Stories

What comes in the wake of energy extraction? This cluster will examine the afterlives of coal, oil, and nuclear energy through the lenses of the arts, political science, and earth science.

How might human beings live according to nature? Is property natural? Is freedom or unfreedom? How can studying human societies in the past inform collective organization in the present?

What does Europe look like from the perspectives of those whose voices are usually missing from mainstream narratives – the disempowered, queers, migrant laborers, artists, refugees, and people from Europe’s eastern and southern peripheries?

Coastlines, by definition transitional environments, are naturally dynamic and resilient. But climate change, sea level rise and shifting species distributions are now causing rapid physical and ecological changes to the world’s coasts. Anticipating and addressing these changes requires understanding the physical, chemical and biological processes that interact at the land-sea boundary. (Taught 2014-15; 2017; 2020; 2024)

Participants will study the history and theories of self-portraiture, self-representation, and self-fashioning in cultures around the globe from antiquity to the present.

This Eco-Literacy 360° cluster considers our participation in the environment from the perspectives of economics, education, and various forms of literary and visual expression. Our goal is to develop a vocabulary for thinking, feeling and talking about the ways in which the places we live affect each of us, and how each of us affects the places we live.

This cluster focuses on the core issue of borderland encounters, and addresses a variety of common themes such as the concept and nature of borderlands, cultural exchange, power relations, ethnic experience, human- environmental interactions, and (trans)nationalism.

Incorporating a visit to the Titagya school in rural Ghana, this 360° explores how children grow and develop in different contexts (e.g. schools, communities, households) and cultures (e.g., the United States, West Africa, Sub-Saharan Africa) and how this growth and development is conceptualized and represented–in texts and theories–mainly by adults, across cultures and fields of study.

This 360° uses the lenses of cultural studies, history, and sociology to critically and comparatively examine migration in different national contexts and historical moments.

This year-long cluster explores the intersections of scientific, philosophic and humanistic ways of thinking about, writing about, and visually representing ways we look at origin stories.

This 360° cluster focuses on the unique ties between Russia and its largest neighbor to the East, China.

This cluster of courses, which have been co-designed by professors with shared interests in disability studies, gender studies, human development, literature, social work, visual studies and writing, will consider how multiple systems of identity, as Rosemarie Garland-Thomson says, “intertwine, redefine, and mutually constitute one another.”