EXPLORING TRANSFER 2011 COURSES
Women's Studies 182
"At the Intersection: Women and Race in the US"
taught by Diane Harriford and Navina Hooker (DCC)
While feminist theory has engaged in conversation with a variety of disciplines and issues, one persistent topic of conversation has been an attempt to understand how women's racial locations effect their own, others and the world's experiences and how these understandings have shaped women's writing and speaking in the US from the 19th century until the present. This course will examine the development of these conversations by looking at a variety of women's writing that not only illuminate their experiences as women but also serve as social theory that enlarges our understanding of race. We will examine various forms of women's creative expression, including autobiography, novels, speeches, poetry and song.
History 186
"Readings in Human Rights History" taught by Bob Brigham and Carol Scarvalone Kushner (DCC)
Human rights have become the dominant language for international public good. They represent the highest moral precepts and political ideals. At the core of the human rights regime is the effort to improve the world by bringing about an international system in which the dignity of each individual is secured and protected. In building such a world, policy makers, lawyers, and activists have relied heavily on the testimony of witnesses and survivors of some of the most horrific atrocities in human history to move toward transitional justice. This course examines the global historical evolution of human rights from the 1970s to the present through the close reading of witness memoirs. It also explores the inherent tension between peace and justice in ending deadly conflict and building sustainable peace.
Urban Studies 182
"Modernism and the City" taught by Tyrone Simpson and Rochelle Rives (BMCC)
This course will examine the meaning of the "city" to modernist writers in Great Britain and America, especially in relation to the movement's credo—voiced most forcefully by the poet Ezra Pound—"make it new." For modernist writers such as Virginia Woolf, Jean Rhys, and T.S. Eliot, among others, the city offered new possibilities for individual agency, self-definition and artistic expression. At the same time, the modern city required its subjects to mount a defense against the various "shocks" and stimuli of urban life, to reference the poet Charles Baudelaire, and to overcome an ethos of capitalism and consumerism that for many modernists, threatened to reduce aesthetic experience to mere imitation and copy. Operating under the assumption that modernist writers themselves acted as sociologists, this course will gauge how a number of modernist texts responded to this contradiction.