Core: Colloquium (CCOL-UH)

Conceptions of death and the afterlife not only structure traditional religious beliefs and practices, but they also subtly inform politics, scientific research, and societies more widely. How societies mete out punishment, engage in war, treat animals, distribute funds for scientific research or medical treatment, give legal expression to various moral mandates, etc. all are rooted in their attitudes and beliefs about death and the afterlife. This colloquium takes up a range of literary, political, and philosophical works from different cultures and periods that have framed in memorable, though often contradictory, ways some basic questions about death and immortality. How long should people live? How would immortality impact the planet's resources? And how might these questions inflect our views about recent technological efforts to extend life and ultimately to achieve immortality virtual or otherwise? Students will confront such questions from a variety of moral, scientific, and cultural perspectives and explore the role that death plays in their own lives and in those of other peoples and societies.

Are people born indigenous or do they become indigenous? If the latter, what is the process of becoming, and what opportunities or tensions does it bring? This course explores trajectories of indigeneity, which may be both more and less than the quality of being "native," paying attention to relationships between indigenous peoples and their respective states, and to how legacies of conflict and accommodation raise difficult questions about economic, cultural, and political justice. Readings are drawn from a wide range of fields, including anthropology, history, environmental studies, public policy, and art history, and also include memoirs and personal testimony. Case studies are drawn from many world regions, including the Nahua, Australian Aborigines, Cree, Tuareg, Algonquin, Nasu, Alutiiq, among others.

We live simultaneously in an age of science and an era of great religious faith, when reason and revelation are often depicted as being in inherent and eternal tension. This course traces the history of the relationship of religion and science in Christendom and Islamdom from the Middle Ages to the present day. The course addresses the global challenges of understanding humanity (by paying close attention to how humans in two religious traditions have defined and narrated the relationship between rational and revealed thought) and seeking peace (by attending to how a nineteenth-century narrative of a timeless conflict between science and religion has distorted our understanding of the past and continues to undermine contemporary debates on their compatibility).

What is "global heritage"? Is it simply our collective legacy as human societies - how we want to be remembered by future generations - or must we confront more difficult questions about identity, the ownership of culture, and conflicts between local and global stewardship of the cultural treasures and historical evidence? With time, negligence, and even military conflict working to erase the past, we must ask: Can a better understanding of our shared heritage assist us in addressing cultural differences in the present day? And how can science both help us understand the historic record and work to preserve it? This class examines ways in which scientific methods can help define "global heritage" and protect it for future generations. Students explore the history and the science behind the creation of paintings, frescoes, parchments, sculptures, ancient mummies, historical buildings, musical instruments, and other artifacts. They will also examine the methods used to differentiate between an authentic object and a fake and ask how some objects come to be valued more than others: distinctions that can lead, and have led, to cultural conflict in recent years.

This course introduces students to a wide variety of cultural perspectives on the ways that nature is conceived in its relation to human agency, social organization, and political behavior. As we become increasingly caught up in a new and ever-changing dynamic of climate change that is transforming cultures and societies globally, understanding our relation to nature becomes a pressing global challenge. How are we to confront the environmental changes caused by industrialization and continuing technological change? How have our views of nature and of ourselves been transformed by urbanization and technological change? Does the global character of production inevitably lead to the dilution of individual and local identities together with previous conceptions of nature? Constructed around a series of discrete problems that will be contextualized historically and culturally, the course strives for a unifying, global perspective on the environmental crisis and will address a range of today's most pressing eco-critical dilemmas.

One of the biggest challenges in medicine is to prevent disease and ensure personalized treatment. This is now becoming possible thanks to high-resolution DNA sequencing technology that can decipher our individual information. These developments are already impacting global health, but they raise global challenges such as equality. How will these new technologies blend into healthcare systems? What regulations are needed to ensure that personalized medicine reaches all layers of society? How do we prevent discrimination based on our genes? Through an inquiry-based approach we will examine the science, economics, and politics behind medicine and evaluate the ethical issues that arise in this fast-developing field.

Until very recently much of the world has lived under colonial rule. Major colonial powers shaped social, religious, and institutional life in countries that they controlled. This course explores the legacies of colonial rule. In it, students encounter the markedly different perspectives of the colonizers and the colonized and ask whether these can be reconciled both historically and in the context of more contemporary postcolonial discourse. Asking how colonial practices have shaped the causes of global inequality and have influenced the dynamics of recent conflicts, the class also engages with the notion of justice in postcolonial contexts and asks whether former colonizers might have contemporary obligations toward their former subjects. This is a multidisciplinary course drawing on sources from the social sciences, history, and literature.

How can we best address global challenges such as promoting peace and environmental sustainability? Hardly a week goes by without a major news story concerning the need for cooperation either between countries, political parties, organizations, or individuals. This course explores the topic of cooperation using insights from economics, evolutionary biology, mathematics, social psychology, and anthropology. The main questions to be addressed are: When is cooperation desirable? When should an individual, an organization, or a country expect others to cooperate? Why do some people fail to cooperate even when it would be to their benefit? Which factors undermine cooperation? How can we engineer cooperation to achieve better outcomes?

Why is the present-day extinction crisis an existential threat to the future of humankind? We are living in the age of the Anthropocene, when the human impact on global biodiversity has led to a dramatic increase in the rate of extinction of animals and plants - the so-called "sixth extinction". This course looks at the causes and consequences of extinctions in the modern era, as well as in the past. It takes a multidisciplinary and global perspective, drawing on evidence from earth science, paleontology, archaeology, climate science, genomics, ecology, and conservation biology. It examines what we have learned from the study of major mass extinctions and their proposed causes, including extra-terrestrial impacts, volcanism, and climate change. The course also looks at the factors associated with extinctions in the human fossil record and what role humans have played in past extinctions. It reviews contemporary extinctions across the globe and the steps being taken to conserve biodiversity. The final part of the course explores the possibilities of de-extinction, rewilding, and planned extinction, and the ethical issues that these raise.

Water is the life blood of existence. Across time and place it has sustained society, nourished crops, made war, diffused networks of trade and cultural exchange, delimited political jurisdictions, and powered machines. Whether tranquil, in motion, or in modes of manipulation, water has also inspired many worlds of artistic practice. This course uses examples from the visual and performing arts to highlight the subject of water as element, energy, human right, bridge between cultures, and instrument of war. Films include Drowned Out by Arundhati Roy, Even the Rain by Icíar Bollaín, Water by Deepa Mehta, and Black Water. Performing arts include plays such as Fire on the Water, a fast-paced series of short plays inspired by a pivotal moment in Cleveland's history created by diverse playwrights; Water by the Spoonful by Quiara Alegría Hudes; and The Water Carriers by Michael Williams. These works highlight representations of water, the technologies deployed to shape such representations, and their larger role in illuminating big questions about the human condition.

The desert has been imagined as a barrier, a dry ocean, a bridge, and a hyphen between various ecological and cultural spaces across the globe. Drifting, parched tides of sand and vast, empty landscapes have made it seem uninhabitable and a metaphor for exile, difficult journeys, spiritual reflection, and death. This course explores the ways in which the desert has been depicted and experienced in various historical, cultural, and geographic contexts - from the Sahara to the Mojave, from the origins of Abrahamic religions to Burning Man, from desert oasis to urban food desert. This course will also consider the future of deserts and global challenges posed by climate change, desertification, and resources (water, oil, solar). Students will encounter the desert through diverse sources that include film, literature, soundscapes, musical performances, environmental and social history, artistic production, fieldtrips, and travel writings. So, even while the desert is an environmental reality that makes inhabitation difficult, it is still a space of demographic, cultural, and economic activity and exchange.

How did life form on Earth? How likely is it that life formed elsewhere in the universe? If it did, how can we find these beings? Was the formation of life in the universe a bygone conclusion? Answering these questions requires understanding the basics of biology, chemistry, and physics and has strong bearing on our understanding of the human condition and the sustainability of life on our planet. During this semester, students will discuss current models for how the necessary ingredients for life formed in the universe, the observational and experimental evidence for these theories, attempts by scientists and science fiction writers to imagine life in other parts of the universe, and the many questions which remain.

When looking at paintings of Rubens, pictures of fashion models, prehistoric Venus figurines or Greek sculptures, it is obvious that the appreciation for the human body has changed drastically through space and time. These differences of perception can generate inter-individual and cultural tensions and affect public policy, for example in the context of health care policy and equal opportunity in the work place. This course will examine how our understanding of human physiology, genetics, and development, as well as methods of investigations of human anatomy, have shaped the perception of the human body, through history, and across cultures. Students will examine the function of the body and how the understanding of bodily functions has changed (the working body). The course will also delve into the modifications the human body has experienced evolutionarily and how our own body is changing from a single cell until death (the changing body). Finally, it will examine deviations from the typical body plan and the causes for these deviations (the abnormal body). These topics will be explored using scientific and non-scientific literature, art, and movies.

There are more migrants worldwide today than Brazil has inhabitants. China, India, and the Philippines are sending most migrants; the most important host areas are Europe and the United States; and expats make up more than 60% of the total population in Qatar and the UAE. How has migration been represented in and shaped by literature and art? This course reviews exemplary texts, striking images, and important films. It focuses on the United States from around 1880 to World War II and on Europe in the second half of the twentieth century, then opens up toward students' examination of cultural work by and about contemporary migrants from around the world. Readings include autobiography, reportage, documentary photography and film as well as fiction and creative visual work. Among the topics for discussion are metaphors and theories of migration (from uprooting and bird-of-passage to expatriate and melting-pot); labor arrangements; scenes of departure, voyage, and arrival; vibrant migrant communities and migrant alienation and pain; negotiation between places of origin and of arrival.

What is war? Why do wars exist? What are the differences between wars in the past and those being waged today and how have the conditions of conflict changed throughout history? Is there an art of war? These questions are central to the purview of this course, which examines artistic responses to war across a wide range of historical and cultural contexts from antiquity to the present. The course explores how the arts, particularly music and musical practices, play a critical role in accompanying the sociological rituals of war from the military marches part of deployment, to the laments and requiems that figure centrally in processes of mourning in the aftermath of conflict. Drawing on histories and philosophies of war, students will engage with issues related to propaganda, censorship, detention, internment, torture, heroism, sacrifice, bravery, justice, history, memory, and death and with reference to work by Homer, Thucydides, Sun Tzu, Clausewitz, Tolstoy, Shostakovitch, Britten, Picasso, Dix, Mishima, Wiesel, Tarkovsky, Kubrick, and John Lennon, among others.

The notion of "following nature" as a guide to human conduct is ages-old. So is the opposing contention that humanity should rise (but how?) above what nature has given us in order to grasp some higher destiny (but what?). What lies behind these opposing conceptions of the relationship between humanity and our natural environment? If we are shown to be nothing but animals of a particular sort, then what does that spell for our self-image, societal ideals, and ultimate end? And does our place in the natural order confer upon us some special duties with regard to the rest of nature? Finally, what notion of "natural" is operative behind these discussions, anyway? Is the notion of "human nature" even coherent, or particularly helpful? Students will examine psychology, society, morality, and religion, and approach these topics from the point of view of philosophy, literature, and science. Classical texts and cutting-edge research will deepen an understanding of the problem faced by us all - that of what it means to act naturally, and whether we should.

