This fall, the College will again offer a suite of multidisciplinary Common Courses created specifically for incoming first-year students as they embark on their education at Bard. Cohort building and connected liberal arts learning will be integral to all Common Course offerings.  Second-year students will also have an opportunity to register for Common Courses in August.

 

Future Commons: Homes, Borders, Climates

Course:	CC 103  Future Commons: Homes, Borders, Climates
Professor:	Olga Touloumi, Ross Adams and Ivonne Santoyo Orozco
CRN:	90194	Schedule:	Tue  Thurs    10:20 AM - 11:40 AM Olin 204  Tue  Thurs    10:20 AM - 11:40 AM Garcia-Renart House  Tue  Thurs    10:20 AM - 11:40 AM Hegeman 204
Distributional Area:	AA Analysis of Art PA  Practicing Arts	Class cap:	45
Credits:	4

The Covid-19 pandemic and movement for racial justice brought to the fore a tremendous uncertainty and instability that governs our lives. All structures – from how states value and order life to the economy structuring how we produce, distribute and consume resources to the networks of dependency and structures that organize how we care for one another – have been upended, revealing a profound sense of injustice permeating our world. The current moment asks us to question these inherited economic and political structures, as well as the institutions that organize our lives (family, school, church, nation state, international organizations, etc.). This course calls students to critically examine and then re-imagine ways in which we live together. Central to our course is the notion of the “commons,” understood as both a historically contested and increasingly marginalized category, as well as a venue through which we consider what we share and how we share in space.

This course is structured around three modules — Homes, Borders, and Climates — where students will explore “commons” though each category and its broader societal, cultural and material construction. We will engage these categories as coordinates of our collective commonsense—notions that are both taken for granted, and, for that reason, sites from which to unsettle the present and around which to project new collective imaginaries. The present will offer a point of departure for radical imaginations for future commons. Students will encounter design as a practice urging social and political transformation through proactive creativity. By using critical thinking and design tools, students will develop imaginative speculations that emerge in the triangulation between anti-racist futures, environmental justice and gender equality. The course will feature invited lectures and field trips to critical sites, culminating in a group sharing of the collective work.

 

 

Real and Imaginary Spaces: Multi-Arts Lab

Course:	CC 106 A Real and Imaginary Spaces: Multi-Arts Lab
Professor:	Susan Aberth, Donna Grover, Gideon Lester and Lothar Osterburg
CRN:	90479	Schedule:	Tue  Thurs    3:50 PM - 5:10 PM
Distributional Area:	LA Literary Analysis PA Practicing Arts	Class cap:	60
Credits:	4

The houses we live in, the cities we inhabit, are both ordinary, tangible spaces, and richly poetic sources for our imaginations, daydreams, and artistic creation.  “We live in houses and houses live in us,” noted the philosopher Gaston Bachelard, and his words carry new meaning after we have spent the past year confined in our homes, apartments, and dorms. In this multidisciplinary course (combining art analysis and creative work) we will explore the slippage between dreams and reality, between the literal and the poetic, and how they manifest in art. We will study the works of artists who have been inspired by the interplay of the real and the imaginary, and then create our own artistic responses to our dwelling places and explore our daydreams of home. We will explore artists from across disciplines whose work grapples with ideas of home, including writers (such as Jorge Luis Borges, Emily Dickinson, Fernando Pessoa, Junichiro Tanizaki, Shirley Jackson, and Edith Wharton), choreographers (Ralph Lemon, Faustin Linyekula), visual artists (Leonora Carrington, Kerry James Marshall, Morton Bartlett, A.G. Rizzoli, Francesca Woodman, Frida Kahlo), film makers, (Robert Wise, Jordan Peele, Kurtis David Harder), theater artists, and architects. Along the way we will encounter ideas from surrealism, outsider art, magical realism, urban planning, psychology, and philosophy. We will learn through hands-on experience of making as well as studying, and discover how images and concepts can translate across artistic genres.  The semester will begin with two plenary weeks, after which students will be assigned to sections and rotate through four three-week modules in art history, art making, literature/writing, and performance, so that by the end of the semester they’ll have worked with all 4 faculty teaching the course.  We’ll return together for guest lectures and cohort-building activities between each module.

