Global Arc

Amazonia is a planetary hotspot of biocultural diversity and a massive carbon sink on the brink. The seminar explores how Indigenous knowledges and the environment co-produce one another and considers the significance of forest-making practices for conservation science and climate change mobilization. Drawing from historical, ethnographic, and ecological studies, Planet Amazonia is a platform for alternative storytelling and future-making agendas based on new scholarly and activist alliances. Students will engage with Indigenous scholars and environmental activists and will craft alternative visions to safeguard this vital planetary nexus.

Politics as Performance helps us understand how local governments function, and how the performance of democracy can be different from its enactment. The class offers a hands-on way to learn about decision-making, empathy, citizenship and the dramaturgy of power. We'll use tools from sociology, philosophy, civics and theater to analyze local democratic processes in Princeton and Trenton today. At a time when our commons feels frayed at best, this course helps activate possible ways to work with each other, both in the evolving digital commons and in person.

We will examine moments of change at different crucial stages in the life cycle (childhood, adolescence, courtship and marriage, work, maturity, and finally death) as they are portrayed in outstanding short stories and one novella. We'll attempt to discover how this change is conveyed convincingly and compellingly, to delineate the nature of the conflict at each stage, and how much of the change comes from without and within, and what the story has to tell us about the essence of each time of life.

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Our way of speaking is an essential part of our identity. Our particular language variety gives information to the listeners about where we were born, how old we are, our social class and even our race or ethnicity. However, since not all dialects are equally accepted, some speakers might feel judged because of their way of talking. In this seminar, we will analyze the reasons behind the belief that some language varieties are better than the rest, and debunk that myth. We will look at several examples of dialects around the globe and especially here in the US and we will study linguistic situations like multilingualism in our society.

War, disease, environmental collapse, and other disasters remain as relevant now as they were for ancient societies. Apocalyptic literature, which claims to reveal knowledge regarding the cosmos and history, has offered powerful accounts of the end of the world in many historical contexts. This course will trace how apocalyptic ideas and idioms forged in the ancient and medieval worlds continue to inform modern speculation about the end times. It will illuminate the flexibility of apocalyptic language, its ability to interpret changing historical situations, and its ongoing power to move people, whether to acceptance or to radical action.

This seminar will study the history and nature of fairy tales, legends, classical myths, and urban myths, particularly in regard to the way that they reflect the concerns and fears of society. We will examine the ways in which myths differ from folk tales, fairy tales and superstition, and the means by which entire communities, seized with conviction often for generations, disseminate and fortify them. The collective unconscious is often manifested in metaphor, particularly in literature and film, and the legitimate anxieties, fears (and guilt) that it reflects will be the subject of our study.

What makes hell what it is? What archetypes of the underworld helped to cement its importance in different religious systems? Why is hell so alive in secular culture today? This course explores the literary topos of the descent into the underworld in several strands of literary culture in the west. In the seminar, we will discuss underworld themes and archetypes in western and eastern antiquity, the Middle Ages, as well as modern and contemporary literature and visual art. Understanding the curious attraction of hell will help us conceptualize what the realm of the dead means for how we inhabit the world of the living.

Increasing global connectivity has brought forth multiple challenges such as such as the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, the rise in cryptocurrency assets driven by mistrust in institutions, and informational opacity despite continuous digital connectivity. To address these challenges, we need to understand the history of the technologies that have precipitated their trajectories. In this seminar, we will explore the history of modern communications technology from a non-technical perspective. Starting with the evolution of Bell Labs and the invention of the transistor in 1949, every decade since has seen a path-breaking invention.

Data is everywhere. Using site-specific research methods, students will explore their local environs, on campus and beyond, searching for data and the patterns and stories that follow. They will collect their observations in evolving archives, iterating on modes of communication (including documentary drawing, sensory visualization, and information design). The output of the course will consist of small weekly projects and responses to data-driven readings, films, design, and art, culminating in the production of a larger creative data visualization project, which illuminates a local story or pattern via data uncovered during the semester.