No organism on Earth lives in isolation! This simple fact underscores the importance of interactions between species. But how do organisms interact? What languages do they use? This course explores how interspecies crosstalk sustains life on Earth and how challenges such as global warming influence such communication. Topics to discuss include the role of chemical communication between bacteria in causing infectious diseases and whether the overuse of antibiotics is sustainable; how communication between ocean algae coupled with global warming lead to recurrent "red tides"; the breakdown of coral-algae symbiosis and implications for coastal fisheries; disruption of the language bees use to maintain colonies and the rise of colony collapse disorder that threatens pollination globally; the potential use of plant language to combat bug infestation in lieu of pesticides; how our gut microbiota influence physical appearance and susceptibility to disease and whether our innate bacteria affect our social interactions; how human communication has influenced civilization and whether modern technological advances, such as social media, have positive or negative effects on us as a species.

What is gender? What does it mean to be male or female across time and space? How can thinking about gender inform the analysis of texts, societies, and politics? This class will explore these questions by drawing on a wide range of sources from religion, science, Islamic and Jewish law, psychoanalysis, philosophy, art, history, and literature including Marquis de Sade, Freud, Virginia Woolf, Anton Chekhov, and the feminist revolutionary Alexandra Kollontai. Using these and other sources, we will investigate how gender is constructed in relation to race, class, morality, social justice, and other norms of "appropriate" social behavior in different contexts. The class will conclude by drawing on examples from contemporary advertising and media to discuss the relationships between gender and power, violence, the economy, and humor.

Inequality is a fundamental issue with which every human society, past and present, has had to deal. This course explores why inequality occurs and why it matters, questions which have taken on critical importance in this time of deepening global inequalities. The course will approach these questions by considering inequality in comparative and historical perspective so that students will gain a deeper perspective on today's debates. While the course will focus on the wide-ranging consequences of inequality, particular emphasis will be placed on the relationship between inequality and government. How does governmental action influence inequality, and why? Does the presence of inequality influence what type of government is possible? To answer these questions the course will draw on sources from a range of academic disciplines including political science, history, economics, philosophy, and literature. However, no prior expertise in any of these areas will be required. By the end of the course students will be in a better position to formulate their own normative opinions about inequality while also understanding how it functions in practice.

"Prejudice is a burden that confuses the past, threatens the future and renders the present inaccessible" - Maya Angelou. Every society in the world struggles with intergroup prejudice to some degree. This colloquium explores the antecedents and consequences of (and potential remedies for) intergroup prejudice through the lens of multiple disciplines, including history, social science, literature, and the arts. It considers the perspectives of the perpetrators, targets, and observers of prejudice and discrimination and explores the following topics: the origins of prejudice, the different forms of prejudicial expression and their justifications, the conditions under which prejudice is exacerbated (or reduced), and the differential ways explicit and implicit prejudice manifests in individuals and institutions. We also discuss the burden of living in prejudicial societies, the social and psychological obstacles involved in acknowledging and confronting prejudice, and the costs associated with overcoming these obstacles.

This course considers disability as a cultural concept - not simply a medical condition or personal misfortune - that describes how human variation matters in the world. How has disability been understood over time and across cultures? How have disabled bodies been represented and classified? How does disability intersect with other identity formations such as race, class, and gender? Ultimately, we will ask: what new forms of representation might bodily difference produce, and what might the concept of disability teach us about all bodies? Alongside texts that may describe disability as defective or tragic, we will trace other literary possibilities for bodies and minds that resist normative structures, from narratives that theorize ideas of access, cure, and care to fictions that reclaim disability as enlivening identity.

Most democracies in the world are multi-ethnic. But the jury is still out on the question of what ethnic diversity means for democratic stability and governance. This course combines materials from across many disciplines, including political science, political philosophy, economics, mathematics, anthropology, history, and the humanities to address questions including the following: Does ethnic diversity - based on race, color, nationality, language, tribe, caste, religion, sect and region - constitute an obstacle or an asset for successful democracy? What are the goals of individuals who mobilize politically on the basis of one or more of these identities? What are the principles that democratic systems should employ in responding to identity-based claims? And how should we evaluate public policies designed to respond to such claims, including affirmative action, federalism, cultural rights, educational policies, and electoral systems? The aim is to train students to think critically and comparatively about the global and local challenges faced by multi-ethnic democracies, using a combination of primary and secondary materials and real-world examples drawn from several countries.

What is evil? We use the term to describe human behavior, political regimes, natural disasters, and epidemic disorder. The idea of evil is as old as humanity, and various religious, legal, political, and social arrangements aim to circumvent it. But definitions vary over time and across cultures, suggesting that evil may be contextual rather than universal. If so, can we say that evil is a constitutive part of the human condition? This colloquium offers a multi-disciplinary investigation into evil's dimensions and its implications for peace, justice, and human understanding. It begins with the theological conundrum all major religions face: how to reconcile the evils of human suffering with the existence of a loving god. Additional topics include the concept of evil as a rationale for colonial and imperial projects; the Nazi use of gas chambers during WWII; and the Aversion Project in South Africa. Students will examine attempts to prevent evil, venturing into the realm of clinical psychology with the psychopathic serial killer and exploring Marx's indictment of capitalism's evils by considering alternatives to corporations' pursuit of profit at the expense of ordinary people.

Do women lead differently than men? What are the implications of women's and men's unequal distribution in leadership across many social domains? This course examines past and present challenges and opportunities related to women and leadership, empowerment, equality, and gender equity from a global perspective. In doing so it seeks to examine critically the historical contexts and conditions within which issues of women and leadership have been embedded. What are the effects of inequality, injustice, and discrimination on women's underrepresentation in leadership across the world? The course will take a variety of disciplinary approaches to the topic, drawing on autobiographies, biographies, novels, films, and TV series, alongside academic literature.

States form the building blocks of our global order, significantly impacting how people from diverse countries, cultures, and regional backgrounds interact with each other. Yet what does the concept of statehood entail and what is its role in a globalized world? The course examines the historical, legal, political, and cultural foundations of the concepts of state and statehood, along with related ideas, such as sovereignty, citizenship, and statelessness. A diverse range of literary, cultural, legal, and government sources will help create the course's conceptual framework as well as case studies of past and present challenges to state-building efforts. Examples will include state-building in the Global South, various forms of regional cooperation (e.g. the GCC, ASEAN, etc.), and the creation of supranational institutions such as the European Union. In addition, the course will examine questions of statehood/statelessness during times of war and conflict, and in relation to topics such as migration and refugees, social movements, gender, race and ethnicity, and civil and human rights.

This colloquium examines the increasingly urgent global challenge posed by radical forms of nationalism. Beginning with the nation-state's origin and logic and extending to contemporary notions of citizenship across the globe, students will draw on disciplines such as history, politics, economics, anthropology, and cultural studies to ask: What makes an individual a citizen? Are nations and states synonymous? Do nations require cultural unity? Focusing on how colonialism and neo-colonialism have shaped the emergence of modern nations, the seminar trains special attention on the Arab world. How did early Arab writers represent other nations before the nation-state? How do Western views of nation-state interact with local understandings of tribe, umma (Muslim people), or community? Historical and theoretical frames range from the Prophet Muhammad's vision for the Islamic umma to Plato's polis, from Benedict Anderson's account of imagined community to Arab socialist adaptations of Marx and Lenin, from oil's impact on notions of citizenship and Arabness in Gulf states to the global refugee crisis that threatens international stability and human rights today.

Can aesthetic forms promote and not just respond to revolutionary social and political change? This Core Colloquium confronts global challenges of peace, justice, and equality by examining the role of music and other art forms in advancing social movements, using the recent history of the Middle East and North Africa as a principal case study. Placing these events in a longer historical context, course materials will explore what role the arts have played in social movements, including 20th-century revolutions in Egypt, the Iranian Revolution of 1979, the Palestinian Intifadas, and the Arab Uprisings. Students will ask how artistic practices not only reflect social changes in these case studies, but also promote them. Drawing on theoretical readings on aesthetics, social movements, and revolution from disciplines including anthropology, musicology, and Middle East Studies, students will develop a critical understanding for the role of art in social change, an analytical grasp of theories of social mobilization, and deeper knowledge of recent historical moments in the Middle East and North Africa region.

How can creativity flourish under crisis? While wars, natural disasters, and disease outbreaks have devastated global communities over the centuries, they have often led to significant advances in the arts and sciences. Why do crisis, calamity, or suffering lead to creativity and innovation? How can we better understand this paradoxical yet intimate relationship between crisis and creative expression? This course considers how the arts have helped us grapple with crisis, conflict, and catastrophe - whether natural or human-made - and shape our responses to them. While tracing different catastrophic events across space and time, from early creation myths to Covid-19, students will ask how artists have responded to crises and what aesthetic strategies they use. Students will also analyze the role the arts play in the scientific, government, and economic debates surrounding natural and human-made disasters and what such forms of creative expression can tell us about ourselves as humans. Students will read primary historical texts and engage with artistic responses to crisis in literature, painting, cinema, music, and theater, supplemented by psychological and scientific texts.

Oil is obviously a matter of huge importance in Abu Dhabi and globally. But what is oil? Is it a mineral formed by long-decayed microorganisms or volcanic activity? Is it a source of power (the fuel derived by cracking it into gasoline) or a source of geopolitical power? Does oil bring wealth - or, as some researchers argue, a "resource curse"? What is oil for Arab states? For the planet? And what happens if or when it runs out? This Core Colloquium addresses these and many related issues from multidisciplinary and global perspectives, drawing on materials and concepts from geology, history, political economy, film, and literature.

What is fair and what is unfair? Is fairness universal? Are equality and fairness synonyms? How can we build a fairer world? Anyone can recall a situation when someone exclaimed, "That's not fair!" Whether arguing with your roommate about the upkeep of common areas, viewing the daily news, or analyzing fiscal policies, people often disagree on what constitutes a fair process or outcome. The plurality of fairness ideals may lead to a breakdown in negotiations, social conflict, or other undesirable outcomes. Social stability is at risk when systems are perceived as unfair. Potential business partners may fail to collaborate if they cannot agree on a compensation system that properly rewards efforts and employees may withhold labor or even sabotage production if they feel treated unfairly. On the upside, a shared sense of fairness may lead to mutually beneficial interactions, social cohesion, and smooth political decision-making processes. This Colloquium draws from disciplines including philosophy, psychology, political science, economics, and organizational behavior to question our own notions and judgments and arrive at a holistic understanding of fairness as a concept.

This colloquium takes as its touchstone the idea that movement, actual and imaginative, has historically generated knowledge and sharpened our ethical sensibilities. Drawing on literature, film, and theory across disciplines, historical periods, and geographic fields, it explores how journeys - and associated experiences such as pilgrimage, nomadism, adventure, slavery, imperialism, migration, exile, commerce, tourism, and climate change - provide narrative frames for human inquiry. What is the difference between travels and journeys? What difference does it make, then, when journeys are chosen vs. forced? How might depictions of journeys enact representational and even physical power and inequality over those they survey? How do journeys transform individual and group senses of self, others, home, and the world? How do encounters with unknown places and others prompt questions about comparison, difference, commensurability, and co-existence? What roles might translation and adaptation play in this process? Such questions suggest that journeys provide much more than the discovery of destinations and may, in fact, facilitate self-discovery in unexpected ways.

