Undergraduate Semester
Program

(Pathways: Advocacy & Social Justice, Media & Publishing, Sustainability & Climate Action) What narratives led to the climate breakdown, disinformation, and injustice we are witnessing today? And what counter-narratives can help influence public opinion, shape policy decisions, and mobilize action to secure a healthier planet and a more just future? This interdisciplinary course integrates perspectives from climate justice, the environmental humanities, and narrative change to examine competing messages in the world of climate change politics, culture, and media. Across three core classroom modules, students will acquire critical skills on shaping narratives for effective policymaking, community engagement, and cultural change — culminating in a capstone portfolio designed to uncover career pathways in climate, communications, and advocacy. Along the way, students will meet and interact with climate leaders and experts and participate in site visits across New York City, including the American Museum of Natural History, the Human Impacts Institute, and New York Climate Week events.

This course examines core concepts in art and aesthetics from three different angles. First, there is the historical development of an idea of beauty from perceptive cognition and its integrated discourses into a proper field of study and philosophical realm, following a long and erratic trajectory from Ancient Greece to post-modernity. Second, there is the internal layering of art into a couple of main interpretive facets, such as the anthropological vocabulary of symbols, the sociological categories of taste, and the psychological speculations of imagination, all of which enhance the very notion of aesthetic object into a constellation of meanings. Third, there are the more contemporary debates, particularly in New York and since the 1950s, around the status of art as an external form of technology, and industry, itself profoundly shaped by the material conditions of intersectional identities and a new openness to affective dispositions.  Through these three approaches, supported as they will be by punctual examples and case studies from a variety of artforms, genres, and geographies, this course aims at allowing students to develop their own sensibility into a more imaginative and critical faculty, as well as gather a wider range of references, a richer palette for expressing their experiences, and a more diverse and robust reserve of tools to face the abundance of art. We will read thinkers like Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Heidegger, Nietzsche, Baudrillard, Danto, Bourdieu, Greenberg, Benjamin, Virilio, Moten, Sontag, Ngai, and Bishop, among others, to answer questions such as: what is beauty? What makes good or bad taste? Are judgements about art always subjective? Can art (or must it) be politically and morally relevant? What is the avant-garde? How can we re-think the status of art today, and its future?

How do we address global social injustices and inequalities? There are many different avenues – joining social movements, careers in government or law, working for nonprofits or international development groups, and more. This course starts from the premise that before taking action, one must be aware of the ways that any intervention, and especially an international one, can inadvertently reproduce rather than shift structures of power. Our inquiry is rooted in social science literature on organizations, human rights, and humanitarianism. As part of this, we reflect on our own status and how this impacts the consequences of our actions. In the second part of the course, we look at the controversies and dilemmas that humanitarian action creates and think through how individuals, groups and organizations can minimize or counteract these problems. Through case studies and conversations, students will leave the course with a critical yet proactive understanding of routes they might pursue to work for change.

This core seminar is designed to connect ethical and social theory to the contemporary American workplace. As the world becomes more interconnected with the rise of AI, globalization, and the impacts of the pandemic, how has the workplace developed and changed? What role does ethics play in the workplace on the individual, organization, and societal level? We will apply ethical theories to specific workplace cases as well as examine our own ethical values.  On a practical level, we will also consider what it means to be a working adult in the 21st century with a liberal arts education. What is fundamental to what I am looking for in a career? How am I growing in my internship? How do I navigate work culture and proper work etiquette? How can one be ethical in the workplace?

(Pathways: Advocacy & Social Justice, Urbanism & the Changing City) Food is often central to the development of community. Whether we're getting together with friends or family—or even people we don't know—when we sit down to share a meal, we're uncovering ways to uniquely humanize one another. Communities identify themselves around the foods that they make. But one element of food that's critically important to understand is the “place” that is made when food is being prepared and shared collectively. Food inherently involves an examination of history and tradition, bridging both memory and story to re-create experiences, or forge new ones. The act of “breaking bread” also lends an opportunity to co-create a platform where deep meaning can be found. This course will examine the ability that sharing food has to help us understand non-geographic and geographic forms of Placemaking. Students will examine five local, national, and international communities and unpack how they tell stories, hold culture, and advocate for each other through the lens of food. Goals of the course are to critically examine; the design of Placemaking and the important elements of fellowship that lend insight to cultural norms and practices; the economic implications of food; individual and collective meaning making; food as forms of resistance and call to action, and NYC’s ‘community assets’ regarding food and their impact here in the City.

(Pathways: International Affairs, Advocacy & Social Justice) As part of the United Nations Decade for Gender Equality, UN Women and partners launched the Global Equality Forum in 2021 which seeks to be an inflection point in the path to global gender equality. But what do we mean by “gender equality” and why are still so far from achieving the unmet potential of the groundbreaking international articulations of women’s rights and gender equality from the 1990s? This course will critically assess the concepts of gender equality, gender mainstreaming, and gender justice and their application to international policy questions. Through case studies, we will explore a range of issues including how the bodies of women and gender non-conforming people are used to advance authoritarian agendas; the neglected role of the care economy; sexual and reproductive rights and justice; and often contested definitions of feminist foreign policy.

(Pathways: Media & Publishing, Technology & Society) The proliferation of digital information and communications technologies over the past half-century has transformed, and continues to transform, the ways literary works are composed, produced, circulated, and interpreted. What is the extent and significance of these changes? How has literature both anticipated and responded to contemporary anxieties about the end of the analogue world? As artificial intelligence emerges within this broader digital landscape, how does it reshape –without entirely displacing– earlier media forms? What new or transformed modes of being-in-the-world does it bring with it? This course reexamines questions central to the study of literature, including archiving, authorship, materiality, narrative, poetics, and readership. It situates our present historical moment alongside earlier media transitions, from antiquity and print culture to modernity. Readings include Plato, Augustine, Elizabeth Eisenstein, Walter Benjamin, Borges, Julio Cortázar, Susan Sontag, Ursula K. Le Guin, N. Katherine Hayles, and Donna Haraway, together with works of hypertext fiction, online poetry, fan fiction, and generative writing. We will consider how literary practices register both fear and possibility in moments of technological change –nostalgia for the book, concern over dematerialization, and recurring experiments in form. Coursework will combine traditional writing with online and off-line activities, as well as collaborative workshops engaging critically and creatively with contemporary digital culture. The course features a series of guest speakers.

(Pathways: Performing Arts) This course offers students an immersive introduction to the landscape of contemporary theater in New York City. Students will survey the historical and artistic aspects of theater in New York City to trace its evolution and cultural significance, while also attending a wide selection of productions from the current New York theater season. Through weekly writing assignments and class discussions, students will develop a critical vocabulary and ability to analyze live performance—understanding it in both its artistic and historical contexts.

(Pathways: International Affairs) This course, an overview of diplomacy, would focus on the work of diplomats and on current diplomatic issues. Amidst the emerging transformation of international relations, it would examine the historically core elements of diplomacy and the impact on them of current developments. After briefly discussing the history and theories of diplomacy, the course would turn to diplomats' key activities, including negotiation, policy input and interaction with foreign interlocutors. The course would then address trends over recent decades, notably a major evolution in public diplomacy, use of health, social and other tools in diplomatic work, and the growing significance of multilateral and "minilateral" (e.g., AUKUS, Shanghai Cooperation Organization) institutions. The course would then look at some case studies and draw conclusions about what makes for effective diplomatic practice. Finally, we would pull this all together to examine potential avenues for the future of diplomacy.