Hobart and William Smith Colleges

Bidisciplinary Courses

The Bidisciplinary Program provides students an opportunity to directly tackle significant academic questions and issues from the perspective of two distinct academic disciplines. Embodying the Colleges' commitment to the role of inter- disciplinary perspectives in a liberal arts education, Bidisciplinary courses are one-credit courses taught by two faculty members from two different disciplines and allow students to see the courses' topics from multiple perspectives, to engage in interdisciplinary conversations about the topic, and to understand different pedagogical approaches to a common subject. Bidisciplinary courses are generally cross listed with relevant disciplinary and interdisciplinary programs.

BIDS 203 The Art + Science of Graphical Representations  This course is dedicated to exploring cross-disciplinary perspectives on informational graphics and illustrations. The course will explore the methods and dissemination of scientific and artistic graphics as a means of expression, creation, and analysis. This will be a discussion-based seminar with studio/laboratory exercises for students to learn disciplinary conventions and build upon those techniques to generate informational graphics with various software programs. We will explore several projects that engage students in interdisciplinary data gathering and graphical projection, including mapping personal geographies in Rome and visualizing historical sites with scientific and architectural layering. The course substantially fulfills the artistic process goal and partially fulfills the quantitative reasoning goal.

BIDS 204 Technical Art History and Applied Chemistry for Museum Studies  Museums are responsible for curating a wide range of artifacts with the goal of preserving them indefinitely. Technical art history (using "art" in its broadest sense) begins with an understanding of the processes by which the artifacts are or were produced and combines it with an understanding of the science of the materials involved. This course will combine both subjects to understand the production of art objects and artifacts from a wide range of cultures and materials while simultaneously learning about the chemistry of the materials. The goal will be to understand the conservation of art, both the principles and practice. In the laboratory, students will produce a range of art forms and study them scientifically to gain practical experience in restoration and conservation of artifacts. Finally, the ethics of being sensitive to indigenous cultures while curating the products of those cultures will be explored. This course will require two 1/2-day weekend trips to conservation labs.

BIDS 214 The Politics of Reproduction  This course uses the disciplines of sociology and biology to examine contemporary policy debates concerning technological advancements in human reproduction. Policy topics to be addressed can include (but are not limited to): genetic testing and gene therapy, sex determination and sex selection, assisted reproduction (e.g. surrogacy and in vitro fertilization), contraception, and abortion. Readings will draw on theoretical and empirical research in particular subfields in sociology (gender relations and the state, sociology of the family, sociology of the body ) and biology (human development, evolution. genetics, cell biology).

BIDS 219 Imagining Environmental Apocalypse across the Muslim World  Do disasters and climate calamity teach you to believe that the end is near? Are they caused by divine punishment or driven by anthropocentric power? This course proceeds from an understanding that there is a messy overlap between Islamic conceptions of apocalypse on the one hand, and capitalist-driven apocalypse on the other-these are not two distinct apocalypses; rather, they are co-constituting. The course texts reflect this overlap, with the aim of understanding the role of religion in either combatting or accelerating apocalypse broadly understood. This course considers traditionally-shaped apocalyptic narratives, as well as how they are reflected in the current debates of war and ten-or and the pursuit of climate justice. Although Islam is the primary lens through which we will consider apocalypse, we will also account for the intersectional impacts of race, ethnicity, nation, gender, sexuality, and class. Readings range from scholarly work to science fiction literature and film. (Anwar and Murphy Offered occasionally)

BIDS 235 Healer and Humanist: Frantz Fanon the Revolutionary  It is fair to characterize Frantz Fanon as one of the most influential and one of the most controversial thinkers of his time. To some he was a liberator. To others he was a warmonger. In this course we will explore Fanon the humanist and Fanon the healer. One of Fanon's most notable contributions, the one highlighted in the course, is his understanding of the link between the individual's mental health and the socialization process for which they are embedded. A socialization process is a tool societies use to reproduce itself. It defines right; it defines wrong. A socialization process delimits normal human behavior, but more ominously, it circumscribes what is and thus names what is not human. Its purpose is to make and remake the society or rather to make and remake the individuals that inhabit the society throughout time. It's a survival mechanism. We will argue that Fanon believed that the socialization process could also be a process of individual un-making. Through his concepts of humanity, power, and violence, Fanon constructs a theory of social un-making or rather a theory of how the non-human is made. We will follow Fanon through his intellectual process by conducting an extensive analysis of his four major texts: Black Skin, White Masks, The Wretched of the Earth, Dying Colonialism, and Toward the African Revolution. Ultimately, we will attempt to locate Fanon's thought amongst other influential humanists of his time including: Paulo Freire, Antonio Gramsci, Malcolm X, Steve Biko, James Baldwin, Aimee Cesaire, and Patrice Lumumba.

BIDS 251 Sovereignty Power & the People.  This course will explore theories of sovereignty from the history of political thought in the ancient, medieval, and modern world. In this bi-disciplinary course, taught by a political theorist and a historian of political thought, we will think about the tension between normative and historical approaches to political ideas. We will practice close, critical readings of mostly primary texts that range from ancient China, Japan, Greece, and Rome to medieval Christian and Islamic kingdoms, and on to questions of authoritarianism, liberal democracy, communism, international law and Indigenous sovereignty today. While a great deal of contemporary theory relegates notions of state sovereignty to an imagined pre-globalized, pre-democratized past, we will leap into the challenge of interrogating the notable persistence of the problems of territory, power, form, and justice in the world in which we live.

