This is the required discussion section for POLS UN3648
Prerequisites: Solid knowledge of calculus, including multiple variable integration. For undergraduates only. IEOR majors must take this course during the third or fourth semester. Students who take IEOR E3658 may not take IEOR E4150 due to significant overlap. Recommended: strong mathematical skills. Introductory course to probability theory, and does not assume any prior knowledge of the subject. Teaches foundations required to use probability in applications, but the course itself is theoretical in nature. Basic definitions and axioms of probability and notions of independence and conditional probability introduced. Focus on random variables, both continuous and discrete, and covers topics of expectation, variance, conditional distributions, conditional expectation and variance, and moment generating functions. Also Central Limit Theorem for sums of random variables. Consists of lectures, recitations, weekly homework, and in-class exams.
Prerequisites: None Humans don’t just eat to live. The ways we prepare, eat, and share our food is a complex reflection of our histories, environments, and ideologies. Whether we prefer coffee or tea, cornbread or challah, chicken breast or chicken feet, our tastes are expressive of social ties and social boundaries, and are linked to ideas of family and of foreignness. How did eating become such a profoundly cultural experience? This seminar takes an archaeological approach to two broad issues central to eating: First, what drives human food choices both today and in the past? Second, how have social forces shaped practices of food acquisition, preparation, and consumption (and how, in turn, has food shaped society)? We will explore these questions from various evolutionary, physiological, and cultural viewpoints, highlighted by information from the best archaeological and historic case studies. Topics that will be covered include the nature of the first cooking, beer-brewing and feasting, writing of the early recipes, gender roles and ‘domestic’ life, and how a national cuisine takes shape. Through the course of the semester we will explore food practices from Pleistocene Spain to historic Monticello, with particular emphasis on the earliest cuisines of China, Mesoamerica, and the Mediterranean.
Today, we have entered a dramatically transformed world where unexpected pivot events, globalized supply chain economics, and unraveling social formations are moving people and community into a fully online world. The field of Anthropology now faces the idea of “fieldwork” that is not located in a geographic space. Anthropologists have started conducting ethnography of online spaces such as digital gaming and hacker communities. This course examines moving image as a space where fieldwork can be done, by working with materials stored online, in archives, and shared on physical media. The practitioners in this field are outside the academy–filmmakers, installation artists, performers, online vloggers, social media influencers–who work with archives created by others. We will examine evolving forms of visual culture, in museums, streaming media, mobile devices, zoomcasting, etc., and practitioners who rework found footage to build new meanings. Anthropology has a tradition of parsing moving image, especially because pioneering ethnographic films cannot be screened today without contextualization. We will consider the concept of “edge of frame,” whereby materials captured by a journalist decades ago are chosen for new meanings by an artist in a radically different context. We will trace a history of human tendency toward media remix, in the context of rapid technology changes, new historical conjunctures, changing conceptions of social forms, and new forms of public gathering, as mediated by anthropology. We will read accounts from film studies, anthropology, and history, interspersed with viewing films, browsing documentations of art installations, and zoom sessions with practicing filmmakers and artists.
Human beings create second, social, skins for themselves. Across history and around the world, everyone designs interfaces between their bodies and the world around them. From pre-historic ornaments to global industry, clothing has been a crucial feature of people’s survival, desires, and identity. This course studies theories of clothing from the perspectives of art history, anthropology, psychology, economics, sociology, design, and sustainability. Issues to be studied include gender roles, craft traditions, global textile trade, royal sumptuary law, the history of European fashion, dissident or disruptive styles, blockbuster museum costume exhibitions, and the environmental consequences of what we wear today. Required 1 hour a week TA led section to be arranged.
This seminar considers recent developments necessitated by classroom restrictions during the COVID-!9 crisis. The course is designed to be flexible and some sessions may be held at NYC locations if conditions at the time permit, however, the experience of virtual communication is developing as one reads this course description. This course intends to advance visual skills that are both flexible and productive for communication in a global environment. Collaborating with creative educators from the digital and design fields living in Berlin, Germany, will enhance class participants' engagement and attention to online learning. The seminar's individual and collaborative projects and innovations can and will be useful well into the future with and without geographical and environmental restrictions. Integrated into skills learned in a traditional studio course is a series of four workshops introducing class participants to relevant approaches for extending the reach of their artistic work through innovative technologies. The workshops' core focus is on learning essential conceptual and practical art studio skills hand-in-hand with the knowledge of technology and software platforms (Miro, Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Premiere, SketchUp, Google Sheets, Google Slides, Keynote, Zoom, and Jitsi). By gaining facility both with the software platforms and collaborations without geographic restrictions, students have the opportunity to develop a broad range of communication strategies in digital and visual image production. Students will execute a series of individual and collaborative projects developed to enhance an understanding of visual subjects.
