Search Results
Your search for courses · during 25FA · tagged with AMST Democracy Activism · returned 17 results
-
AMST 100 Imagining America 6 credits
This course examines twentieth-century literature, film, and music in the U.S. to consider how newcomers first imagine this country and how, in turn, “America” sees them. We’ll trace how ideas of Americaness shift over time, reflecting on how understandings of citizenship, freedom, and rights depend on the variable meanings of race, gender, ethnicity, ability, and sexuality. We’ll pair our study of cultural expressions with readings in history, law, and sociology to better understand the complex ways in which “America” is perceived, written into existence, and contested.
Held for new first year students
- Fall 2025
- AI/WR1, Argument & Inquiry/WR1 IDS, Intercultural Domestic Studies
-
Student is a member of the First Year First Term class level cohort. Students are only allowed to register for one A&I course at a time. If a student wishes to change the A&I course they are enrolled in they must DROP the enrolled course and then ADD the new course. Please see our Workday guides Drop or 'Late' Drop a Course and Register or Waitlist for a Course Directly from the Course Listing for more information.
-
AMST 231 Contemporary Indigenous Activism 6 credits
Indigenous peoples across Turtle Island and the Pacific Islands are fighting to revitalize Indigenous languages, uphold tribal sovereignty, and combat violence against Indigenous women, among many other struggles. This course shines a light on contemporary Indigenous activism and investigates social justice through the lens of Indian Country, asking questions like: What tools are movements using to promote Indigenous resurgence? And what are the educational, gendered, environmental, linguistic, and religious struggles to which these movements respond? Students will acquire an understanding of contemporary Indigenous movements, the issues they address, and the responsibilities of non-Native people living on Indigenous lands.
-
AMST 231.01 Fall 2025
- Faculty:Meredith McCoy 🏫 👤
- Size:25
- T, THLeighton 330 1:15pm-3:00pm
-
-
AMST 239 The Death Penalty: An American History 6 credits
A critical examination of the history of capital punishment in the United States, including its origins, development, and current status. Students will engage with broad questions and themes related to the death penalty, including its legal intricacies, religious implications, ethical components, racial and class dynamics, and political meanings. Multiple disciplinary lenses will be applied to a variety of texts, including history, journalism, memoir, court decisions, and documentary film.
-
AMST 239.01 Fall 2025
- Faculty:Christopher Elias 🏫 👤
- Size:25
- M, WWillis 114 12:30pm-1:40pm
- FWillis 114 1:10pm-2:10pm
-
-
ARTH 205 Invisible From Space: Representing Ecosystems 6 credits
Since NASA's "Whole Earth" photographs emerged in the late 1960s, people have struggled with humanity's place in the cosmos and our interconnection with all life on our "blue marble." How can we comprehend the whole while valuing each component of this complex system? In the U.S., Romantic landscapes and frontier imagery continue influencing perception despite tensions with vast scales of space, time, data, history, and non-human perspectives. These challenges of seeing our planet and ourselves have inspired diverse creative responses across photography, new media, mapping, alternative archiving, theater, music, data visualization, and other interdisciplinary approaches.
-
ARTH 205.01 Fall 2025
- Faculty:David Bailey 🏫 👤
- Size:25
- T, THBoliou 161 10:10am-11:55am
-
-
ARTH 207 Cultivating the Future: “Growing” Together 6 credits
Artists have long explored the dual themes of plant cultivation and knowledge cultivation. What explains this connection between horticulture and pedagogy in art? This course examines these interconnections, beginning with early modernist art circles and following their influence on developments like Black Mountain College and Joseph Beuys's Free International University. We then explore contemporary artists who employ permaculture gardens, traditional ecological knowledge, ecofeminist principles, guerrilla plantings, and foraging as tools to foster new social, political, and spiritual understandings. Through these practices, artists cultivate not just plants but future-oriented ways of knowing and being in the world.
-
ARTH 207.01 Fall 2025
- Faculty:David Bailey 🏫 👤
- Size:25
- T, THBoliou 161 1:15pm-3:00pm
-
-
CAMS 225 Film Noir: The Dark Side of the American Dream 6 credits
After Americans grasped the enormity of the Depression and World War II, the glossy fantasies of 1930s cinema seemed hollow indeed. During the 1940s, the movies, our true national pastime, took a nosedive into pessimism. The result? A collection of exceptional films populated with tough guys and dangerous women lurking in the shadows of nasty urban landscapes. This course focuses on classic American noir as well as neo-noir from a variety of perspectives, including mode and genre, visual style and narrative structure, postwar culture and politics, and race, gender, and sexuality. Requirements include two screenings per week and several short papers.
