Global Arc

Urbanization is a defining characteristic of the 21st century and the Global South. Beyond demography, urbanization is a process of transformation and change as cities increasingly determine the economic, political, and environmental present and future. The "urban question" has been raised throughout history, why do cities matter? Cities were conceptualized as drivers of economic growth and are now being positioned as drivers of environmental sustainability creating a tension about how cities develop. This course asks: What role do cities play? Is perennial growth desirable? At what cost in terms of the environment and inequality?

This course explores contemporary productions of Latinx culture through a survey of Latinx literature, music, and performance, such as examining some of the biggest headliners in Latinx music now, such as Bad Bunny and Karol G. Through reading texts in the Latinx literary canon, this course asks 'how are Latinxs writing their stories' in multi-layered and transdisciplinary ways that are both written and performed i.e. slam poetry, music videos, literary representations, and general performances. Students will explore multiple genres and diverse voices in a multimedia classroom to learn how subversive narratives are written and their impact.

The Molecular Biology Research Experience is a two-course sequence that provides sophomore students with an in lab research experience mentored by faculty in the department. MOL 280: Molecular Biology Research Experience I, offered in the fall semester, is a non-credit bearing P/D/F course and is a prerequisite to MOL 281: Molecular Biology Research Experience II. MOL 281, offered in the spring semester, is a credit bearing course. Students must earn a "P" in MOL 280 to enroll in MOL 281. Students are expected to spend a minimum of 6 hours per week engaged in research and attend weekly meeting as determined by the mentoring faculty.

What kinds of art issues forth from need? Taking its name from Brazilian film director Glauber Rocha's 1965 manifesto, this course investigates how artists, writers, and theorists have sought to understand political, social, economic, and material limitations as generative conditions for aesthetic form. Moving between Latin American debates of the 1960s and 70s and the contemporary global moment, we examine such concepts as hunger, scarcity, imperfection, reproduction, and ecological justice though works by Cecilia Vicuña, Steve McQueen, Maria Thereza Alves, Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, Jumana Mana and others.

What does "Justice" mean? What do efforts to achieve "Justice" tell us about injury, retribution, and peace? This class will explore how justice is defined and sought by looking at criminality, fights for indigenous and women's rights, post-conflict transitions, environmental catastrophe, debates about reparations, and intimate forms of repair. We will combine a global perspective with engaged local work to think about what struggles for justice look like in theory and on the ground. These debates will illuminate about how the past is apprehended, and how visions of possible utopias and dystopias are produced in the present.

This course is an anthropological and experience-based exploration of video games. As we consider scholarship in Digital Anthropology, Game Studies, and African American Studies, we scrutinize the design of games and engage in gameplay, with a particular focus on Black experiences. Throughout the course, we probe how video games utilize and interact with race and, in doing so, we advance an intersectional approach that also accounts for class, gender, and sexuality. The course's core set of theoretical and methodological tools helps students to engage with gaming critically and to create alternative games in the future.

Why do development projects succeed or fail? This course examines how to design a human-centered development project using anthropological theory and methods. It looks closely at what anthropologists mean by culture and why most development experts fail to attend to the cultural forces that hold communities together. By examining development projects from the vantage in North Africa, students learn the relevance of kinship, power, religion, and ontologies. Students will also work with local organizations in the High Atlas Mountains as a way to study development in practice.

This course explores early modern figurations of gender and sex in the literature and philosophy of Europe. We will look carefully at poetry, plays, utopian fiction, and natural philosophy from early modern England, France, Spain, the Netherlands, and the wider Atlantic world. Orienting our reading around the intersecting paradigms of faith, labor, and utopia, this course will offer us the chance to explore historical theories of gender, sex, and desire as well as consent, race, and property. We will also consider how early modern problems and assumptions inform more recent debates concerning gender and sexuality.

Introduces the transdisciplinary field of trauma studies by examining visions of humanity from the Global South that prioritize alternative narratives and paradigms of healing individual and collective trauma. Re-orienting healing as a decolonizing process enables students to re-politicize personal trauma as it intersects with global legacies of violence, war, racism, slavery, patriarchy, colonialism, orientalism, homophobia, ableism, capitalism, and extractivism. The course participates in a new project to help illuminate how the humanities itself can offer new paths to understanding trauma and healing.

This course examines feminist critiques of art history and contemporary art. What challenges did they pose to the fields of art history and contemporary art? Drawing on artworks by Rosa Bonheur, Georgia O'Keeffe, Adrian Piper, Cindy Sherman, Shahzia Sikander, Andy Warhol and others from the Princeton University Art Museum, as well as readings in art history, art criticism, cultural criticism, literature and philosophy, we will see how the feminist critique transformed art history and contemporary art, and was itself transformed in the process.