Section 01: Troubled Waters
Instructor: Dave Dolak (Science and Mathematics)
Mondays 9:00-11:50 a.m., 600, #101
In this course students explore the importance of water resources to various communities and ecosystems in Chicago, a city that was founded because of water and whose natural waterways were altered to build a great metropolis. They examine how this process displaced the original inhabitants, altered ecosystems, displaced wildlife, and how access to water for recreation and consumption without effective and egalitarian policy-making can affect some communities unequally, create and perpetuate inequality. Students investigate the nature of water as a finite resource and how changing demographics, politics, and climate uncertainty may challenge existing narratives of water abundance, scarcity, access, and quality for various communities in and around Chicagoland. In a final project, they envision how responsible stewardship of the shoreline or the river could provide more communities with access to Chicago’s waterways and water resources.
Section 02: Joyfulness and Well-Being
Instructor: Jessica Young (Dance)
Tuesdays 12:30-3:20 p.m., WEB
Section 03: Joyfulness and Well-Being
Instructor: Susan Imus (Dance)
Wednesdays 3:30-6:20 p.m., WEB
What makes you joyful? What prevents you from experiencing joyfulness? How is joyfulness related to your well-being? This course examines how experiences of joy and well-being are culturally situated, and how such states can be cultivated through physical, mental, social, and spiritual practices. Furthermore, students will engage their creative interests in arts, media, and communication as a means of informing these practices. Through engagement with community resources at Columbia and the wider Chicago area as well as critical analysis of introductory readings and viewings in joy, pleasure, resilience, and the body/mind/spirit relationship, students will expand upon and strengthen their self-care practices to optimize their bio-psyho-social-spiritual well-being.
Section 04: Culture of Climate Change
Instructor: Michelle Yates (Humanities, History, and Social Sciences)
Thursdays 9:00-11:50 a.m., 618, #207
In this class we will learn about climate change and the ways in which writers, artists, filmmakers, activists, journalists, and scholars respond to this issue, arguably the most important and challenging issue facing human societies and global species. Through assignments that introduce its causes and impacts, we will explore the intersectional environmental, social, economic, and cultural dimensions of climate change. We will identify how humans and their activities have exerted powerful forces on the planet, giving rise to what scholars debate as a new geological epoch, the Anthropocene. Students will critically analyze relevant source material, including readings, data, media, and art and design objects and experiences. We will consider the disproportional impacts of increasingly eroding environmental conditions on poor and marginalized communities in the United States and globally as well as how these communities advocate for environmental and climate justice. Students will draw on their own interests and skills to investigate and articulate their understandings of climate change and its impacts, and to envision possible outcomes.
Section 05: Rethinking Museums
Instructor: Onur Ozturk (Art and Art History)
Tuesdays 9:00-11:50 a.m., SPER, #421
In this course, students will explore, study, question, and reimagine historical and contemporary curatorial practices. Mini lectures, class discussions, and field trips will investigate permanent and temporary exhibitions of the Chicago area museums, archival materials of Chicago world expositions, and current scholarship on curating Islamic art as special case studies. Exposing students to current debates around museums and curators, the course will pose various questions: How and why museums have been giving priority and authority to some forms of knowledge and objects over others? How do museums organize, categorize, and present their collections? How can museums address colonialist, orientalist, and racist origins of their practices and collections? How can museums represent missing or misinterpreted histories, stories, and traditions of indigenous and global cultures? Students will be asked to apply their academic research and critical thinking skills as they reimagine a portion of the Art Institute of Chicago for their final project.