This course examines diversity at the societal, organizational, and individual levels. At the societal level, for example: How to measure the health of an economy? Growth in GDP is the current dominant metric. But organizational diversity might be a better measure if health is understood as the ability to adapt to sudden changes in the environment. What is the relationship between wealth and diverse principles of worth? At the organizational level: Under what conditions does racial and gender diversity contribute to higher team performance? Can a complex organization be managed according to diverse principles of evaluation? Moving to the individual level, how do we manage the multiple presentations of self in a diverse society?
Prerequisites: Instructor's permission. (Seminar). Theatre typically exceeds the claims of theory. What does this tell us about both theatre and theory? We will consider why theatre practitioners often provide the most influential theoretical perspectives, how the drama inquires into (among other things) the possibilities of theatre, and the various ways in which the social, spiritual, performative, political, and aesthetic elements of drama and theatre interact. Two papers, weekly responses, and a class presentation are required. Readings include Aristotle, Artaud, Bharata, Boal, Brecht, Brook, Castelvetro, Craig, Genet, Grotowski, Ibsen, Littlewood, Marlowe, Parks, Schechner, Shakespeare, Sowerby, Weiss, and Zeami. Application Instructions: E-mail Professor Austin Quigley (aeq1@columbia.edu) with the subject heading Drama, Theatre, Theory seminar. In your message, include basic information: your name, school, major, year of study, and relevant courses taken, along with a brief statement about why you are interested in taking the course. Admitted students should register for the course; they will automatically be placed on a wait list, from which the instructor will in due course admit them as spaces become available.
This one-credit tutorial has been designed to assist American Studies seniors as they (1) clarify their scholarly commitments, (2) develop the research questions to be explored in their capstone seminars, (3) identify relevant archives and the methods needs to analyze those archives, and (4) develop a basic familiarity with the scholars and texts driving conversations about their research topic. Meetings alternate between one-on-one tutorials with the instructor and peer discussions. Assignments focus on explorations of ideas and literatures, culminating in a research proposal.
How do founders and their new ventures change the world? Changes in technology and society are increasing the power of small teams to impact everything. Startups, large corporations, social groups and governments are increasingly focused on the power of innovation to solve the world’s hardest problems. The ideas and patterns driving this recent form of change-making build on frameworks defining the development of modern civilizations since the Renaissance. Venturing to Change the World introduces the intellectual foundations and practical aspects of founding a new venture. We explore the entrepreneurial mindset, team formation, idea selection, how ideas become products with markets, and the key steps in building a venture. Our scope is commercial as well as social ventures, and the course is appropriate not only for prospective founders but anyone who will operate in a society increasingly animated by entrepreneurial activity.
Initially, the emphasis is on understanding the challenges confronting leaders and developing skills to effectively deal with these obstacles. Beyond intelligence and technical know-how, what separates effective leaders from other team members is a set of social skills (e.g. impression management, self-awareness). This course identifies these critical leadership skills and provides ideas and tools for improving them. Then, the course considers how social intelligence skills fit the needs of managers at different stages of their careers. In early stages, managers need to achieve a good person-job fit, find mentors, and build an effective social network. At the mid-career stage, managers need to lead an effective unit with increasing complexity and responsibilities. Finally, the course examines challenges managers face at later career stages as they become partners, CFOs, CEOs, etc.
This course examines the basic methods data analysis and statistics that political scientists use in quantitative research that attempts to make causal inferences about how the political world works. The same methods apply to other kinds of problems about cause and effect relationships more generally. The course will provide students with extensive experience in analyzing data and in writing (and thus reading) research papers about testable theories and hypotheses. It will cover basic data analysis and statistical methods, from univariate and bivariate descriptive and inferential statistics through multivariate regression analysis. Computer applications will be emphasized. The course will focus largely on observational data used in cross-sectional statistical analysis, but it will consider issues of research design more broadly as well. It will assume that students have no mathematical background beyond high school algebra and no experience using computers for data analysis.
Prerequisites: At least sophomore standing recommended.
Corequisites: Computer Lab: TBD (50 minutes per week). Enrollment limited to 40 students: "L" sign-up through
eBear
.
Not an introductory-level course.
Barnard syllabus.
