Global Arc

This course will focus on cross-cultural issues surrounding representation in documentary filmmaking, both in front of and behind the lens. Through film production, screenings and texts, we will explore the question of "who has the right tell whose story, and why?" Students will direct two documentaries each: one set in their own cultural sphere, the other set outside of it. Each student will direct these films while another student assists them. They will then switch roles, giving every student exposure to the construction of four different documentaries. They will also write a final paper reflecting on their experience making these films.

Driverless cars have become an exciting topic in recent years. How soon will they be available to general consumers on public roads? What needs to be done to prepare for their grand entry into the world? Addressing these questions, this seminar focuses on what it will take for driverless cars to work effectively as well as their impact on everyday life and society at large. The seminar will be of interest to students interested in the topic of driverless cars and their social impact. It is also meant to help students see the changing globalized world through the lens of driverless cars.

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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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.

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.