BIDS 284 Women,Work & Media  In this course, students will study the relationship between gender and the media with a particular focus on contemporary and historical examples of women's labor. The course will use a variety of texts (from films to blogs to anime to magazines to social media) to explore the vital social, political and economic issues raised by women's role in the workplace. Subjects covered will include: women's role in the development of critical technologies; motherhood, caring labor and community-building as work; race and gender in the workplace; activist labor and community building; sex work and sex trafficking; women leaders of conglomerate media; and representations of women at work. Students will complete projects that draw from their own experiences while building new writing and media production skills.

BIDS 286 Gender,Nation, and Literature in Latin America  This course examines the relationship between gender and national cultures in Latin America, from Independence to World War II (c. 1825-1945). As Latin American nations broke from Spanish colonial rule, state-builders confronted the colonial past and set out to forger new national identities and cultures. Specifically, state-builders sought to construct social citizenship and fashion national cultures in societies still asymmetrically ordered on the basis of the exclusionary colonial criterion of gender, ethnicity, class, and geography. Popular works of literature frequently cast the desire to reconcile the colonial order and assert modern nationalist identities in gender terms. In particular, the critical problems of state formation in Latin America-the hope and anxiety associated with post-colonial instability; socioeconomic equality, ethnic unity, and spatial consolidation; the quest for modernity; and the assertion of sovereignty and authenticity-often took on erotic overtones. Unrequited love, sexual union, and marriage became central metaphors for understanding (and naturalizing) national consolidation, and establishing the new hegemonic order. By tracing out the "national romances" of Latin America, we can learn much about the role of gender (writ large) in Latin American State formation, and the position of women in the region's post-colonial order. As such, this course will offer students parallel histories of the changing role of women in Latin American culture and literature, and the role of gender in the Latin American political imagination. (Farnsworth and Ristow, offered alternate years)

BIDS 293 Racial Utopias: Economizing Soul  With the continued hunt of black lives and the rising social unrest that the hunt has engendered, this course asks: what would an ideal racial world look like? What would equality or equity be like in such a world? How do visions of the sacred have to compromise with the realities of the profane in such utopias? Utopian visions often include a message of oneness/sameness. How do questions of oneness and sameness apply to questions of race? Do they separate people? Do they homogenize people? How have they changed over time? What is the role of the religious leader in fashioning these ideal visions? For the economist interested not only in behavior but motivations, racial utopias present the opportunity to study how conflicts between worldview (religion) and habit/behavior (racism) are or are not resolved. For the scholar of religion, racial utopias are unique products of a religious imagination that seeks the Kingdom of God on earth. Interrogating racial utopias will allow all students to examine aspects of their own lives including their image of God, what they hope for, and what they can do to help create their ideal world. We will investigate a number of utopian projects that included racial components, including The People's Temple (Jim Jones), Father Divine, the Black Hebrew Israelites, and Star Trek.

BIDS 295 Alcohol Use & Abuse  Alcohol is the most widely used and abused drug in contemporary American society. While attractions, pleasures, and possible benefits of alcoholic consumption may be debated, there is little argument about the debilitating effect and enormous costs of heavy drinking and alcoholism on the health of individuals, families, and society in general.  The course brings together natural science and social science contrubutions to the interdisciplinary study of this phenomenon by incorporating a variety of academic perspectives including biology, chemistry, social psychology, epidemiology, and sociology, and by making extensive use of multimedia resources. Students explore the effect of family, genetics, peers, ethnicity, and gender on drinking and physiological effects of alchohol on the human body. Social patterns of drinking in various societal contexts also are examined. Educational programs are developed to share the course outcomes with the larger community. BIDS 295 can be applied for course credit in sociology and public policy majors and minors, and is part of the American Commitments Program of the Association of American Colleges and Universities. It has been recognized nationally as a model for courses about substance use and abuse.

BIDS 325 Creative Placemaking: Community Development, Civic Life, and Public Art  This course combines historical research with creative approaches to place-making in an urban setting. The course will allow students to develop familiarity with the critical issues surrounding art design, and the humanities in public, while also applying their knowledge to the creation of a public humanities project During the first part of the semester, students go over the methods and ethics of public scholarship and programming and gain skills in visual communication, graphic thinking, and the politics of public display. Students work with the instructors in the second part of the semester to build a collaborative public project which asks to you apply your skills. The project will explore creative solutions that promote and affect social engagement and community building. Guest artists/scholars and field trips are important parts of the course learning experience. Course themes vary from semester to semester.

BIDS 335 Pandemics, Race, & Settler Colonialism  Conventional wisdom dictates that pandemics create divisions in society - after all, we quarantine the sick from the healthy. However, history teaches us that pandemics expose societal divisions. Depending on the context, these divides could be along racial, gendered, class, or ethnic lines. Recognizing this reality leads us to asking urgent questions about how these divisions were constructed and why they persist. It leads us to question why Black, Brown, and working-class communities face disproportionate share of the deaths from Covid-19? Why did the outbreak lead to a summer mass protests around the country? How ought we best understand this political moment? Exploring both the South African and American pasts, this course is anchored in post- colonial thought, critical science studies, and critical race theory. By thinking through the relationship between 400+ years of Settler Colonialism, the development of race as a political category, and the current environmental threats humanity faces with COVID and climate change, this course will prepare students to think through the transformations they will participate in after the graduate in the wake of this monumental crisis.

BIDS 390 The Video Essay  This course examines the video essay and its corresponding or emerging forms in videographic criticism, the essay film, and written essays, including personal narrative, creative nonfiction, or hybrid texts. Students explore source material and develop media competencies that encompass video, sound, image and text in order to critically analyze content that explores facets of identity or dimensions of culture. In addition, students collaborate on lo-fi and more developed video projects that explore the formal dimensions of narrative and criticism, By maintaining a focus on the poetic and rhetorical dimensions of the video essay, students address broader concerns in and around fair use and copyright while determining how the video essay impact them as producers and consumers of media forms.