UCOR Section Descriptions

Course Description

Whatever one's education, background, or socio-economic status, the advances of science have great implications for the public. However, science has become increasingly specialized, often resulting in a disparity between what the expert scientist knows and what the non-expert understands. This class offers case studies for students to learn about scientific controversies in the public sphere so that they may better understand the dynamic, social, cultural, and political aspects of science.

Course Description

This course investigates the philosophical, social and psychological forces at work in the way humans create and deploy monsters to cope with the fear and uncertainty. Using philosophical and psychological resources, and drawing from stories, myths and media, this class seeks to understand and rethink the way strangers are turned to monsters.

Course Description

Empires are often associated with power, and utopia with impossible visions. What are the global challenges created by legacies of modern imperialism? How are these reflected in unequal contemporary political and economic relations? We will explore how African Diaspora intellectual history has engaged with inequality in the discourse of justice. Under the rubric of empire and utopia, we will explore how freedom and justice, and philosophical and material progress are encoded in African Diaspora narratives.

Course Description

This course explores the nature of contemporary global violence through a philosophical lens. It mobilizes the concept of historical effect, developed by the German thinker Hans-Georg Gadamer, to assess our present-day situatedness within an ongoing era of conflict, suffering, and trauma. In taking account of our historical inheritance of conflict, this assessment will involve analyzing both the overt narratives and tacit assumptions that frame our conception of violence.

Course Description

This course investigates the philosophical, social and psychological forces at work in the way humans create and deploy monsters to cope with the fear and uncertainty. Using philosophical and psychological resources, and drawing from stories, myths and media, this class seeks to understand and rethink the way strangers are turned to monsters.

Course Description

This course will examine U.S. military intervention in the world from 1898 to the present.

Course Description

The global challenge this course explores, through dystopian literature, is how desires for social order, and the globalizing philosophies underlying those desires, result in hegemonic forms of social control achievable only through the imposition of ideologies of perfection. Dystopian literature imagines grim worlds where plurality and co-existence are sacrificed for the hegemonic establishment of social harmony. Students will engage and critique these literary landscapes to analyze and assess how global dreams can become global nightmares.

Course Description

In this course we will be seeking to understand the very meaning of what constitutes "global" history. Through an intellectual-historical and theoretical perspective we will investigate four universal histories written over the course of European history from the classical to the modern period. Our goal will be come to some understanding as to how Europeans have, in attempting to construct an historical identity for themselves, constructed the history of the world. In this manner, we will investigate the history of the history of the world and so be better able to understand whether the writing of such a history is possible, both in an ethical and an historical sense.

Course Description

This course will examine U.S. military intervention in the world from 1898 to the present.

Course Description

Through a study of literary texts, this course will explore nationalism, citizenship, and belonging in South Asia post 1945. The course will focus primarily on India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Sri Lankan writers.