How are meanings made? How do meanings emerge from making and doing, as well as from seeing and listening, thinking and feeling, and even just being in the same place at the same time? This seminar takes up these fundamental questions, primarily in relation to materials drawn from visual art, poetry, theater, film, and music. It also attends to other ways in which people engage in meaning making, individually and collectively. Throughout the course, creative exercises, creative activities, and creative projects provide students with opportunities to explore and apply what they have learned about meaning making.

Chris Robinson, lead guitarist for the Black Crowes once stated, “Musicians playing together, it’s like a conversation, and ideally I want our conversation to be really intriguing and interesting and beautiful.” In this course, we will have intriguing, interesting, and beautiful conversations about the power of music and the role it plays in our lives. We will read about and explore the lives and artistry of famous musicians such as Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen and Prince, as well as their roles as agents of social change. 

As they are today, conceptions of sex and gender were hotly debated in Renaissance Italy. In this seminar, students first explore ideas and debates that shape 21st-century understandings of sex and gender. Students then consider how current conceptions inform the study of women artists in Renaissance Italy, when women’s artistic abilities were vehemently debated. Course assignments teach students to engage in meaningful discussion on controversial topics, to visually analyze works of art, and to find and evaluate a variety of sources for individual research projects.

Movement and dance encourages the exploration of complex ideas through investigation, knowledge, and expression of the body. Dance embodies both historical and cultural values and also awakens new perceptions which help you learn and think in new ways. Over the course of the semester, we will consider the role of movement and dance as a vital form of human expression, understanding, communication, and interaction. Come and be “moved” by the power of dance. No dance experience required.

How do magic, spirituality, myth, the occult, and the paranormal inform our understanding of race and identity? How do artists bring these supernatural elements to material life on stage and screen to facilitate critical conversations about power? This course invites students to engage in deep and nuanced discussion about culture, belief, and imagination, while also learning how artists render critical thinking about race into creative work. Our emphasis will be on reading plays, but we will also look at pop culture like film, music videos, and current TV shows.  Students will lead presentations and class discussions, develop research materials around course texts, and stage theatrical magic themselves!

How have the events of 2020 impacted you? The COVID-19 pandemic robbed hundreds of thousands of their lives and all of us of our daily habits. The murder of George Floyd spawned a worldwide uprising over racial injustice. Through it all, teachers and schools have been tasked with delivering instruction, creating community in online classrooms, and supporting students during the most challenging school year in memory. In this class we will explore what the year has meant for teachers, learners and schools through readings, podcasts, personal reflections, class discussions and case studies. What have we learned from 2020 and how can it be used as a set of experiences to foster growth and radical change in education in the years to come?

Habits make up a large part of our daily lives – the estimates range from 40% to a whopping 90%. Your habits contribute to your happiness, your mental and physical health, and your GPA. Some habits are considered good, some are bad, some simply are, and an ever-growing number of apps have been created to help you track all of these habits. In this seminar we’ll explore the science of learning and habit creation, how stress, sleep and health are directly connected, and how harnessing the power of cues can help create habits that can improve your life, for the rest of your life.

“What kind of creature is a human being?” explores an impossibly big question at the heart of higher education. To do so we will read a series of odd books, one by a sociologist on the “global party circuit,” another on walking and human evolution, and a third by an artist entitled “How to Do Nothing” that contemplates modern maladies like TikTok. As we examine humanity in this broad sweep, we will also consider college as a rite of passage and a social institution. How does St. Olaf shape you as a kind of person? Prerequisite: curiosity.

You may be familiar with the “power of data” but have you considered the power structures that are embedded in data? Data collection is at the center of many advances in the 21st century. Almost every area of modern life depends on data in some form. The influence of data-dependent fields has grown to affect all aspects of our lives from dating to health to business to public policy to entertainment. Thanks to advances in technology, we now live in a world inundated with data. But how can we use all of this data to yield useful and meaningful information? We will spend the semester investigating various aspects of data collection and presentation of data. We will explore data in our own lives and the data we consume in news, the popular press, and scientific studies. In this course we will move further to examine how data reflects the societal power structures under which it was collected and supports systems of privilege and discrimination. This course is NOT a mathematics or a statistics course, and no mathematical or statistical knowledge is assumed.

