Macalester Moodle

PHYS

STAT

ENGL

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ENGL

In 1947, India embarked upon one of the world’s most ambitious experiments in postcolonial democracy. This course surveys the history of the Indian state and society in the decades following the formal end of colonial rule, as the country sought to rebuild its economy, institute a new political system, and usher in large-scale social change. Given India’s immense cultural and social diversity, this was no easy task. It required answering a range of questions: How would the state ensure the rights of the country’s minorities? How would the country’s model of economic growth address wide-ranging demands for social equality? Which of India’s many languages would be designated its official language? Underlying all these questions were debates concerning the history, present, and future of Indian society.

In this course, we will consider postcolonial India from its “margins”, that is, by centering the perspectives of migrant workers, Dalits, women, and/or revolutionaries. We will use the ideas and practices crafted by these groups as our guides in assessing the political record of the Indian state.
While surveying this history, we will also study recent shifts and challenges confronting Indian democracy. Today, India is one of the fastest growing economies; it is also a country with some of the most extreme forms of social inequality. According to a recent report by Oxfam, 10% of the Indian population holds 77% of the country’s national wealth. However, reports of social inequality in India, such as the one cited above, exist alongside celebrations of its status as the “world’s largest democracy” in the national press and in global media. Considering this, what does it mean to call India a “democracy”? How do we assess the successes and failures of Indian democracy?

The challenges we will discuss are not unique to Indian democracy. Democracies everywhere struggle to balance the claims of freedom for individuals with the promise of social equality for all. India’s paradoxical, complex, and contradictory encounter with democracy has produced a rich archive of debate and contestation on this issue. This course will not only introduce you to key events, ideas, and issues shaping postcolonial Indian history, but also provide you with conceptual resources to investigate political ideas like democracy in a global, historical perspective.

Through a combination of secondary texts and a range of primary sources from postcolonial Indian history, we will develop a complex picture of the relationship, often contradictory, between the promises of democracy, development, and decolonization in postcolonial societies. You do not require any prior knowledge of Indian history or languages for this course.

This course is an introduction to a particular method of ethnographic data collection known as Ethnoscience. This is not the only method that anthropologists use, and not all anthropologists use it. It is, however, ideally suited to the research requirements of the undergraduate classroom: the need to complete a high quality research project in the course of a single semester. The aim of ethnoscience is to determine how different societies classify and categorize their worlds, and how these systems of classification provide them with guidelines for behavior and a framework to interpret experience. Ethnoscience thus seeks to elicit in a systematic and replicable way the native categories or folk terms of a culture, and to show how these terms (symbols) relate to each other in a system of meaning. Drawing on the interviewing techniques of ethnoscience, this course provides students with an opportunity to develop skills in the area of ethnographic field interviewing—a methodological staple of the discipline of anthropology and the domain of qualitative research. Students will develop these skills in the context of a field research project, which they initiate. The course revolves around generating, analyzing and reporting the data from this project. The interactive format provides weekly opportunities for students to develop and polish their oral presentation skills.

This course surveys the visual and material culture of Europe and Western Asia from the beginning of the Neolithic (ca. 10000 BCE) through the late Medieval period (ca. 1400 CE). We consider the material remains from ancient Western Asia, Egypt, the Aegean, Greece, Etruria, and Rome; early Christianity, Judaism and Islam; and Early Medieval, Romanesque and Gothic Europe from a contextual perspective. Our main goal will be to recover the meanings of works of art and architecture within the cultures that produced them. How did images and architecture work in the pre-modern world? Who were the patrons of art and architecture in different cultures and what were their motivations in commissioning those works? Who were the intended audience? In addition to these main questions, we will discuss the ethics of appropriating and displaying art objects and images in modern museums and private collections.

East Asia encompasses the incredibly varied modern states of China, Japan, and Korea. In many ways, it is a difficulty and arbitrary geographic distinction rather than any sort of a unified cultural or political unit. However, in some ways it is also a useful distinction, and it is these aspects which we will focus on. Students will gain a broad‐based historical and cultural understanding of East Asia in its global context, beginning with the origins of this culture, and including its inter‐regional connections and its encounters with the West. In this way, this course addresses the preconception that East Asia existed unchanged until the arrival of Europeans. The theme of this course is “Contact and Change,” which will afford an opportunity to examine two of the principal challenges facing historians: accounting for change and understanding people and societies separated from us by space and time.

Encompassing a vast and diverse region that includes the present-day states of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Afghanistan, Sri Lanka, Maldives, and Bhutan, South Asia is home to a fourth of the world’s population. What was political, social, and cultural life in this region like before modernity? How did the plural religious, linguistic, and social identities that shape everyday life emerge? How did the encounter with colonialism reshape the contemporary trajectories of South Asian cultures? Proceeding chronologically, we will explore important themes that continue to inspire a rich historical scholarship, namely: processes underlying the integration of diverse cultural traditions across the Indian Ocean; the emergence, and consolidation of Indo-Persian kingship and attendant forms of socio-cultural life; changes wrought upon this landscape by the arrival of European colonial rule; and the postcolonial trajectories of South Asian societies.

We will explore these changes by engaging with sources and scholarship on different genres and mediums of communication ranging from art, architectural practices, music, film, fiction, and ethnography. This course will not only introduce you to critical issues for understanding contemporary South Asia but also to cultural practices and modes of representation unique to the region. By examining the past with an eye to its contemporary relevance, we will investigate why premodern identities and histories remain at the center of debates about politics and culture in contemporary South Asia.

Symbolic logic is the formal study of reasoning, inference, and proof. This course will focus on deductive logic, including the formal analysis of statements and arguments, sentential and quantified logics, formal semantics, and logical proofs. We will also explore some philosophical questions about logic (e.g., is there only one correct system of logic?) as well as philosophical issues arising within our study of logic.

