UCOR Section Descriptions

Course Description

We will use a combination of historical, textual, legal, and anthropological approaches to analyze the complex interplay between Quranic exegesis, Islamic religious traditions, gender, sexuality and politics in the Muslim world. We will start with Quranic tenets and traditional precepts on gender and sexuality; we will continue with a study of how classical interpretations were altered by the encounter with the West; and we will conclude with different views and strategies adopted by Muslim women and gay, lesbian, and transgender Muslims around the world.

Course Description

We will use a combination of historical, textual, legal, and anthropological approaches to analyze the complex interplay between Quranic exegesis, Islamic religious traditions, gender, sexuality and politics in the Muslim world. We will start with Quranic tenets and traditional precepts on gender and sexuality; we will continue with a study of how classical interpretations were altered by the encounter with the West; and we will conclude with different views and strategies adopted by Muslim women and gay, lesbian, and transgender Muslims around the world.

Course Description

This course is an introduction to Native North American religions and spirituality. The course highlights the sacred ecology of people, plants, animals, and the environment. Special emphasis is placed on myths, rituals, and beliefs ranging from individual practices to organized religions among a diverse array of Native American communities. These different ways of seeing, sensing, and listening form entire life ways that are reflected in the arts, music, dance, poetry, narrative, architecture, and social organizations. Or importance will be the historical, economic, health, environmental, political, and legal issues that influence the present and future ways that Native Americans practice their religious traditions.

Course Description

In this course, we tackle the complex role religion played in the establishment, defense, and continuation of slavery in the American colonies and fledgling United States, the role religion played in the slave communities themselves, the role it played in the abolitionist movement in the northern states through the time the slaves’ emancipation, and the role it played in maintaining rigid patterns of racial discrimination and segregation in the United States afterward.

Course Description

This course asks students to consider the ways in which, according to Marshall Berman, the city street operates as “the primary symbol of modern life” Students will explore how various texts 1) celebrate the richness of the city street as a space of global contact and 2) use the literary street to push back against attempts to limit access to this potential.

Course Description

The aim of this course is to explore the relationship between cultural memory, history, and identity and how these factors work together to perpetuate oppression and historical trauma. This study is essentially interdisciplinary in nature and contains both philosophical and historical dimensions.

Course Description

Whatever one's education, background, or socio-economic status, the advances of science have great implications for the public. However, science has become increasingly specialized, often resulting in a disparity between what the expert scientist knows and what the non-expert understands. This class offers case studies for students to learn about scientific controversies in the public sphere so that they may better understand the dynamic, social, cultural, and political aspects of science.

Course Description

This course investigates the philosophical, social and psychological forces at work in the way humans create and deploy monsters to cope with the fear and uncertainty. Using philosophical and psychological resources, and drawing from stories, myths and media, this class seeks to understand and rethink the way strangers are turned to monsters.

Course Description

Empires are often associated with power, and utopia with impossible visions. What are the global challenges created by legacies of modern imperialism? How are these reflected in unequal contemporary political and economic relations? We will explore how African Diaspora intellectual history has engaged with inequality in the discourse of justice. Under the rubric of empire and utopia, we will explore how freedom and justice, and philosophical and material progress are encoded in African Diaspora narratives.

Course Description

This course explores the nature of contemporary global violence through a philosophical lens. It mobilizes the concept of historical effect, developed by the German thinker Hans-Georg Gadamer, to assess our present-day situatedness within an ongoing era of conflict, suffering, and trauma. In taking account of our historical inheritance of conflict, this assessment will involve analyzing both the overt narratives and tacit assumptions that frame our conception of violence.