There is growing concern among policy experts and economists about the rate at which developing countries, especially those in Africa, have been accumulating debt in recent times. While debt build up is a global problem, the consequences of a debt crisis would be felt disproportionately by poor countries. A high debt-to-GDP ratio elevates the risk of growth collapse and may pose serious implications for job creation and poverty alleviation in developing economies. In this seminar, students explore the debt problem in developing economies with a focus on how resource endowment affects the relationship between public debt and economic growth.

While Covid-19 has strained healthcare systems around the world, the pandemic has shown that the value of healthcare professionals cannot be underestimated. What careers are available in healthcare beyond physicians and nurses? What skills are needed to be successful in this demanding industry? In this course we will explore the many complexities and facets of healthcare and see where you might fit in. 

Sports and competition have long been lauded as building character for young people, in part because athletes thrive on challenge and use failure as a springboard for growth. Sports are a multi-billion dollar industry in the U.S. because fans (who aren’t playing the games themselves) become passionate about following sports teams or individuals. The focus of this writing seminar will be how gender intersects with these two worlds of sports, the participants and the fans. We’ll examine how gender is performed on the field or the court. We’ll discuss Title IX and its importance to increasing sports opportunities for women. We’ll look at how the media represents social attitudes toward sex and gender, particularly in its binary forms. As befits a writing seminar, we will take extensive time to discuss the writing process, revision, audience, researching, and other important matters relating to improving our writing abilities.

In recent years, musicians and music lovers have engaged in increasingly heated debates over the ethics of cultural appropriation, a phenomenon in which practices or artifacts from one culture are used by another culture. The phenomenon itself has proved difficult to pin down: what might seem like appropriation and theft to one person can seem like an expression of respect, celebration, and even love to another. In this seminar, we’ll examine shifting understandings of cultural appropriation and musical ownership from Plato and St. Augustine through Mozart and Beethoven, blackface minstrels and Walt Disney, Robin Thicke and Pharrell Williams. Drawing on iterative writing techniques, we’ll produce a series of short essays and a longer researched essay in which we’ll apply insights from anthropology, philosophy, economics, law, and musicology to develop a moral framework for distinguishing “love” from “theft” in our own cultural practices. 

How did we get from Richard Nixon and DJ Kool Herc’s break to Obama’s playlists and Cardi B? This seminar uses hip-hop culture as a guide to the social, political, economic, and artistic changes that have taken place in the US since the early 1970s. We will focus on the historical circumstances and unique spaces out of which hip-hop has arisen as well as the culture’s own conceptions of history, social life, and aesthetics, or what you might call its poetics of place. Our study of hip-hop culture will encourage us to think about writing as a process, a practice of daily attention and development. To this end, you will learn to write in diverse formats, from close listening exercises and album reviews to personal reflection papers and a research-driven essay. As a class, we will participate in a semester-long series of workshops that will invite you to generate and circulate drafts among your peers, respond to and provide feedback on the work of others, and revise your writing.

T-Shirts, cell-phones, lava lamps, GI Joes, La-Z-Boy Recliners–the objects that fill our lives have social histories and communicate all sorts of messages. What do objects “say” about their users? What kind of light can they shed on matters of social structure and inequality, national or class identity, values and morality? In this class we will use tools from the field of material culture analysis to think, talk, and write about objects from the American past and present (including the stuff in your dorm room). Writing in this course will take all sorts of forms, from museum labels, to a research-based essay, to a very short one-act play.

