡Ay mija! explores the theme of childhood in Latin America and Spain through fictional and non-fictional storytelling. Course materials include contemporary testimonial literature, poetry, novels, and film. Students will practice critical thinking through writing and active discussions. Additionally, students will have an opportunity to work with youth in the Geneva community as educational volunteers. [Prerequisite: Open to incoming First-Year students only.]
FSEM 108 From Comix to Graphix: The Art of Story Are comics and graphic novels literature, art, both, or neither? What does Wonder Woman have to do with political history? Why render the Holocaust in a comic format? This seminar considers formats and themes of comics and graphic narratives, a thriving hybrid form, created by artists from various global cultures. The seminar is designed (and sometimes collaboratively taught) by a literature professor and an art historian and uses methods of literary and visual analysis to gain a deeper understanding of graphic storytellings. Students will read a range of works in these media, as well as theory, method, and criticism in the field. Students will produce critical analyses and, potentially, creative projects, both individually and in collaboration. This seminar helps students develop multiple skills of interpretation of narratives in a range of contexts. Readings may include Persepolis, Maus, Fun Home, and Scott Pilgrim, among others. [Prerequisite: Open to incoming First-Year students only.]
FSEM 119 Information and Misinformation: Thinking Critically about Science in a Digital Age When should we trust scientific claims? When should we not? From Covid-19 to diet to relationships to our environment, we are bombarded with claims about how to behave and live our lives. But just because "studies have shown" does not mean that something is true, and pseudoscientific, exaggerated, and inaccurate claims can be difficult to spot. How do we learn to have 'healthy skepticism' about scientific claims and those who make them? This course addresses questions that are essential to evaluating and using scientific information effectively in our daily lives: What is scientific evidence? What constitutes strong vs. weak evidence? How do people gather evidence to inform their judgments and decisions, and how should they do so? How can we make sense of conflicting evidence, including evidence on polarized topics? How do we recognize and counteract bias in scientific reasoning, including our own? What role do the media and public play in the (mis)communication of science? We will tackle these and other questions by considering a range of popular, controversial, and critical topics relevant to 21st century experience using writing-instructive, critical, and reflective approaches to build skills for college and for life as informed consumers of science. (Anglin) [Prerequisite: Open to incoming First-Year students only.]
FSEM 120 Running Down a Dream 'Running' is a leisure activity for an estimated 47 million Americans (according to Sports and Fitness Industry Association, 2017), a competitive sport practiced worldwide in multiple forms, and one of the most ancient sports known to history. This FSEM will explore what running and holding an identity of `runner' or `not a runner' means today. How is running positioned today in American society? Other cultures? What does it mean to be a runner, a member of a running community? How does running 'look' for different across gender, race, and age lines? Using Jones and McEwens' conceptual model of Multiple Dimensions of Identity and an interdisciplinary lens, we will explore running as a phenomenon, cultural practice, and physical activity: we will touch on physiological aspects of running; examine the historical context, from running as a mode of transportation and communication to the modern day use of running as recreation and fitness; examine running from cultural and gender-based perspectives; engage in kinesthetic and meta-cognitive learning by examining our own running practice or non-practice; and have opportunities to engage with Geneva running communities as runners, non-runners, and volunteers. Students will also explore their own identities as students, including that of a runner. Please note: this course has an experiential component, but it is accessible to students of all physical abilities. [Prerequisite: Open to incoming First-Year students only.]
FSEM 121 What's Eating, You? Cooking, Cuisine & Me In 1826 Brillat-Savarin wrote, "Tell me what you eat and I will tell you what you are." But what can we tell from studies of not eating? This course will explore the hungering of fasting ascetics, anorexic girls, medieval saints, crash dieters, occasional cannibals, professional athletes, TV contestants, strategic political fasters, and famine and environmental disaster victims among others. Our subject will be cravings, desires, uneasy sensations, and weakened conditions as occasioned by the lack of food or some other unmet need. We will examine the myriad ways that hunger is constructed cross-culturally to critically analyze what it means in relation to other features of daily life. Using multidisciplinary accounts such as fiction, history, ethnography, biography, and film, we will examine how in particular contexts what we gloss as hunger can inform larger issues, such as the relationship between the individual and society, society and culture, and the local and the global. [Prerequisite: Open to incoming First-Year students only.]
