An interdisciplinary 'gateway course' examining the meaning of a liberal education, emphasizing seminar skills, oral and written communication, and introducing the Hutchins Portfolio. SUCCESSFUL COMPLETION OF LIBS 302 IS REQUIRED TO CONTINUE IN THE HUTCHINS PROGRAM. Students earning a gradelower than a C will not be allowed to continue in Hutchins. [top]

This course will give students a forum to create a Hutchins Community Art Showing. During class time, students will choose the dates and venue for the art showing, secure the necessary venue, publicize the event, create a call for entries, process the entries, decide which entries will be shown, hang show, plan and conduct reception, take down show. [top]

A capstone course required for the Hutchins major. Drawing on the papers collected for his or her portfolio, the student prepares a major paper and a Senior Project synthesizing aspects of that individual’s own intellectual development. Each student makes an oral presentation of his or her project at the end of the semester. Must be taken in the student’s final semester in the Major. [top]

This course provides studetns with an opportunity to enhance their facilitation skills through serving as a seminar leader in large lecture/discussion courses. Requires the consent of instructor. [top]

All students develop an internship working outside the classroom. Students also prepare a portfolio project based upon a larger topic implicit in their internship. They participate with other interns in an internship class once a week to discuss their internship experience and issues related to the larger society. Grade only. [top]

Courses in this area address the following issues and themes:

• Problems and possibilities before us at the start of a new century as we move toward a genuinely global culture.
• The relationship between the individual and all kinds of human groups, the context of human interaction in which the individual finds many of the dimensions of the self.
• Ideas, attitudes, and beliefs that flow between society and the individual and which result in the political and economic arrangements that make life-in-common possible.
• Historical and economic developments, geographical facts, analytical models, and moral questions necessary to understand the dynamics of individuals and their communities.
• Moral and ethical underpinnings of our patterns of social interaction and how these affect issues such as race, gender, and class.
• Questions concerning whether the goals of human dignity, political justice, economic opportunity, and cultural expression are being enhanced or destroyed by specific historical developments, cultural practices, economic arrangements, or political institutions. For example: How, in the face of that compelling force, do we shape the kind of society that values and protects the individual? How do we become the kinds of individuals who understand and help foster the just society?

In this course we study how a quest for democracy is manifested first in English and Spanish America and later in the relations between the United States, Mexico, Cuba and Puerto Rico. We explore the nature of democracy self-determination, colonialism, and the classification of citizens according to class, gender and culture. For this explorations we use theoretical tools such as economic, discursive (the intersection between power and language) and patriarchical analyses of power relations and their impact on human bodies in the present.

Prerequisite: LIBS 302 or LIBS 101-202
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This is a study of the political status given to human bodies in different epochs in the American Continent. The objective is to increase our understanding of the struggles for economic, human and civil rights dating back to Colonial Continental America and the overthrow of the European Monarchies, which led to the birth of democracy in the Western Hemisphere. A second objective is to learn how these same struggles have taken different forms throughout history and how they continue to take shape in our lives today.

Prerequisite: LIBS 302 or LIBS 101-202
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This seminar will examine interdisciplinary perspectives on consumer culture from the late 19th century to the present. We will explore different theories of consumption; the major structures of consumerism such as credit, packaged goods, branding, advertising, and retail spaces; and the lived experience of consumer culture in terms of its impact on our families and communities, our environment, and ourselves. Special attention will be paid to how race, gender, age, and class have affected the experience of diverse peoples in American consumer culture. As seminar participants, we will also reflect about our own place in the American political economy, examining our own experiences in comparison to those we have read about in seminar and considering the possibilities for recovering from “affluenza.”