The course introduces students to the systematic study of political phenomena. Students will learn how to develop research questions and executable research designs. Then, taking an applied approach, students learn basic statistical and case study techniques for evaluating evidence and making empirical claims. No prior experience with statistics is assumed.
In this seminar, we will investigate ancient and indigenous art, materials, and aesthetics from areas of what is today Latin America. Taking advantage of New York’s unrivaled museum collections, we will research Pre-Columbian gold and silver work, as well as equally precious stone, shell, textile, and feather works created by artists of ancient Mexico, Central America, and Andean South America. We will also study latter-day histories of collecting, reception, display, appropriation, and activism that shape contemporary understandings of Pre-Columbian art.
“What is he?” murmurs one gray shadow of my forefathers to the other. “A writer of story-books! What kind of a business in life,—what mode of glorifying God, or being serviceable to mankind in his day and generation,—may that be? Why, the degenerate fellow might as well have been a fiddler! - Nathaniel Hawthorne, “The Custom House” (1850) , Fiction is one of the fine arts, deserving in its turn of all the honors and emoluments that have hitherto been reserved for the successful profession of music, poetry, painting, architecture. It is impossible to insist too much on so important a truth. - Henry James, “The Art of Fiction” (1884) , In any discussion of the novel, one must make it clear whether one is talking about the novel as a form of amusement, or as a form of art. … Amusement is one thing; enjoyment of art is another. - Willa Cather, “The Novel Démeublé” (1922) , Can fiction be an art? While we may be inclined to say “yes” today, in the nineteenth century the reputation of fiction writing – novels, tales, short stories, and sketches – was by no means so secure. Novelists were more likely to be considered entertainers or “story- tellers” than serious artists, and novels were usually thought of as frivolous at best and immoral at worst, and certainly not worthy of serious scrutiny or consideration. How did the reputation of fiction writing in America develop such that novels could be considered certifiably “artistic?”This course examines the novels, short fiction, and critical writings of three important American writers: Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry James, and Willa Cather. While very different in very many ways, these three authors shared a belief that fiction was a serious business, and every bit as much an art as painting, poetry, sculpture, music, or other “fine” arts. They also all shared an interest in representing these various fine arts and the artists that make them in their novels and stories, often using the figure of the painter, the sculptor, the actor, or the singer in order to explore, develop, and justify their own fictional practice. In other words, this class will examine “the art of fiction” in at least two ways: both by looking at the representation of art and artists in the fiction of these three writers, and also by examining how such representations help these writers to make fiction an art in its own right. This course asks: This course asks: What ideas about the “fine arts” led to the exclusion of novels? Are there reliable criteria
Prerequisites: Instructors permission (Seminar). Although Socrates takes a notoriously dim view of persuasion and the art that produces it, the Platonic dialogues featuring him both theorize and practice a range of rhetorical strategies that become the nuts and bolts of persuasive argumentation. This seminar will read a number of these dialogues, including Apology, Protagoras, Ion, Gorgias, Phaedrus, Menexenus and Republic, followed by Aristoles Rhetoric, the rhetorical manual of Platos student that provides our earliest full treatment of the art. Application instructions: E-mail Prof. Eden (khe1@columbia.edu) with your name, school, major, year of study, and relevant courses taken, along with a brief statement about why you are interested in taking the course. Admitted students should register for the course; they will automatically be placed on a wait list from which the instructor will in due course admit them as spaces become available.
This class aims to introduce students to the logic of social scientific inquiry and research design. Although it is a course in political science, our emphasis will be on the science part rather than the political part — we’ll be reading about interesting substantive topics, but only insofar as they can teach us something about ways we can do systematic research. This class will introduce students to a medley of different methods to conduct social scientific research.
Many of us are drawn to sociology because we care about making the world more just. One important promise of the discipline is that social research can help direct efforts toward progressive social change. And yet, people and organizations on the front lines of grassroots action are often not privy to social-science research and vice versa. This course will create an opportunity for active engagement between students doing sociology and a local organization working for social change. Before the semester begins, the instructor(s) will have secured a commitment to a partnership with a community organization and planned a research or action project for the students to complete over the course of a semester. During the class, students will be expected to actively study and/or participate in the project designed by the instructor and organization leaders. The action/research may take the form of participant observation (taking part in the activities of the organization/campaign and analyzing your experiences); interviews (conducting interviews with members and leaders from an organization or campaign); historical analysis (studying the origins and development of the organization(s) or campaign(s)); or something else entirely. Students will also read, discuss, and write about literature on scholarly-community partnerships, collective-action models, and relevant social issues. We will study a combination of scholarly work, practical organizing advice, and case studies. This course is intended to be one semester of a two-semester course. Students may take either Part I or II or both. The opportunity to take two semesters (and engage with two different projects) should allow students to engage more deeply and broadly with the material and relationship with the organization.
