The Covid pandemic exposed just how ill-equipped governments are to truly care for people worldwide. Five years later, are we any better at caring? Drawing on Japan’s resilience in the face of societal and environmental challenges, we’ll dive into how communities and spaces of care might be built and maintained, at CC and beyond. At the end of this course, you’ll walk away with a more community-centered and socially engaged approach on to “How to CC.”

Identity is informed by culture, inheritance, and more recently by genetic testing. In the current era, it is important to recognize the limitations of genetics on who we are. This course will examine cellular components of inheritance and their relationship to identity. Students will learn about human genome, genome testing, and genome editing technologies. They will examine elements of identity in the context of ability and disability. We will discuss ethics and language of genomics along with limitations of our understanding of biology and inheritance.

Comedy is profitable component of popular culture, a topic impossible define, a means to satirize power but also 'punch down' on marginalized communities, a defense ('I was only joking') used to dismiss offensive remarks, a way of finding affective relief and building political solidarity in moments of crisis, and more. Perhaps unsurprisingly, then, the study of comedy requires an interdisciplinary framework to tease out its many complexities and cultural resonances. This course examines the function and impact of comedy, especially when it is entrenched in discourses about race, gender, sexuality, and other social markers. We will provide a space for students to engage and participate in conversations that are concerned with comedy, including stand-up, situation comedies, film, political satire, and other forms, as a contentious and contradictory space with resistive, generative, and problematic qualities.

In this course, we will use dance and political science to study the critical role of movement and gesture in politics. From the symbolic use of body language (e.g., gesturing) during speeches to protest marches, physical expression can shape public perception, galvanize support, and challenge authority. Movement and gesture in politics convey power, solidarity, and emotion in ways that words alone cannot. This interdisciplinary course will explore creative process by focusing on five core principles —collaboration, deconstruction, repetition, reaction, and listening. Each principle will be explored from the perspectives of both dance and political science. For instance, when focusing on the principle of deconstruction, we will employ choreographic compositional techniques to analyze how embodied knowledge can be manipulated, as well as, creative process approaches to deconstruct critical complementary arguments and theories of political science research.

Resilience–the ability of an individual or system to return to a stable state following disturbance–is important for systems and selves to thrive in increasingly complex and unpredictable contexts. Cultivating Resilience is an interdisciplinary course that explores cultivated and natural ecological systems through Western and Non-Western ways of knowing. Emphasizing field experiences and community agriculture, we will examine the role of reciprocity in maintaining stability, biodiversity, and ecosystem function at local gardens and open spaces. Students will develop tools for reflection, communication, artistic expression, and critical inquiry in ecological and sociocultural disciplines. Students will apply their understanding of resilience and reciprocity to develop personal capacity and deeper conceptions of community at Colorado College.

As you enter college, you will be consuming a great deal of knowledge, and will end up producing knowledge as well. In this course, we will think critically about the politics of knowledge production in the humanities and social sciences, two academic disciplines that rely on different methods and ideas of data. So, we’ll be asking questions like, How do we know what we know? What does “good” evidence look like? How do we claim authority in knowledge production? Whose stories and perspectives are privileged, why, and with what consequences? Together, we’ll come to better understand how knowledge is constructed and what methods and perspectives can help us determine our own learning journeys.