Self-tracking. Biohacking. Personal informatics. Quantified self. The contemporary "quantified self" movement makes claims of "self-knowledge through numbers" and improving health and human welfare. There are clearly other elements to self-tracking culture that deserve critical investigation. What does the self become through the lens of data? What is the dark side of data that can be used against us, and without regard for social justice and equality? This multidisciplinary course takes both a theoretical and a practical look at the pressing issue of data aggregation about human beings. It looks to the past for historical forms of self-quantification and to the future of a rapidly expanding globalized landscape of app tracking and wearable technologies. With the question of human data in mind, the course examines the unsure futures of humanity in a variety of domains: medicine and aging, education, the arts, marketing, and the Internet of Things. Students will situate themselves critically within this increasingly dense data landscape by creating data about themselves that can be analyzed and interpreted using a variety of data visualization and storytelling frameworks.

Inspired by the French Enlightenment, "secularism" has come to represent non-religious approaches to morality and socio-political life. This course draws on multiple disciplines - including history, philosophy, fine arts, and political science - to explore secularism's multiple meanings and manifestations. Does secularism have core values and, if so, how do those differ from religious values? What are secularism's origins, and is it fundamentally Western? How do philosophical approaches commonly associated with secularism (e.g., humanism, agnosticism, and atheism) differ, and how have such paradigms influenced knowledge-production and human rights norms? In addition to exploring these far-reaching questions, students will compare the specificities of secular mobilization and governance worldwide: How does secular governance in China and Russia differ from models in the United States, France, India, and Turkey? Is there a positive correlation between secularization and economic development, increased religious diversity, or broader access to education? What interrelationships exist between secularization and democratization? Is any contemporary society truly secular?

Water is fundamental to life and to fundamental human rights such as adequate food and livelihood. Water's availability and quality have shaped civilizations; its place in our contemporary lives bears on global societal issues such as health, food security, gender equality, and economic policy. Despite making up most of the Earth's surface, water remains a precious resource to which billions of people have little or no access. This colloquium takes a multidisciplinary approach to the connections between water and society, including scientific, social, and economic perspectives. How does the availability of safe drinking water relate to health and sanitation? How are water, food, and energy linked? In what ways do human actions affect water-related ecosystems? What role does the water industry play in job creation? What recent advances have been made in water harvesting and desalination? Learning to weigh and synthesize multiple forms of evidence, students will develop the skills needed to address these and other questions and challenges posed with respect to water and society.

Across the globe, political conflict is increasingly defined by the notion of resentment - defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as a "sense of grievance; an indignant sense of injury or insult received or perceived; (a feeling of) ill will, bitterness, or anger against a person or thing." In this Core Colloquium, we will endeavor together to better understand the role of resentment in politics. How should we define resentment, and how universal is this concept across cultures and nations? What tools or approaches can we use to assess its impact on contemporary political events? What are the relationships between resentment and desired end-states like equality, justice, and reconciliation? Course materials will include philosophical explorations, primary sources, conceptual mappings and empirical research on resentment. Students will also engage in basic data analyses exploring the causes and consequences of resentment worldwide.

A handful of languages - English, French, Spanish, and in some regions Russian, Arabic and Mandarin - are becoming 'world languages', used internationally and widely acquired as additional languages. Since human communities always develop some common medium of communication, this reflects the emergence of wider transnational or global communities. But it also reflects and ratifies disparities of power, conferring great privilege to the nations and native speakers of the world languages, and disadvantage to non-speakers. What are the implications of linguistic imperialism for the other six thousand or so human languages, and the billions of people who do not speak a world language? Many minority languages are losing speakers and becoming endangered or extinct. Educational failure and economic exclusion are widespread among those compelled to function in an unfamiliar world language. This course explores the processes and consequences of linguistic imperialism. We discuss issues of language maintenance and shift, language politics, multilingual education, and linguistic human rights. We examine the tension between the utilitarian role of language in enabling communication with an ever-wider community, and its powerful social role as an expression of culture and of community and personal identity.

How does the "benefit of hindsight" shape the stories that define our sense of self? Do these stories change depending on what is important to us at the time of looking back This multidisciplinary colloquium brings together the study of psychology, philosophy, sociology, history, and literary memoir to explore how autobiographical memories may be structured less by weighing evidence than by rules of employment and the need to create a morally comprehensible narrative identity. What roles do dominant narratives constructed within different socio-cultural worlds play in shaping individuals' narrative identities? And what happens when dominant narratives are created globally and no longer the preserve of regional societies? Whose interests might such identity-conferring narratives serve? What happens when globalizing cultures create tension between collective memories of belonging (to communities/nations) and autobiographies that foreground exceptionality, individual achievement, and cosmopolitan engagement? What are the psychological consequences of "looking back" on one's life from a critical moral perspective? And what are the implications for "understanding humanity"?

What distinguishes a luxury from a necessity? How do we know luxury when we see it? Luxury goods range from art and handbags to automobiles, vintage vines and rare animal species, and many others items. Such goods have played important roles in the history of civilizations, triggering wars and financial crises or defining political and religious values. Luxury is also like a pioneer, making important steps for the first time, allowing mankind to develop its capabilities and expressing this development. In fact, the dynamic of "luxury" predates humans and figures in the behavior of mammals. Today, luxury goods are hardly reserved for the wealthiest, which devote nearly 65% of their consumption to such items, since low-income families (the bottom fifth of earners) also spend about 40% on luxuries and 60% on necessities. How does such behavior factor into a pursuit of just societies? How does it play out in everyday decision-making? Students in this multidisciplinary colloquium will examine the history, pricing, cost, and present state of luxury goods across societies and will learn to use scientific methods to envision the roles that luxury goods might play in humanity's future.

Most of us agree that we should be tolerant of the beliefs and practices of others. Often the call for tolerance is grounded in some form of relativism - that is, in the thought that there simply isn't an absolute or objective fact of the matter. After all, on what basis could we insist that others share our beliefs if those beliefs are subjective in some way, a function of our upbringing, our religion, our social norms, our culture, or our own peculiar tastes and concerns? But what reasons do we have to accept some such form of relativism? Can relativism really ground our commitment to tolerance? If not, then how else can we justify that commitment? We will explore these questions as they arise in a number of different philosophical and religious traditions. Readings will be drawn from both classical and contemporary sources and will include the work of anthropologists, literary and political theorists, philosophers, and theologians.

How has the automation of work changed the ways we live? What challenges and opportunities does automation of work pose for the future? This multidisciplinary colloquium draws on materials in social science, science, and the humanities to explore how societies have organized themselves relative to technology in the past, and what changes are currently taking place. As we are now in the midst of the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR), and dislocated by covid-19, how we live and work is undergoing profound change. New technologies pose new global challenges in the areas of equality, sustainable development, and education. Students will examine the wave of technology-driven transformations occurring on a global scale, including artificial intelligence, the Internet of Things, and 3D printing. The future of work is explored through literature, policy, and scientific expression, as we anticipate how humans will spend their time as current-day work becomes automated and permanently changed by the impacts of covid-19. They will consider the 4IR as an opportunity to critique theories of technological change and construct their own narratives of change in individual case study analysis assignments.

The body plays a central role in today's global challenges, including in the promotion of justice, equality, health, and human rights. But controversies surrounding these aspirations also reveal the existence of divergent - often opposing - definitions of the body. This course asks how current political struggles over issues such as gender identity, racism, and reproductive and human rights involve conflicting understandings of the body. What relationships do these notions establish or depend upon between the body, identity, power, and truth? How do body politics inform debates about the anti-vaccination movement, "political correctness," or body modifications? To denaturalize our ideas about the body, the course combines the exploration of current trends with the examination of views from diverse time periods and cultures. By identifying and analyzing these contrasting assumptions, the course seeks to better understand the challenges we face today, and how to address them. Major topics will include the problem of embodiment and the limits of our bodies; the role the body plays in the definition of racial and gender identities; bodily disciplines; and the human quest for truth.

How do agricultural developments affect human population and demographic regimes? What constraints of traditional agriculture shape pre-industrial societies? Does human population, as the famous British political economist Thomas Malthus argued in 1798, increase faster than the means of subsistence, and if so, what are the implications? People need food and the production of food needs people (and land). The world's population grew slowly, with major setbacks, from perhaps 200 million people in AD 1 to about 600 million in 1700 and to 2.3 billion on the eve of WWII. In just seventy years, it has soared to 7.7 billion, and the UN projects a total of 9.8 billion in 2050 and 11.2 in 2100. How, then, has the per-capita intake of calories not declined worldwide and the balance of nutrients arguably improved? If past population growth was made possible by unprecedented agricultural expansion, will the future require a comparable increase? This colloquium offers broad economic and historical perspectives to approach practical dilemmas and ethical questions related to sustainability and global justice as students ask how best to feed the world's current and future inhabitants.

What kind of justice matters when political regimes change? How should new democracies handle the legacies of a violent past? Should emerging political actors punish perpetrators? Or, instead, should they encourage victims to reconcile with former aggressors? How do ancient and modern experiences of justice differ? Which is a better condition for peace: knowing or not knowing the past? Is there a trade-off between political stability and full disclosure of the past? Taking up such questions, this course asks what we can learn from the contemporary field of Transitional Justice, as well as from its critics. Investigating ideas and practices of punishment, reconciliation, forgiving, and forgetting, students will examine such cases as Argentina, South Africa, East Timor, Egypt, and Brazil. They will examine how the International Criminal Court manages complex issues surrounding international intervention in domestic affairs. How have diverse national experiences of violence yielded varying concepts of justice, reconciliation, and transition? How does political imagination relate to representations of justice in post-conflict films, documentaries, fiction, and testimonial literature?

What is the relationship between multilingualism and global citizenship? How does learning and speaking multiple languages correlate with changes in identity and perception? This interdisciplinary colloquium integrates theory with practice in looking at the effects of language-learning on education, society, and cultural identity. In addition to developing a basic understanding of Second Language Acquisition (SLA) concepts, students will consider multilingualism from perspectives including educational and social psychology, diplomacy, business, and public policy. Along the way additional questions arise: In what settings does multilingualism thrive? What makes a language easy or difficult to learn? Why do some people succeed at learning new languages while others don't? Can plurilingual citizens boost the economy of their countries? Does language-learning require and/or promote cultural understanding? Are there drugs that can accelerate language learning? Guest experts will address different areas of language education, social behavior, and psycho/neurolinguistics. All students will experiment over the course of the semester with studying a language using the Duolingo application.

How does the ceaseless movement of people - a key feature of our globalized world - impact our sense of the self, of social identity, and indeed of political rights, all of which are anchored in a presumption of "belonging" that is secured by primordial ties of blood and soil. "Migrant," "Refugee," and "Indigenous" are among the most fraught terms in a time when the "Citizen" has been elevated to being the singular legitimacy. Formal citizenship often excludes migrants or those who were born to parents of foreign nationality. What are the tensions between citizenship and mobility? Can one recognize both the "right" to movement and mobility alongside assertions of the preeminence of "local populations"? How are these competing claims conceptualized and rights affirmed? What are the distinct valences of terms like "Neighbor," "Stranger," "Citizen," "Alien," "Guest," and "Resident"? And how do we debate the contrasting conceptual grounds of territorial claims and circulatory flows? In this multidisciplinary colloquium, students will engage these in order to better understand the place of the nation-state and the experience of citizenship in the context of globalization.

