This is an historically-structured inquiry into the American constitutional law of equality. Cases decided by state and federal courts are essential, but we also devote considerable time to the ways legislatures, political parties, interest groups, and private citizens have shaped American law. Much of the course focuses on race and racism in the law of equality in the U.S.; we also study discrimination based on gender, socioeconomic class, religion, and sexual orientation. In addition to judicial decisions, readings include excerpts from state constitutional-convention debates, party platforms, speeches, and social-science texts interpreting law and legal change. Assigned reading will include a constitutional-law textbook supplemented by an instructor-designed course-pack, plus occasional some materials online.

Since times immemorial, humans have been fascinated with the natural world, so much so that we have continuously sought ways to imitate Nature in search of solutions to our daily challenges and to expand the realm of human activities. Many ascribe the original notion that “technology imitates nature” to Aristotle, who defined mimesis as the perfection and imitation of nature. Nature’s fascinating designs and elaborate strategies for problem solving are the product of 3.8 billion years of experimentation, the process of organic evolution, sensu stricto. While the concept of imitating Nature has been around for millennia, its pursuit as a scientific discipline dates back to the 1950’s when the term biomimetics was coined to describe the transfer of ideas from biology to technology. The 1990’s witnessed the birth of biomimicry, a new science that studies Nature’s models and then imitates or takes inspiration from these designs and processes to solve human problems. But the goal of biomimicry is not simply to rob Nature of its secrets for human’s technological prowess. Biomimicry also aims to instill among its practitioners a sense of awe and respect for Nature; that Nature’s best ideas are only there for the taking if we protect and preserve our natural surroundings. Truly innovative bio-inspired solutions should transform human lives while also creating a more sustainable world. In this course, students will become familiar with the discovery, scientific, and technological processes that turn a Nature-inspired idea into an invention, whether it is an intellectual concept, a process, a material, or a device.

Fifteen years after Hurricane Katrina, the city of New Orleans continues to bear the effects of one of the worst disasters in U.S. history. On the one hand, the Katrina disaster laid bare for all to see, in newspapers and on TV screens, the gross inequality indicative of all American cities, where the city’s largely Black and poor populations who lived in the areas most vulnerable to flooding suffered the greatest. The storm made manifest the ways in which years of policymaking and urban planning had effectively dispossessed whole segments of the population. On the other hand, the recovery efforts, and debates about them, were also grossly uneven, ushering in new forms of “disaster capitalism” (Klein, 2017) that benefit elites at the expense of the most vulnerable. This course takes stock of what has happened in New Orleans since the Katrina event, with a particular focus on the uneven effects of the storm and strategies of recovery. Drawing from a multidisciplinary approach in fields of cultural, urban, and media studies, students will learn about the causes and aftermath of the storm, the cultural politics of recovery and renewal efforts, and the significance of art, media, and culture in representing and reconstructing post-Katrina New Orleans. The course enjoins students to reflect on what we can learn from the effect of Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath on New Orleans, particularly as it pertains to understanding the broader implications of urban inequality (especially within the contexts of race, class, and gender), disaster recovery, and the cultural politics of representation and resistance.

In this class, we study social marginality through the lenses of diverse cultural groups, prostitutes, LGBTQIA, and the religious other. The filmic and literary materials feature works by members of these groups, but not exclusively. Among other issues, the course addresses the consequences deriving from acceptance into mainstream society for individual and group identity. Starting with the depiction of these various contemporary realities, we later compare the representations of life as a prostitute, a non-Christian, and homosexual sex partners in different historical periods, 20th and 21st centuries vs. 13th through the 16th centuries.

Many people hope that society can successfully address the challenges presented by climate change, poverty, healthcare access, and other issues. Society will struggle to meet those challenges unless it develops creative responses to a diverse collection of problems that vary in magnitude. Business ventures are playing an increasing role in these responses as they approach societal problems with business practices and resources, including their access to capital and their skills in developing innovative techniques, products, and services. This course will explore the role for social enterprises in addressing these problems, including efforts to combine social missions with profit-seeking activities. Students will consider questions such as whether businesses should become involved in social problems and nonprofit organizations should pursue profit-orientated ventures, who should decide what problems to address and how to address them, and how can society trust organizations with dual purposes of profit and mission.

This seminar will examine the intersection of war, race, and identity in America focused around two critical sites.  Firstly, the racialized othering of Native America from the wars of colonial conquest to the defeat of the Plains Indians; and secondly the Civil War, viewed as war for the overthrow of slavery and as it was transformed in memory into a valorous war between brothers in which questions of race were marginalized.  These sites are critical to race and race relations in America, working to define who is, and who is not included with its racialized boundaries.

