TUTORIAL:

 

12581

HUM T200  EXPLORING HUMAN CONNECTION THROUGH ARGENTINE TANGO II

Supervised by Leon Botstein (Chungin Goodstein)

M           4:40 pm-7:00 pm

CAMPUS CENTER MPR

2 credits
 This ELAS group tutorial builds on the first course in the Tango sequence, delving deeper into an exploration of the profound human connections that Argentine Tango music and dance engender. To enroll, students must have completed either Tango I or at least one college-level dance course. The course includes discussions of the historical and cultural context of the music and dance, and the gender politics that surround it. In a workshop setting, the group will focus with practitioner Chungin Goodstein on mastering complex movements beyond the fundamentals of the dance. Work for the tutorial will be split between experiential learning through actual practice and readings/videos on issues relating to this dance form. Students will also attend at least three “milongas” or community dance events either locally, or in NYC. The course also contains a community engagement project. No partner necessary. All students learn both roles: leading and following.

 

12307

ANTH 212      Historical Archaeology

Christopher Lindner

Th     4:40 pm-6:00 pm     F     1:30 pm-5:00 pm

HEG 300 ROSE 108

HA

SSCI DIFF

Cross-listed: Africana Studies; American Studies; Environmental & Urban Studies; Historical Studies

Our research and excavations focus on a religious site 9 miles north of Bard, epicenter in 1710 of the first substantial German-speaking community in the New World. After their mass emigration from the Rhineland, and then two years of forced labor conditions under British colonists in NY, the economy of these orchard farmers, grape growers, and artisans began to flourish in the central Hudson Valley. Their diaspora from here established the Mohawk Valley's Palatines, the Pennsylvania Deutsch, and the Shenandoah Germans in Virginia. Before 1750 our site, the Parsonage (or minister’s home), was likely the scene of visits from Mohicans from a Moravian mission village in the Taconic Range east of Bard, just before they were pushed out of New York. African Americans lived at the Parsonage as slaves of the Calvinist minister’s family by the 1780s, if not decades earlier. Our excavations have found traces of their ritual gestures for protection and well-being. In the mid-1800s, an African American family bought the property and became the center of a neighborhood that lasted until the early 20th Century. Our class will do 3.5-hour dig and/or lab sessions on Fridays, or weekend afternoons before mid-term, to find more evidence of spiritual practice, domestic lifeways, and landscape treatment. To better contextualize our research, we’ll study background texts in order to write short papers for weekly seminars. The 2nd Friday of the semester, February 7, will feature a bus trip to the Bard Graduate Center in NYC for an all-day conference on the archaeology of free African American communities. Students should arrange for excuse from other classes that day.  Please consult with the professor in advance of enrollment. [Some participants return for another month in summer for 4 more credits; see www.bard.edu/archaeology/fieldschool.]

Class size: 12

 

12305

ANTH 255      Anthropology of the Institution: Making Change through Social Service and Community Organizing

Gregory Morton

T          3:10 pm-4:30 pm     F     8:30 am-1:20 pm

HEG 201

SA D+J

SSCI DIFF

Cross-listed: American Studies; Human Rights

Can a small group of people change the society in which they live? This course uses the tools of anthropology to consider human organizations that wrestle with the human condition—organizations like nursing homes and crisis hotlines, labor unions and migrant coalitions. What can we learn if we consider these groups as institutions? The course is designed for students who wish to gain practical experience with health, psychological services, youth work, social movements, or related fields. We combine classroom readings with weekly work in a community organization. Students commit to a semester-long internship at a group that carries out community organizing or social service. We strive to make change by participating directly in the labor of mental health, human services, or activism.  In the classroom, students assess the concept “institution,” searching for its roots inside the tradition of modern social science. Just what is an institution? Do institutions always oppress someone? Is there such a thing as a liberating institution? We read classic theory from Weber, Durkheim, Gandhi, Tocqueville, Hamer, Goffman, and Foucault alongside contemporary ethnographies of institutions. These allow us to draw connections to barracks, prisons, workhouses, shopping malls, and utopian communities. The class will meet twice each week: (a) once for a classroom session of one hour and twenty minutes and (b) once for an internship session of four to eight hours. At both locations, we try to change the world as we know it and we wonder if institutions can help. Why can’t we live without institutions? Why do we want to do so? Interested students must email Duff Morton at gmorton@bard.edu before registration and complete a brief online form. If this class is taken in conjunction with EUS/Sociology 319, Hudson Valley Cities and Environmental Justice, a single intensive community project can be arranged for both classes.

