INTERCULTURAL COMMUNICATION AND CONFLICT RESOLUTION / CAS 407/507 / KATIE DWYER
This course will explore concepts in intercultural understanding as well as build skills in conflict resolution, cross-cultural work, coalition building, and individual self-reflection. We will examine both the broad frameworks for discussing cultural differences as well as thinking through the ways identity and context influence our experience of the world and our encounters with one another. Conflict resolution theories and skills will be a focus. We will also discuss intercultural encounters in a variety of specific contexts, including education, the workplace, and in humanitarian efforts. We will ground these concepts in our own experiences, and include real-world applications in our own lives.
RACE AND ETHNICITY AND THE LAW / ES 452/552 / MICHAEL HAMES-GARCIA
This independent reading course will focus on race and urban policing. We will consider developments around community policing and civilian review in cities like New York and Los Angeles and the history of policing in Baltimore and Chicago. We will also look at the role of policing internationally, at the U.S. border, and in colonial spaces like Puerto Rico and Hawai’i. Of particular interest will be the relationships between policing agencies and communities of color. This course has a reading and conference format, relying exclusively on written exchanges between students and the professor. It satisfies an upper-division ES elective requirement for Ethnic Studies majors and minors and also counts toward the General Social Science major with a focus in Crime, Law, and Society.
ANTHROPOLOGY: CULTURE AND PSYCHOLOGY / ANTH 410 / DIANE BAXTER
Culture and Psychology (Psychological Anthropology) is the sub-field of cultural anthropology that focuses on the relationships between cultural and psychological fields. It poses a variety of questions, such as: how does culture impact individual psychology? What is the “self” and how is identity formed? Is there such a thing as “human nature,” and, if so, what were/are the forces that have created it? How does emotion arise? What is the relationship between culture and mental health and illness?In this course, we will begin by examining basic principles and core controversies in psychological anthropology. We will then explore three major areas in psychological anthropology: self/selves/identity; emotion; and mental illness. Our readings include two excellent books: Disciplined Hearts which focuses on identity, colonial history, and loneliness among the Flathead Indians, and Saints, Scholars, and Schizophrenics, a study of family, development, and mental illness in rural Ireland.
TOLSTOY’S SHORT AND LATER FICTION / CAS 407/507 / STEVEN SHANKMAN
Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910) is one of the greatest and most influential masters of the novel. The Russian literary classics of the nineteenth century, including the fiction of Tolstoy, made a profound impression on Emmanuel Levinas (1906-1995), perhaps the greatest modern philosopher on the nature of ethical obligation and its relation to what it means to be human. We will carefully read Tolstoy’s shorter fiction as well as his final novel, Hadji Murád, paying special attention to what Tolstoy’s fiction has to say about ethics understood in Levinas’s sense: my inescapable responsibility for a unique and irreplaceable other. We will read Ethics and Infinity, a reasonably accessible and brief series of interviews with Levinas, and we will look for connections between Tolstoy’s fiction and Levinas’s thought.