COLLEGE SEMINAR: THE PRACTICE OF COURAGE

While we tend to value courage—Hannah Arendt even called it the highest political virtue—historically the concept has veered from the noble to the dangerous. From Antigone to suicide bombers, courage has been construed as heroic and/or dangerously solipsistic. This series of seminars asks the question: What is the practice of courageous action in the 21^st century? Courses are open to Sophomores and Juniors and are limited to 16 students. Students are required to attend three evening lectures on Mondays from 6-8. There will also be dinner discussions with guest speakers and students from other sections of the College Seminar.

17443

HIST 210 Crusading for Justice: On gender, sexuality, racial violence, media & rights

Tabetha Ewing Truth Hunter

T Th 4:40pm-6:00pm

OLINLC 118

HA

HIST

Cross-listed: Africana Studies; American Studies; Gender and Sexuality Studies; Human Rights (Courage To Be College Seminar) This course focuses on the activism of journalist Ida B. Wells, daughter of two American slaves. Her campaign against lynching in the late 19th- and early 20th-century continues to complicate understandings of how and why black bodies are raced. She exposes lynching as state-sanctioned, extra-legal violence against black men and women. She challenges the legal double standards that erase the victimization of black women and the sexual agency of white women. In doing so, she put her life and livelihood on the line. In Wells’ work, we see the matrix of more than a century of black feminist thought, critical race theory, and civil and human rights activism. With articles on New Orleans and East Saint Louis that address violence against the police as well as police use of excessive force, her work speaks urgently of the contemporary American predicament to which the Black Lives Matters movement responds. This course is part of the Courage To Be College Seminar Series; students are required to attend three lectures in the in Courage to Be Lecture Series sponsored by the Hannah Arendt Center. Class size: 15

17533

HR 355 Scholars at Risk

Thomas Keenan

W 10:10am-11:30am

HAC CONFERENCE

SA

SSCI

2-credits. Scholars, students, and other researchers around the world are routinely threatened, jailed, or punished. Sometime they are simply trapped in a dangerous place, while in other cases they are deliberately targeted because of their identity or their work. Academic freedom, or freedom of thought and inquiry, is usually considered a basic human right, but its definition and content is essentially contested. This seminar will explore the idea of academic freedom by examining — and attempting to intervene in — situations where it is threatened. In conjunction with the human rights organization Scholars at Risk, we will investigate the cases of scholars currently living under threat and develop projects aimed at releasing them from detention or securing refuge for them. This will involve direct hands-on advocacy work with SAR, taking public positions and creating smart and effective advocacy campaigns for specific endangered students, teachers, and researchers. In order not to do this naively or uncritically, we will explore the history and theory of human rights advocacy on behalf of ‘prisoners of conscience,’ the genealogy of ‘academic freedom,’ and the ethics and politics of risk and rescue. This course is part of the Courage To Be College Seminar Series; students are required to attend three lectures in the in Courage to Be Lecture Series sponsored by the Hannah Arendt Center. Class size: 12

17494

PHIL 361 Introduction to Caribbean Philosophy

Ariana Stokas

W 10:10am-12:30pm

HEG 201

MBV D+J

HUM

This course will introduce students to the rich tradition of philosophical ideas in the Caribbean. The course will aim at doing philosophy and not only knowing philosophers. This distinction is important as areas with a legacy of epistemological colonialism, like the Caribbean, have many works that contain a substratum of philosophical ideas but have not necessarily been welcomed as canonical works of philosophy. Thus we will seek to engage in philosophy as a questioning activity that attempts to answer epistemic, aesthetic, normative and metaphysical questions. Some threads of analysis unique to this geography that this course will cover, include: the idea that philosophy is a contextual project rooted in a specific place rather than an abstract, ideal theory; the effect of colonialism on culture and education; the exploration of creolization; and the critical analysis of “modernity” as a European project. Course texts include works by Edouard Glissant, Wilson Harris, Eugenio Maria Hostos, Julia de Burgos and Franz Fanon. This course is part of the Courage To Be College Seminar Series; students are required to attend three lectures in the in Courage to Be Lecture Series sponsored by the Hannah Arendt Center.

Class size: 15

17511

REL 240 Collaboration with West Point: equality

Bruce Chilton

T Th 11:50am-1:10pm

OLIN 305

MBV D+J

HUM

Cross-listed: Human Rights; Theology The theme of the third joint academic project between Bard College and West Point is the meaning and the nature of equality – equality for individuals, and equality for communities, societies and nations. The topic of equality reaches into every area of human culture: local politics, national identity, international relations; political science, philosophy, jurisprudence, and literature; religious institutions; the military profession; economics, psychology, sociology, and history. Problems focused on equality have broad dimensions of theory and practice, contrasting what should be and what can be with what is. The examination of what equality means in these different areas holds up a mirror to ourselves. The project includes parallel seminar courses at both institutions using common reading material prepared by Bard and West Point faculty; four joint sessions that bring together the students and faculty collaborating in the project; an academic conference hosted by Bard College at which invited scholarly papers are presented and discussed. This course is part of the Courage To Be College Seminar Series; students are required to attend three lectures in the in Courage to Be Lecture Series sponsored by the Hannah Arendt Center. Class size: 14