Extra Time required. Evening Screenings.
-
CAMS 225.01 Fall 2025
- Faculty:Carol Donelan 🏫 👤
- Size:25
- T, THWeitz Center 132 1:15pm-3:00pm
-
Extra Time Required: Evening screenings
-
-
CAMS 270 Nonfiction 6 credits
This course addresses nonfiction media as both art form and historical practice by exploring the expressive, rhetorical, and political possibilities of nonfiction production. A focus on relationships between form and content and between makers, subjects, and viewers will inform our approach. Throughout the course we will pay special attention to the ethical concerns that arise from making media about others’ lives. We will engage with diverse modes of nonfiction production including essayistic, experimental, and participatory forms and create community videos in partnership with Carleton’s Center for Community and Civic Engagement and local organizations. The class culminates in the production of a significant independent nonfiction media project.
Extra Time
- Fall 2025
- ARP, Arts Practice IDS, Intercultural Domestic Studies
-
Student has completed any of the following course(s): CAMS 111 with grade of C- or better.
-
CAMS 270.01 Fall 2025
- Faculty:Rini Matea 🏫 👤
- Size:15
- T, THWeitz Center 133 10:10am-11:55am
-
Extra Time Required:
-
ENGL 141 Latinx Voices in the Age of Trump 6 credits
The last few years have placed Latinx communities under siege and in the spotlight. The demands of the census and new policies around immigration mean that who counts as Latinx and why it matters has public visibility and meaning. Simultaneously, the last few years have seen an incredible growth of new literary voices and genres in the world of Latinx letters. From fictional and creative nonfiction accounts of detention camps, border crossings, and asylum court proceedings to lyrical wanderings in bilingualism to demands for greater attention to Afrolatinidad and the particular experiences of Black Latinxs–Latinx voices are rising. We will engage with current literary discussions in print, on social media, and in literary journals as we chart the shifting, developing terrain of Latinx literatures. Offered at both the 100 and 200 levels; coursework will be adjusted accordingly.
-
ENGL 241 Latinx Voices in the Age of Trump 6 credits
The last few years have placed Latinx communities under siege and in the spotlight. The demands of the census and new policies around immigration mean that who counts as Latinx and why it matters has public visibility and meaning. Simultaneously, the last few years have seen an incredible growth of new literary voices and genres in the world of Latinx letters. From fictional and creative nonfiction accounts of detention camps, border crossings, and asylum court proceedings to lyrical wanderings in bilingualism to demands for greater attention to Afrolatinidad and the particular experiences of Black Latinxs–Latinx voices are rising. We will engage with current literary discussions in print, on social media, and in literary journals as we chart the shifting, developing terrain of Latinx literatures. Offered at both the 100 and 200 levels; coursework will be adjusted accordingly.
-
GWSS 265 Black Feminist Thought 6 credits
This seminar offers students an opportunity to engage closely with key concepts, figures, and arguments in the Black Feminist intellectual tradition. We will focus primarily on texts by key figures/scholars from the Americas/Caribbean—in order to situate Black Feminisms within a transnational feminist context. We will take a historical approach, starting in the 19th century and work our way to more contemporary figures and texts throughout the term. Some of the key figures we will examine are Sojourner Truth, Anna Julia Cooper, Ida B. Wells, Angela Y. Davis, Sylvia Wynter, Hortense Spillers, Saidiya Hartman, Audre Lorde, bell hooks, and Patricia Hill Collins. Offered at both the 200 and 300 levels; coursework will be adjusted accordingly.
-
HIST 205 American Environmental History 6 credits
Environmental concerns, conflicts, and change mark the course of American history, from the distant colonial past to our own day. This course will consider the nature of these eco-cultural developments, focusing on the complicated ways that human thought and perception, culture and society, and natural processes and biota have all combined to forge Americans’ changing relationship with the natural world. Topics will include Native American subsistence strategies, Euroamerican settlement, industrialization, urbanization, consumption, and the environmental movement. As we explore these issues, one of our overarching goals will be to develop an historical context for thinking deeply about contemporary environmental dilemmas.
-
HIST 205.01 Fall 2025
- Faculty:George Vrtis 🏫 👤
- Size:25
- T, THLeighton 426 8:15am-10:00am
-
-
HIST 226 U.S. Consumer Culture 6 credits
In the period after 1880, the growth of a mass consumer society recast issues of identity, gender, race, class, family, and political life. We will explore the development of consumer culture through such topics as advertising and mass media, the body and sexuality, consumerist politics in the labor movement, and the response to the Americanization of consumption abroad. We will read contemporary critics such as Thorstein Veblen, as well as historians engaged in weighing the possibilities of abundance against the growth of corporate power.