How do we understand and make sense of the consequences of what has clearly become a climate emergency? What conditions catalyzed this moment of crisis? Why and how might we consider re-orienting our habits of thought and action to engage this global challenge? What are the limits of anthropomorphism or the anthropomorphic imagination, of assigning human attributes to nonhuman others? Our notions of "development" and "progress," our conception of natural resources, our relationship to the technocratic imagination have all contributed to the making of the Age of the Anthropocene, in which human agency reshapes our environment. This course will engage with a range of approaches that re-conceptualize the relationship of humans with nature. It will study the environmental consequences of urbanization, resource frontiers, extractive industries, the quest for sustainable energy, human-animal conflict, and the politics of conservation. It will conclude by asking what constitutes environmental justice as students explore the need to recalibrate multiple disciplines to generate a "multispecies" perspective on our world.

Concerns about corruption are everywhere, but the way corruption is perceived and interpreted changes from context to context. We tend to use the adjective "corrupt" for private individuals, public officials, and state institutions alike. Phenomena ranging from bribery and nepotism to poor governance and human rights violations are also sometimes bundled under the same umbrella. But what do we mean when we talk about "corruption"? Can we define it in a way that explains its wide and diverse usage? How do we detect it and can we agree on when or how to combat it? This course seeks to provide frameworks for answering these questions. In the first part, students will examine earlier philosophical contributions to the debate about corruption, put them into historical context, and understand how the concept and its applications have changed over time. The second part of the class will turn to contemporary controversies, focusing more specifically on corruption in public institutions and on existing "recipes" for eliminating it.

Throughout human history we have searched for a Panacea, a mythical remedy that can cure all disease and prolong life. In this course students will explore the intriguing origin stories of the life changing drugs which have shaped society and the ethical dilemmas raised by their use. The course will bring multidisciplinary perspectives to question the moral, legal and economic dilemmas posed by the commoditization of life. What happens when how we live and why we die is decided by a price tag? How do you allocate a limited resource? In a free market economy, who profits and who suffers? What are the consequences of government regulation? Have we become reliant on pills to remedy our personal and social ills? We will also investigate the ways in which language and communication are inseparable from the challenges facing modern medicine, from the anthropomorphism of scientific terminology to the power of misinformation. The issues discussed here are not unique, they reflect and inform how we address the global challenges of inequality, justice and sustainability facing society as a result of technological advancement. Except in this case, it may be a matter of life and death.

How does theater reflect upon the global impact of scientific discoveries that can in one turn contribute to the well-being of the planet and by another turn devastate it? The Drama of Science explores that question through the lens of dramatic literature by studying a series of plays that engage with issues of scientific practice and discovery and their consequences. But how do these different agendas come together? How are individual scientists portrayed, and how are scientific communities, sites, and practices evoked and understood? How do playwrights speak to the impact of science, especially nuclear power, genomics, and climate change on society? Relevant plays are read with an eye toward addressing the theater's influence on the perception of science.

Put on your goggles. What if instead of seeing beyond difference we tried to see through it? In this course we will consider caste and race and ask how they have enabled modes of seeing, thinking, being. How have critics, theorists, poets and artists attempted to define, undefine, imagine, deconstruct, historicize, problematize, race and caste? For the Black British critic Stuart Hall, the question was not only of race in and for itself, but of 'the whole social formation, which is racialized.' For B.R. Ambedkar, the father of both the Indian constitution and the untouchable caste - 'Dalit' - movement in India, caste was not 'a wall of bricks, like a line or barbed wire,' but 'a state of mind.' We examine how the varied experiences and discourses of caste and race might intersect, both historically, and in our contemporary moment. We will study a range of narratives of caste and race - that of the migrant and the student, the laborer and the prostitute - in fiction, poetry, film, painting and music. We also examine critical theories of race and caste that have produced new questions, terminologies and categories: fugitivity and humiliation, double consciousness and Dalit love.

This course examines the history and science of fire, including its impact on the evolution of the human species, on human culture, technology, and climate change. Three fires - the natural fire, the fire tamed and controlled by humans in the natural environment, and the industrial fire, i.e., controlled combustion - will ground the discussion of questions typically not envisioned when we think of fire: How did fire provide a strong set of symbols for thinking about what it means to be human, and how has it figured in culture, mythology, arts, and rituals? Did taming fire and learning to cook change the course of human evolution? Is cooked food the hinge on which evolution turned, allowing rapid development of larger brains? How did cooking and the use of fire impact the formation of societies and the advent of a family structure? Did it make us farmers and hunters? What roles has fire played in agriculture, especially in areas inhospitable to farming? The industrial fire and its role in climate change, climate change's impact on natural fire, and conversely the impact of natural fires on climate change, will be deliberated, as will the question: Are we entering the Pyrocene era?

Emotions are an essential aspect of our mental lives. We make significant efforts to express them, or contain and suppress them when this seems the right thing to do. They lead us to make both mundane and life-changing decisions. For some of us, they define who we are. But what precisely is an emotion? Are emotions universal, experienced in the same way everywhere, or are they determined by culture and society? To what degree are they accessible to us, and can we choose which ones to have? How did people experience sentiments, such as love or shame, in other historical periods? And can we expect Artificial Intelligence to be able to feel the kind of emotions that humans do? Such questions will lie at the heart of this Core Colloquium, which will explore the nature and structure of emotions from various perspectives, based on theories from Western, Asian, and African philosophy, historical accounts, and observations from social psychology and sociology. Through this exploration, the colloquium pursues a richer understanding of human experience and aims to throw light on the challenges of living together in a global society and our attempts to bridge cultural differences.

Despite the rise of science and secularism, why, and to what extent, do people still believe in supernatural phenomena? Even when cultures or individuals disavow such beliefs, how does the history of belief in the supernatural affect contemporary life? Belief in ghosts, magic, and other mystical phenomena is widespread across cultures and history. This interdisciplinary Colloquium asks how the connection between humanity and the prospect of mysterious phenomena - from spirit entities and the mysteries of nature to the challenging futuristic world of artificial intelligence - has shaped human history and still impacts current critical global issues: forced migration, poverty, the Anthropocene, social injustice, and xenophobia. Aiming to enhance our ability to understand the boundary between everyday life and another order of reality, the course asks what happens when that barrier eases or breaks apart for some. The goal is not to promote or debunk specific beliefs or practices, but rather to understand them using approaches from anthropology, sociology, social psychology, philosophy, and history, seeing beliefs and practices in their cultural, social, and political contexts.

What can different notions of the sacred teach us about human relations throughout the world, throughout time? How do sacred sites, artworks, and practices illuminate the deepest possibilities for human connection, healing, and reconciliation? And how do they represent what we stand to lose through environmental extraction and degradation? Historically and today, the sacred has been located within nature, within built environments and material culture, and within the dynamic actions of the human body. As ancient myths reveal, the sacred is a precious - and sometimes tragic - contact zone between gods, peoples, and animals, and it is also a contested place of ideologies and identities. Sacred art and culture also present ethical tensions for research and collecting practices of museums and ethnographers. This colloquium explores case studies from Africa, the Americas, Europe, and Asia, and draws on religious studies, sociology, art and architectural history, film, literature, historic preservation, museum theory, and performance to help us understand the global implications of endangered, thriving, and ever-evolving worlds of the sacred today.

With dramatically rising rates of loneliness, isolation, alienation, and suicide around the world, the most pressing questions we can ask include: What is at the root of what is now called a global "crisis of connection"? How do we effectively address this crisis? The science of human connection, which incorporates a wide range of disciplines including developmental and social psychology, neuroscience, primatology, and the health sciences, approaches both questions by telling a five-part story that underscores: 1) the social and emotional nature of humans; 2) how cultural ideologies clash with our social and emotional natures and lead to a crisis of connection and; 3) how we can effectively address the crisis by creating a culture that better nurtures our nature rather than gets in the way.

Negotiation is an essential part of our professional, academic, and personal lives, and is also increasingly relevant to tackling global questions such as climate change, social inequalities, and biodiversity loss. How can we evaluate the need for - and impact of - negotiation? Is negotiation innate or can we develop skills to become more strategic and effective negotiators? What changes when we negotiate for ourselves or on behalf of someone else? What are the links between negotiation and justice, fairness, and ethics? This colloquium aims to understand the theory and practice of negotiation, including conflict resolution and consensus building. Exploring concepts in negotiation, interpersonal effectiveness, and organizational behavior, students will encounter various types of negotiations including integrative (win/win approach), distributive (win/lose approach), and various iterations of these two extremes. Topics include communication, emotion, perception, team negotiations, international negotiations, and cultural differences. Theory and practice will be integrated to improve students' conceptual understanding and cultivate negotiation, conflict resolution, and strategic skills.

Does anyone deserve to be unfree? What does captivity tell us about freedom? Does incarceration evidence a move away from cruel punishment in modern times? Is confinement always about punishment? Is punishment a universal component of justice? This course tracks the history of captivity, confinement and incarceration. We examine laws and literatures of captivity in ancient Rome and the medieval Islamic world through to humanitarian debates around slavery and modern prisons and the political economy of successive wars on Crime, Poverty, Drugs, and Terror in the Americas. Our protagonists range from anti-colonial nationalists in Kenya and Chinese indentured laborers, to prisoners of the Russo-Ottoman wars and convict laborers in Australia. Through the writings of captives, lawmakers, architects, and activists we explore the personal and political consequences of incarceration in sites such as prisons, ships, penal colonies, POW camps, asylums and detention centers. We interrogate how class, gender and race co-determine who ends up in these sites, and how different carceral regimes shaped local environments and global relations of power, production, trade, mobility and culture.

What is the relationship between language and identity in societies that are multicultural, rapidly changing as a result of population flows, or seeking to differentiate themselves from other countries? Every country has a national language that encapsulates its unique history and culture. While many have more than one national language, others give pride of place to only one “national” language. Exploring interactions between languages spoken within countries (e.g., national, co-official, indigenous, minority, foreign languages) this course asks how individuals and societies preserve and promote linguistic identities while aiming to maintain social cohesion and national identity. Questions driving this inquiry include: What is the right balance between linguistic diversity and national unity? What are the challenges of multilingualism? Of global English? How should governments approach these issues from a policy standpoint? Can education systems handle the mandate to protect and promote linguistic identities? Students will reflect upon their own language trajectories and will research how a country or region of their choosing has tackled these challenges.

Scientific knowledge production is fundamentally based on observation and data. Drawing on a wide range of disciplines, this course examines systematic gaps in what information is gathered about whom. What are the consequences of ignoring such gaps for human development and well-being? From medical diagnosis and treatment, seat belt design, and disaster relief, to snow removal, public toilets, and the construction of academic merit and economic performance, what is seen and how it is seen is intimately connected to maintaining structural disadvantages for women, Black people, people of color, indigenous populations, people of determination, and others. Regulatory and intellectual frameworks that aim to reduce such data gaps are also addressed.

What has globalization meant to different people and who has benefited and who has been harmed from globalization? This course will investigate the lived experience of globalization for individuals and communities around the world in order to better understand different manifestations of globalization that have been criticized by scholars and activists. These critiques include the McDonaldization of production, the precarity of international labor migration flows, the concentration of wealth and poverty in global cities, and the economic instability often linked to global capitalism and finance. At the same time, students will also investigate the global social movements that have grown in strength in response to corporate globalization’s challenges, and explore possible post-globalized worlds. Students will apply their new knowledge on a global object of their own choosing, and explore if their particular object exacerbates, perpetuates or ameliorates issues of global inequality and social injustice in the present day.