Class size: 10

 

12311

ANTH 323      The Politics of Infrastructure

Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins

Th     1:30 pm-3:50 pm

HEG 201

SA D+J

SSCI DIFF

Cross-listed: Environmental & Urban Studies; Human Rights; Science, Technology, Society

Infrastructure is said to be invisible until the point at which it breaks down. Drawing on ethnographic and historical readings from a number of disparate geographical locales (e.g. India, Egypt, South Africa, France, Ghana, Hong Kong, Mexico, the United States, Nigeria, Palestine, Greece, Albania and the Arabian Peninsula) we will start by asking when, and with what consequences, infrastructures become visible or invisible. The course will be organized thematically around different types of infrastructure present in colonial and postcolonial contexts. These will include roads, water distribution networks, landfills, sewage pipelines, electricity, telecommunications, nuclear energy stations and electrification. We will explore how infrastructures become central to popular claims to rights, how they shape senses and sensibilities and how they shape relationships between the body and the public (the “body politic”). We will investigate how marginalized groups may reappropriate dominant infrastructures, for example, such that the “messages” infrastructures convey and the material effects they produce may be transformed. Climate change scientists increasingly have the ear of governments and multinational corporations. We will thus also consider how climate change “adaptation” and emissions reductions strategies through new large-scale infrastructures are producing new discourses around environmental security and new ways of imagining the future of human existence. “Waste Cluster”: This class will include engagement with joint classroom and field experiences around the theme of waste with Prof. Ellen Driscoll's Studio Arts class, Prof. Elias Dueker’s EUS class, and Prof. Susan Rogers’ Written Arts class (all classes meet at the same time). These collaborations are supported by the Center for Civic Engagement. Cross-listed: Environmental & Urban Studies; Science, Technology, Society. The class counts as an upper level seminar for STS.

Class size: 15

 

12312

ANTH 324      Doing Ethnography

Gregory Morton

W       1:30 pm-3:50 pm

OLIN 310

SA

SSCI

Cross-listed: Environmental & Urban Studies; Human Rights

What are the ethical stakes, practical questions, and methodological tools that we use when we practice ethnography? Ethnography is the cornerstone of contemporary cultural anthropology, and so ethnography includes both fieldwork and representation. This course is a survey of, and practicum in, ethnographic field methods. We will study and critique traditional ethnographic methods such as participant-observation, interviewing, archival research, and visual, sonic, textual and spatial analysis. The course addresses the challenges of doing fieldwork in a variety of contexts, including the virtual domain. A series of sequenced intensive research exercises will raise guiding questions about how ethnographic research can be ethically and effectively "translated" into written text. To complement the fieldwork projects, we will also read exemplary, and sometimes controversial, texts of ethnography in practice. Students will develop a community-based ethnographic research project of their own design throughout the course of the semester. Ethical aspects of conducting ethnographic fieldwork, including preparing for Institutional Review Board (IRB) approval, will be addressed. This seminar is primarily intended for anthropology students preparing for senior project research. Prerequisites: Introduction to Anthropology 101. 

Class size: 15

 

12552

ART 132      Art and Climate Change

Adriane Colburn Ellen Driscoll

W        10:10 am-1:10 pm

FISHER

PA

PART

Cross-listed: Environmental & Urban Studies; Human Rights

Does art have a role to play in altering the course of the crisis of climate change?
Students from disciplines across the College are invited to engage in the analysis of a range of artistic practices and strategies addressing climate change. Through focused case studies, we will learn basic sculptural techniques that use social and civic engagement as part of their structure, and digital tools in the Adobe Creative Suite for making books and graphic projects to increase visual understanding of climate change. We will include field trips with local non-profits such as Riverkeeper to understand efforts to address the impacts of climate change on the Hudson Valley. Dynamic lectures from scientists, activists, and visiting artists will supplement class interaction, independent research, and collaborative thinking.

Class size: 14

 

12266

ART 206 ED  Sculpture II:Earth/Air/Water

Ellen Driscoll

Th      10:10 am-1:10 pm

FISHER FOUNDATIONS RM

PA

PART

  Cross-listed: Environmental & Urban Studies

 We will look at air, water, and earth as sites, subjects, and material for making sited sculptural installations with special focus on environmental waste. We will focus locally on such sites as the Bard Campus, local wastewater systems, the Sawkill, the Hudson River, and New York City. We will look at the diverse range of artists working with the elements in contemporary art practice, and look historically at Earth Works and Land Art. Working site-specifically, students will create a series of sculptural projects that address the research platform of the class in fresh and poetic ways. At intervals throughout the semester we will overlap with Professor M. Eli Dueker's class "Waste”  and Professor Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins “The Politics of Infrastructure”for collaborative exchange across the disciplines of Art, Biology, and Anthropology.