 

 

 

The Making of Citizens: Local, National, Global

 

Citizenship is one of the most important, yet complex elements of communal life. It can be a marker of belonging or exclusion, set boundaries or open them, be progressive or conservative, and operate at the local, national, or global levels. It has the capacity to bestow power on an individual and create obligations and duties for an individual. It is both a modern idea and ancient one. And at the current moment in time, the ideas associated with citizenship are in flux and contested. Questions around globalization, immigration, pandemic, climate justice, and racial justice require us to think deeply about what it means to be a citizen at the current moment in time. This cluster of courses takes up the opportunity to think about citizenship in multidisciplinary ways, exploring citizenship at the local, national, and global levels. It also seeks to understand how ideas of citizenship change over time and across cultures. Questions addressed may include:  what does it mean to be a citizen?  How does citizenship shape feelings of belonging and exclusion?  How does the practice and effects of citizenship differ at the local, national and global levels?  How does citizenship mediate the relationship between individuals and the community?  How does experience of citizenship differ across time and different geographical and cultural spaces?  The goal of this cluster of courses is to critically analyze the concept of citizenship so as to make it—in whatever form—a meaningful and productive force in students’ lives.

 

Course:	CC 102 A  Citizenship as Exclusion
Professor:	Michelle Murray
CRN:	90508	Schedule:	Mon    Fri   12:10 PM - 1:30 PM Olin 205
Distributional Area:	MBV Meaing, Being, Value SA Social Analysis	Class cap:	15
Credits:	4

Cross-listed: Human Rights; Political Studies

Citizenship is one of the most powerful markers of belonging and exclusion in contemporary political life.  Our citizenship defines the nature and extent of our legal rights and is an important element of our individual identities.  It shapes how we understand the duties and obligations we have to fellow citizens and the limits of these responsibilities to those whom we perceive as outsiders.  As a consequence, the conditions of our citizenship—where, when and how we can claim to be a citizen—determine the very real circumstances under which we live our daily lives.  This course will explore how the institution of citizenship produces the boundaries of the political community (with all of its attendant rights and obligations), and, importantly, the injustices this process of exclusion creates.  In doing so, we will ask:  what does it means to be a citizen?  How has the political project of national citizenship contributed to inequalities along the lines of race, class and gender?  How have individuals and groups invoked their citizenship to challenge these injustices?  How does the dominance of national citizenship prevent the realization of human rights on a global scale?  What forms of citizenship exist above and below the state and how might they transform our understandings of political belonging and political power?  Throughout the course we will emphasize the power of individual and collective acts of citizenship, both historically and in our current political moment, to promote social change and build more inclusive societies at the local, national and global levels.

 

Course:	CC 102 B Citizenship in the Contemporary United States
Professor:	Simon Gilhooley
CRN:	90511	Schedule:	Mon  Wed     2:00 PM - 3:20 PM Olin 202
Distributional Area:	MBV Meaing, Being, Value SA Social Analysis	Class cap:	18
Credits:	4

Cross-listed:  Human Rights; Political Studies

Many of us hear “citizen” and think of a fairly concrete form of political membership – that you are a citizen or you are not. But the history of citizenship in the United States has been one in which citizenship has been subject to much more contestation than that binary allows for. Examining topics including voting, incarceration, militarization, immigration, and education under the broader trajectories of race, gender, and class, the class will explore the entanglements of citizenship with the struggles over power. We will consider how “citizenship” in the United State has been and is uneven, unsettled, and often more of a political project than any individual’s status. In this way, our goal is to acquire a situated and critical understanding of the dilemmas of citizenship in the US and the inequalities, injustices as well as opportunities citizenship has come to be associated with.

