Through a studio-based, interdisciplinary approach, this course explores diverse methods and practices within contemporary painting. We will discuss both traditional and experimental definitions of painting and exercise connections between painting and other disciplines, including performance and sculpture. Topics include painting as a byproduct of movement, unconventional materials in abstraction, and creative responses to current events.

What does it mean to be an artist in a time of global environmental crisis? How can art connect social, racial, and environmental justice frameworks? How can art foster a sense of kinship between humans, land, water, and non-human organisms? In this class, we'll conduct interdisciplinary, project-based inquiry exploring themes of place, materiality, reciprocity, and advocacy, as they relate to environmental concerns. Students will create independent artworks in conversation with the class community and instructor.

This class is designed to give the beginning student an overview of basic printmaking techniques and an understanding of what a print is, its form in both unique and multiple formats, and how these techniques function in our culture. The focus of this course will be on developing methods students can take with them when they graduate, whether or not they have access to a traditional studio space and equipment, using nontoxic, water-based materials.

Nagel states, "Without consciousness the mind-body problem would be much less interesting. With consciousness it seems hopeless." Chalmers calls consciousness "the hard problem." Explaining consciousness raises significant challenges for philosophers and cognitive scientists alike, and understanding the nature of the problem is half the battle. This class will explore contemporary philosophical approaches to consciousness, and draw in psychology and neuroscience perspectives. Topics may also include split-brain problems, the nature of dreaming, and altered states.

This is a research seminar, designed to introduce students to classic and recent debates on the "history of capitalism" and to support original research on a broad array of topics related to the social and cultural history of economic life. Rather than take British capitalism as exemplary of modernization we will situate that which was particular about the British case against the pluralities of capitalism that have evolved over the past three centuries.

As U.S. racial group populations are on the rise, educational institutions need to prepare for racial diversity reflected in classrooms from elementary school to college. In this lab course, students will use qualitative research methods and social justice frameworks to code and analyze three distinct data sets, one collected from Puerto Rican parents in Holyoke; one from a college course on social justice; and one from pre-service teachers in public schools.

What does it mean to be (in?) a body? Who counts as whole, broken or food? How do discipline, punishment, use, reproduction, and illness come into play? What are agency, animacy, knowledge, consciousness in relation to embodiment? Western rationality has produced and disciplined a coherent, bounded, defended, racialized, and gendered bodily Self through medicine, psychiatry, nutrition, education, sexology, thanatology, obstetrics, and other disciplines.

Taught in English, the course explores comparative racial and ethnic politics in the U.S. during the 20th century. We will analyze the creation and maintenance of structural inequalities through laws and policies targeted at persons of color in the areas of healthcare, transportation, immigration, labor, racial segregation, and education. Through readings, lectures and films, we will discuss critical histories of community struggle against social inequality, registering the central impact that race, class, gender, sexuality, and citizenship have had on efforts toward social justice.

This course offers a foundational investigation of African-American and other African descendant women's contributions to feminist theory as a heterogeneous field of knowledge encompassing multiple streams of gender- and race-cognizant articulation and praxis. While Black feminism's historical development will be sketched, our focus will be on the literature and theory of writers like Alice Walker, Angela Davis, Audre Lorde, bell hooks, and Barbara Smith.

This course introduces students to the critical study of media, focusing on electronic media, digital technologies, and network cultures. We will analyze the aesthetics, politics, protocols, history, and theory of media, paying attention to the ways they create and erase borders; affect how we form and articulate identities; invade privacy while providing a platform for exploration; foster hate speech and progressive movements alike; and participate in capitalist economies and the acceleration of climate change.