Courses

Dr. Steve Jones, UIC Distinguished Professor, Communications | sjones@uic.edu

TA: Jared O’Connor

Course Information: HUM 101 (CRN 36799) MW 9:30-10:45AM  and HUM 100 (CRN41752) M 11-11:50AM

This seminar will explore and examine how we talk about and how we have envisioned, and continue to envision, media, information, and communication technologies and their role in society. The future is socially and imaginatively constructed through communication, particularly media, literature, film and art. While it may be the case that most aspects of our lives, from the daily commute, through work and relationships, to major events such as birth and death are increasingly intertwined with media, information, and communication technologies, those technologies are being shaped not just through engineering and design in the creation of technological artifacts but also by the discursive rhetoric of imaginative, creative activity that sometimes precedes the artifacts by years, decades, or even centuries. We will examine and discuss critical questions about the interplay of art, design, and engineering in the development, deployment and adoption of technologies that give the information age its objective shape and subjective power. Our goal will be to develop critical analytical thinking about the role of metaphors and visions of media, information, and communication technologies in the shaping of social structures and arrangements of power through technology design, regulation, and use.

Dr. Beate Geissler, Associate Professor, Art & Art History| beate@uic.edu

TA: Gregor Baszak

Course Information: HUM 101 (CRN 42877) TR 9:30-10:45AM and HUM 100 (CRN 42886) T 11-11:50AM

Every 2 minutes today we snap as many photos as the whole of humanity took in the 1800s. Images come to us through a variety of mediums; mobile phones, online sources, magazines, newspapers, billboards, advertisements, in art and on television, to name only a few. Even more remarkable than the quantity of images that we are exposed to and which we produce ourselves is the effect that these images have on us. Images always come with an agenda – they seek to sell us products, influence how we think, draw correlations between things or reinforce political opinions…

Through lectures, presentations and projects we are going to begin to deconstruct the visible environment in which we live. Exercises, gallery and museum visits will help to supplement our experiences. Through the analysis of our use of technical and technological images we will begin to see all of the ‘moving parts’ of how visual culture and technology affects us. Recognizing visual language(s) we are empowered to understand how imagery transforms us. Employing visual codes to our own pictures and reflect how we participate, how we navigate through a world with optical devices, may provide insights into the workings of our culture.

Dr. Ruth E. Rosenberg, Associate Professor of Music | rrose76@uic.edu

TA: Bailey Szustak

Course Information: HUM 101 (CRN 36805) TR 9:30-10:45AM and HUM 100 (CRN 41753) T 11-11:50AM

This course, an interdisciplinary introduction to sound studies, is premised on the idea that listening is a significant (if sometimes overlooked) mode of engagement. Scholarship and inquiry on this topic within the humanities has grown in recent years as music scholars have rethought the standard frameworks for the study of music (style, repertoire, composer/biography, audience), and scholars from related fields have introduced new approaches to sound, musical expression, and practices of listening. In general, work in this field approaches questions such as: How and why do we listen? How does sound structure our social and political relations and discourses? What role does sound play in the way we interact with the material world? How has sound been used to empower, disempower, control, liberate, or engage us? The course has five units, and each is organized around a question to which the assigned readings provide some sort of response. No knowledge or formal background in music is required for this course.

rrose76@uic.edu

MW: 9:30-10:45

This course will explore the possibility that cities like Chicago can provide a pathway to ecological futures. We will explore the idea that doing so requires new ways of thinking about the human in relationship to the environment, and to the plants, animals, and substances that constitute our world. Chicago is home to many innovative environmental initiatives and environmental justice movements seeking to alter the way we design, build, and provision our city.  We will explore some of the main factors contributing to climate change, including food production, industrial emissions, and transportation and housing, from the perspective of these potential solutions. The course will incorporate visits to sites around the city and invited speakers to explore: 1). Chicago’s Native-American landscapes and alternative relationships to nature 2). The city as a sanctuary for wild species 3). Alternative food systems and the idea of urban food sovereignty 4). Environmental Justice and the afterlives of coal and oil 5). Affordable and ecological housing 6).  Wellbeing and urban nature

mdoane@uic.edu

*This course also requires you to enroll in the HUM 100 workshop.

W: 11-12

Workshop Instructor: Tierney Powell

T/TH 11-12:15

This course explores the human experience of displacement and the subsequent search for belonging. Displacement can include experiences ranging from international migration, internal migration, and the consequences of social mobility (up or down). Displacement normally means a shift in geographic location, but almost always has economic, social, and cultural ramifications as well. In each of these instances, those affected need to learn new skills in order to survive—and hopefully thrive—in a new environment. We will also consider what constitutes a border, how boundaries are formed and maintained, and the skills and cost required to cross over. International borders are not the only ones that can be difficult to cross.

