Fall 2024 Seminar Summaries

Robots in Fact and Fiction

We live in a technological world and technological changes can have social, artistic, economic and political implications. This seminar uses the subject of robotics to explore some of the changes that have happened in the last few years and will attempt to examine some of the changes that are projected to occur by the time the students that taking this seminar have graduated from Southwestern.

Roadside America

This seminar explores ways that car-based mobility is mapped to ideologies about freedom, agency, and belonging in contemporary American culture. These ideologies speak to and from tensions that are central to identity and culture in the United States today—between stability and mobility, freedom and control, self and society, belonging and exclusion, roots and routes. To understand these phenomena more fully, we will study multiple representations of driving, highway landscapes, and “the road” in contemporary American popular culture and connect them to our own personal stories of living in places where cars and car culture are central to everyday life.

Does Chocolate Have a Dark Side?

Nearly everyone loves some kind of chocolate but no one thinks enough about where chocolate comes from or how it gets to the stores’ shelves. Chocolate’s versatility reaches back centuries, yet emerges routinely in our social lives, our environmental concerns, our health applications and our aesthetic experiences. Using chocolate as a context to make connections between the sciences, social sciences, humanities and the fine arts, this seminar challenges assumptions of students about what “chocolate” really means. Students will critically evaluate sources of chocolate and discuss texts that shed light on past applications and controversies surrounding this delightful resource.

From Poetry Into Song

What do Hank Williams, Katy Perry, and Wolfgang Mozart have in common? Have you read or written a poem that you thought would make great song lyrics? Throughout history, song writers have written poetry that explores the human condition. Many of these poems have been used by composers and singer-songwriters as lyrics for their songs. Some songs are written specifically for more formal concert settings, while others may be passed down through oral tradition, and there are still others that fall into a contemporary popular style. We will explore the connections between poetry and music in a variety of styles, from an historical context to the contemporary, popular style, and through a wide range of composers from folk to country, pop/contemporary, and hip hop and rap to traditional and classical songs.

Banned Books

According to Penn America’s “Index of School Book Bans,” over 1600 books were individually banned from schools and libraries between 2021-2022 alone! While we can’t capture the whole spectrum of these ongoing book controversies, we will read a selection of books that have been “banned” recently for a variety of reasons, in the greater context of important, groundbreaking books that have been variously “banned” over a much longer span of time. Using a trio of perennially controversial novels by Aldous Huxley, Toni Morrison and Margaret Atwood as a baseline, the seminar expands to consider new YA classics like All Boys Aren’t Blue (Johnson) to The Hate U Give (Thomas), contemporary Latinx poetry like “The Poet X” (Acevedo), and graphic fiction like Maus I (Spiegelman) and Fun Home (Bechdel).

Art, Revolution, & Today

This seminar will help students to understand that artists – whether they be musicians, filmmakers, painters, poets, or some combination of these – are members of society and as such use their art(s) to reflect on social and political issues and converse with others about them. We will also think critically about how art is like and unlike “entertainment.” We will consider these issues from an intercultural perspective, examining protest songs of Latin America as well as the U.S., suffrage music, literature of the Great Migration, and more — and exploring how “art” and “revolution” are not just abstract historical phenomena, but real and integral parts of our own world today.

Taking a Walk in a Painting: Velzaquez’s Las Meninas

“A princess, a nun, a dwarf, a dog, and an artist walk into a room.” It could be the beginning of a joke, but these are only some of the strange characters in Diego Velázquez’s famous painting, Las Meninas (1656), considered by many the world’s greatest artwork. There is eternally something enigmatic about the painting: What mysterious codes are concealed in the painting’s complicated composition and mathematics? What desires are you possibly harboring, that a semester-long journey will reveal?

Healing Women

This seminar is a feminist exploration of modes of healing employed by women (and others) in different religious and cultural traditions. We will focus on how specific traditions conceptualize gender and gender roles, as well as health and illness. Some of the questions we will investigate are: Who has power and authority to heal? What methods are used to heal trauma? How is individual healing connected to community transformation? What role does storytelling play in healing? What are the connections between healing and activism?

Legends, Myths, and Folktales in East Asia

Everything has a story. Peoples, states, societies, cultures, traditions, identities, religions, and ideologies are all built on stories, and as these stories traverse the passage of time, they become legends, myths, and folktales. This seminar introduces the world of East Asia through the stories of old. Analyzing various sources such as oral traditions, foundational myths, heroic literature, religious epic tales, historical records, and more, students explore core principles and beliefs which form the basis of East Asian societies. By also examining modern representations of these stories which pervade daily life such as pop music, video games, webtoons, mangas, dramas, and movies, we uncover how these tales contributed to the shaping of East Asia and the world today.

A Barrel of Crude: Oil in the Modern World

This seminar uses a single commodity, petroleum, as a lens through which to study the modern world from multiple viewpoints. It traces the industry from a technologically simple, small-scale affair to a quintessentially global enterprise. Grappling with history and mythology, science and engineering, business and politics, it charts the evolution of oil from an incendiary source of heat and light to the quintessential fuel and foundation of modern life–and asks us to grapple with what that means for the present and future.

Understanding Race and Racism

This seminar introduces students to college-level critical thinking, reading, and writing through looking at what “race” is from several perspectives: the historical development of the idea of race, scientific racism and the current science of human biological diversity, the contemporary forms of institutional racism and racism as a lived experience both in the U.S. and around the world, and the movements for Black life and racial justice that have resurged recently. The seminar encourages students to bring a critical academic lens to both the world around them (e.g., current events/news) and to their own everyday lives.

