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In this course we will examine the role of music as a vehicle for political and social change in Africa. Our focus will be music-making throughout the continent of Africa during the nationalist struggles that resulted in independent African states and how musicians responded (and continue to respond) to the persistent challenges faced by those post-colonial states.

This course introduces a variety of materials, techniques and approaches to working with oil paint. Emphasis is placed on developing and understanding of color, form and space as well as individual research and conceptual concerns. The daily experience of seeing, along with examples from art history and contemporary art, provide a base from which investigations are made. Formal, poetic, and social implications within paintings both from class and from a wide-ranging selection of practicing artists are examined and discussed. Students complete work weekly.

Chromophilia, refers to intense passion and love for color. What is it about color that has the power to induce reverie, and conversely to manipulate, or disgust? How does color work? What is the role of color in visual art? In language? How do we understand and respond to color from phenomenological, poetic, philosophical, and societal vantage points? How as artists can we become effective stewards of our passionately-loved and yet ever-shifting chroma?

This intermediate level painting course will take as its platform the investigation of writing by artists about art and artists. While developing their own self-defined studio practices, students will engage with primary documents of art history - artists' essays, letters and sketchbooks.

This class will examine contemporary challenges through the lens of complex systems. The class will include a training in Mediation and Negotiation skills. Through readings, discussion, exercises and role-plays, the class will examine and deconstruct the complexities of current democratic and environmental issues related to local, national and global governance, We will begin with personal training and extend it to group multi-party collaborative problem-solving. 

This course will explore the construction and experience of gender and sexuality in the Middle East through a performative lens. Drawing on research in ethnomusicology, queer and gender studies, anthropology and Middle Eastern history, the course will examine performance (music, dance, theater, poetry and more) as a process of representation, assertion, and sometimes transgression of sexuality and gender identities. This course will delve into the ways that performance, gender, and sexuality relate to ethnicity, nationalism, modernity, colonialism, and religion.

In this course, we will be uncovering, re-positioning, and affirming historical legacies and traditions that stand the risk of being lost forever, and explore how to use them to fight discrimination, racism and hate today.

In this wide-ranging introduction to the study of international politics, we will be exploring how states and non-state actors negotiate their interactions in an increasingly interconnected, interdependent and globalized world.

Against a background of what is often described as a worldwide democratic recession or regression, this advanced seminar surveys current theoretical debates, empirical analyses, and policy conversations on the emergence, survival, challenges, breakdowns, and prospects of global democratization.

In terms of public action, Ganas remains a community-driven, cross-cultural association that offers students volunteer opportunities to engage with the predominantly undocumented Latine migrant worker population. We maintain relationships with local organizations and members while developing new ones, along with more conventional classes and readings. Over the past couple of years, it has ballooned into a range of simultaneous activities that are seemingly happening all of the time, with students very much at the center of said impetus.

Climate change, poverty, and food access are all compelling and urgent issues confronting our society. Growing local food is one significant way we can respond. Having received the Bennington Fair Food Initiative Grant with the mission to develop educational training programs in agriculture/food system workforce development and to create small business, this class will be practice based learning in regenerative agricultural practices and the creation of sustainable food systems.

Fake news, reality television, “IRL” – asserting the veracity of our perceptions is a constant preoccupation in contemporary culture. What is real? Realism is a widely used term with multiple connotations: verisimilitude, authenticity, objectivity, truth, fact.

This course is for experienced student artists with a firm commitment to serious work in the studio. Students will work primarily on self-directed projects in an effort to refine individual concerns and subject matter. Students will present work regularly for critique in class as well as for individual studio meetings with the instructor. Development of a strong work ethic will be crucial.

Today it is clear that the environment matters. In activism and scholarship and public policy, the environment has become a potent (if sometimes obligatory) point of reference. Less attention, however, has focused on the emergence of the environment itself as a converging field of action for advocacy, science, and statecraft. In this seminar, we will reflect not only on what we know of the environment but also on how we came to know the environment.

“I, at least, am not a Marxist”&�Բ�����;Karl Marx

How does love emerge under conditions of war? This seminar explores what it means to sustain intimate relations in the face of overwhelming violence. Through the Anthropology of Kinship, as well as through methods developed across the fields of Queer Studies, Black Studies, and Postcolonial Studies, this course considers how intimacy and love figure in the production and maintenance of racialized, classed, and gendered difference.

How can anthropology help us listen more critically and carefully? Each class session will consider one ethnographic approach, which students will apply to their listening. Following in the anthropological tradition, where concepts both reveal social processes and are themselves modified by the material at hand, students will consider how podcast episodes they listen to can be elucidated by and also place pressure on each class’s conceptual approach.