Based in the discipline of History, the seminar will embrace approaches drawn from gender studies, critical race theory, anthropology and film studies. Seminar discussions will be based on academic monographs and on cultural products, particularly in film.  I also plan to organize a visit to the “Dreaming of Timbuctoo” exhibit at the John Brown Farm in Lake Placid as part of a discussion on Civil-War era Black settlement in the Adirondacks.

Animal agriculture is a significant portion of our national agricultural economy and foods of animal origin play a significant role in our global food system. A striking but lesser known fact is that animal-derived food products have been an important factor in human evolution (e.g., eating meat has led to increases in the size of both the human body and brain). Current dietary patterns derive from the changes in food production that started with the industrial revolution and from the more recent construction of a global food economy. With increasing prevalence of chronic diseases, obesity, and food-borne diseases, animal products are coming under increasing scrutiny. Broad areas of focus reflect global patterns of consumption of meat, dairy, eggs, fish, and their products.

We will explore the connection between animal products, their nutritional attributes, and human and public perception. Particular emphasis will be placed on functional and value-added foods, biotechnology in animal agriculture, as well as animal product quality and safety issues. The course utilizes an interactive approach, involving a broad spectrum of methods including lectures to build fundamental knowledge, student forums to stimulate debate and understanding, individual and group assignments to develop key skills in writing and presenting, and the use of computer-aided learning.

This course will explore what it means to think, learn, know, and understand, and the cognitive structures and processes involved with those activities. Much of the content will pertain to learning as it occurs in formal learning environments (i.e., classrooms) because much of the research has taken place in those contexts with the goal of improving classroom instruction, but this course will extend what has been learned in classroom settings to learning in other contexts. We will also learn about the techniques used to study thinking and learning, both traditional and novel, and consider the strengths and weaknesses of various approaches.

Individual choice is the foundation of modern society driving decisions ranging from what type of cereal to buy to selecting spouses and careers.  Understanding how and why individuals make the choices they do has occupied philosophers and researchers from the ancient Greeks to modern marketers. Many disciplines have developed theoretical and empirical approaches to understand and predict human choices.

This course reviews a wide-ranging set of theoretical models for individual choices drawn from social psychology, economics, (moral) philosophy, marketing and other disciplines and then introduces students to a set of standard choice modeling approaches. We begin with theoretical frameworks based on the rational model of judgment and decision making, then review the assumptions made in this model and recent challenges, particularly focusing on the work of Daniel Kahneman, a recent recipient of the Nobel prize in Economic Sciences. Individual as well as household decision-making models are developed in a discrete choice framework with discrete choice applications, including both empirical and econometric components.

The second part of the course culminates in an in-depth introduction on how to develop a choice experiment for either research or marketing. Students will be exposed to standard software used to develop experimental designs and will develop their own experiment, drawing on class materials and research from the academic literature in their chosen area.

This class will focus on the extensive empirical research which suggests a child’s racial profile and economic status are significant predictors of educational success, matriculation to higher education, and participation in alternative pathways, such as the school-to-prison pipeline. Performance gaps rooted in these identifiers begin to manifest in the earliest years of a child’s life and are rarely mitigated through time. Consequently, disparate access to higher education for children who experience systemic inequalities remains persistent. Through a “P-16” examination of American educational inequality and the myth of meritocracy, this course will explore the legal, educational, and public policy challenges that promote or preclude access to higher education for low-income, first-generation, and/or racially minoritized students. Readings draw from a range of disciplines, including political science, social welfare, public policy, housing policy, law, and sociology.

This course explores the rich entanglement between humans and honey bees across a range of perspectives and ways of knowing. Drawing on the natural sciences, humanities, social sciences, and spirituality, we will immerse ourselves in the life of honey bees to explore the animating questions of this class: What are honey bees? What are they asking of us? What can we learn alongside them about living sustainably on earth? These lines of inquiry will take us on a multidisciplinary journey through the tapestry of human/honey bee cultures. In the process, you may discover your own guiding questions to carry you forward.