This is the required discussion section for
POLS UN3720.
From “diversity management” in the workplace to the “Ministry of McKinsey” that dominates various Gulf monarchies, the discourses, rhetorics, “visions,” and recommendations of consultants proliferate globally as we careen from one endless crisis to another. This reading intensive course will explore the histories, aesthetics, affects, and logics that have produced this shadowy, yet cheerful figure of “the consultant.” Critically, the course also explores how the figure of the consultant transforms ideas of knowledge-production, political responsibility, urban forms, imperialism, and ideas of the future. Students will thus explore forms of professionalization and expertise, new office cultures, the work of public relations, optimization, management, and design. While the proximity of the consultant to the anthropologist is of particular interest, students will read widely across different academic disciplines which include critical architecture, art history, literature, histories of capitalism, media and technology studies. The course will also consider how the figure of “the consultant” takes up, but is also taken up by cinema, literature, memes, and contemporary art.
The class is an intensive reading of the prose and poetry of Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman and Emily Dickinson. Through detailed analysis of Emerson’s
Essays
we will try to understand his philosophy as an effort to radically reformulate traditional concepts of identity, thinking, and everyday living, and investigate the politics that guided his philosophical efforts, especially his stance on slavery and his activism against the Cherokee removals. But we will also be interested in his thinking on dreams, visions and mental transports and in order to ask how those experiences come to model his understanding of personal identity and bodily integrity. In Thoreau, we will look closely into ideas about the art of living and his theory of architecture, as well as quotidian practices of dwelling, eating or cooking, as ways to come to terms with one’s own life. We will pay special attention to Thoreau’s understanding of thinking as walking, as well as the question of space vs. time and we will spend a lot of time figuring his theory of living as mourning. With Whitman we will attend to his new poetics and investigate its relation to forms of American Democracy. We will also want to know how the Civil War affected Whitman’s poetics both in terms of its formal strategies and its content. Finally, we will try to understand how ideas and values of transcendentalist philosophy fashion poetry of Emily Dickinson both in its form and its content. We will thus be looking at Dickinson’s famous fascicles but also into such questions as loss, avian and vegetal life and the experience of the embodied more generally.
Prerequisites: None formally; instructor may recommend introductory or advanced course in their subfield For joint Faculty-Student research on a deisgnated topic of the instructor's choice. Students will critically engage with scholarly debates, formulate research designs, analyze or interpret data, and learn to summarize and present findings. Apply directly to the instructor. Can be taken once for elective credit toward the major.
Randomized experimentation is an important methodology in political science. In this course, we will discuss the logic of experimentation, its strengths and weaknesses compared to other methodologies, and the ways in which experimentation has been -- and could be -- used to investigate political phenomena. Students will learn how to interpret, design, and execute experiments.
This is the required discussion section for POLS UN3768.
This course deals with the scholarship on gender and sexuality in African history. The central themes of the course will be changes and continuities in gender performance and the politics of gender and sexual difference within African societies, the social, political, and economic processes that have influenced gender and sexual identities, and the connections between gender, sexuality, inequality, and activism at local, national, continental, and global scales.