Class size: 14

 

12083

BLC 185      Placemaking:Mission-Center Design

Joshua Livingston

F     8:00 am-10:00 am

HDR 106

 (2 credits in spring; yearlong course for 6 credits: semester 1, 4 credits; semester 2, 2 credits.) Design that is visually intriguing and highly functional is extremely important in developing spaces that are ultimately turned into places by their users. A space, in this context, is understood to be more of the framework or meeting spot for people; while place is defined by what is made by the people based on the life and meaning they put into it. The goal of this course will be not only to think, but to create. Through peer inquiry, human-centered design activities, and research, a need for students on campus will be examined and additional pain points unearthed. This course incorporates physical, human, and operational design iterations to create space that revolves around the wants of the people it intends to serve. Theoretical perspectives and practical approaches of design thinking will be used. Social enterprise and social innovation will be explored through a wide range of literature, audio and video. The deliverable for students in this course will be a new and innovative space to take root on Bard College’s campus. This class is team oriented. Students will conceptualize, and if interested, create physical design within the space to be developed. No prior experience with design or mission-based work is required. The course welcomes and thrives on inclusivity, as it draws upon the unique perspective from all students. Interested students should send an email to Joshua Livingston (livingstonjosh@gmail.com), that includes your academic focus and a brief description of your interest in the course. Keep in mind that this is a year-long course. You will be required to complete both parts to participate.

Class size: 10

 

12559

ECON 209      Local Community Currencies

Leanne Ussher

M         3:10 pm-4:30 am     W    3:10 pm-5:30 am

OLIN 302

SA

SSCI

Hyman Minsky famously said “Anyone can create money; the problem is to get it accepted". This course will critically examine the rise in alternative currencies by grass roots organizations to confront the ills of market‐based capitalism. Classes will cover monetary theory, game theory, economics of the commons, and token economics. While learning the design principles of making a new currency ‘accepted’, students will also be required to analyze and visualize data from local currency networks by programming in Mathematica. Prior knowledge of programming is helpful but not necessary. The class will partner with the Hudson Valley Current (HVC), a local currency issuer, and take field trips to interview HVC members. Students must propose their own token currency design to optimize a local community ecosystem, promote reciprocity, realign community goals, and/or prioritize people and the planet.

Prerequisite: ECON 100 Principles of Economics or ECON 114 Economics for Planet Earth or permission by the instructor.

Class size: 10

 

12334

EUS 102      Intro:Environmental & Urban Science

Robyn Smyth

T        1:30 pm-3:50 pm  Th       1:30 pm-4:30 pm

HEG 106 ROSE 306

LS

SCI

 This course offers an integrated exploration of the science underlying environmental issues. The primary objective is to provide students with a systems-oriented understanding of biological, chemical, physical, and geological processes that affect earth, air, water, and life. Students will gain a solid understanding of the fundamental scientific principles governing environmental systems including the cycling of matter and the flow of energy. By practicing the application of these scientific concepts, students will develop their ability to think critically about the potential outcomes of complex environmental issues. Local and global examples of elemental cycling, hydrology, ecology, agriculture, urbanization, and climate change will be used. This class will include some local field trips and outdoor data collection. 

Class size: 20

 

12508

EUS 232      (Urban) Oceanography

Elias Dueker

W F  1:30 pm-4:30 pm    W  F 1:30 pm-4:30 pm

HEG 300 ROSE 306

LS D+J

 The world's oceans are vastly underappreciated in terms of their profound influence on our daily lives, regardless of where we live. We will take an earth sciences approach, coupled with a socioeconomic lens, to understand this influence globally, regionally, and locally. Using the Hudson River Estuary, the New York Harbor, Coney Island, and other regional coastal areas as our living lab, this class will introduce you to the fundamental biological, physical, and chemical mechanisms governing global oceans. We will explore the central role that the oceans play in climate change and connect this directly to the real-time struggles of coastal megacities facing bigger storms and worsening coastal water quality. We will partner with the NY Harbor School to learn about the concrete interplay between environmental racism and water quality in megacities like New York City. We will also work with community-based organizations including the Newtown Creek Alliance, the River Project, and Billion Oysters Project on remediation efforts including microplastics mapping and removal, oyster reef recovery, living docks, climate adaptation, and combined sewer overflow mitigation. For 300-level credit (which is cross-listed with Biology), you will additionally collaborate with a team of students from the NY Harbor School in conducting a semester-long project.