Prerequisite: LIBS 302 or LIBS 101-202
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Courses in this area address the following issues and themes:

• Science and technology and their relationships to the individual and society.
• The methods of science and important information that has been discovered through their applications.
• Some of the crucial issues posed by our cultureís applications of science and technology and, adversely, the cultural consequences of a materialist world view.
• How science and technology impact all areas of our lives.
• How, for better and for worse, as inheritors of the Scientific and Industrial Revolutions, we intervene in our material world technologically.
• Scientific aspects of particular social issues, or an issue of personal concern, the sense of science as a social endeavor.
• The values implicit in a particular technology.

This course will provide a multi-faceted analysis of the system of food production and distribution in the modern world, and its implications for both human and environmental health. We will explore the global food web through a variety of lenses, including economics, politics, health, ecology, chemistry, aesthetics, and psychology. We will examine the consequences of industrial agriculture and developments in genetic engineering, as well as the recent emergence of farm to school projects in our local community, which are building stronger connections between schools and local farmers, and integrating food and gardens into all aspects the curriculum. We will explore a variety of perspectives on diet and nutrition. The course will include a service learning or community-based research component, and will hopefully add new meaning to the notion that “you are what you eat.”

Prerequisite: LIBS 302 LIBS 101-202
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Course description to be added at a later date.

Prerequisite: LIBS 302 or LIBS 101-202
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In this class, we will carry out an interdisciplinary examination of the body, starting with basic anatomy and physiology and then moving on through art, politics, brain function, etc. to philosophical and religious arguments about mind-body, spirit-flesh distinctions, and to our society’s obsessions with diet, exercise, and body image. By the end of this course, we should all attain greater understanding of the human body and a sense of acceptance and respect for our bodily differences.

Prerequisite: LIBS 302 or LIBS 101-202
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Courses in this area address the following issues and themes:

• Why humans create literature, epics, poetry, drama, and other literary forms, the visual arts, languages, architecture, music, dance, the writings of philosophers, and the thought and literature of the worldís religions.
• The inner world of creativity and individual values as well as the questions about how we arrive at a sense of meaning and purpose, ethical behavior, and a sense of beauty and order in the world.
• Deep and significant aspects of ourselves which may otherwise remain obscure and therefore troubling.
• Important questions - and occasional answers - about life and death, about feelings, and about the ways we see things.
• The metaphors that help us recognize and become aware of the interrelations of all the areas of inquiry humanity has developed.
• Images from which we may learn about our reality or realities of other times.
• Creative and intuitive thinking processes that lead to an understanding of the aesthetic experience.
• How the arts can be an end in themselves, as well as a means to an end.

In "Flash of the Spirit," Robert Farris Thompson describes the brilliance of the Kongo worldview. "If you know where you are going, and where you are coming from, you can decorate the way to other worlds—the road to the ancestors and to God; and your name will merge forever with their glory." Despite Western misconceptions of Kongo as mysterious, dark, and primitive, this region, divided during colonial rule into several countries, was once a great spiritual, political, and artistic kingdom whose beauty persists in Africa and America today. In this class we will examine constructions and representations of the Kongo region, the brutal colonization of the present-day regions of Angola, Cabinda, the Republic of the Congo/Democratic Republic of the Congo, and the political aftermath of colonialism, including the diaspora of belief and art in America. We will also explore our own "regions" of discomfort with what we long ago learned was "strange" or unfamiliar, and discover that such insights may be transformative: "the man who is in touch with his origins is a man who will never die" ("mu kala kintwadaya tubu i mu zinga.")

Prerequisite: LIBS 302 or LIBS 101-202
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Earth Art is a hands-on class which explores the use of natural materials in artistic processes, examines the use of artistic methods and media to understand and describe natural processes, and investigates earth-based art forms from various artists. The course requires the purchase of several books about various artistic methods and nature journaling, the purchase of a variety of art materials, creation of several earth based art projects, and at least one REQUIRED WEEKEND FIELD TRIP.  You will also be required to spend at least 30 minutes 10 different times journaling in natural settings to create a nature journal.