-
HIST 226.01 Fall 2025
- Faculty:Annette Igra 🏫 👤
- Size:25
- T, THLeighton 330 3:10pm-4:55pm
-
-
POSC 122 Politics in America: Liberty and Equality 6 credits
An introduction to American government and politics. Focus on the Congress, Presidency, political parties and interest groups, the courts and the Constitution. Particular attention will be given to the public policy debates that divide liberals and conservatives and how these divisions are rooted in American political culture.
-
POSC 122.01 Fall 2025
- Faculty:Christina Farhart 🏫 👤
- Size:30
- T, THHulings 316 1:15pm-3:00pm
-
-
POSC 228 Power and the American Presidency 6 credits
The power of the executive branch is loosely defined in the second article of the U.S. Constitution. While the presidency was designed to be clearly subordinated to Congress, presidential has exploded over time and has reshaped American politics around presidential prerogatives. Today, the other branches of the government defer to the president, while voters look to the president to solve a snowballing set of public problems. However, citizen expectations of the president have outpaced even the growth in executive power, which has simultaneously upended the constitutional order while still leaving the average American chronically dissatisfied with government in Washington. This course is designed to explore the dynamics, the drama, and the intrigue associated with the rise of the imperial presidency in America.
-
POSC 228.01 Fall 2025
- Faculty:Ryan Dawkins 🏫 👤
- Size:25
- M, WHasenstab 105 9:50am-11:00am
- FHasenstab 105 9:40am-10:40am
-
-
POSC 271 Constitutional Law I 6 credits
This course will explore the United States Constitution and the legal doctrines that have emerged from it, using them as lenses through which to understand the history—and shape the future—of this country. Using prominent Supreme Court opinions as teaching tools and loci of debate (including cases on the Court’s recent and current docket), this course will explore the different kind of theoretical approaches with which to make Constitutional arguments and interpret the Constitution. It is one of two paired courses (the other being POSC 272) that complement each other. Both courses will address the structure and functioning of the United States government, and will explore in greater depth the historic Constitutional “trends” towards greater equality and more liberty (albeit slowly, haltingly, and with steps both forward and backward). This course will focus in particular on how matters of racial justice have been a Constitutional issue from the very beginning of the nation—and very much remain unfinished legal work. In exploring matters of personal liberty, this course will focus in particular on First Amendment freedom of religion. Finally, in examining governmental structures, this course will emphasize federalism and the distribution of power between the national and state governments, including the rise of a nationwide economic system and the modern administrative state. The course will require close reading of judicial opinions and other texts, and learning how to construct arguments using logic and precedent. A special feature of this course will be detailed examination and intra-class mock debate of the cases the Supreme Court will hear this fall challenging raced-based affirmative action programs at private and public universities.
- Fall 2025
- SI, Social Inquiry
-
POSC 271.01 Fall 2025
- Faculty:Steven Poskanzer 🏫 👤
- Size:25
- M, WHasenstab 002 11:10am-12:20pm
- FHasenstab 002 12:00pm-1:00pm
-
POSC 273 Race and Politics in the U.S. 6 credits
This course addresses race and ethnicity in U.S. politics. Following an introduction to historical, sociological, and psychological approaches to the study of race and ethnicity, we apply these approaches to understanding the ways in which racial attitudes have been structured along a number of political and policy dimensions, e.g., welfare, education, criminal justice. Students will gain an increased understanding of the multiple contexts that shape contemporary racial and ethnic politics and policies in the U.S., and will consider the role of institutional design, policy development, representation, and racial attitudes among the general U.S. public and political environment.
-
SOAN 252 Growing Up in an Aging Society 6 credits
Both the U.S. and global populations are trending toward a world with far fewer young people than ever before. So, what does it mean to grow up in a rapidly aging society? This course explores age, aging, and its various intersections with demographic characteristics including gender, sexuality, race, and social class. We situate age and aging within the context of macro-structural, institutional, and micro-everyday realms. Some topics we will examine include: media depictions and stereotypes; interpersonal relationships and caregiving; the workplace and retirement; and both the perceptions and inevitable realities of an aging population.
The department strongly recommends that Sociology/Anthropology 110 or 111 be taken prior to enrolling in courses numbered 200 or above
-
SOAN 252.01 Fall 2025
- Faculty:Annette Nierobisz 🏫 👤
- Size:25
- M, WWeitz Center 230 9:50am-11:00am
- FWeitz Center 230 9:40am-10:40am
-