From its beginnings, film has been preoccupied with law: in cops and robbers silent films, courtroom drama, police procedural, judge reality show, or all the scenes that fill our media-saturated world. What do films and other audio-visual media tell us about what it’s like to come before the law, or about such substantive issues as what counts as murder, war crimes, torture, sexual abuse? How do films model the techniques that lawyers use to sway the passions of their audiences? How do they model the symbolism of their gestures, icons, images? If films and other audio-visual media rewrite legal events, what is their effect: on law? on legal audiences? How is the experience of being a film spectator both like and unlike the experience of being a legal subject? This course investigates such questions by looking at representations of law in film and other audio-visual media. We will seek to understand, first, how film represents law, and, second,how film attempts to shape law (influencing legal norms, intervening in legal regimes). The seminar’s principal texts will be the films themselves, but we will also read relevant legal cases and film theory in order to deepen our understanding of both legal and film regimes. *Students should email Professor Peters (peters@columbia.edu
) the following: school, year, major, a short description of why you would like to take the class, and previous relevant classes taken.*
Students who wish to do an independent study project (I.S.P.), should speak with a Political Science faculty member willing to serve as sponsor, then fill out a Request for Approval of Credit for Independent Study (see Registrars link below) and obtain signatures from the sponsor and from our Department Chair. File this form with the Committee on Programs and Academic Standing, which must approve all requests. (It must be filed with the C.P.A.S. well before the Registrars program-filing deadline for the semester of the I.S.P.) Note that no credit is given for an internship or job experience in or by itself, but credit is given for an academic research paper written in conjunction with an internship, subject to the procedures outlined above. The internship and the I.S.P. can be in the same semester, or you may do the I.S.P. in the semester following the internship. A project approved for three or four points counts as an elective course for the purpose of the ten-course major or five-course minor requirement. No more than two such three- or four-point projects may be used for the major, and no more than one for the minor. An independent study project may not be used to satisfy either the colloquium or senior seminar requirement. Each instructor is limited to sponsoring one independent study project per semester. The Registrar will assign a POLS BC 3799 section and call number unique to the faculty sponsor. The Registrars ISP form: http://www.barnard.edu/sites/default/files/inline/indstudy.pdf. The Political Science faculty: http://polisci.barnard.edu/faculty-directory.
Prerequisites: (CHEE E3010) CHEE E3010. Corequisites: EAEE E3255 Experiments on fundamental aspects of Earth and environmental engineering with emphasis on the applications of chemistry, biology and thermodynamics to environmental processes: energy generation, analysis and purification of water, environmental biology, and biochemical treatment of wastes. Students will learn the laboratory procedures and use analytical equipment firsthand, hence demonstrating experimentally the theoretical concepts learned in class.
Guided, independent, in-depth research culminating in the senior thesis in the spring. Includes discussion about scientific presentations and posters, data analysis, library research methods and scientific writing. Students review work in progress and share results through oral reports. Weekly seminar to review work in progress and share results through oral and written reports. Prerequisite to EESC W3901.
(Formerly R4601) New York City is the most abundant visual arts resource in the world. Visits to museums, galleries, and studios on a weekly basis. Students encounter a broad cross-section of art and are encouraged to develop ideas about what is seen. The seminar is led by a practicing artist and utilizes this perspective. Columbia College and General Studies Visual Arts Majors must take this class during their junior year. If the class is full, please visit http://arts.columbia.edu/undergraduate-visual-arts-program.
Prerequisites: (EAEE E3800) EAEE E3800 Corequisites: EAEE E4003 A continuation of EAEE E3800, with emphasis on the principles underlying water analysis for inorganic, organic, and bacterial contaminants.
Corequisites: MATH UN1201,APMA E2000 Modeling, description, and classification of signals and systems. Continuous-time systems. Time domain analysis, convolution. Frequency domain analysis, transfer functions. Fourier series. Fourier and Laplace transforms. Discrete-time systems and the Z transform.
Is the political novel a genre? It depends on your understanding both of politics and of the novel. If politics means parties, elections, and governing, then few novels of high quality would qualify. If on the other hand “the personal is the political,” as the slogan of the women’s movement has it, then almost everything the novel deals with is politics, and few novels would not qualify. This seminar will try to navigate between these extremes, focusing on novels that center on the question of how society is and ought to be constituted. Since this question is often posed ambitiously in so-called “genre fiction” like thrillers and sci-fi, which is not always honored as “literature,” it will include some examples of those genres as well as uncontroversial works of the highest literary value like Melville’s “Benito Cereno,” Ellison’s “Invisible Man,” and Camus’s “The Plague.”
Fundamental considerations of wave mechanics; design philosophies; reliability and risk concepts; basics of fluid mechanics; design of structures subjected to blast; elements of seismic design; elements of fire design; flood considerations; advanced analysis in support of structural design.
Faculty supervised independent study for undergraduate Film & Media Studies majors. Must have faculty approval prior to registration.
A practical and multi-disciplinary exploration of research methods and interpretive strategies used in feminist scholarship, focusing on larger questions about how we know what we know, and who and what knowledge is for.
This lab course is an optional addition to the WGSS junior colloquia courses “Theorizing Feminist Activisms” and “Feminist Inquiry”; students must take one of those courses simultaneously with this lab. The lab gives students an opportunity to gain practical experience with one or more qualitative research methods that are frequently used in feminist and gender studies. It will be particularly valuable as groundwork for senior thesis research, but all students enrolled in Theorizing Activisms or Feminist Inquiry are encouraged to take the lab to deepen their understanding of practical and ethical issues in conducting research in support of social change.
