Notes: Course Repeatable for Credit. Prerequisite: 101 the nonhuman From climate crisis to computer code, data to dust, plastics to plant life, the nonhuman has become a central figure of critical and aesthetic concern in our contemporary world. In this course, we will be exploring the canonical and emerging scholarship that attempts to understand the role of the nonhuman in the human world and the possibility of nonhuman worlds beyond or devoid of the human. Among many significant questions for this course, some we will be considering are: In what ways does the nonhuman complicate or resist representation or description? How does the presence of the nonhuman change how we understand agency? How does the nonhuman intersect with issues of race, class, gender? As the critical discourses surrounding the nonhuman are interdisciplinary, diverse, and rapidly shifting, the goal of this course is to introduce students to the various discourses concerned with the nonhuman. We will do this through explorations of six primary figures, including: environments, nonhuman life and creatures, elements, technology, infrastructure, and objects & the alien. Students will closely engage with critical writing in each of these areas and consider this scholarship alongside texts across narrative genres and media forms, including print narratives, film, games, and more. This course will consider the nonhuman as a philosophical figure, a cultural, social, and political phenomenon, and as a framework to approach and analyze literature, art, and texts. Assignments will include writing, a presentation, and a project.

Notes: Course Repeatable for Credit. Prerequisite: 101 Women of Color Feminist Theory and Practice Cherríe Moraga has described women of color feminisms as generating an analytical framework “that makes sense of the seeming paradoxes of our lives.” In this course we will consider what forms of knowledge might be marshalled towards a practice that “makes sense of” the multiple forms of interpersonal and state violence perpetrated against minoritarian subjects. We will engage with prominent themes in women of color feminist thought, such as the politics of representation, interlocking oppressions, reproductive justice, and strategies of resistance. To this end, we will read a range of foundational and contemporary women of color feminist theory, and explore Black, Latinx, Indigenous, and Asian American and Pacific Islander feminisms. While most of the texts we read are understood to be theory as such, we will also read a few literary texts as theory. When we consider the ways in which the imbrication of race, gender, class, and sexuality shapes lived experience, what begins to come into view? How do women of color feminist thinkers push us to imagine new forms of political possibility and broader visions of social justice? Some possible authors include Cherríe Moraga, Gloria Anzaldua, Huanani Kay-Trask, Grace Kyungwon Hong, Zora Neale Hurston, Kimberle Krenshaw, Layli Long Soldier, Patricia Hill Collins, Audre Lorde, Karen Tei Yamashita, Sandra Cisneros, Trinh T. Minh-Ha, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Chela Sandoval.

Notes: Course Repeatable for Credit. Prerequisite: 101 PRE-COLLEGE SECTION. Women of Color Feminist Theory and Practice Cherríe Moraga has described women of color feminisms as generating an analytical framework “that makes sense of the seeming paradoxes of our lives.” In this course we will consider what forms of knowledge might be marshalled towards a practice that “makes sense of” the multiple forms of interpersonal and state violence perpetrated against minoritarian subjects. We will engage with prominent themes in women of color feminist thought, such as the politics of representation, interlocking oppressions, reproductive justice, and strategies of resistance. To this end, we will read a range of foundational and contemporary women of color feminist theory, and explore Black, Latinx, Indigenous, and Asian American and Pacific Islander feminisms. While most of the texts we read are understood to be theory as such, we will also read a few literary texts as theory. When we consider the ways in which the imbrication of race, gender, class, and sexuality shapes lived experience, what begins to come into view? How do women of color feminist thinkers push us to imagine new forms of political possibility and broader visions of social justice? Some possible authors include Cherríe Moraga, Gloria Anzaldua, Huanani Kay-Trask, Grace Kyungwon Hong, Zora Neale Hurston, Kimberle Krenshaw, Layli Long Soldier, Patricia Hill Collins, Audre Lorde, Karen Tei Yamashita, Sandra Cisneros, Trinh T. Minh-Ha, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Chela Sandoval.