During this course, you will:

1. master concepts and technical vocabulary that will enable you to think clearly about arguments;
2. become proficient at translating sentences from English into formal languages;
3. master basic techniques for testing arguments for validity;
4. develop your pattern recognition skills, which will permit you to tell good arguments and reasoning patterns from bad ones; and
5. explore philosophical questions about logic as well as other philosophical issues arising within our study of logic.

Since the invention of film, audiences have been fascinated by fantastic depictions of the Middle Ages on screen. Audiences love escaping into mysterious worlds of adventure with kings, warriors, and princesses. But how much do these movies really have to do with the historical Middle Ages? Do they illuminate truths or manufacture lies? Was this time period really as exciting, romantic, and dangerous as we imagine? In this class, we will dive into medieval movies and use actual historical sources to see how “accurate” the movies are. In the end, we will find out what modern movies say not just about medieval societies, but how they are actually a mirror for modern-day viewers.

As a First-Year Course, this class will familiarize you with college-level materials and methods, including seminar discussions and written analysis. The class will also introduce you to various resources on campus, from health services to tech rentals.

Learning Outcomes:
Develop analytical skills and critical vocabulary using film and text
Generate profound ideas using community knowledge-weaving
Learn how the Middle Ages get translated for modern audiences
Demonstrate understanding in analytic writing and creative film-making

Course Description
Like Latin and Greek in Europe, Sanskrit is a highly inflected language of scholarship, and revered in India as the perfect medium for discourse on everything from science and sex to philosophy and religion. (In modern Hindi, sanskriti means “culture.”) It flourished in its classical form after the age of the Buddha (5th century BC) and served as a scholarly lingua franca in India until the Islamic period and beyond. This course serves as an introduction to the grammar and script of Sanskrit, and we will advance to a point of reading simplified texts from the classical epic Ramayana. Students will be expected to attend class regularly and spend six hours a week outside class studying the grammar and vocabulary. Without this sort of effort, no progress is possible in such a complex language. In addition to the rigorous study of the language, we will consider both the role of the language in classical Indian culture and religion, and some texts from the Ramayana, looking at both English translations and Sanskrit originals.

INTL

ART

ASIA

Write a concise and interesting paragraph here that explains what this course is about

Write a concise and interesting paragraph here that explains what this course is about

Write a concise and interesting paragraph here that explains what this course is about

ECON

GEOG

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FREN

PHIL

PSYC

PSYC

PSYC

ECON

SOCI

STAT

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ART

MUSI

INTL

ENGL

ENGL

ECON

GEOG

LING

PHIL

PHIL

SOCI

STAT

RELI

PHYS

INTL

PSYC

What will this Intro to the Library lab cover?

How do I find books and articles I need for my classes? How do I navigate library research at the college level? What resources does the college provide for me that can save me money and time? What do all these different databases even DO? Becoming familiar with Macalester College's online and physical collections during your first semester at college can be a tremendous help later in your academic career. This "lab” is designed to introduce you to college-level research strategies, and complement the many skills you already bring to your academic work. This three-week online "lab" uses Moodle for communications and content.

PSYC

History 229 is an introductory course focused on African-American women’s history and the narratives it inspired. We will examine the ideological, political, economic, and cultural make-up of the Black musical traditions in the United States. The basic themes of this course will include: Black feminism; womanism; jazz art and design; African-American literature; intersectionality; and Afrofuturism.

This is a team-taught class that combines sociology and anthropology decolonial theories to provide a critical examination of global perspectives that tend to be associated with modern institutions that emerge in the Global North. More importantly, through a decolonizing lens, we will delve into an alternative understanding of the global rooted in the perspective of the Global South and discuss its liberatory possibilities. To better grasp the “coloniality of power” (Quijano 2000) we will focus on how this is manifested in intergovernmental organizations like the United Nations and educational and arts institutions. The course will introduce students to subaltern practices and movements in the Global South that have the potential to unsettle the Western hegemony that dominates international organizations, and the fields of education and the arts in the Global North. A decolonial approach to global perspectives also requires an inquiry into the cultural and racial differences embedded in local-global contexts. Finally, the course will allow students to learn new ways of thinking about power, responsibility, and ethics in the context of globalization, and become aware of organizing experiences that have engaged in decolonization processes.

The following is an outline of the course. The syllabus is a binding contract between students and the instructor. Students should familiarize themselves with course requirements, policies, and calendar of the class. Students are responsible for the understanding of the content presented in this syllabus.

Course Description and Objectives
SPAN 101 is the first elementary Spanish course in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese. The course objectives are:

a) To introduce students to the Spanish language and culture(s)
b) To help students develop the necessary skills to be able to communicate in Spanish at a novice-mid/novice-high level
c) To acquire proficiency in all four communicative skills: listening, reading, speaking and writing
d) To challenge students to think and react to questions and situations which require them to draw on their own background and experience
e) To begin to familiarize them with the Latinx communities in Minneapolis and Saint Paul

SPAN 101 meets MWF with the instructor. There is one extra hour with the Laboratory Instructor(s). Since the course is interactive, attendance is required and mandatory to all sessions, including the labs.

Note: Spanish and Portuguese Department policy requires that students achieve a grade of C (73%) or higher in order to be able to continue on to the next level (i.e. from SPAN 101 to SPAN 102).

ENGL

ECON

ECON

RELI

FREN

PHIL

PSYC

PSYC

STAT

MUSI

PSYC

PSYC

LING

ASIA

ENGL

ENGL

FREN

PHIL

MUSI

PHYS