FSEM 126 Media in Our Life How does TikTok's algorithm figure you out? Is my phone spying on me? What is "digital blackface"? Why are #OscarsSoWhite? Why do we use print media less and less? This course is designed to examine the ubiquitous role of media in our life. Focusing on the global and local contexts, this course will address two key questions: How do media help shape our identity and our view of the world on everyday basis And how do we as a society simultaneously forge the social uses of media? Guided by these two key questions, the course will explore various forms of media along with specific issues/questions around each form. [Prerequisite: Open to incoming First-Year students only.]
FSEM 130 I Know What You Ate Last Summer Chemistry is a fundamental component of home and restaurant food preparation, as cooking is ultimately a series of complex chemical reactions. Chemistry is also essential to the production of food, from the most basic ingredients to the most elaborate industrial grocery store offerings. An understanding of how society produces food, and how these practices are both regulated and manipulated, can be informed by an appreciation of the chemistry that underlies these techniques. Students in this course begin by garnering a background in food-related chemistry; they then apply this knowledge to the understanding of food production and policy. Students will design and perform experiments using food, research and write about issues of food production and policy, and learn to communicate their finding. [Prerequisite: Open to incoming First-Year students only.]
FSEM 131 The Mindful Body This seminar is a "yoga class" that takes place in a studio setting. Sounds fun, yet continuously it will challenge creative students to connect their physical practices to social justice principles and to be brave enough to explore sensitive topics with peers and to unlearn habits of thought and action. The history and philosophy of yoga, human anatomy, social justice education, storytelling, movement as metaphor, and inter-group dialogue are a few of the subjects that comprise this course. Students will need to be ready to venture into new territory: new body, new connections, new thinking, and new understanding of the self in relation to others. The adventure will include ongoing reading, college-level writing, research, dialogues outside class, and honest evaluation of outcomes. [Prerequisite: Open to incoming First-Year students only.]
FSEM 142 Pop Culture: Writing and Analysis Pop culture is easy to know but difficult to analyze. Because we are immersed in pop culture and consume it when seeking entertainment - in the form of films, TV shows, standup comedy, music, art, social media, ads, etc. - we all too easily engage with pop cultural artifacts without significant critical thought. In this course, we will develop and sharpen critical thinking, analysis, research, and writing skills by focusing on pop culture, critical theory, and pop cultural artifacts. In doing so, we will explore what pop culture is and what shapes it. We'll ask such questions as: What does pop culture teach us about ourselves and others? How might we question the role of pop culture in our lives? And how might we produce pop culture differently or demand something different from it? [Prerequisite: Open to incoming First-Year students only.]
FSEM 143 Berlin: Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow Berlin stands for many things to many people: political might, cultural energy, technological advancements, intellectual vitality, and vibrant, palpable history. Indeed, the city has witnessed a great number of events that defined not only European but world history. This history is carved into Berlin's landscape, it influences the city's and country's politics and culture, and it impacts the everyday lives of the city's inhabitants. This class will explore these phenomena to ask: How is the past remembered? How does it influence the present? How does it shape the future? We will do so by working with primary and secondary materials from the past 200 years; from first-hand accounts of parades through the Brandenburg Gate from the 19th through the 21st century, to social media commentaries on current events, to interviews with HWS students and Berliners themselves about their lived experiences in the city and what challenges lie ahead. [Prerequisite: Open to incoming First-Year students only.]
FSEM 151 On Strike! From 2021's Striketober to 2023's Hot Labor Summer we are experiencing a revitalization of the labor movement in the United States. Actors, nurses, baristas, autoworkers, writers, teachers, tech workers, and more are organizing for their dignity and connecting workplace struggles to environmental and social justice. We are also seeing how strikes move beyond the workplace - from youth climate strikes to international feminist strikes. This course asks: How have strikes been used to create social and political change at key moments in history? And how do strikes work today? We will explore these questions by analyzing how strikes are depicted in film, fiction, poetry and song; studying the slogans and tactics of strikers throughout U.S. history and today; reading and discussing theories about why strikes work or don't; and learning the stories of strikers-workers of color, queer, disabled, immigrant, and women workers who have been overlooked or ignored. Our analysis of strikes will not only sharpen our critical thinking skills, but also build our abilities to make change through collective action. [Prerequisite: Open to incoming First-Year students only.]