Prerequisite: LIBS 302 or LIBS 101-202
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In this course we will consider various examples of memoir writing, particularly in terms of the author’s use of place, that is, of a specific local as it relates to, or does not relate to, the writer’s depiction of his or her life story. We will want to ask questions such as: How has place shaped both the writer’s understanding of his or her world and, in turn, the issues themetized in the respective life story? How might the same environment be understood otherwise, say, in terms of a difference in gender, race, ethnicity, or religion on the part of the writer? How has our sense of place our coming from a particular locale shaped our reading of the memoir? At the same time, we will be writing and workshopping our own life stories, looking for ways to develop and strengthen our craft and voices as writers. Furthermore, we will take at least two fieldtrips one to an urban locale, another to a nature preserve in Sonoma County and think about these places from our point of view as writers shaped by our background and world views.

Prerequisite: LIBS 302 or LIBS 101-202
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Courses in this area address the following issues and themes:

• Reality as a result of many factors, some of them psychological, some biological, some philosophical, some social and the many aspects of being or existence as reaching from the physical to the metaphysical.
• Consciousness as, somehow, the result of our gender, our ethnicity, our health, the ways in which we were reared, the social stratum in which we find ourselves, the beliefs that were engendered in us, and other factors.
• Consciousness as occurring across a spectrum of potentials (conscious/unconscious, rational/irrational, egocentric/transpersonal, masculine/feminine) that influence our personal and collective realities.
• Human needs at various levels of emotional, religious or spiritual, intellectual, and transpersonal or universal disciplines, practices, and experiences.
• One of the major concerns of people in all places at all times has been: what are the components of being human?
• The range of answers which are sometimes perplexingly inconsistent with one another, and yet their very divergence itself suggests something about the powerful complexity of the human individual.
• The study of biology as it relates to psychology, and consciousness as it affects and is affected by perceptions of reality.
• Meaning-making as a necessary human achievement, and identity formation as it is understood in the light of developmental psychology and the nature-nurture controversy.

In "Men Speak Out," R.W. Connell suggests that the world is presently undergoing an "ethnographic moment" of masculinity. The oppressive expectations attached to masculinity, male violence, and constructions of gender are increasingly narrated and challenged. This "revolutionary honesty," as John Stoltenberg describes it, is "a gift to anyone who yearns and works not only for equality and justice for women—but for men, too, as well as for human rights, non-violence, and an end to so much of the unnecessary suffering of the world." Yet what are the implications of privileging "a dominant and oppressive class that has, arguably . . . been the primary focus" of political, social, and academic representation? What are the unique contributions of male leadership globally? Can such leadership be distinguished in terms of nationality and gender? This class will examine the construction and privileging of male subjects, the dichotomy of Western and non-Western male leadership, and the possibility of overcoming the prison and privilege of "being a man."

Prerequisite: LIBS 302 or LIBS 101-202
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"I don't want to achieve immortality through great works. I want to achieve it through not dying." - Woody Allen.

Confronting death can bring us fully to life. This course will examine biological dying, the sociology and psychology of death, and the spiritual dimensions of passing beyond through literature, art, film medicine, guided meditations, and humor. Written and experiential assignments will engage our analytic, creative, and spiritual minds. This course may be emotionally challenging. Field trips to be arranged.

Prerequisite: LIBS 302 or LIBS 101-202
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In this class, we will look at the connections between the personal and the geographic. This course will examine the self and our personal histories using the ideas, tools, and methods commonly used in geography – including mapping, coring, pattern analysis, and spatial analysis. This class will use both writing and artistic techniques to examine ideas of space and place, and to create a series of maps of our interior and exterior worlds. We will also use geomorphic process concepts like erosion, sedimentation, and geologic history as metaphors to examine the internal and external forces that have molded us into the person we are. We will seminar on these ideas and create weekly projects to share in class. A paper and/or project, which will be largely autobiographical, will be required at the end of the semester. At least one weekend field trip may also be required.

Prerequisite: LIBS 302 or LIBS 101-202
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