Cultural Encounters Courses

Semester specific course descriptions

150. Introduction to Intercultural Studies.
This course will lead students from an examination of their own identities and social locations to an understanding of how those identities exist in a global matrix of cultural, economic and political relationships. Students will be introduced to various theoretical and political positions on identity, including essentialism, social construction, strategic essentialism, hybridity, and multiplicity. This will be done through film and fiction as well as theory with a focus on such differentiating categories of identity as gender, race, ethnicity, class, spirituality and sexuality. While much of the material will be drawn from the contemporary era, the historical context of European conquest and expansion and the Middle Passage will be used to frame a critical examination of the evolving ideas of “America “ and the “West. “ Also offered as Global Studies 102.

212. Creative Expressions of Health and Healing.
This class will compare how health, healing and spirituality intersect with the arts from several different cultural perspectives, including those of U.S. medicine, Tibetan Buddhism and selected indigenous peoples of North and South America. The course will seek both understanding of different cultural traditions and critical reflection on how those traditions are appropriated and represented by Western institutions and popular culture. We will study original works of art, gallery exhibitions, performances and film/video, which will be supplemented by theoretical texts throughout the semester. This course does not require an arts background, and we encourage students who are interested in the links between health and healing, spirituality and creativity to consider this class.

330. Writing About cultural Encounters.
This is a capstone course for students in the cultural encounters minor. It is also an appropriate elective for any student who, having returned from a study abroad program, wishes to reflect on that experience within the framework of the cultural encounters minor. (It may also be elected by interested international students and students who have some other kind of immersion experience in a culture other than their own.) The seminar uses student writing — primarily creative nonfiction, personal essays and journalistic feature writing - to explore issues that arise when learning about another culture firsthand. We will read cultural theorists, other scholars and creative writers to develop the thinking, discussing and writing done in this course. Topics will include: problems representing a culture, including how to incorporate voices from other cultures; problems arising in finding one’s own voice and perspective in writing about the encounter with another culture; reflections on one’s position within, and responsibility to, a world made more complex through the experience of living in another culture.

335. Comparative Studies in Racial and cultural Identities.
This is a senior seminar designed to fulfill the goals of the Cultural Encounters program: to prompt students to synthesize and re-evaluate their academic study of cultures, their experiential learning off campus and their own social locations and identities. The course content will be a comparative analysis of racial, ethnic and cultural identities; readings will be drawn from literature, contemporary cultural studies theory and philosophy of race, gender and identity, supplemented by films shown outside of class. A significant portion of the readings will be drawn from “critical white studies, “ looking at the ways white supremacy has been constructed and maintained in both historically specific and transnational ways. The course will pay particular attention to the interrelations between gender and race in different regions, especially as this is revealed through attitudes toward miscegenation and mixed-race identities. Students will be required to complete and present a major research project and to write a self-reflective analysis of their own identities and locations.

352. Travel and Tourism as cultural Encounter.
This course will offer students a chance to reflect upon and integrate their own study abroad experience. We will ask questions about their perceptions and representations of other cultures. It will also allow a chance for students to reflect critically on the ways their studies and experience have enlarged, and perhaps confused, their capacities for appreciating different ways of living. Questions of power, representation and identity will be at the center of all our work. The course will also provide students with a setting to articulate and reflect upon their own emerging ethical and political positions. It will help them see that, indeed, there are consequences to such positions, for us and for others.

412. Senior Seminar: Cross-cultural Perspectives of Healing.
Around the world many alternatives exist to Western allopathic medicine. This course will explore the philosophical, practical and medical definitions of health and disease from a number of Western and non-Western traditions. The course will begin with the Hippocratic tradition, go through Western theories of health and disease and then consider non-Western approaches to health and disease. For example, The Islamic Code of Medical Ethics, The Oath of a Muslim Physician, the Oath of Initiation (from the Caraka Samhita), medical ethics in ancient China and the 17 Rules of Enjuin will all be discussed as they relate to their appropriate medical traditions. We will discuss how the principles described in these readings apply to questions of beneficence, promise keeping, autonomy, killing and prolonging life and the healer/patient relationship within the various medical traditions. Preference to students who have taken one Cultural Encounters course or participated in a study abroad program. Class size limited to 16.