This course provides a panoramic, but intensive, inquiry into the ways that archaeology and its methods for understanding the world have been marshaled for debate in issues of public interest. It is designed to examine claims to knowledge of the past through the lenses of alternative epistemologies and a series of case-based problems that range from the academic to the political, legal, cultural, romantic, and fraudulent.
Prerequisites: an introductory programming course. Fundamentals of computer organization and digital logic. Boolean algebra, Karnaugh maps, basic gates and components, flipflops and latches, counters and state machines, basics of combinational and sequential digital design. Assembly language, instruction sets, ALU’s, single-cycle and multi-cycle processor design, introduction to pipelined processors, caches, and virtual memory.
A year-long course for outstanding senior majors who want to conduct research in primary sources on a topic of their choice in any aspect of history, and to write a senior thesis possibly leading toward departmental honors.
Everything we contact has been designed. Design makes and unmakes desires on a global scale. It organizes our lives—from the way we move to the interface that tracks our movements. We’ve trained for the end for a while now, apocalypse is announced on every image channel. In a world, soon impossible to physically inhabit, the things we consume now consume us. The stakes have never been higher. To make a new world, we must use design. Our planet need not be disposed. It is an infrastructure for another one. To make contact with it we need to understand design as a value system for propelling possibility, not possession. The designed world requires new relation to things and fullness of use. As we read, write, experience and make our own projects,
Designing Design
helps us: acquire intimate knowledge of how we got here, recognize our historical allies and foes, and foster imagination and intelligence to live and make responsibly. This course requires no prior design experience.
Why do certain mental illnesses only appear in specific regions of the world? What processes of translation, adaption, and “indigenization” take place when Western psychiatric diagnostic categories, pharmaceutical regimens, and psychodynamic treatments travel to China, South Korea and Japan? How do East Asian therapeutic modalities such as Traditional Chinese Medicine and the practice of qigong destabilize biomedical assumptions about the etiology and treatment of mental illness? This course engages these and other questions through anthropological analysis of the experiences of people struggling with mental illness, the mental health practitioners who treat them, and the broader economic, social and political contexts that shape these interactions.
Prerequisites: Enrollment in the course is open to 18 undergraduates who have completed at least one core course in human rights and /or international law. This seminar introduces students to the field of health and human rights. It examines how to advocate for and implement public health strategies using a human rights framework. It takes note of current international and domestic debates about the utility of a ;human rights-based approach; to health, discusses methods and ethics of health-related human rights research, and examines case studies of human rights investigations to explore the role of human rights analysis in promoting public health.
Advertising emerged in modern societies as they developed into bourgeois market economies. As a creative industry involving verbal/visual communication and technology, it is intertwined with cultural production in general, and many of its products can be seen as artistic in their own right. As it both caters to and creates a consumer public with needs and desires, it is intertwined with broad social and ideological currents, and can provide an angle for their historical analysis. This course posits analysis of a “discursive formation” that includes the language of advertising as well as literary, cinematographic, and other social languages engaging publicity as a vehicle for the study of modern/contemporary Spanish cultural history, from the birth of the modern constitutional monarchy (1812), through the Franco dictatorship (1939-75), and into the transition to present-day democracy. Topics will include the evolution and professionalization of Spanish advertising itself, advertising and aesthetics, early bourgeois reflection on art vs. commerce, the special role of women as both publicity and public, changing views on consumer culture, and marketing’s function in consolidating substate political identities.
Talk about “individuality”, about being (or becoming) “yourself” is all around us. But what exactly does this mean? What is genuine individuality, and how can we develop it, in ourselves (though self-development) and in others (by designing appropriate educational institutions)? What is the relationship between being an individual and being a part of society? Is there a tension between the non-conformism often associated with genuine individuality on the one hand, and the demands of community and good citizenship, on the other? Can educational institutions be designed to fulfill both those demands (to the extent they are distinct)? And how might oppressive social institutions hinder the development of “individuality”? In this course, we will explore these and related questions by drawing on both the classics of philosophy of education (Plato, Rousseau, Nietzsche, Dewey, Du Bois), and on relevant literary material that is in conversation with the philosophical texts (Rilke, Tolstoy, Woolf).