Class size: 14

 

12340

EUS 304      Aquatic Ecosystem Restoration

Robyn Smyth

F     9:30 am-12:30 pm     F     9:30 am-12:30 pm

HEG 300 ROSE 306

LS

 With climate change intensifying the hydrologic cycle and exacerbating existing challenges to water management, we face a need to simultaneously restore and adapt aquatic ecosystem to improve water quality and prepare for larger variation and uncertainty in precipitation. Billions of dollars are currently spent on ecological restoration in the U.S. alone. In this course we seek to understand how to maximize these resources to simultaneously restore degraded water quality, enhance resiliency to climate extremes, sequester carbon, and enhance biodiversity. We will use local, national, and international case studies to examine the theory and practice of ecological restoration with an emphasis on climate change projections and the need to mitigate and adapt while restoring.  We will hear about challenges and best practice from practitioners engaged in restoration and adaptation in NY and beyond. The majority of the class will be held outside at impaired aquatic field sites where we will design, implement, and/or evaluate restoration/adaptation projects. In addition to hands-on practice in the field, students will write and present a mock proposal for a restoration/adaptation project in response to an actual grant solicitation for the course final.

Class size: 10

 

12341

EUS 311      Climate & Agroecology

Jennifer Phillips

M  W   10:10 am-11:30 am    Th     9:30 am-12:30 pm

ALBEE 102 ROSE 306

SA

SSCI

In this course we will examine the linkages between agroecosystems and the climate system.  Based on the framework of impacts, mitigation and adaptation, we will cover the physiology of increased global temperatures and elevated CO2 on plant growth and yield, and the implications for global food supplies. We then turn to an investigation of the role that regenerative agriculture and permaculture can play in both reducing greenhouse gas emissions and adapting to expected climate extremes.  Special attention will be paid to practices that promote soil health.  In addition to close reading of the peer-reviewed science, students will run experiments using a simulation model.  This is a graduate course in the program in Environmental Policy.  All students taking the course attend lectures twice a week.  Undergraduates additionally attend a soils lab once a week.

Class size: 16

 

12343

EUS 415      Microbial Remediation (Waste Cluster)

Elias Dueker

Th     1:30 pm-3:50 pm

HEG 300

Cross-listed: Biology

Our past approach to handling human-generated waste, "the solution to pollution is dilution," has resulted in the saturation of our air, water, and soils with toxins and plastics. As we grapple with this complex issue, we are also being forced to upgrade crumbling infrastructure including landfills, waste treatment plants, and drinking water plants. This seminar will explore the dynamic microbiological field that is dedicated to proactively reducing pollution in our water, land, and air, and to developing effective alternatives to our treatment of waste moving forward. This course will be part of the EUS Waste Cluster, which includes arts, anthropology, and writing classes taught by Ellen Driscoll, Susan Rogers, and Sophia Stomatopoulou-Robbins. We will occasionally meet with these classes during the semester to engage in interdisciplinary discussions about waste issues, and will join them in a joint field trip to New York City to witness this megacity's approaches to handling waste on a massive scale.

Class size: 12

 

12342

EUS/SOC 319      Hudson Valley Cities/Environmental (In)Justice

Peter Klein

W      10:10 am-12:30 pm

HEG 200

SA D+J

SSCI DIFF

Cross-listed: American Studies

 How do urban processes of growth, decline, and revitalization affect different groups, particularly along dimensions of race, class, and gender? This place-based research seminar course looks closely at this question by examining the historical, political, and social landscape of Hudson and Kingston. We will use these nearby cities as cases to explore theories on urban transformation and the contemporary challenges that face small urban centers. In particular, the course will use the lens of environmental inequality, or the ways in which some people are more likely to be exposed to environmental hazards than others, to examine the effects of historical processes, as well as to investigate how residents and government officials are addressing pressing problems. The course will look specifically at issues of food justice, pollution, access to resources, and environmental decision-making processes. We will visit these cities as a class, and students will develop and carry out their own research project with an organization in one or both places. (This course fulfills the practicum requirement for moderated EUS students.) Admission by permission of the instructor. This course will usually meet from 10:10-12:30 on Wednesdays, but students must be available from 9:00-12:30, in order to allow for off-campus trips. This class may be taken either on its own or in conjunction with Anthropology 255: Anthropology of Institutions.

