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.

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.