Course readings include personal narratives and ethnographic accounts that engage the full human experience of what it means to be displaced and to search for a sense of belonging. As a class we will also research and examine the historical reasons for experiences of displacement described in the readings. Finally, we will look at ways in which specific instances of displacement, border crossing, and the ongoing quest for belonging, have been treated in the public arena through media coverage and in political discourse.

hostetle@uic.edu

M/W 3:00-4:15

The humanities study human expression in literature, art, discourse, and custom, understanding these expressions by looking deeply at how they’re put together, and looking widely at when, where, and why they are produced and consumed. Using these deep and wide interpretative skills, we value the history of ideas and culture, but more importantly we reach toward building new futures. In our modern world, art, entertainment, and even the humanities themselves seem like luxuries for after work, and so we perceive human history as if people first built functional forms like tools, environments, and cities and only later made beautiful forms like art. But in fact humans made songs, paintings, dance, sculpture, and stories even when they had no fire, no buildings, nor enough food; there has been no human life without art. This fact inspires the big questions in this course, which we ask with the help of political and cultural theory, art, and literary texts: “why do human beings universally make art and literature?” “what does this universality imply for the organizing of social life?” “why is there so much suffering in human civilization?” and “how can works of the imagination address political catastrophes like inequality and climate change?” Our texts include essays in Marxist, feminist, psychoanalytic, structuralist, queer, postcolonial, and critical race theories, alongside novels, poems, sculpture, music, photography, and film. Our research projects take shape through frequent responsive writing assignments, group exercises in synthesizing big ideas, and optional field trips to public parks / art spaces, and culminate in formulating creative prescriptions for collective existence.

Kornbluh@uic.edu

Rachel Havrelock

Department of English and UIC Freshwater Lab

raheleh@uic.edu

Are you what you eat? If so, then can you determine exactly what you are eating?  Why is it so difficult to know the ingredients, processes, and industries that make our food?  If we can’t really know what we’re eating, then can we know what we are?

Questions such as these will guide our exploration of food and food production.  The course is resolutely local as it shows the global nature of making food. We’ll begin with Upton Sinclair’s famous Chicago novel The Jungle and appraise how the story of a single family humanizes and renders vivid the ways in which early 20^th Century food production drove immigration, labor practices, and the geography of Chicago. We will visit Back of the Yards where The Jungle is set and tour The Plant, an abandoned 93,500 square foot pork processing facility turned into a working model of a closed loop net zero energy food production space. Students will train their focus on current economic and industrial aspects of food production including futures trading, seeds and fertilizers, factory farms, pesticides and organic foods, genetically modified foods, and fast food.  The class will also consider the intersection of food and culture and conduct interviews on a distinct food tradition and/or recipe.  As we meet with professionals working on different aspects of food and visit key sites in Chicago, we will also engage questions of food insecurity, meals served in institutional settings like schools and dorms, offerings available on the UIC campus, food deserts, soil, emergency planning and urban farms.

Workshop Instructor: Kathleen Blackburn

Kathleen Blackburn is currently a PhD student in the Program for Writers at UIC and a research assistant in the UIC Freshwater Lab, where she investigates the intersection of U.S. militarization and ecological disruption, specifically in cases of invasive species. Recent projects have focused on invasive Brown Tree Snakes on Guam and Asian Carp in the Midwest. A Pushcart Prize nominee, Kathleen’s work has appeared in Bellingham Review, Colorado Review, DIAGRAM, River Teeth, and others, and has been listed as notable in Best American Essays.

Nadine Naber

Professor

Gender and Women’s Studies and Global Asian Studies

naber@uic.edu

This course explores the themes of immigration, race/racism, and social justice through a comparative focus on Asian Americans and Arab Americans. Students will engage with these themes through a focus on (1) experiences of immigration and settlement; (2) the impact of U.S.-led war on diaspora communities living within the U.S.; (3) struggles related to gender and sexuality within immigrant communities; and (4) activism related to racial and social justice. Examples of course topics include “Japanese Internment” and the “Muslim Ban;” Palestine and the Philippines; feminism and queer resistance; and coalitions and solidarity activism. A significant portion of the course will train students to consider how academic research can contribute to community building in the world around us. Throughout the semester, students will interact with community-based organizations and will learn methodologies related to building trust, respect, and accountability between researchers/universities and community organizations.

Workshop Instructor: Cecy Villarruel

Cecy Villarruel is a PhD student in the Program for Writers at UIC. She serves as Assistant Director in the First-Year Writing Program and is a writing tutor with the City Colleges of Chicago. While in the Peace Corps in Namibia, she was co-editor of IZIT? A Magazine for the Namibian PCV. Her essays and fiction have appeared or are forthcoming in Oyez Review, CAF Review, and Another Chicago Magazine.