FYF@Innis Seminars

Cities have been described as places of desire and places of fear. They pulse with life, bringing together people from different class, gender, and ethnic backgrounds, simultaneously giving rise to a sense of freedom and oppression, a sense of belonging and alienation. This course will explore the city as a physical reality that shapes our lives, but is also a projection of our deepest imaginings. Through readings of philosophical and sociological texts by influential theorists of the city, we will consider various ancient and modern conceptions of urban space and subjectivity. Alongside these theoretical readings, we will also examine literary and filmic representations of the city as a space of desire, memory and power.

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.

MAT195 explores the appearance of mathematics in our everyday world. This will be achieved by learning mathematical concepts, conducting experiments, using mathematical software — including Phyphox, GeoGebra, and Excel — and playing with physical models.

This course examines the political geographies of transnational migration. It asks 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. It seeks to extend our understandings of migrants, borders, and mobility, and it explores the processes through which mobility is produced, delimited and structured. We will consider the transnational politics of migration, the militarization of border zones, and the political spaces of migrant displacement, dispossession, and dislocation. The seminar readings focus on classical paradigms as well as emerging approaches in immigration studies.

Anthropology has much to say about death. There is foundational literature on sacrifice, suicide, and the rites surrounding the end of life. Anthropology also has a lot to say about violence: war, conflict, revolution. But at the nexus of death and violence lies murder, a culturally and socially salient phenomenon that garners less scholarly attention. This seminar will explore what constitutes murder in different cultural and historical contexts, by reading across anthropology, cultural studies, and film studies.

Understanding disability as a cultural concept — not a medical condition or personal misfortune — that describes how human variation matters in the world, this course asks: how do literary texts represent physical and intellectual disability?

This course will use an interdisciplinary perspective to explore the quirks, achievements, and puzzles of the human mind. Topics could include how technology and tools extend our minds, or the light that our ability (and inability) to reason sheds on human nature.

This first-year foundation course is a survey of sound film (with a brief selection of silent shorts) on the topic of how popular cinemas have represented going to school. Looking at one film and one scholarly text a week, the course will offer an introduction to the close reading of film texts, reading and writing film criticism, and the fundamentals of film history. By engaging with only one film/reading per week, the course emphasizes depth over breadth. Texts for the course may include excerpts from Corrigan’s A Short Guide to Writing About Film, Sturken and Cartwright’s Practices of Looking, Staiger’s Interpreting Films, and Prince’s Movies and Meaning, along with selected criticism on the movies screened. Those films may include Zero for Conduct, Aparajito, Tom Brown’s School Days, Tea and Sympathy, If, Rock and Roll High School, Mean Girls, School Daze, Blackboard Jungle, or Lady Bird. Restricted to first-year students.

Art causes scandals for many reasons, provoking a range of consequences, including censorship, cuts to government funding of the arts or even destruction of the work in question. In this course we will consider a number of kinds of art scandal arising from exhibition in public galleries and urban spaces, including those that have to do with legal issues such as plagiarism and vandalism; aesthetic objections on the part of the public, ranging from perceived obscenity to simple resentment of abstract art; racism; sacrilege; and political subversion, amongst others.