Why do we sometimes make decisions that we come to regret and, hence, fail to reach a certain level of happiness and well-being? What is well-being? What are the biases that influence our decisions? If we cannot make the right decisions for ourselves, who can? How can cognitive and behavioral science, with the help of nudges, inform policy-making? What philosophical and legal issues may arise from governmental interventions in decision-making in general? Scientific research has demonstrated that decisions are often a result of heuristics, mental shortcuts, and irrational influences that lead us to make suboptimal choices. As a result, governments and scientists have intervened to enhance individuals' and societies' well-being through nudge interventions. This course offers an interdisciplinary and thoughtful look at the topics of well-being, cognitive bias, and the role of institutions in societies. It brings together scholars from different fields to analyze issues ranging from sustainable development, health, and interpersonal relationship, to the need for government intervention and policy-making.

The human mind can engage in sophisticated representation that allows us to plan far into the future, think about circumstances light-years away, imagine scenarios that are possible but not actual (what if I started eating healthy?), speak multiple languages, and understand the goals of other creatures. But... where does the mind come from? This course examines historical and contemporary answers from a range of cultural perspectives, drawing on academic research as well as literature. For thousands of years, minds, a.k.a. souls, were thought to be imbued into human flesh by gods or other supernatural goings-on. Recent science favors a more reductive physicalist conception, according to which all of reality is just matter, appropriately arranged. But... how do you arrange particles into a mind? One answer is that minds are, put bluntly, meat computers. The course examines the breakthroughs in mathematics, philosophy, and the foundations of computer science that (allegedly) solved this long-standing mystery, as well as further questions about artificial intelligence and whether the computational revolution in theory of mind left out a core element of mental life: consciousness.

Home, which might have been a simple rock shelter in prehistoric times, now includes constructions in extravagant skyscrapers, inner-city slums, endless suburbs, and many more manifestations. Access to adequate shelter is a universally accepted human right, yet few people live in countries where this right is guaranteed. This course looks at our relationship with shelter, the physical structure that protects us from the elements. In particular, the course highlights the social and environmental impacts of how we build our homes, how we pay for them, and what happens when we cannot afford one. Two billion new homes need to be built before the end of this century just to meet the needs of a growing human population, all while meeting the need to reduce the impact of their construction on the environment. The course includes hands-on workshops that introduce students to building with reinforced concrete, the most commonly used material in home construction today, as well as other building materials used to create human shelter.

The legend has it that around 520 BC, the Greek philosopher Hippasus was drowned at the sea after suggesting that some numbers are irrational. The Greek’s rejection of irrational numbers was just part of a general rejection of infinite processes, and the concept of infinity was forced upon them from the physical world. Mathematicians have long followed philosophers in avoiding the concept of infinity, because of its paradoxical nature and the inconsistencies it introduces. It was only until the late 1800s, that the German mathematician Georg Cantor finally created a consistent theory of the actual infinite. Before being largely accepted, Cantor’s unorthodox ideas and monumental work were first controversial among mathematicians and philosophers. Cantor’s mentor, Leopold Kronecker, claimed: ‘I don't know what predominates in Cantor's theory – philosophy or theology, but I am sure that there is no mathematics there’, whereas David Hilbert, another famous German mathematician, said: ‘No one shall expel us from the paradise which Cantor has created for us.’ In this course, we will explore the evolution of the concept of infinity from ancient civilizations to the modern era, shedding light on its influence on philosophy, art and mathematics. Throughout readings and short videos, paradoxes and rather counterintuitive statements will be discussed, inviting students to rethink infinity in an attempt to tackle the question: (how) does the infinite exist?

Questions about identity dominate public discourse as well as political and intellectual debate in many parts of the world. This course explores the following questions as entry points into these global conversations: How are personal and social identity related? Is identity something fundamental about us as human beings? How is identity formed? Do we have one identity or many? What is the role of identity in history? What is the relation between identity and economic activity? How does identity relate to politics and the nature of the state? What is the relation between identity and religion? How do firms, societies, and states use identity? How is identity related to conflict and war? Readings and assignments will allow students to take up perspectives from philosophy, politics, sociology, history, and economics to examine these and related questions.

“Our dream: a world free of poverty”, the motto of the World Bank, is of universal significance. What would it take to make this dream possible? We are all reminded everyday, in the news or otherwise, of the poverty that strikes a large part of the population in developing and emerging countries, often due to some natural disaster or conflict. We are also told of millions of people who are poor in so-called ‘advanced’ countries. Or is it a different kind of poverty? Poverty encompasses many other dimensions than a low level of monetary income, including the comparison of poor people with the rest of society, which comes under another key social concept, inequality. This course considers the measurements and definitions required to effectively fight poverty. We will evaluate the poverty and inequality trends, and their socio-demographic structure, in individual countries and in the world. We also reflect on the root causes of poverty at the individual, country, and global levels. Finally, the course focuses on available policy instruments in advanced and developing countries, and internationally, to lower poverty and inequality around the world.

What is happening in our brain right now? Whether we are awake or asleep, our brain works around the clock to manage our daily life. When we are moving our bodies, navigating a new city, having a conversation, making decisions, or resting, our brain is continuously working behind the scenes. But how does it manage all of these activities, sometimes simultaneously? This course will start with a brief introduction of the principal structure and function of the human brain. You will go on a brief tour of the different cell types and their unique features in the brain. Then the course will progress through “24-hours” of recognizable real-world examples of brain activity where we will discuss the underlying activities and biological processes that are behind day-to-day activities. In doing so, we will discover the biological principles of our intelligent behaviors such as learning, representations and decision-making. We will also consider how some of these processes are influenced not just by our genes, but also through culture, technology, and human evolution.

Are humans making the natural environment unsuitable for their own existence as advanced, civilized societies? Humans are interacting with the environment at an unprecedented scale. Human activities may change the global climate, wipe out entire ecosystems, and exhaust natural resources. But our societies may not be robust enough to withstand the change. This course addresses the question in two stages: the first part establishes a solid foundation based on the science of the Earth system. This is an interdisciplinary subject that brings together mathematics, physics, chemistry and ecology. The second part examines the interaction between human societies and the Earth system. This interplay is initially framed in the language of ecology, and humanity is presented as part of the system, rather than as separated from it. Later, the perspective is broadened, to include engineering and economics, and then flipped, examining the problem from the viewpoint of media and politics. This course was not designed from a climate activist perspective. The course requires that students engage in rigorous mathematical and quantitative thinking before drawing any conclusions.

What is Nature? Does it even exist? And if so, how and why is it that we humans have increasingly come to think of ourselves as beings excluded from it? Beings ever in search of various forms of reunion with Nature? Are consciousness and the singular ability to name the inhabitants of the "natural" world the very things that distance and separate us from that world? Can we come to appreciate how simultaneously significant and small our place in that world is? The fact that we are at once a mighty force and a mere mote on the very biology that begat us and all life? What do we, "the namers", do about our seemingly singular place in Nature? Such questions are as old as consciousness itself but now more urgent than ever, and in this course, we will be looking at the multivarious ways in which human beings across time and different cultures have addressed them. Have tried - be it through mythology, religion, philosophy, poetry, music, the visual arts, fiction, or non-fiction - to "encompass nature", and thus reunite with something we know ourselves, deep down, to be a part.

This is a class that examines the self as a problem. We will explore the historically specific conditions under which the modern notion of selfhood came to be and how ideas about self-knowledge, self-definition, and fulfillment exposed individuals to persistent existential questions such as: who am I? what am I? who do I want to be? how do I know? The point of this class is to interrogate deeply held, taken-for-granted ideas about ourselves and try to make sense of where they came from, how we use them, and where it all might be going. The aims of the class are threefold: (1) historicize, disaggregate, and sociologically explain different dimensions of selfhood (self-definition, self-knowledge, self-fulfillment, relationship of individual and society; (2) learn how we use concepts to make sense of and narrate human experience; (3) make visible the taken for granted assumptions we have about identity and meaning.

The boundaries between “nature” and “culture” might once have seemed clearly defined: they underlay, for example, the distinction between the objects of the natural sciences and those of the humanities and social sciences. Today, however, these boundaries appear more unstable than ever. Claims about biological determinism and cultural construction are increasingly complex and contested. At the same time, ecological and planetary events foreground our interconnectedness with our environment, and with the various species that inhabit the Earth. Structured around fundamental problems that challenge the nature-culture divide, this course explores how we need to move beyond this dualism to better understand the contemporary world, through case-studies located at the crossroads between anthropology, biology, ethology, and philosophy. We will first address how the nature-culture dualism plays a crucial role in relationships of domination, by assigning racial or gendered “others” to the realm of nature. In the second part of the class, we will explore how our relationship with animals and landscapes is both informed by, and challenges, the nature-culture dualism.

Smoke signals, torch signaling, flashing mirrors, and semaphore flags can be considered as the early means of wireless communication. The discovery of invisible electromagnetic waves laid the foundation for contemporary wireless communication systems, profoundly altering the fabric of our daily lives—redefining work, study, and social interactions. In this course, we will take a global view of wireless technologies, examining their multifaceted impact on society: What are the direct and indirect consequences of deploying wireless technologies on society, from the early days of radio to contemporary cellular networks? What is the transformative influence of wireless across diverse industries? How can we leverage wireless connectivity to address the digital divide and contribute to the sustainable development goals set by the United Nation? Beyond daily applications, we will ponder the extraordinary potential of wireless communications in exploring previously inaccessible realms, such as deep space and the ocean's depths. The course will also delve into government regulations and techno-politics that shape wireless standards beyond technical requirements, exploring the ethical, societal, and regulatory dimensions.

What did slavery and freedom mean across time and place from the 16th century to the present? The emergence of the modern world was shaped by the blood and toil of people in varying degrees of bondage, who helped knit distant shores into transnational networks of trade and empire, and fueled a global public square of debate over the concept of human rights. This course explores the archives, texts and images that these historical figures produced or inspired, to enter the slaving paths, plantations, palaces and parliaments of Africa, Europe, the Americas, the Middle East and South Asia. Within these settings lie the answers to the questions that we will consider: how did political economy, law, culture, as well as power relations and tropes of difference, such as race, caste, class, religion, gender, and sex, produce variant forms slavery and ideas about freedom in various parts of the world? We will examine enslaved cultures, communities, and resistance within comparative frames of reference, reflect on their relationship with diaspora, and consider the legacies of these pasts in the worlds that we inhabit.

An Ocean Voyage: How can we effectively explore, understand, and communicate the critical role of oceans amid climate change and its impact on marine ecosystems? Despite their significance, oceans remain largely uncharted, with only 5% having been explored. They host diverse life forms, from tiny phytoplankton that generate half the oxygen we breathe to coral reefs that sustain a quarter of global fisheries. Yet, they are also the most impacted by climate change. Scientists undertake voyages aboard research vessels to sample, document and study the mysteries of this hidden world. However, since most of the oceans are hidden, communicating the oceans' importance and how climate change is impacting them remains a major challenge. This course will take students on a voyage aboard the state-of-the-art scientific vessel, OceanXplorer, to discover how physics, chemistry, biology, engineering and media influence our perception of the ocean. Students will engage with crew members and work on projects exploring such topics as ocean physics circulation, the chemical patterns of the ocean water column, marine biodiversity, and media strategies to enhance ocean communication. This course includes a regional academic seminar to Singapore. This course will be offered in January-Term 2025.