FSEM 156 Our Linguistic Identities Language is perhaps the most human of our activities, yet it is difficult for most of us to objectively describe what exactly language is or how it works. This course will consider the relationship between language and thought and the role of language in society, and it will question some of our commonly held beliefs about what language is. Students will develop the basic skills required to describe language analytically and will use these tools to consider how variations in basic linguistic features define a speech community's identity. We will then investigate how language creates social communities and defines social boundaries, how it changes and adapts to a variety of social demands, including the use of conversational strategies and politeness, the development of slang, and the rejection or acceptance of standardization. Finally, we will consider how pragmatic turns and rhetorical structures in language create power relationships. [Prerequisite: Open to incoming First-Year students only.]
FSEM 158 Recognizing Victims and Survivors Crime seems to be everywhere. It is in the news constantly and is a common source of entertainment, with the popularity of true crime books, movies, and podcasts booming due to crime's enduring mystique. Indeed, thinking about crime for many has become fun. But what about the victims? Through the adoption of a victim-centered approach to criminology, this unique seminar will transcend common sensationalisms of crime that routinely negate victims' experiences and obscure their pain. We will examine empirical research findings on victimization patterns and trends, with a specific focus on how one's age, race, gender, class, sexuality, and other statuses intersect with their likelihood of being victimized. We will also weigh efforts geared toward improving crime victims' lives, such as victims' rights movements, legislation, public health responses, and restorative justice programs. By foregrounding victims rather than those who do the victimizing, we will come to recognize that crime introduces profound harm into the lives of victims and survivors. Accordingly, engaging with these topics will be difficult at times, which is precisely the point in a society that all too often equates crime with fun. [Prerequisite: Open to incoming First-Year students only.]
FSEM 159 Pawprints! All Things Dogs Are dogs our oldest BFFs in history? Was it the mutual relationship between dogs and humans that shifted our own evolution? Does the tail of the dog wag our capacity for compassion and humanness? Beyond archeologists and paleogeneticists' efforts to pin down this story of mutual development, some say a story that began roughly twenty-three thousand years ago, dogs have their pawprints all over history, fiction, art, advertising, film, religion, television and digital media and the fields of history, psychology, economics, medicine, anthropology and canine cognition centers at major universities. Their pawprints cross worlds of adventure and discovery, tales of divination and evil as much as in worlds of violence in systems of apartheid and enslavement. Today commercials hound us to further domesticate our relations with dogs, inundating us with products, care, training, fashion, health, food, vet care and pet insurance - a multi-billion-dollar industry. Dogs are considered good (if not the best) therapists for medical and psychological needs; they are laborers in hospitals, classrooms, daycares, and hotels; they accompany people with emotional, neural diverse and physical needs; they are called on to sniff out disease, police airports, and lead rescue missions. At the heart of it all, however, dogs continue to walk beside us, showing us the way at times to take the lead, other times to chill and to play, nuzzle and bark or howl our way in this world. Dogs are in and of our world. Still, the question remains: What do we really know or understand about dogs or our relations with them? How does understanding them help us understand ourselves? This course follows the vast and sprawling pawprints across time and place, gender and race relations, to inquire into what these long standing and manifold connections may tell us about making worlds and humanity. [Prerequisite: Open to incoming First-Year students only.]
FSEM 161 Spontaneous and Ruthless At the polar ends of a spectrum there are essentially two modes for birthing and maintaining a complex social order: ruthlessness and spontaneity. The ruthless seek to carve a new order or sustain a dying one primarily through violence unconstrained by conventional ethics and law. By contrast, the advocate of the spontaneous sees the autopoietic emergence of durable but flexible complexity in the world all around them, for example, in language, natural selection, the ecosystem, the urban built environment, the free market, and even the international order. While ruthlessness requires certainty in both knowledge and the direction of history, the spontaneous is a product of radical uncertainty and knowledge that is understood to be infinitely and minutely dispersed, dynamic, and variable. Of course, this is not to argue that the spontaneous order has no ethics; the adherents of the spontaneous order furnish themselves with an ethos that is guided by their discovery of these hidden rules of nature, social systems, and the market and thus the need to limit willful intervention that disrupts the natural equilibrium. This course will examine both modes of social organization as ideal types and assess the morality of their morality. In essence, we will assess the tradeoffs of acting on the basis of these modes of seeing the world. The course seeks to understand if, when, what kind, and how much violence and coercion is necessary in the creation or preservation of order, as well as the responsibilities of actors towards the innocent and the prospects for the realization of justice in an unjust world. Moreover, the course seeks to complicate the range of possible positionalities beyond the unscrupulous and fanatical activist on the one hand, and the complicit individual on the other hand. The aim is thus to open space to think about the revival of a realistic liberalism in world where moral purity is impossible. [Prerequisite: Open to incoming First-Year students only.]
