FYF@Innis Seminars

POL192H1 introduces students to citizen political participation in democracies, with a focus on Canadian case studies. We examine theories of political participation and a range of methods by which citizens engage in political life including social movements, political party membership, deliberative mini-publics and more. We will also examine debates about the appropriate role for citizens in governance and considers barriers to equity in political participation in Canada.

From environmental disasters and ecological collapse to climate change denial and celebrations of nature and wilderness, we will explore the diverse ways humans imagine and write about the natural world and the consequences of such writing. We will study a variety of nonfiction texts, images, and videos about ecology, the environment, nature, wilderness, and sustainability as we consider what these terms mean.

This first-year seminar explores radical traditions of education beyond and in resistance to formal schooling. Transnational in scope — and journeying from the late nineteenth century to the present day — we will study the pedagogical innovations and grassroots struggles of anarchic youth, guerrilla intellectuals, and feminist revolutionaries who used education broadly, and historical inquiry in particular, as tools for empowerment and collective liberation.

This course has two goals. It aims to familiarize students with current challenges and dynamics within Arab societies. It seeks to help students develop a critical perspective on prevalent analytical frameworks such as culturalist, orientalist analyses applied to the region. To achieve this, we will use a controversy, conflict, or current event as an entry point to illuminate one or more dimensions of the society we are studying. The countries studied will vary from session to session to reflect the socio-economic, cultural, religious, and political diversity of the region, as well as the common challenges facing these countries.

The term "world-making” is often used to refer to transmedia storytelling, or the creation of story-worlds across serial narratives in entertainment media, ranging from games to comics. EAS197H1 looks at the ways that media producers and fans, alike, engage with media worlds. More importantly, the course situates these media worlds within a broader conception of "world-making," namely, the geopolitical and economic configuration of modern East Asia.

This course examines the political geographies of transnational migration, asking how spaces of migration and mobility are political — and how migration politics are tied to inequalities wrought through intersecting histories of race, class, and gender. We extend our understandings of migrants, borders, and mobility, and explore the processes through which mobility is produced, delimited, and structured. We also consider the transnational politics of migration, the militarization of border zones, and the political spaces of migrant displacement, dispossession, and dislocation.

This first-year seminar introduces key ideas in anthropology, psychoanalysis, and religion on bodies, personhood, and forms of reason. Focusing on anthropological accounts of personhood, Artificial Intelligence, and medieval and contemporary forms of mysticism, we ask how different technologies of reason may co-exist, emerge, and collide while shaping politically different forms of being in the world.

This seminar examines the meaning and mathematics of probabilities, and how they arise in our everyday lives. Specific topics may include: the nature of coincidences, the concept of luck, games involving dice and cards, long run averages in casinos, margins of error in polls, the interpretation of medical studies, crime statistics, decision making, pseudorandomness, and Monte Carlo algorithms.

Films create story worlds, imaginary environments in which characters live and act, and where events, large and small, transpire. Some story worlds are elaborate, fanciful constructs (think of Disney’s animated films). Others stay close to reality (think of “docudramas”). But across the spectrum, all of them are framed by and provided with rules of time and space, of believable or impossible. This course offers an examination of selected story worlds from several periods of film history. Emphasis falls on the expansive story worlds of contemporary corporately-run media-franchise “universes,” like the cross-media “DC Universe.”