Just Cash: The Politics, Economics, and Philosophy of Cash Transfer Programs: The world has never been so wealthy, and it has also never been so unequal. Could the simplest solution to eradicating poverty also be the most fair and effective? At the local, national, and international levels, various groups are studying, experimenting, and advocating for direct cash transfer payments as a solution to both poverty and growing inequalities. Unconditional cash transfers have become established as development tools for both national policy and international aid. Universal Basic Income (UBI), an unconditional and universal cash payment, has gained ground in wealthy countries too. What explains this wave of interest in cash transfers? What ethical values underpin these programs? What are some of the most significant objections and challenges facing these programs? This class will take students on a global, interdisciplinary study of unconditional cash, covering the international aid revolution through Give Directly, South Africa's Social Grants, the Alaskan Permanent Fund Dividend, Silicon Valley's UBI initiatives, the US mayor-led basic income support, and the global resources dividend proposal. This course includes a regional academic seminar to Rwanda. Note: the majority of the course will take place in Rwanda. Students will travel from the UAE to Rwanda as early as the first day of classes. This course will be offered in January-Term 2025.

Mande Music and the Black Experience: Oral History, Folklore and Contemporary Connections: How do stories, songs, and proverbs serve as vessels for cultural identity, communal values, and historical memory? In many West African societies, historians, storytellers, singers, poets, dancers and musicians known as griots (or jalis) serve as oral custodians of Mande traditions. What are the responsibilities of these griots in preserving and transmitting these traditions? How are their diverse and important roles mirrored in African diasporic cultures worldwide today? This experiential seminar offers students an in-depth exploration of Mande music and its integral role in shaping the Black experience today. Guided by Yahael Camara Onono, bandleader of the acclaimed Balimaya Project, and his team of expert musicians and dancers, students will immerse themselves in the rich traditions of Mande oral history, folklore, and contemporary performance practice through engaging in singing, dance, and music workshops, attending musical performances, and visiting local Mande communities and cultural hotspots in the UAE. As a result, students will emerge with a rich understanding of the enduring legacy of Mande music and its vital role in shaping cultural identities worldwide. This course will be offered in January-Term 2025.

Sand: It is a material most of us barely think about but can’t live without. How has sand come to form the very foundation of modern civilization? What can sand teach us about human history, ingenuity and culture and what does our dependence on it mean for the planet and our future? After water, sand is the most used resource on Earth. It is the core ingredient in concrete and glass and is used in everything from toothpaste to paint. Sand transforms sunlight into electricity through crystalline silicon solar panels and is essential in the production of the microchips that power our digital lives. The story of sand also has a dark side, one that is polluting rivers, wreaking havoc on the ocean floor, and giving rise to a violent black market. This course takes up William Blake's challenge to see the world in a grain of sand. By tracing the footsteps of our ancestors to the present through folklore, architecture, art, and industrial design, sand will offer students a unique window into human history, invention, and culture. Classroom sessions will be complemented with studio workshops in art and design and a study trip to Al-Ula and the Hegra sandstone archeological site in Saudi Arabia. This course includes a regional academic seminar to Saudi Arabia. This course will be offered in January-Term 2025.

Art, Attention, and Environment: How do our acts of attention illuminate the world around us? Why do some works of art appear to "call out" to us, and others leave us unmoved? Is our accelerating world of new technologies altering our attention spans? What cultural resources do you bring to the acts of listening, looking, and reading? This course will help you reflect upon and expand your powers of attention. We will give primary focus to works of music and visual art and experiment with different modes of listening and looking. We will listen deeply and repeatedly to a single piece of music, until it becomes as familiar as our own inner voices. We will visit the Louvre and spend an insane amount of time looking at a single painting. We will talk to artists and musicians about the role that attention plays in their artistic lives. And we will spend a day at the Liwa oasis practicing radical modes of attention to sand dunes. If you take this course seriously, you will emerge with a powerful set of conceptual tools; a new appreciation for the profound depth, complexity, and expressive richness of artworks and of your surroundings; and a refreshed and revitalized attention span that will enrich your scholarly life and the broader world you create, inhabit, and share. This course will be offered in January-Term 2025.

Common Sense: What is common sense and what are its cognitive origins? This course interrogates commonsense notions we have about people, places, and things, notions that support our knowledge and reasoning in everyday life. For example, from infancy, we know that objects are solid, places are navigable, and people act in ways consistent with their goals. Yet, such common sense eludes today’s best artificial intelligence. How does our human common sense allow us to be the best knowers and learners on earth? In this course, students will unravel the cognitive origins of human common sense through the lens of behavioral experiments with infants and children, with close readings of primary research articles, analysis of experimental stimuli and tasks, and interaction with open datasets. By staging experiments in the NYU New York professor’s exclusive "round room" and in the National Museum of Mathematics in New York, students will participate in both science and scientific outreach. By the end of the course, students will have designed a creative and novel experiment that empowers them as learners and motivates them with the excitement of scientific discovery. This course will be offered in January-Term 2025.

The Science of Color and Art: What is the scientific basis of color? What are the origins of different pigments and the roles they have played in the palettes of artists across history? Color is a vital part of all our lives. The bright red of our blood, the shades of green in the trees around us, the glory of flowering plants, and the beauty of birds of paradise are all examples of color in nature. But it is in the breadth and depth of art across the ages that color sees a significant impact on human culture. The availability of different pigments and the choice of colors throughout history has influenced not only the beauty of the work but also the direction of art itself. Using fundamental principles of chemistry and physics in this course we will connect molecular structure to absorption properties and the resulting colors. Students will explore the pigments of nature and investigate the colors that have been used in art from the cave paintings of early humans through antiquity and the renaissance to modernity. Through lectures, visits to the local art museums, fieldwork, and individual research, students will explore how science has influenced art, and how art has driven developments in science. This course will be offered in January-Term 2025.

What is Life? Is it a substance, a structure, a process? Is a living organism merely a complex machine? What is the "language" of life, the information that underlies the acquisition of forms, movement and growth in the living? This course will seek to provide some answers to these fundamental questions. It will look into the past through the lens of the history and philosophy of science to outline the main conceptual frameworks that characterize life. The course will trace how biology became an autonomous discipline within the natural sciences at the beginning of the 19th century, how it moved away from vitalism and became increasingly grounded in physics and chemistry, and how it now investigates the emergence of complexity with the help of computational sciences. We will dive into the origins of life, its organization, dynamics, persistence, adaptation and evolution. Designed for those without extensive technical backgrounds, the course features interactive classes, readings, films, and a field trip to showcase the beauty, diversity and complexity of life. Ultimately, its aim is to foster a deep sense of wonder about the living world. This course will be offered in January-Term 2025.

The Sensorial City: Food Studies and Urban Ethnography: How does food reflect and influence broader patterns of cultural identity, historical memory, and social transformation in cities? Cities are both repositories of memory and material networks that feed cycles of production, consumption and waste. Cities invite us to explore foodways as an outlook into the plurality of human experience. At the crossroads of global connections, labor migration and cultural exchange, Abu Dhabi is a uniquely diverse city consisting of more than 20 ethnicities. If the city assembles the tangible and intangible heritage of its residents, food embodies a profound sensory dimension. Against this dynamic context how are urban communities defining their culinary identities? How do foodscapes in Abu Dhabi reflect local histories and current transformations? This course approaches Abu Dhabi as an ethnographic fieldsite for the students to develop their skills in the field of urban food studies. Exploring the smellscapes of the city, drawing food maps, following commodities in markets, documenting urban rhythms and filming seasonal festivals, the course highlights the ways in which the senses can generate new understandings of how people live together in cities. This course will be offered in January-Term 2025.

Disability and Development: How is disability understood across cultures and how does the understanding of this disability inhibit or influence development for persons with disabilities? This course will explore the way in which disability is created in developing countries and the extent to which the prevalence and pattern of impairments is a function of poverty. Attention will be given to the ways in which impairments are perceived and responded to across cultural contexts. Models and definitions of disability which underlie policy and practice will be critically reviewed, with particular reference to definitions developed by the WHO and organization of persons with disabilities (OPDs). The way in which the incidence of impairment and the experience of disability vary by gender will be assessed. The role of governments, carers and of the wider community in facilitating capabilities of PWDS being fully realized or inhibited will be considered, as will the experience of PWDS within the educational system and the wider economy. Finally, the impact of policy and the contribution of donors, NGOs and OPDS to a fuller claim on the rights and responsibilities of citizenship will be addressed. This course includes a regional academic seminar to Zimbabwe. This course will be offered in June-Term 2025.

Commercial Determinants of Health: A Focus on Globalization: Globalization has propelled multinational companies to a prominent role in shaping economies and societies worldwide. They shape cultural norms around food and redefine consumer behaviors. The course examines the pivotal role of these commercial actors, particularly in the food and alcohol industries, in determining population health outcomes. Through a comparative analysis of the UAE and Uganda, this course explores how corporate strategies impact food systems, food security, and health disparities across diverse socio-economic landscapes. Students will visit local communities and conduct stakeholder interviewers with community leaders and healthcare professionals in both countries. Students will critically analyze strategies, policies, and practices of the food industries and their impact on research sponsorship, public health, health equity, social justice issues and population-level disease risk. Through case studies relevant to both countries, students will gain insights into the complex relationships between commercial determinants and health, while exploring strategies to promote healthier and more equitable societies. This course includes a regional academic seminar to Uganda. This course will be offered in January-Term 2025.

Wayfinding: Graphic Design in the Built Environment: What is it to find one's way? Wayfinding encompasses the ways in which people orient themselves via the organization of sensory cues from the environment. As a noun, it refers to the use of design elements (text, pictograms, signage, color, etc.) to assist in navigating a physical space. It also pertains to the planning and decision-making we engage in when aiming for destinations outside our immediate sensory field. As a discipline, informed by the demand for sustainability and inputs from cognitive studies, it has grown into a field of research in its own right, closely tied with architecture and urban planning. The course elucidates the foundational design components of wayfinding and its theoretical, social, and political ramifications, with a dual focus on inclusive and cross-cultural design. Students in the class will investigate how we cope with the feeling of disorientation and what we can learn from millennia-old analog practices before GPS. The course's experiential learning will include a disorientation walk in the Forest of Fontainebleau and hands-on workshops on the Paris Metro signage system - led by the people who designed it! - where students will conceive, design, and test their own maps. Please note: this course may not be taken by students who have already taken CADT-UH 1020. This course will be offered in January-Term 2025.

Debt and Society: Why do governments in the Global South decide to borrow, and how are debt crises resolved? In this course on the causes and consequences of debt, we focus on the politics of sovereign debt in Ghana. From 2008, many Global South states borrowed cheaply from private and official creditors. Contractions in financing, the pandemic, and commodity price shocks left more than fifty countries in, or at risk of, debt crises. In crisis, governments often impose austerity measures, which worsen poverty and inequality, and postpone urgent spending such as that addressing climate change. In 2022, the Ghanaian government spent more than half of its revenues on public debt service, and its default led to protracted negotiations with creditors, which resulted in a tentative deal in 2024. This course combines social science theory with practical insights through site visits to and guest lectures from key stakeholders, including the Ministry of Finance and Bank of Ghana; representatives from the African Development Bank and the International Monetary Fund; labor unions, anti-poverty activists, and other civil society groups. Students’ projects will assess various elements of Ghana’s debt restructuring process. This course will be offered in January-Term 2025.