FSEM 162 Narratives of Disability This course uses personal accounts and other narratives to introduce students to the lives of individuals with disabilities. The course has a geographic orientation beginning with narratives grounded in our local HWS and Finger Lakes communities before moving to other parts of the United States and abroad. Issues to be examined include educational opportunity and inclusion, social participation and challenges, and family perspectives and issues [Prerequisite: Open to incoming First-Year students only.]
FSEM 164 Encountering Difference Encounters happen every day. We encounter people of different civilizations, nations, races, faith, class, sexes, and genders at schools, workplaces, supermarkets, public squares, and other venues. What do we expect when we meet other people? How do we respond when we encounter difference? What constitutes difference? Why do we fear difference? Why do people stereotype? Could the fear of the other necessitate one to control the narrative, the people, or their resources? Or, could encounter with the other become a life-changing experience that affirms oneself and the other simultaneously? What needs to be done for us to have a meaningful encounter with the other? This seminar will particularly explore on two kinds of encountering difference: Christian Spaniards' encounters with Native Americans in early Americas, contemporary encounters between White Americans and American people of color including African-Americans and Arab-Americans, and interfaith encounters between Christians, Jews, and Muslims. [Prerequisite: Open to incoming First-Year students only.]
FSEM 179 Biophysics of Human Motion What do simple physics and biology reveal about human body motion that might be interesting or even useful? Velocity, force, energy, momentum, center of gravity, and balance are all aspects of human motions such as walking down stairs, performing a yoga pose, playing the violin, kicking a soccer ball, dancing, shoveling snow, etc. How do those concepts apply to the muscles, tendons, and bones to enable human movement? The analysis of human motion facilitates a large number of applications including smart-human computer interfaces, special effects in movies, orthopedic surgery, physical therapy, performing arts, and athletic performance. A variety of human movements will be observed and discussed. Various models for human motion will be studied, requiring high school algebra and trigonometry. Class meetings will use a blend of discussions, labs, and lectures to help students understand and apply basic biophysical concepts to a variety of human motions. There's no substitute for feeling in one's own body the way physical principles apply! [Prerequisite: Open to incoming First-Year students only.]
FSEM 180 The Blue Planet Water controls life on planet Earth. Water is a universal solvent, wherever it goes, it takes along valuable chemicals, minerals, and nutrients. Water is the only substance that exists naturally on Earth in all three physical states of matter-gas (water vapor), liquid (water), and solid (ice and snow). The heat capacity of water controls our weather and climate. Water, economics, politics and wealth can be intimately tied together. When water flows, its power can be harvested. Where rains occur on a predictable basis, sustenance through farming can be achieved. Civilizations depend upon accessible drinking water. Does water control civilizations and politics? When water doesn't flow or droughts persist, civilizations can collapse. What is our relationship with water? How does global climate change alter these relationships? Students will characterize our local and global relationship with water and climate using scholarly articles, maps, biographies, movies, music and novels. Through discussions, presentations, debates, guided journals and short essays, we will explore the bounds that water places on humanity. This course is taught as a learning community. [Prerequisite: Open to incoming First-Year students only. Must be taken concurrently with GEO 186.]
FSEM 188 Belief, Skepticism, and Paranormality How do we construct belief and how do we test the beliefs of ourselves and others? There is a body of knowledge about what it means to be skeptical and what kinds of tools we can use to evaluate beliefs. We as humans are also prone to particular errors in constructing belief that we can analyze objectively. We consider the principles and techniques of skepticism and apply them to a range of phenomena and beliefs to evaluate their likelihood. Subjects studied include a range of proposed paranormal and supernatural phenomena, as well as conspiracy theories, cults, witch hunts, beliefs about afterlife and the spirit world, and how to draw the line between science and pseudoscience. [Prerequisite: Open to incoming First-Year students only.]
FSEM 189 The Theory of Everything What is time? Why are there nation-states? What happened in the (roughly) first 195,000 years of human history? Are non-human animals sentient? Will artificial intelligence replace humans? These big questions challenge scholars, forcing them to go outside their disciplines to seek answers at the confluence of several fields. In this course, we'll engage with such big questions along with theories that attempt to synthesize various realms of knowledge to answer them. We'll discuss the deep history of the universe and its main events - the emergence of light (about 300,000 years after the Big Bang), the advent of stars and galaxies, and the birth of molecules and life. We'll also delve into the deep history of humanity: the domestication of humans by dogs (you read that correctly!), the advent of farming, the industrial revolution, and the Great Acceleration (from the 1950s onwards). Furthermore, we'll explore the future of religion, work, and artificial and natural intelligence. Students will learn that the most ambitious theories we have are truly theories of everything, aspiring to explain how the world works. [Prerequisite: Open to incoming First-Year students only.]