 

Course:	CC 102 C  Political Animals: Citizenship in Greece, Rome, and the Ancient Mediterranean
Professor:	Robert Cioffi
CRN:	90512	Schedule:	Mon  Wed     2:00 PM - 3:20 PM Hegeman 106
Distributional Area:	MBV Meaning, Being, Value FL Foreign Languages and Lit	Class cap:	22
Credits:	4

Cross-listed:  Classical Studies; Human Rights

Since Aristotle, humans have been known as “political animals,” a phrase that refers not to their aspirations for public office, but rather to the bonds of citizenship that tie together human communities. Greece and Rome are often taken as models or origins for the idea of citizenship in modern societies. But what did it mean to be a citizen in the ancient Mediterranean, long before the advent of the modern nation state? Who was included in and excluded from these categories? And how are the ever-shifting boundaries of self and other, citizen and non-citizen expressed in the literatures and cultures of antiquity? By reading literature (e.g, Aeschylus’ Oresteia, Aristophanes’ Lysistrata), history (Herodotus, Thucydides, Livy), political philosophy (e.g., Aristotle), and by examining tombs, inscriptions, and other ancient art and visual culture (e.g. vase paintings, maps, coins), we will seek to investigate these and other questions about the societal bonds of the Greek and Roman worlds. We will also reflect on how our reading of ancient texts is informed by and can contribute to discussions of citizenship in other literatures and cultures, including our own. All readings will be in English translation.

 

Course:	CC 102 D  Citizen Poet / Poet Citizen
Professor:	Erica Kaufman
CRN:	90533	Schedule:	Tue  Th     3:50 PM - 5:10 PM Olin 107
Distributional Area:	MBV Meaning, Being, Value PA Practicing Arts	Class cap:	18
Credits:	4

Cross-listed:  Human Rights

2021 inaugural poet Amanda Gorman described her experience preparing to read “The Hill We Climb” as follows: “Now more than ever, the United States needs an inaugural poem. Poetry is typically the touchstone that we go back to when we have to remind ourselves of the history that we stand on, and the future that we stand for.” Gorman’s comments remind us that poetry can play a role in public life; it holds the potential to do something through language that differs from our daily forms of discourse. This course will consider the idea(l) and history of the public poet, civic poetry, citizen poet through reading broadly and experimenting with a range of poetic forms. What does it mean to compose a contemporary poem? How have poets of the past harnessed form in order to advocate for rights and question social structures? What is the relationship between democracy and poetic form? Through asking questions such as these, we will work together to imagine a public for poetry at the local, national, and global levels. Our writing and exploration will be rooted in readings by writers including: Walt Whitman, Divya Victor, Langston Hughes, Terrance Hayes, Eileen Myles, Myung Mi Kim, Anne Waldman, CAConrad, and others.

 

 

 

Disability and Difference

Course:	CC 107  Disability and Difference
Professor:	Liz Bowen, Erin Braselmann, Jack Ferver, Kathryn Tabb, and Dumaine Williams
CRN:	90550	Schedule:	Mon  Wed     2:00 PM – 3:20 PM Campus Center MPR
Distributional Area:	MBV Meaning, Being, Value PA Practicing Arts	Class cap:	60
Credits:	4

Cross-listed:  Human Rights

                  Disability and Difference is a Common Course that utilizes close readings of canonical and contemporary texts; movement explorations; film viewings; guest lectures; critical and creative writing assignments; and community involvement to deepen students’ understanding of disability and difference. Professor Bowen will use literature and popular media to examine how the concept of “the human” is shaped by cultural assumptions about ability and normalcy, and explore the artistic practices of disabled artists who disrupt and reimagine ableist notions of what it means to be a human animal. Professor Ferver will be dismantling the notion of “Neutral” through body/mind centered physical practices and performances, leading towards individual empowerment through pleasure and play. Professor Tabb will critically examine work in the philosophy of medicine to ground contemporary disputes over the difference between the normal and the pathological, and consider how the concept of “difference” can shape the future of these debates. Professor Williams will examine how intersectional disability experiences and systems of disadvantage and exclusion impact the formation of disability identity and influence our cultural understanding of disability. Students will work with all four professors, as well as Bard's new Director of Disability Resources and Accessibility, Erin Braselmann, in different contexts throughout the course, as well as collaboratively with their classmates on analytic and artistic projects.