Global Arc

Students learn how to apply critical thinking and analytical skills to creating sustainable value-producing systems, organizations, and enterprises that are valued and supported by existing well-defined communities or groups. This class is for student entrepreneurs who feel deeply about a project they are already working on and want to figure out how to make the product or design valuable on an ongoing basis to a group or community. By the end of this class sequence students will have designed and created smooth functioning products, services, systems, or actions that actual groups or communities want and are willing to fund going forward.

We are not solving our problems anymore. There is a fundamental mismatch between our normal ways of approaching problems and the new open, complex, dynamic and networked challenges facing us today. To approach the new reality we need to fundamentally shift the way we think and act. This course introduces the logic and the practices to do so through a novel approach to design. We will explore HOW to create space for the deep change we really need.

The course immerses students in creative problem-solving, with an emphasis on exploring and communicating about math. Through collaborative projects, students learn to make conjectures, formulate interesting questions, and discover patterns. The course culminates with publicly exhibited projects. Students can expect to be pushed out of their comfort zones and approach math in new ways. This highly participatory course includes interactive exercises adapted from the arts (e.g. improvisational theater) for developing communication, observation, and collaboration skills.

This interdisciplinary course explores the design of digital protocols as alternatives to centralized platforms, emphasizing their role in democratizing technology, empowering workers, and enabling collective action. Students will engage with theories from computer science and social science while collaborating on hands-on projects with nonprofits and cooperatives. Through readings, discussions, and design work, students will critically examine how protocols shape power, governance, Artificial Intelligence, and participation in the digital age .

This course introduces foundational design approaches and methodologies for students without prior design training. The course focuses on three core areas of design practice, Ideation, Representation, and Prototyping, with an emphasis on applying design as a way of thinking, communicating, and experimenting in complex, real-world contexts. Students will learn how to frame and reframe problems, generate and communicate ideas, and test concepts through multiple forms of prototyping. Each week includes two core topics, two hands-on, in-class activities, two readings and an assignment. Classes balance discussion, making, critique, and reflection.

The times are changing, and the old ways of working (business-as-usual) are not leading to the results we need. Normally we would then turn to innovation but in this class we will argue that these future challenges are so fundamentally different that innovation-as-usual is not working anymore. To take charge of future challenges, we need to explore new forms of transformative design and entrepreneurship that empower us to look critically at the modus operandi (the current paradigm, the rules of the game) and sketch out new paradigms for the future.

How can literature and film bring to life ideals of environmental justice and the lived experience of environmental injustice? This seminar will explore how diverse communities across the globe are unequally exposed to risks like climate change and toxicity and how communities have unequal access to the resources vital to sustaining life. Issues we will address include: climate justice, the Anthropocene, water security, deforestation, the commons, indigenous movements, the environmentalism of the poor, the gendered and racial dimensions of environmental justice, and the imaginative role of filmmakers and writer-activists.

This class considers short poems of the 16th and 17th centuries that are variously concerned with love, desire, and sexual intimacy. What are the modes of address in the erotic lyric? How do poems represent the subject and object of desire, and how do they represent the ethics of the erotic encounter? What is the social, political, and philosophical work of a personal and intimate poetry? Alongside a wide range of poems (including at least one contemporary collection placed in dialogue with the earlier poems), the course will include several short theoretical readings on the representation of desire.

Despite the stereotypes of the over-bearing Tiger Mom and the Immigrant Mom, the figure of the mother has been surprisingly absent (either missing, dead, or otherwise gone) in 20th and 21st century Asian American literature and cinema. This class explores how the missing maternal figure structures the lifeline of Asian American imagination. Why is such a primal figure of origin ghostly? What happens to the mother-child relationship in the shifting contexts of diaspora, migration, nationhood, interracial relation, technology, and/or adoption? What happened to the "Asian Mother" in the late stage of American neoliberalism and racial reckoning?

Shakespeare wrote for the page and the stage, but the last century has taken him to the movies. This course introduces his language and theatrical imagination through their translation into films, from Romeo and Juliet in Verona Beach to Macbeth in feudal Japan. We will take up Shakespeare's great subjects-love, tyranny, revenge, redemption-while developing our powers of attention to the forms of three media, writing about the plays, acting them out, and making short films of our own as we go. We will study the performance conventions of his time and ask whether there was such a thing as cinematic imagination before the invention of cinema.