Being Here: How have spiritual guides and devotees in various religious traditions conceptualized presence and mindfulness, nature of the soul, purpose of life, suffering and joy? This course provides students with an experience of the daily life of mystics and monks committed to a spiritual path and ascetic ways of being. It will include daily reflective journaling, reading, and a final paper. To optimize the experience, each student will commit to a series of conditions of intentional living across religious traditions, which include modifications in technology, verbal communication, attire, and food. Students will study poetry and other writings, meditations, and prayers to provide insight into the metaphysical reality experienced by those who have committed themselves to lifelong contemplative living. Through experiential inquiry and intercultural encounters, students enter an intentional way of life to discover the mysteries and depths of these questions and have the rare opportunity to embody the timeless spiritual maxim, "be in the world but not of it". This course includes a regional academic seminar to Nepal. This course will be offered in January-Term 2025.

Colorism Across Global Lines: Focus Study in Ghana: Around the globe, hierarchies exist on a color continuum, with lighter skin toned individuals receiving preferential treatment. This course asks why colorism persists as a global phenomenon. We explore its historical roots and examine its pervasive impact across cultures and societies. We consider implications of skin color and its intersections with structural and systemic discrimination. Students explore colorism’s nuanced operations and intersectionality with racism, classism, and global white hegemony through detailed case studies from Africa, Asia, Latin America, the United States, and the Caribbean. Based in Accra, Ghana, students will engage directly with communities, merchants, and scholars to better understand colorism's manifestations in a specific cultural context. They will integrate academic study with field experience covering a broad spectrum of colorism's implications, from its entrenchment in colonial legacies to its influence on contemporary beauty standards, educational opportunities, job markets, and familial structures. This course will be offered in January-Term 2025.

Sensing (Sensitive) Archives: How can archives be understood as dynamic spaces that preserve personal and communal memories, shape narratives, and reflect broader universal concerns? Traditionally, archives have been seen as repositories for storing and classifying historical records. Beyond the physicality of the documents themselves, however, archives contain deeper layers of meaning. This course explores how archives function as sanctuaries for memories and narratives while manifesting universal issues, such as intolerance, exile, and migration. How can we address archives as subjects in their own right and as constructs of our recollections? Inspired by the contributions of curators, researchers, and artists in Berlin, students will engage with archives of Jewish histories, such as the Jewish Museum and the city itself as living entities. They will explore sensitive questions of remembrance and memorial through photography, writing, and reflection. The course will culminate in a journal of their experiences and a final project examining how archives serve as sites for addressing sensitive and significant issues. This course will be offered in January-Term 2025.

African Perspectives on Data and Technology: Why do digital technologies entrench global inequalities, and how might they also offer opportunities for alternative futures, local creativity and appropriation? This class shifts the focus from the usual narratives on data and technology, which tend to revolve around Silicon Valley and its renowned tech innovators, to African contexts. It aims to understand, conceptualize, and analyze data and digital technologies through an African lens. We will rethink the temporality of the digital revolution by looking at the history of fiber optic undersea cables in Africa. We will consider how people consume data differently in rural contexts where access to the Internet is expensive. And we will discuss who is a tech worker in Africa, from software engineers and tech start-up entrepreneurs to gig economy workers, content moderators, and data annotators. The course involves readings by anthropologists, communication scholars, STS scholars, and political analysts; site visits; and encounters with technologists, social entrepreneurs, and activists in Rwanda. This course includes a regional academic seminar to Rwanda. Note: the majority of the course will take place in Rwanda. Students will travel from the UAE to Rwanda as early as the first day of classes. This course will be offered in January-Term 2025.

Message in a Bottle: If you were to deliver one message to the world, what would it be and how would you ensure it reaches and resonates with your intended audience? Messaging is an art that many have yet to master. This course teaches how to deliver impactful messaging through social media, written communication, public speaking, and the requisite damage control. Students will participate in panels and mock interviews and will craft and present a 7-minute talk in front of a live audience. The course focuses on identifying a personally significant message and perfecting the skills needed to present it in an engaging and accessible manner. Through interactive and hands-on experiences - and a splash of comedy - participants will learn how to amplify their message effectively and connect meaningfully with a global audience. This course will be offered in January-Term 2025.

Network Theory and Social Interactions: How are evolving social structures influencing and transforming human behavior? The explosive changes in our abilities to communicate over distances - spurred on by the development of communication technologies and the increased capabilities of the internet and social media - have made peer relationships and social structures very salient. Inequality, social immobility, and political polarization are only a few crucial phenomena driven by the inevitability of social structures. Social structures determine who has power and influence and enlarge our understanding of patterns of contagion - from the spread of disease to financial crises. This course provides an introduction to the importance of social structures, peers, and networks with an emphasis on real-world applications, including crime, education, labor, development economics, industrial organization, political economy, and financial economics that will engage students with UAE organizations like the Abu Dhabi Police, the Gender Balance Council, NYUAD's Human Resources, and more. This course will be offered in January-Term 2025.

Ribbons of Blue: Urbanization on the Coastal Fringe: How can we reconcile rapid coastal urbanization with the need to preserve our planet's coastal ecosystems and environments? Over half of global populations reside within 100 km of a coast, a trend most evident in the Caribbean where 84% live within 25 km of the coast, a third within low-elevation zones. Such affinity for coasts leads to extensive development, frequently incurring significant environmental costs and putting our infrastructure, economies, and societies at risk. Using global coastal cities as case studies and Belize as an immersive experiential learning environment, we explore the challenges and opportunities for sustainable coastal development. Students will gain an interdisciplinary understanding of the balance required between urban growth, economic development and environmental sustainability. Using GIS, remote sensing, and other environmental data, complemented by immersive field studies and guest lectures, students will engage with critical questions around coastal development. We will explore how Belize balances the intense pressure of being one of the most rapidly growing populations in the region with sustaining its natural assets for the future. This is an J-Term away course in BELIZE. This course will be offered in June-Term 2025.

The Silk Road: Ancient and Modern Globalizations: To what extent has the Silk Road been one of the most pivotal networks in human history, and can we reassess its global impact? This course explores the Silk Road's historical significance by examining its social, cultural, and economic roles across more than three thousand years, extending to contemporary initiatives like China's Belt and Road. We will analyze primary sources such as period maps and travelogues to understand the experiences of Silk Road travelers and the geographical, cultural, religious, and/or social contexts they traversed. The course includes a study trip to Uzbekistan to explore key Silk Road sites and critically engage with prevalent views on Central Asia. Students will produce a research paper and presentation as part of this seminar. This course includes a regional academic seminar to Uzbekistan. This course will be offered in June-Term 2025.

New Capitals of Contemporary Art: Sharjah, Abu Dhabi and Amman: Over the past decade, Sharjah and Abu Dhabi have emerged as major cultural capitals, redirecting the artistic compass away from the global North by becoming regional hubs for artists seeking alternative ecosystems. In contrast, Amman has been a stable home for artists from neighboring Palestine, Iraq, and Syria since the early 1990s, offering a cultural counterpoint to the UAE's rapid artistic development. How do artists respond to the these socio-political exigencies? How has the proliferation of arts institutions in cities shaped regional and global cultural expression? And what role does cultural production play in a nation's image? This course involves in-depth engagement with key institutions in these dynamic cities to explore regional art histories, artist responses to socio-political issues, and the impact of arts institutions on cultural expressions in the Arab world and beyond. Through visits to Sharjah Art Foundation, Louvre Abu Dhabi, 421 Arts Campus, Darat al Funun and MMAG Foundation, amongst others, students will investigate how cultural production shapes national images and develop interdisciplinary research to map new perspectives in contemporary art. This course includes a regional academic seminar to Jordan. This course will be offered in June-Term 2025.

Endangered Languages: As the development of a global culture continues to accelerate, some linguists estimate that about half of the world's languages may be lost this century. But what is a "language" and what does it mean for a language to be endangered? What are the local and global factors that cause a community of speakers to shift away from their native tongue? Does language loss matter? If so, why and to whom? How do communities feel about language loss and how have they revitalized languages? What does it take for such efforts to be successful; indeed, how does one define "success"? Through readings, films, and discussions with guest speakers, this course will explore such questions globally, but will bring a special lens to Nepal, a linguistically complex country with 124 indigenous languages, most endangered to some degree. The class will travel to Kathmandu to engage directly with members of diverse ethnic groups. Students will use field notes to contribute to a class wiki, and to reflect on their own heritage and experiences as they linguistically navigate our changing world. This course includes a regional academic seminar to Nepal. This course will be offered in June-Term 2025.

Global Africa and China: How are recent demographic shifts impacting cultures and societies worldwide? Using African migration to China and Chinese migration to Africa as case studies, this course explores how historic migration patterns intersect with the current demographic renaissance in Africa and the declining populations in economically advantaged countries. After reviewing theories of migration and immigrant integration, the course turns to the lived experiences of African migrants in China, Chinese migrants in Africa, and the reception and perception of these migrants by citizens of the host countries. We shall discuss China’s long history of receiving "Black" migrants, from South Asians during the Cold War to recent African migrants, and the influence of China's enlarged presence and Belt and Roads initiatives on African societies. Through readings and qualitative research, including observations and interviews with African migrants in Shanghai and Yiwu, students will explore international student mobility, the impact of global racial hierarchies on migrant experiences, and cultural and societal exchanges between Africa and Asia. The course will place particular emphasis on the experiences of African female migrants, addressing the gap in existing research that predominantly focuses on male migrants. This course will be offered in June-Term 2025.

Social Media and the Governance of Speech: More and more, social media platforms are the source of information for what we know about the world, how we frame who we are, express our feelings, and decide how to act in both our personal and political lives. But what we see on our screens is only a small fraction of all the content that platforms receive. All platforms engage in some form of content management and content moderation. How exactly do platforms manage the flow of content? What do they reject? What do of do they promote? What rules, norms, or guidelines do they follow? And who sets those rules and carries them out? This course explores those questions. It investigates the ways that social media platforms such as Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, X, Snapchat, moderate and curate content, as well as the legal and regulatory regimes in which platforms operate in various countries. Our fieldwork outside of class will focus on the oversight and operation of social media platforms in the UAE. This course will be offered in June-Term 2025.

Technology for Sustainable Development: Can technology be leveraged to address and solve critical issues related to the 2030 UN Agenda for Sustainable Development? This course explores this central question by examining how technological innovations can tackle global challenges such as health, climate change, education, refugee crises, and poverty. Students will investigate how technology can be harnessed to create impactful solutions tailored to their local communities. The course teaches students to develop and analyze high-impact, interdisciplinary projects through hands-on collaboration with experts and organizations dedicated to achieving the UN's Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), including the UN SDG Lab, UNHCR, health and refugee NGOs, startups, and civil society groups. Through this course, students will acquire the tools and pedagogy needed to design and implement technology-driven projects that address specific SDG-related issues. They will work in small teams to produce local use cases that not only meet the needs of partner organizations but also inspire meaningful action and foster pathways toward sustainable technology solutions. This course includes a regional academic seminar to Jordan. This course will be offered in June-Term 2025.

