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Culture of Surveillance

The word “surveillance” often conjures up George Orwell’s dystopian world in 1984, where a totalitarian government had obliterated intellectual and political freedoms and kept an ever-watchful eye on its citizens. Today, mass surveillance certainly exists in the United States, everything from local traffic cameras to federal agencies monitoring our electronic communications. Edward Snowden revealed just how much the U.S. government knows about us. Yet, there are other kinds of surveillance that we often fail to recognize.

Chocolate and our Environment

Cocoa has been cultivated for centuries and today it’s a much loved indulgent confectionery. In this course, students explore the interdisciplinary nature of chocolate and sustainability. Chocolate is art, music, film, literature, spiritual, medicinal, culinary, commodity, injustice, environment and science. Historians shed light on how chocolate changed the world. Economists show a greedy consumer-driven global chocolate market estimated at 139 billion USD, which might just vanish as scientists estimate there are less than 25 years before the plant faces extinction from climate change.

Architecture: Symbol and Ideology

A socio-historical and symbolic exploration of architecture, gardens, and other aspects of built environments in Europe and the United States. Themes include architecture and mysticism; buildings and gardens as metaphors of power, and as microcosms and sacred realms; the technological revolution; utopian worlds in modern architecture; and topics in current architectural theory.

Hormones and Behavior

This lecture-laboratory course provides an introduction to the field of behavioral endocrinology. The interplay between hormones and behavior is explored by reviewing current knowledge derived from human and animal research in the field. Topics include the influence of hormones on reproductive behavior, parental behavior, aggression, sexual orientation, moods and emotions, psychiatric disorders and perceptual and cognitive abilities. Environmental and experiential influences on endocrine function are also examined.

Art and Nature

An overview of nature as a subject of artistic representation, in ancient Mediterranean and Mesopotamian cultures, and in the West from the Renaissance to the present. This course explores the ways in which depictions of nature have both reflected and shaped constructs of the natural world, by reference to religions, philosophies and moral values. Works of art to be examined include obvious examples of nature in art, such as landscape painting, and less obvious ones, such as villas and portraits, as well as earthworks and other  environmental art created by contemporary artists.

Biomimicry: Using Nature as a Model for Contemporary Design

This course will emphasize the research, analysis, and exploration of natural patterns and systems as a model for contemporary design. After researching recent biomimicry developments in industry, the sciences, and other fields, students will employ several design media (including but not limited to: drawing, photography, digital modeling, and 3-D printing) as an analytical method in their investigations of nature's "systemness." In the words of Dr. Janine Benyus, after 3.8 billion years of research and development, nature knows what works, what is appropriate, and what lasts.