Increasingly often, we ask ourselves, “What can I do about climate change?” Maybe we try to recycle or donate to environmental causes, but we wonder if such actions make a difference. In a way, what we’re really wondering is this: in the time of climate change, how do we live well–that is, overcome climate anxiety, find joy, and work toward collective human and environmental justice? What can we do to be good ancestors to those who inhabit the world yet to come? To address these questions, we’ll read and discuss environmental media from diverse thinkers. 

Glacial ice is melting and sea levels are rising. Climate change exacerbated by human activity is happening, and the debate about these changes continues. Storytelling is at the heart of this dialogue, but how are these stories told and whose stories are they? While stories are the vehicles scientists and nonprofits use to make cases, they are also the vehicle of multinational corporations. Often forgotten or diminished in these debates are the stories of vulnerable populations who will likely be the most impacted by climate change. This seminar will examine the complexities of the political and corporate landscape regarding environmental issues, as well as how some of our most celebrated science fiction and literary authors have contributed to this dialogue with a special focus on narratives that highlight marginalized communities.

Monarch butterflies, sea turtles, and wildebeest are some of nature’s famous migrators, but humans migrate, too. Our own migrations take many different forms. These journeys can be geographical, chronological, over different time lengths, and taken individually or collectively. Migrations are also topically diverse; our opinions, identities, knowledge, relationships, priorities, and more may migrate over time. Thought-provoking fiction and non-fiction readings will help us identify, reflect on, and write in various ways about our own migrations, as well as enrich our knowledge about different individuals’ and groups’ identities and journeys.

In her 2009 TEDTalk “The Danger of a Single Story,” novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie states that we often learn about a topic from one point of view. While that one perspective isn’t necessarily bad, it limits our understanding of the topic and, more importantly, of the world as well. In this course, we will analyze the idea of the “single story.” We’ll start by interrogating the single stories we’re familiar with in our cultural contexts, academic experiences, and personal lives. Who creates these stories? Why do they do so? How do these narratives take root? We will then seek out works that challenge these master narratives by addressing the same topic from another angle: a different author’s perspective, a different discipline’s approach, or a different culture’s beliefs, to name a few.

In the U.S., perhaps no other value is as widely promoted as freedom. To give “free rein” to our “free will,” to be “as free as a bird” or to “live free or die” — these phrases suggest the great stress placed on the capacity to control one’s life and live unconstrained by others. But beyond easy affirmations that, e.g., U.S. citizens are more free than those in totalitarian states, we often find ourselves debating the precise contours of freedom. Critics challenge those who act in the name of freedom, insisting that it should be limited by respect for some other principle, or that their acts enable some but threaten or abuse others. In this seminar, we’ll consider situations in which the pursuit of freedom is questioned in this way, as it conflicts with values such as equality, justice, and privacy.

The United States is a country increasingly divided by issues of politics and religion. From immigration to abortion, from gun rights to bathroom rights, from vaccinations to mask use, many of us feel strongly about the issues that we care about. But from where, exactly, do our deepest held beliefs emerge? And how do we actually change the minds of others–or ourselves? In this course we’ll use moral psychology to consider the roots of belief and the human capacity for change. Students will investigate contemporary issues through a variety of lenses: personal reflection, research, close textual analysis, etc. Students in this course will come to see themselves not only as thinkers and writers, but also as members of the St. Olaf College community.

The opening decades of the twenty-first century have seen considerable attention to race and its role in contemporary life. Yet, in the public protests and debates that have followed events such as the deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, Sandra Bland, Philando Castile, Tamir Rice, Michael Brown, and Trayvon Martin; the Charleston massacre at Emanuel AME Church; immigration policies and practices such as the “Muslim ban,” family separation, and policies intended to limit refugee arrivals; and the rise in racist violence directed toward Asians and Asian Americans in the wake of the COVID pandemic, scholars, political leaders, activists, journalists, and–not least of all–college students have pointed to the shortcomings of our reckoning with race. This seminar is intended to address this need.