Course Title & Description: Sports, Play, and Games in Interaction - Rules are the basis for our shared social order and language. In this class, we explore rules in sports, play, and games to examine the structure of rules themselves. We will show the way in which rules are not external constraints on settings, but are in fact productive resources used by participants in these settings (and many others) in order to manage the activities to hand. By playing games, examining the unstated codes of conduct in sports, and exploring rules in everyday interactions we will uncover some of the shared nature of our human social life. 

Course Title & Description: Autoethnography -  This capstone course will provide students with an in-depth understanding of the theory, method, and ethics of autoethnography. As the name implies, autoethnography explores cultural phenomena through the lens of lived experience, connecting biography with history, psyche with society, self with other. The class will learn about and experiment with various autoethnographic forms (e.g., evocative, analytical, performance, multi-voiced, layered accounts), and each student will undertake a semester-long autoethnographic project, which they will perform at the end of the semester and revise for potential submission to a journal. Ultimately, students will come to appreciate the power of autoethnography and personal narrative to shine light on terrains of human experience that are unreachable via traditional research methods. They will also develop a relational ethics of care towards the subjects of their inquiry.

Course Title & Description: Media and Global Populism - The rise of nationalist populism in established democracies across the globe has inspired considerable shock. From India to Brazil, across Europe and North America, nationalism and growing authoritarianism divide societies and threaten human and minority rights. This course examines how the current moment of populist upheaval relates to contemporary mainstream political and media discourse. This course explores how media contributes to populist discourses that divide the nation. Media are crucial for defining shared ideas of who represents "the real people" and whose lives matter most. In the first part of the course, we explore populism's definitions and the media's role in its emergence. What are the historical roots of populism? How have populists historically used new media to reach and influence the public? What distinguishes various forms of populism, and how do they overlap with authoritarian and democratic politics? The second part of the course will examine the media's role in different populist movements worldwide. Students will conduct original research on a single national populist movement over the course of the semester. The capstone project is an online multimedia research portfolio, which includes background research briefs and creative research project options. We will start from the ground up; no prior knowledge is required. Together, we will explore what these different national movements have in common and what they reveal about the future of democracy in an increasingly interconnected world.