This interdisciplinary course examines fault lines of contemporary collective life from a theoretical and ethnographic perspective. We will explore theoretical approaches to ‘the social’ and how different theorists envision it to come into being. Drawing from political anthropology, urban studies, sociology and cultural studies, we will interrogate what is at stake when terms like the collective, community and solidarity are invoked and trace changes over time and across geographical places and political formations. As a microcosm of society, cities are a crucial site of analysis in this course. We will be attuned to the way social difference structures visions of collective life and ideas of who can and who cannot belong. The course emphasizes the political relevance of emotions: emotions both reflect and transform social relations. This appears particularly important as we are observing a shift from liberal democracy towards more authoritarian forms of government in many places of the world. Public spheres saturated with intense emotional states figure prominently in this context. We will examine a range of feelings (including hate, anger, contempt, and fear) and ask how they (re)structure the relation between the individual and the collective and of collective life more broadly. Which modes of social interaction do they give rise to and which do they foreclose?
Saigon and Hanoi served as competing capitals of the Republic of Vietnam (RVN) in the south and the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) in the north (1954-1975). They were symbols of warring states, one home to a fledgling republic, the other the seat of communist power. Since the late 19th century, they have also been sites of Vietnam’s most dramatic transformations. As such, they occupy an important place in the historiography of modern Vietnam, not least in ongoing debates over the Indochina wars, Vietnamese nationalism, and regional difference. This course examines Saigon and Hanoi as social, political, and cultural spaces, and as representations of their respective states during the war. We first consider the significance of regionalism in fashioning “new ways of being Vietnamese” and examine how colonial rule reinforced those distinctions. We devote the rest of the semester to reading an array of works on the history of these cities. For the colonial period, we examine colonial urbanism, the lives of the poor, intellectuals and their ideas, as well as currents of political agitation and cultural iconoclasm. For the post-World War II period, we will focus on the distinct political cultures that took shape in the RVN and DRV. Finally, we end by looking at Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City) and Hanoi in the post-war era, particularly after the Socialist Republic of Vietnam instituted sweeping economic reforms in the 1980s. Each week, we will discuss works social, cultural, and political history of Saigon and Hanoi, all the while keeping in mind their divergent trajectories in the three decades following World War II.
Prerequisites: Permission of the instructor. Enrollment limited to 15. Preregistration required. Sophomore Standing. Explores migration as a gendered process and what factors account for migratory differences by gender across place and time; including labor markets, education demographic and family structure, gender ideologies, religion, government regulations and legal status, and intrinsic aspects of the migratory flow itself.
Prerequisites: Limited to Barnard Anthropology Seniors. Offered every Fall. Discussion of research methods and planning and writing of a Senior Essay in Anthropology will accompany research on problems of interest to students, culminating in the writing of individual Senior Essays. The advisory system requires periodic consultation and discussion between the student and her adviser as well as the meeting of specific deadlines set by the department each semester. Limited to Barnard Senior Anthropology Majors.
If a student wishes to pursue a research project or a course of study not offered by the department, he or she may apply for an Independent Study. Application: 1. cover sheet with signatures of the professor who will serve as the project sponsor and departmental administrator or director of undergraduate studies; 2. project description in 750 words, including any preliminary work in the field, such as a lecture course(s) or seminar(s); 3. bibliography of primary and secondary works to be read or consulted. Please visit the English and Comparative Literature Department website at http://english.columbia.edu/undergraduate/forms for the cover sheet form or see the administrator in 602 Philosophy Hall for the cover sheet form and to answer any other questions you may have.
This course relies primarily on visual materials to familiarize students with the history of Japan from the beginning of the nineteenth century through the present. It follows a chronological order, introducing students to various realms of Japanese visual culture—from woodblock prints to film, anime, and manga—along with the historical contexts that they were shaped by, and in turn helped shape. Special attention will paid to the visual technologies of nation-building, war, and empire; to historical interactions between Japanese and Euro-American visual culture; to the operations of still versus moving images; and to the mass production of visual commodities for the global marketplace. Students who take the course will emerge not only with a better understanding of Japan’s modern historical experience, but also with a more discerning eye for the ways that images convey meaning and offer access to the past.