Class size: 15

 

12516

HIST 2242      US-Russian Relations and the Founding of the UN

David Woolner

F 10:10 am 12:30 pm

OLIN 203

HA

HIST

Cross-listed: Russian and Eurasian Studies

 This course will examine the critical role US-Russian relations played in the founding of the United Nations. It will explore how the American versus Soviet view of the purposes of the United Nations differed during the course of the Second World War, and the important part the wartime alliance played in overcoming those differences. The course will include a look at the October 1943 Moscow Conference, followed by examination of the proceedings of the Dumbarton Oaks, Yalta, and San Francisco Conferences. Students will gain a deeper understanding of the important issues involved in creating the UN through extensive use of the records of the FDR Presidential Library. To facilitate this research, the course will include five field trips to the FDRL, where students will look for “key documents and images” that may be used in a subsequent exhibit marking the 75th anniversary of the founding of the UN at the Bard College Library, as well as an exhibition marking the end of the war in Europe at the Russian State Archives in Moscow. Five of the Fridays will involve 5 hour visits to the FDR Library in Hyde Park. Transportation will be provided.

Class size: 22

 

12369

HR 219      Mapping Police Violence

Kwame Holmes

T  Th 10:10 am-11:30 am

OLIN 310

SA D+J

Cross-listed: American Studies; Environmental & Urban Studies; Experimental Humanities

This class emerges from my preoccupation with the recent increase in media and political attention to extra- judicial killings by police officers in the United States. Predominant questions will include: What can we know about police violence, and what are the barriers to data transparency and distribution? What are the means--political, legal, economic, cultural-- through which Western societies authorize the police to use deadly force?  Can we measure the impact of police violence on a range of exogenous factors like public health indices, adjacent property values, educational opportunities and the distribution of social services? In pursuit of answers, we will engage political theory, history, sociology, economics, and cultural studies to produce an interdisciplinary study of police violence. I use the word “produce” with great intention.  Students will be tasked with producing new knowledge about police violence.  As a collective, we will use demographic analytical tools, alongside datasets from the Police Data Initiative, to spatially apprehend police violence incidents in a given city.  Students will then bring their own research questions to our collectively generated maps.  In that sense, we will also think critically about how to ask a research question, and how to pursue a variety of research projects.

Class size: 18

 

12487

LIT 153      Falling in Love

Maria Cecire

M  W    3:10 pm-4:30 pm

OLIN 102

LA D+J

Cross-listed: Experimental Humanities; Gender and Sexuality Studies

Caught up, let down, storm-tossed by emotion, under a spell, suddenly looking around as if with new eyes: are we talking about falling in love, or reading a great book? This course will consider some iconic literary depictions of romantic love as well as lesser-known texts, critical theory, and popular material across a range of media as we expand and challenge our ideas about this often-controversial emotional state. We will consider to what extent language and literature can capture and convey our most intimate feelings, experiences, and desires -- and to what extent they participate in creating them. Course texts will include medieval chivalric romance, Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, Gabriel García Márquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera, Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, selections of love poetry, and at least one mass-market “bodice-ripper” romance novel. Our discussions will bring us into contact with discourses of gender and sexuality, power and desire, and “literary” and “lowbrow” fiction, and address what role digital culture plays in how love is imagined and experienced today. This course is open both to intended Literature majors and to others interested in developing skills in close-reading and critical analysis.

Class size: 22

 

12131

MATH 116      Mathematics:Puzzles & Games

Silvia Saccon

M  W   10:10 am-11:30 am

HEG 308

MC

MATC

 Mathematics can be used to analyze many puzzles and games.  Conversely, puzzles and games can be used as a vehicle to explore new mathematics concepts.  In this class we will develop the mathematics of puzzles and games from both perspectives, as a means to solve a puzzle or win a game, and also as a fun way to learn and develop mathematical skills.  We will focus on the mathematics and the strategies behind puzzles and games such as the Rubik’s Cube, SET, Nim, Hex, and Sudoku. This is an Engaged Liberal Arts and Sciences course, and the ELAS activities include guests presenters, a trip to the Museum of Mathematics, and participating in games sessions for local K-12 students and community members. No prior experience with the games and puzzles listed above is required.  Prerequisite: A passing score on Part 1 of the Math Placement Diagnostic.

Class size: 22