Early twentieth-century writers sought to represent human experience in a time of revolutionary change while breaking decisively with traditional modes of thought and representation. In this course, we will read novels by Joseph Conrad, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, D. H. Lawrence, Aldous Huxley, and George Orwell that confront the crisis of modernity: think urbanization, industrial/technological revolutions, global war, and transformative intellectual ferment in the sciences and social sciences and in the arts and humanities—developments for which such names as Marx, Darwin, Nietzsche, Freud, Picasso, Stravinsky, Einstein, and Heisenberg may serve as a shorthand. We will read our texts--Joseph Conrad, The Secret Agent; James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; D. H. Lawrence, Women in Love; Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway; Aldous Huxley, Point Counter Point; and George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four-- as political novels, understanding politics in the broadest sense of the term: not only parliamentary politics, electoral politics, and political economy but also all of the tensions and conflicts emergent when two or more people are in any way associated. As Aristotle says in Part II of his Politics, man (“man” is Aristotle’s term, of course, for the human species) is “by nature a political animal” and politics begins, he says, with the binary female-male pair necessary for reproduction. Thus, we will be concerned as much (and mostly more) with sexual politics—and with issues of class, caste, and race—as with ideologies, national policy, and statecraft.

Students will gain a general understanding of the experience of disability through critical analysis of a broad range of socio-cultural artifacts and expression. Though not an exhaustive list, these artifacts will include literature, visual art, performance art, dance, film, television, and resources from the web. By interpreting differing points of view, concepts such as ableism, implicit bias, cultural appropriation, and intersectionality will be discussed through course assignments and in-class discussions. The essential questions that we will discuss include: How has the social construction of disability been influenced by the many different forms of media representation? What are the range of media responses to the disability experience? What are the cultural benefits and social justice opportunities of examining disability through a variety of representative forms?

People, objects, and environments interact to produce culture and society. As a result of these interactions, it has become evident that spoken and written language are just some of the modes involved in producing meaning and experience. Thus, gesture, gaze, composition, and layout have been added to them. In order to analyze multimodal social interaction and meaning, the course will rely on three major theoretical bases. Using Halliday's systemic functional linguistics and mediated discourse analysis as a starting point, the current course will emphasize a social semiotic approach to multimodal communication. Through observation, analysis, criticism of human interactions, communication behavior, mediated systems, and technological innovations, students are given the opportunity to understand how communication is shaping the domain of meaning and most importantly how to be an efficient participant in the global social environment of contemporary communication.

This course introduces students to the comparative study of religion, spiritual, and psycho-physical practices - exercises by which individuals and groups deepen, develop, challenge, and transform their perceptions and capacities for action in harmony with religious, moral-ethical, or philosophical ideas.  The course covers a range that stretches from ancient Green and Roman philosophers (Stoics, Epicurians, Skeptics and Neoplatonists), the yogis and monks of ancient medieval South and East Asia, medieval Christian ascetics and Renaissance mages, to practitioners of modern forms of westernized yoga, martial arts, ritual magic, and forms of "civil religiosity" such as environmental activism.  Readings of ancient texts and contemporary philosophical writings will be complemented by practical exercises and writing and presentation assignments.

By the turn of the twenty-first century the inherited models for understanding photography and performance seemed outmoded and its very geography was constituted by a kind of provincialism. Critiques of photography’s history pointed out that it really only accounts for and can make sense of Euro-American phenomena; Any non-western work is considered a performance of Western society rather than presenting themselves to each other as they are. In response, scholarship and exhibitions about the cultural specificities of the medium’s history in the so-called Global South have become increasingly popular. But what are the ideological underpinnings of the "global turn" in the history of photography? What is the relationship between photography and performance, with the colonial, postcolonial, and neocolonial condition? What are the larger implications of reframing photography as a global and highly differentiated practice? Does an emphasis on difference fundamentally de-center established norms or does it in effect only reify problematic notions of the “other”? Or both? This course investigates these and related questions by focusing on recent artwork and scholarship about photography and performance art in Africa, the African Diaspora, Latin America, and Asia.

This course takes as its starting point the idea that philosophy is not only a theoretical discourse but a way of life that aims to make one’s life better. The founder of the Western tradition of philosophy as a way of life is Socrates and we will start by discussing his views and methods. Then we will examine the ethical views of Stoics (especially Seneca and Epictetus), who emphasize the importance of exercises or practices to help to strengthen and internalize one’s understanding of their ethical views. We will end by discussing one of the leading contemporary ethical theories, utilitarianism, as it is developed by Peter Singer, and examine its proposed way of life.  The course has both a theoretical and a practical component: we will learn about different conceptions of a good life and try out some of the practices or exercises that were taken to contribute to living a good or happy life.