What is the end of a monument, and when does it happen? On October 12th, 1992, on the quincentennial anniversary of Christopher Columbus’ arrival in the Caribbean, the Organización Campesina Emiliano Zapata marched into the city of San Cristóbal de Las Casas and knocked down the statue of Diego de Mazariegos. In subsequent reporting on the event, a participant named Mariano argued that the monument was a “symbol of the conquest, colonialism, exploitation, racism and plunder,” and that toppling the statue represented five centuries of popular, indigenous struggle against these forms of repression (cuartopoder.mx). Criticism of these spectacular instances of popular resistance often seize on their inability to destabilize the structural edifice underlying the material symbol, as if the monument were only the tip of the iceberg. As recent movements across Latin America and the US have rearticulated critiques of monuments as place markers for ideologies of settler colonialism, capitalism, anti-blackness and patriarchal notions of power, however, they have also intersected with movements against land theft, resource and labor rights, reproductive justice, abolition, and self-determination. In the process, these popular debates have engendered new ways of thinking about social space and other forms of monumentalism that claim to be reparative, critical, functional, or ephemeral in their engagement with local history, existing or destroyed monuments, and the built environment. In this seminar, we will explore historical and contemporary issues around space, place, memory, and belonging, in order to understand what forms of cultural practice emerge through monumentalism. We will also examine how community actors, activists, writers, artists, and political figures engage with the spatial politics of memory, and actualize, complicate or attempt to dismantle legacies of settler colonialism, white nationalism and resource extraction. We will take as our point of departure an understanding of monuments and their meaning on the Columbia/Barnard campus, and in the City of New York more broadly. Then, we will consider a range of theorizations and interventions on monuments in Buenos Aires, Brazil, Chiapas, Ciudad Juárez, France, Ibadan, Lof Campo Maripe, Nassau, and beyond. Later, we will question the problem of aesthetics and the role of art discourse in determining the character or qualities of a monument. Finally, we will discuss possible relationships between archives, memorials, and monumentali
Prerequisites: the instructors permission. This seminar aims to show what an anthropologically informed, ecocritical cultural studies can offer in this moment of intensifying ecological calamity. The course will not only engage significant works in anthropology, ecocriticism, philosophy, literature, politics, and aesthetics to think about the environment, it will also bring these works into engaged reflection on living in the end times (borrowing cultural critic Slavoj Zizeks phrase). The seminar will thus locate critical perspectives on the environment within the contemporary worldwide ecological crisis, emphasizing the ethnographic realities of global warming, debates on nuclear power and energy, and the place of nature. Drawing on the professors long experience in Japan and current research on the aftermath of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant disaster, the seminar will also take care to unpack the notion of end times, with its apocalyptic implications, through close considerations of works that take on the question of ecocatastrophe in our times. North American and European perspectives, as well as international ones (particularly ones drawn from East Asia), will give the course a global reach.
This course explores some of the main visual trends, movements, and concerns that were discussed and performed in Latin America during the 20th and 21st Centuries. The class is structured around clusters of visual and literary production that have women artists at their core. We will devote each module to an in-depth study of one female artist and the ripple effects that her work and ideas produced in their spheres of influence—from visuality to politics. We will consider questions like: How did women artists inhabit the artistic space as one of emancipation and critique? How did Latin American artists incorporate and transform the artistic influences coming from Western Europe and North America? How did artistic practices influence and reflect local and regional contexts? How do these women engage with conceptualism and how does this engagement affect their work? Some of the artist we will review are: Tarsila do Amaral (Brazil, 1886 – 1973); Frida Kahlo (Mexico, 1907-1954); Lygia Clark (Brazil, 1920 -1988); Gego (Venezuela, 1912-1994); Beatriz González (Colombia, 1938); Marta Minujín (Argentina, 1943); and Diamela Eltit (1949). The course will incorporate talks by museum practitioners that have dealt with exhibiting and presenting the work of these women in non-Latin American contexts. Students are expected to visit local museum and engage directly with the objects of study of the class.
Prerequisites: Written permission from instructor and approval from adviser. This course may be repeated for credit, but no more than 6 points of this course may be counted toward the satisfaction of the B.S. degree requirements. Candidates for the B.S. degree may conduct an investigation in applied mathematics or carry out a special project under the supervision of the staff. Credit for the course is contingent upon the submission of an acceptable thesis or final report.
Prerequisites: Written permission from instructor and approval from adviser. This course may be repeated for credit, but no more than 6 points of this course may be counted toward the satisfaction of the B.S. degree requirements. Candidates for the B.S. degree may conduct an investigation in applied physics or carry out a special project under the supervision of the staff. Credit for the course is contingent upon the submission of an acceptable thesis or final report.
Candidates for the B.S. degree may conduct an investigation of some problem in chemical engineering or applied chemistry or carry out a special project under the supervision of the staff. Credit for the course is contingent upon the submission of an acceptable thesis or final report. No more than 6 points in this course may be counted toward the satisfaction of the B.S. degree requirements.