Spring 2024 Course Offerings

HONR 117 - Monsters and Monstrosity
From ancient myth to nineteenth-century freak shows, from medieval maps to modern conspiracy theories, monstrosity both frightens and fascinates. What makes someone monstrous, and what role do monsters play in our culture and society? This course will explore religious and and philosophical interpretations of monstrosity; social and psychological functions of monsters; and the role of race, gender, disability, and other forms of "otherness" in deeming certain bodies to be monstrous.

HONR 119 - Material World in Art
What would cause someone to physically attack an artwork? What does science tell us about the unanticipated changes in artworks over time? How difficult is it to move an artwork from one location to another? In our digital age we have become distanced from the material dimensions of making, transporting, encountering, and conserving artworks. This interdisciplinary course re-grounds visual art in the physical world, taking seriously the properties and interactions of art materials and the impacts of first-hand encounters with it. It also reveals specific aspects of art’s social significance that are not captured effectively in photography, such as the ways in which art’s materiality connects to spiritual, political, or technological practices. Looking at these issues in earlier periods of time sheds light on our own ideas about material, labor, time, and space.

HONR 129 - Philosophy of Science
The course will examine the major topics and issues of contemporary philosophy of science, including (but not limited to) the demarcation criteria of science, the rationality and objectivity of scientific theories, the verification and falsification of scientific theories, and the claims and merits of realism, pragmatism, empiricism, and constructivism. The course will also consider the ways in which various contexts of scientific activity (technological, social, historical, economic, political, personal) affects the practice and aims of science.

HONR 135 - Law & Society in a Changing Climate
This course will address the overlap between law, society and climate change with a specific focus on how and to what extend law can or could respond to "ruptures" of this magnitude. Broadly the course is structured around the way we use law to make cultural meaning, to structure access to resources and to allocate or resist power. Topics to be addressed in-depth include physical displacement of humans and other animals and the legal and social responses to those movements; the idea of displacement of responsibility and the deferring of crisis management from older to younger generations, and from wealthier, more powerful states to those with less; and the role of law and hope.

HONR 137 - Medical Anthropology
Medical anthropology examines affliction and healing in a cross-cultural perspective. It emphasizes the understanding of how health and healing are shaped by cultural and biological processes. It also analyzes the relations among health, illness, social institutions, power, and cultural representations. Medical anthropologists examine the ways in which global processes—health policies, epidemics, war and violence, inequalities—affect the life of individuals and communities.

HONR 139 - Victorians in Color
Bright dresses. Multiracial crowds. Lots of sex. Murderous wives. Tea. Labor activists. Those 6 bullet points encapsulate many complexities of the Victorian period. The Victorian era was not gray or sleepy. Rather, it was full of contradiction, debate, and rebellious figures. In this class, we read 19th-century British literature with a focus on understanding how the Victorians questioned and developed concepts that remain central to human experience. How did Victorians represent and define race? How do stories about scandalous marriages comment on restrictive laws? What do rebellious fictional wives tell us about feminism in the nineteenth century? What do we learn from studying Victorian pornography? How does detective fiction interrogate race? What do domestic servants reveal about family structures and labor dynamics? Students in this course will investigate those questions in a wide range of texts, and the reading list will include Lady Audley’s Secret (Mary Elizabeth Braddon), Jane Eyre (Charlotte Brontë), and The Moonstone (Wilkie Collins).

HONR 140 - Mass Incarceration
The United States incarcerates more people than any other country in the world. Scholars use the term “mass incarceration” to understand this phenomenon. We will look at how scholars from different disciplines have answered the most fundamental questions surrounding mass incarceration, including: Why does the US incarcerate so many people? Why are there such profound race, class, and gender-based disparities within the incarcerated population? And, what would a world look like that incarcerated less, or maybe even did not incarcerate at all? We will also consider the impact of mass incarceration on people and communities, including families, landscapes, and local economies, as well as how incarceration has been a site of cultural production, including writing, art, and music.

HONR 144: Health & Development

Certainly, a desire to "give back" and help make the world a better place is a noble ambition. Unfortunately, the road to perdition is paved with such good intentions. The data is clear that health development aid can do harm as well as good. In this course, we will explore why countries are poor, what can be done to alleviate their poverty, and some of the results of health and development aid schemes. This is a reading and discussion intensive type course that will familiarize students with current theories, and controversies in health and development. Working in this area is not easy. Idealists and do-gooders burn out quickly. Having an awareness of the major issues in development will assist you in being as effective as possible in your volunteer work or career as an aid worker. It will also make you a better informed citizen and voter. If you finish the course more confused than when you started the course, it simply means you now understand how complex health and development aid actually is.