Schools at Play

Play is a common activity in many species of animals and all human cultures. From the rat whisperer to Russian psychologists, we will learn about animal and human play research and the role of play in learning, development, and education. The seminar will explore philosophies and theories of schools with play-based programs, studying approaches to education such as Montessori, Waldorf, forest, democratic, and expeditionary schools as well as unschooling. Students in the seminar will collaboratively plan and present a play/performance/theater-based science activity to children in a local elementary school.

The Secret Lives of Metaphor

This seminar examines metaphor through a variety of lenses and texts. Although metaphors are typically thought of as decorative bits in poetry or artful prose, scholars from many disciplines argue that metaphors are fundamental to how we understand the world around us. Metaphor—roughly equating or blending two different terms or ideas (e.g., my love is a rose)—enables us to make connections among things, construct categories or groups, contextualize events, and frame courses of action. We will look at and test arguments about metaphor taken from a range of disciplines by applying them to everything from poetry to medical diagnoses.

Running For Your Life!

Modern humans evolved as endurance runners yet physical inactivity accounts for 1 in 10 deaths globally, a rate comparable to that of heart disease. This is due to a mismatch between our prehistoric bodies designed for activity and a modern world that values leisure. Therefore, it is somewhat paradoxical that while modern humans were designed to run, the number of physically inactive people continues to increase. This seminar will explore this paradox from two perspectives; 1) humans need physical activity to survive; 2) becoming physically active requires engagement with activities that are perceived to be difficult.

Fixing Broken Minds

The prevalence of mental illness increases with each generation. Its negative effects range from staggering economic costs to unparalleled emotional suffering and lost lives. Mental health professionals across a wide variety of disciplines devote their careers to battling mental illness through understanding and treatment. In this seminar we will explore this battle through open-minded inquiry via readings, discussion, and debate. We will contemplate the meaning of mental illness and grapple with the weight of a profession that holds lives in its hands.

R-E-S-P-E-C-T Find Out What it Means

You’re expected to show it, encouraged to have it for yourself, and lacking it can get you in trouble - respect. But what exactly IS respect? Does it mean the same thing in an age of Online Trolls, Emoji Etiquette, and Celeb apologies as it did when Aretha sang about it in the 60’s? What does respect (or props? consideration? discipline?) look like under the light of History, Art, Philosophy? What’s its social function - acknowledging an individual’s humanity or reinforcing a social hierarchy? Our interdisciplinary exploration of respect will inform the project of finding out what it means to YOU.

As Seen on Netflix: Streaming Global Culture

Have you ever binged a Netflix show instead of doing homework? Now you don’t have to feel guilty - it’s a requirement for class! In this seminar, we explore how the streaming service Netflix has changed the way we consume and interpret media. We will focus on the international impact of Netflix across continents, and we will look at how Netflix uses a glocal (global-local) business model to create content that bridges cultures. You will have the opportunity to make connections between the U.S. and other countries, and you will begin to understand how culture is represented in different series on Netflix.

Roots & Branches: Family History

Who are you? How much of you comes from your family’s past and genetic code? How much do you really want to know? This seminar is an introduction to personal discovery through family history, which includes the art of listening to and gathering stories as well as tracking down records and data. Together we’ll encounter and discuss exciting discoveries and frustrating dead ends and setbacks, and intriguing connections. We will learn about unsuspected dangers, but most likely, you will deepen and expand your connection to a larger family than you have known.

If Boards Could Talk: Hidden Lessons in Board Games

Board games often provide a “time capsule” of some aspect of society in the time they were produced. The Landlord’s Game, the game that Monopoly is based on, was originally meant to show how there should be little reward in monopolies and we should distribute property more equally. The original map in Risk shows what regions were important to world powers. In this seminar, we’ll dive into some classic board games, like Risk and Monopoly, and some more contemporary ones, like Photosynthesis and Pan Am, and examine the history and lessons they contain.

The Social Networks: The Role of Connected Networks in Society

Think about all the ways you are connected to others. Networks can provide formal and informal structures for collaboration and exchange of ideas. Collaborative networks in the sciences and arts have led to new innovations. Networks in sports have led to player trades and the diffusion of sports to new geographies (e.g., the Tampa Bay Buccaneers playing in London). Conversely, networks can pose barriers for those disconnected from them. In this seminar, we will explore the networks in which we are embedded and examine characteristics of networks in a variety of domains. Get excited to make connections across different topics!

Autobiography in the Age of the Selfie

This is a hyper, self-focused age of constant physical reflection. Estimates are this generation will take 25,000 selfies in a lifetime. This is a new aspect of self-examination created by technology but the exploration of self in the arts, science, and literature has always been part of being human. As long as there have been people, endless attention has been paid to tracing our existence, creating representations and exploring ways to tell our narrative. This seminar will examine how and why people represent themselves, and how technology offers new ways of documenting and rendering depictions of the self.

From Cancer to Forensics: How is DNA Changing our World?

DNA is the blueprint of life. From solving crimes, determining ancestry, and predicting inherited diseases, DNA has a profound impact on our lives and the world around us. This seminar will equip students with a comprehensive and critical perspective on the role of DNA in shaping the future of medicine and society and to also identify health and medical misinformation. Students will engage in discussions and case studies to deepen their understanding of how DNA is transforming our world and the ethical considerations that accompany these advancements. Topics include human diseases such as cancer, personalized medicine, and personal identity.

Confucius Says: Ancient Paths to Happiness & Well-Being
Many self-help books published today promote transformation by searching for an authentic or true version of one’s self. Teachings by Confucius and other thinkers more than two thousand years ago advocated for a different approach: assuming the world is unpredictable, embracing possibilities instead of labels, yielding instead of grasping for power, and improving oneself through small daily habits. This seminar will present an overview of these powerful ideas by introducing students to the writings of early Chinese thinkers such as Confucius, Mencius, Zhuangzi, Laozi, and more in translation.