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 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. (Bowyer and Leopardi, offered occasionally)

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). (Kenyon and Munson, offered every other year)

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 he/she is 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. (McCorkle and Grayson, offered occasionally)

BIDS 251 Sovereignty, Power, and 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. (Crow and Dean, offered occasionally)

BIDS 286 Gender, Nation, 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. (Salter and Grayson, offered occasionallly)

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. (Shafer and Ristow, offered occasionally)