Unequal Childhoods: How and why does childhood unfold so differently across societies? This course explores patterns, drivers, and consequences of child development and emerging adolescence comparatively across high- and low-income societies, drawing upon multidisciplinary sources spanning sociology, economics, international development, anthropology, psychology, fiction, and literature. We first consider the kinds of inequalities that children and adolescents experience at multiple stages of the life course, alongside their drivers and some of the policies enacted to target them. We then turn to case studies from and field experiences in the UAE and rural Rwanda. Emphasis will be placed on axes of inequality such as poverty, race/ethnicity, migration status, gender, and disability, as well as on manifestations of unequal trajectories such as low human capital, child malnutrition, demographic factors (e.g., household sizes), teen pregnancy, and sexually transmitted diseases. Students will be able to think critically about the linkages between research, policymaking, and practice in improving child development and successful transitions to adulthood in various contexts, including rural sub-Saharan Africa. This course includes a regional academic seminar to Rwanda. This course will be offered in June-Term 2025.

Music, Migration, and Memory: When people migrate, what travels with them? What stays behind? What elements of their cultures do they actively remember, and what do they hope to forget? How do migrants create or recreate a sense of home in conditions of displacement, and what stories do they tell about themselves? How do these stories confirm or contradict standard narratives of migration in mainstream journalism and scholarship? This experiential seminar will explore these questions through engagement with the dynamics of music-making among Syrian migrants in the UAE and Turkey. Students will learn the basics of Syrian Arab music performance and then engage in field research with Syrian musicians in Abu Dhabi and Istanbul, where students will inquire how Syrian musicians navigate life in a new land using both old and new sounds. To investigate how Syrian musicians “sound” home in new contexts, students will take field notes, document performance practice, interview artists and audiences, create sound maps, and compose multimedia presentations based on their field research. Class seminar discussions and experiential learning will be supplemented with guest lectures and performances. This course includes a regional academic seminar to Turkey. This course will be offered in June-Term 2025.

The Californian Ideology: How has contemporary American tech culture led to radical reconfigurations of work, social structure, and even definitions of what it means to be "human"? In 1995, Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron defined the "Californian Ideology" animating American culture during the dot-com bubble as "the freewheeling spirit of the hippies" combined with "the entrepreneurial zeal of the yuppies." The next three decades have seen the amplification of Silicon Valley's influence far beyond the proverbial "California" of their original essay. Through a chronological survey of fiction texts, theoretical interventions, and films, we will trace the evolution of this ideology from its origins in fin-de-siècle utopianism, through its development in postwar American technocracy, to its current manifestation in international platform capitalism. We will also engage with the "Californian Ideology" experientially by visiting some of its key sites in and around Los Angeles and through examining phenomena such as posthumanism and generative AI. We will also consider the ideology's political dimensions, from human capital theory and the gig economy, to the spread of far-right thought among Silicon Valley elites. This course will be offered in June-Term 2025.

What is Fair in University Admissions?: Around the world, more students than ever are seeking a university education. When admissions is competitive, how does a society and its universities answer the question: who should get in? This question is complicated by the recognition of educational disparities in the primary and secondary systems that prepare students for university. Today, about a quarter of all countries have some sort of affirmative action programs - also known as reservations, quotas, or preferential admissions - and eligibility criteria range from race, caste, gender, ethnicity, and ruralness to socioeconomic disadvantage. This course analyzes the development and impact of affirmative action policies within broader debates about equity and fairness in higher education. Case studies and guest speakers will be drawn from Brazil, India, the United States, France, and beyond. Special focus will be given to India, which has the world’s oldest and one of the most controversial reservation systems, with an increasing number of students competing for university places each year. Site visits to higher education institutions in Delhi will offer additional insights into the practical implications of these policies. This course includes a regional academic seminar to India. This course will be offered in June-Term 2025.

Strategies for Civic Inclusion: How can governments and civil society organizations enhance civic inclusion for marginalized groups? Political rights, government programs and opportunities for participation in civic life offer valuable material and symbolic benefits to individuals. Yet not all of those who are eligible for these resources are actually able to access them. Even more concerning is that these take-up gaps are often most pronounced among marginalized communities, who often face significant barriers to accessing these benefits. How can governments and civil society organizations address these disparities? This course seeks to answer this pivotal question by exploring strategies for enhancing civic inclusion across various dimensions of exclusion, including gender, socioeconomic status, ability, age, race and ethnicity, and immigration status. Through collaborative work with local UAE and international organizations - such as sports clubs, religious institutions, cultural groups, and government agencies - students will investigate and evaluate current and innovative approaches aimed at reducing these access gaps. The course will focus on identifying and assessing effective strategies to promote a more inclusive society, emphasizing both material and symbolic benefits for individuals within these communities. This course will be offered in June-Term 2025.

Tropical Forests and the Climate Crisis: How can global mechanisms and local strategies be improved to prevent tropical deforestation? Addressing tropical deforestation is a crucial piece of the climate change mitigation puzzle. Multilateral frameworks and global markets exist to generate incentives for protecting tropical forests. However, these mechanisms currently face a credibility crisis given their failure to prevent deforestation or deliver benefits to those affected by forest use changes. Given the imperative to preserve tropical forests, are there ways to do better? In Ghana, students will explore the challenges and opportunities in forest protection through a detailed case study of Ghana's deforestation emissions reduction strategy, which has gained international recognition as a notable success. After engaging with Ghanaian scientists; government, NGO, and private sector representatives in Accra; and community representatives in the Asunafo/Asutifi Hotspot Intervention Area, students will work in groups to complete and present research presentations. This course will be offered in June-Term 2025.

Immersive Experiences: Why have human beings long been driven to push the boundaries of reality and spectacle through immersive experiences? Do immersive environments provide sensorial experiences that extend human perception? What is the impact of immersive technologies on entertainment, education, and communication in the first quarter of the 21st century? Ultimately, how do these environments and technologies condition/enhance/distort our perception of reality? This course will address these questions by organizing discussions about relevant literature and audiovisual media, complemented by fieldwork consisting of various immersive experiences in Los Angeles, including visits to museums and escape rooms, experiences with Virtual Reality, and an insider look at the film industry in Hollywood. This course will be offered in January-Term 2025.

A Cultural History of Falconry: In what ways have the interactions between humans and birds shaped cultural practices and societal values? Falconry, recognized as a UNESCO Intangible Heritage of Humanity, offers far more than a hunting story; it allows us to explore fundamental human questions. This course uses the art of falconry as a lens to illuminate our collective past and present. We will explore how falconry has influenced and reflected human societies over various historical periods and cultural contexts. Through its examination of the intricate relationship between humans and birds, the course sheds light on how our modern societies, and we as individuals, owe a debt of gratitude to the falcons - our hunting companions - with the help of whom we forged some of the most fundamental ideas of our civilizations. It delves not only into its implications for our historical connections with nature but also into falconry's role in shaping social and gender dynamics, religious beliefs, and cultural identities. By examining texts, images, and films from diverse cultural backgrounds, we will uncover falconry's profound influence across 5000 years of global history, gaining a deeper understanding of the enduring relationship between humans and their feathered companions. This course includes a regional academic seminar to Italy. This course may not be taken by students who have taken CCEA-UH 1083(J). This course will be offered in January-Term 2025.

Creative Robotics & Tech: What will the future of human and robot interaction look like? How can new technology and robots inspire human creativity and help us grow artistically? How can we use the intersection of art and tech to pursue research? Einstein said, 'Play is the highest form of research'. By exploring technology through art and movement, how can we further research? This course provides students the tools and knowledge to integrate robotics and new technology into their creative practice as artists and researchers (no prior experience required). Students will design and create a final project exploring the intersection between art and robotics and tech in various forms. Depending on the scale of the project, students will work together as one big group or smaller groups. Previous student works have been presented at the Louvre in Abu Dhabi and MOTB Dubai Festival. This course may not be taken by students who have taken CADT-UH 1074(J). This course will be offered in January-Term 2025.

In an era where technology has exponentially increased our capacity to manipulate sounds, pursuing the 'perfect' sound has become a central concern for musicians, sound engineers, producers, and audiophiles. Who gets to define perfect sound? How do individual tastes and preferences play into the idea of perfect sound? How have cultural and historical contexts shaped the evolution of our understanding of sonic perfection? Students will explore these questions in the classroom and in some of the world's most renowned recording studios. From the state-of-the-art recording studio at NYU Abu Dhabi to the historic Loa District Studio in Rome and Firdaus studio in Dubai, students will have the opportunity to work alongside musicians of the caliber of Ennio Morricone's orchestra and collaborate with Grammy Award-winning music makers. Through guided projects, students will create a collection of recorded works, detailed analysis, and documentation, all demonstrating proficiency and a deeper understanding of sound. These hands-on experiences will introduce students to the real-world application of making music, leaving them with a deeper understanding of the intangible nature of sonic perfection. This course includes a regional academic seminar to Italy. This course will be offered in January-Term 2025.

Culture as a Collective Achievement: Explorations in Italy and UAE: Individual celebrities are the public face of contemporary culture industries. But in reality, cultural creation is a collective achievement involving a wide range of people and organizations working under increasingly precarious conditions transformed by rapid technological and economic changes. If we care about and want to support cultural excellence, we need to better understand how culture is actually made. Italy and the UAE serve as our case studies. Both nations are integrated into global markets but construct unique hubs of cultural creativity as part of their 'nation-branding'. A regional seminar in Italy will focus on the making of culture in Rome, Bologna, and Milan, with Abu Dhabi as a reference point. This course will go behind the scenes to meet the people who make, curate, and circulate contemporary art, fashion influencing, photography, movies and TV dramas, and digital news. Who are these people and what motivates and shapes their best work? We will be especially attentive to dynamics of power, popularity, prestige, and purpose, as these are situated historically and in relation to both the local and the global. Students will write short papers analyzing site visits that demonstrate their ability to conduct research, ask probing questions, and draw comparisons to identify and explain salient differences in ways of making culture. This course includes a regional academic seminar to Italy. This course will be offered in June-Term 2025.

How to Build a City: What makes a city special? What gives it energy, economic dynamism, cultural appeal and a particular feel or buzz? Is it top-down planning by civic leaders and architects, a mix of peoples and cultures, or some combination of strategies, peoples, and happenstance? As more of the global population moves into cities the question of how to create community in urban contexts has become increasingly urgent for policymakers, urban designers and everyday people. More than ever neighborhoods are becoming tethered with geographies beyond their city borders, prompting some to ask if there is an emerging global commons. This course will explore the dynamism of New York City through the emerging framework of placemaking: collaborative efforts to shape the places we inhabit in order to foster the conditions for community. Placemaking can vary in scope and scale from a small local park to a major tourist destination. We address the challenges of sustainable development and of creating a commons in an era of climate change. Students will engage in the critical study of New York City, culminating in a placemaking proposal. This course will be offered in June-Term 2025.

The Shaping of Identity: Past and Future of Egyptological Collections: Museum collections are often perceived as static entities hidden away in storerooms or trapped behind showcases. By focusing on the dynamic histories of museum collections, new research reveals their pivotal role in shaping a wide range of social relations. Over time and across space the interactions between these artefacts and the people and institutions who made, traded, collected and exhibited them have generated complex networks of material and social agency. This class will draw on a broad range of source materials to explore the cross-cultural interactions which have created museum collections. As European nation-states came of age in the nineteenth century, museums and archaeology played critical roles in constructing each nation’s ideas of its distinctive heritage and identity. A theoretical overview of those historical elements will be at the basis of a more conscious reflection on the role of contemporary museums, both in Europe and in the Gulf area. How do museums deal with their history? How to define their identity? What is their future? How should a museum tackle ethical issues? This course includes a regional academic seminar to Italy. This course will be offered in June-Term 2025.