HONR 145: Global Reproductive Politics
This course will explore reproductive practice, policies, and politics throughout the world. We will consider local practices of human reproduction and production -- the bearing and raising of children -- in a transnational context, exploring the ways power relations shape social practices of family formation across the globe in varying ways. We will consider this issue through a range of interdisciplinary sources including media, literature, ethnography, history, and public policy. This course will address such issues as sexuality, birth control, pregnancy, abortion, adoption, and child rearing in the context of particular social and cultural traditions as they are affected by global power relations.

125: PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION

The philosophy of religion, broadly defined, is the philosophical examination of religious reasoning. As practiced, however, the philosophy of religion usually gets narrowly focused on either the rationality of modern-western religion or the religiosity of modern-western philosophy. This course ventures a new approach in the philosophy of religion, one that is religiously diverse and historically grounded. As such, it seeks first to survey several different instances of reason-giving in several different religions of the world. It will then formally compare these instances of reason-giving in an effort to detect important and interesting similarities and differences between them. Finally, it will ask whether and how these instances and patterns can be critically evaluated with respect to their truth and value. Since this is a philosophy of religion course, particular emphasis will be placed on this third and final step: can one inquire into the truth and value of religious reasons and ideas? If so, how? If not, why not? Note that this class is designed to accompany Drake University's public program in comparative religion, The Comparison Project (http://comparisonproject.wordpress.drake.edu).

HONR 161 - Africa/Africans/Atlantic/Slavery
The immense growth of slavery and slave trade research in the last quarter century has made examinations of unfree labor a major issue for world research. Studies of Atlantic slavery have generated the bulk of that research, and as a result have challenged many traditional perceptions of that trade and its associated system of slavery. However, despite the unquestioned value of these recent analyses, most of these studies have looked at Atlantic slavery from the American side of the ocean. Consequently, the African nature of Atlantic slavery has often lacked close scrutiny. This course has two goals: 1) to root Atlantic slavery and its trade in its African context, and 2) to help incorporate recent research findings into popular understandings of the Atlantic trade. The major argument of this course is that one cannot know why the Atlantic trade happened as it did nor how Atlantic slavery developed as it did without understanding the context which produced the people who were sold into slavery. Therefore, the course looks at the influence political, social, economic, and cultural factors in Africa had on the making of slavery and the slave trade both in Africa and the Americas. In doing so, the course will challenge students to rethink their own notions of Atlantic slavery as they analyze and critique the ideas encountered in this course.

135:  LAW & SOC IN A CHANGE CLIMATE

This course will address the overlap between law, society and climate change with a specific focus on how and to what extend law can or could respond to "ruptures" of this magnitude. Broadly the course is structured around the way we use law to make cultural meaning, to structure access to resources and to allocate or resist power. Topics to be addressed in-depth include physical displacement of humans and other animals and the legal and social responses to those movements; the idea of displacement of responsibility and the deferring of crisis management from older to younger generations, and from wealthier, more powerful states to those with less; and the role of law and hope.

140: MASS INCARCERATION

The United States incarcerates more people than any other country in the world. Scholars use the term "mass incarceration" to understand this phenomenon. We will look at how scholars from different disciplines have answered the most fundamental questions surrounding mass incarceration, including: Why does the US incarcerate so many people? Why are there such profound race, class, and gender-based disparities within the incarcerated population? And, what would a world look like that incarcerated less, or maybe even did not incarcerate at all? We will also consider the impact of mass incarceration on people and communities, including families, landscapes, and local economies, as well as how incarceration has been a site of cultural production, including writing, art, and music.

141: DIGITAL RELIGION: JONESTOWN

This semester Digital Religion will analyze the Peoples Temple movement and their agricultural project in Jonestown, Guyana. This group, led by Jim Jones and an inner circle of devoted socialists, rose to prominence in the San Francisco Bay area in the 1970's, working on radical political issues, establishing communal living facilities, and emphasizing racial and economic equality. The group left the Bay Area for Guyana where it established a communal agricultural project. Ultimately, the group committed what they called "revolutionary suicide" in late 1978. In cooperation with the "Alternative Considerations of Jonestown and the Peoples Temple" project hosted by the San Diego State University, students will assist in the analysis and annotation of an online selection of documents originally produced by Jim Jones and members of the Peoples Temple.

191:  WOMEN AND HEBREW SCRIPTURES

The basics of the course include reading Biblical accounts involving women and various commentaries on those Biblical accounts with a critical eye. These accounts will include "Genesis", "The Red Tent", and "The Five Books of Miriam". The goal is to come to an understanding of how the Jewish Bible deals with issues involving women and how such an understanding can help us understand issues today.