FSEM 192 Literary Science Fiction and Fantasy This course traces the development of Science Fiction (and to a lesser extent, fantasy) from the genres' 19th Century origins through contemporary challenges by queer, POC, and slipstream writers. This course will explore the cultural context for the emergence of each genre, consider what genre means, and debate definitions of science fiction and fantasy. As we move through the golden age of SF, we will pause for an extended look at one mass market text that could arguably belong to either genre, Dune. In the latter half of the semester, we will explore how newer works offer radical vantages on old questions about science, progress and the nature of reality. We will consider such questions as what it means that we as a culture seek alternatives to our present reality, how genre relates to the canon, the problem of escapism, and how imagined realities act on the world we live in. Although science fiction and fantasy can be said to be occasions for the work of the semester, students should be prepared that our primary objective is about reading and writing. Students in this class will receive intensive training in textual analysis, critical essays and evidence-based oral argumentation. [Prerequisite: Open to incoming First-Year students only.]
FSEM 196 "Bodies" Politic How do you present yourself in everyday life? Your clothes, manners, haircut, and how you decorate your room are all `texts' through which you reveal (and sometimes hide) yourself from others. Are you a preppy, a punk, a goth, an urban hipster, or a chic hillbilly? In this seminar we will explore `the body'; as a site at which cultural, social, and political commitments are both constructed and challenged. In its traditional use, The Body Politic is a metaphor in which the members of a political community are thought to compose a single corporeal body. In this course, however, we will be less concerned about how individuals may be incorporated into a legitimate and politically authoritative collective; instead we will employ `Bodies' Politic to interrogate how society produces material bodies that are meaningful (and how those meanings often inspire resistance). Specifically, we will draw upon texts from history, anthropology, literature, film, and political theory in order to explore the body as a means of learning and self-expression, as a mechanism for social control, and as an object of political regulation. More specifically, we will examine what vampires, soccer hooligans, Civil War reenactors, cyborgs, and Japanese anime reveal about the changing and contested categories of class, race, gender, and sex through which our bodies are made comprehensible to others. [Prerequisite: Open to incoming First-Year students only.]
FSEM 197 American Medicine: Justice, Access, Identities, and Culture The renowned physician and educator William Osler once observed that "The good physician treats the disease, the great physician treats the patient." In this FSEM we will apply Osler's insight in evaluating the role of cultural understanding in modern western medicine to various case studies. We'll examine The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, juxtaposing advances in modern medicine with issues of race and poverty and access to medical care, considering the question posed by Deborah (Henrietta's daughter), "But I have always thought it was strange if our mother cells done so much for medicine, how come her family can't afford to see no doctors?" In the middle section of the course, we will explore how people of various identities have navigated an often-problematic American medical system, with a particular focus on two infectious diseases - HIV and Covid-19. In the final section of the course, we will study The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, which recounts the cultural collision of American medical doctors and Hmong parents over what was best for their child with disabilities. We will contemplate the question posed by Sukey, "Which is more important, the life or the soul?" [Prerequisite: Open to incoming First-Year students only.]
FSEM 199 Fish On! What happens when you survey the history and future of fishing in literature, science, art, and media? Well, you get a first-year seminar that expands your thinking while you learn the materials skills of freshwater fishing through hands-on activities like fly tying and water restoration and conservation. This experiential course draws energy from learning about fishing through classical sources and contemporary social media. We will fish and learn how fishing roots itself in the social, cultural, and historical fabric of cultures beyond our classroom and around the world. This course does not require prior experience. You need only be willing to learn and bring in an open mind to the fishing traditions we'll explore in the course. Tight lines! [Prerequisite: Open to incoming First-Year students only.]
LEAD 250 Leadership and Peer Mentoring in Theory and Practice This course is exclusive to First-Year Mentors. In this course, students will explore: learning theory, leadership theory, science of motivation, mind-set, and behavior, facilitation methods, public speaking, engagement models, as well as honing the skills of critical thinking, reflection, and analysis. They will have the opportunity to put their theory into practice as they support first-year students through their respective FSEM courses. This course will host a collective group of students to learn, collaborate and share best practices in a classroom setting to be directly applied to the FSEM course they are mentoring.