In this film, photography and video workshop, students will use multi-media imagemaking to address their core concerns in the world. Each student will craft, execute and present a project that uses social engagement as a form of media production. Recent art movements question the superiority of the art object, the hierarchy of aesthetics over ethics and the role of the artist in social and political life. When an artist chooses to use art to engage with the society that surrounds them, practical questions arise. Who does the artist want to engage with, why and in what capacity?

From financial markets to meteorology, sports projections to medical testing, and scientific studies to gambling, probability and statistics are fundamental to analyzing data and making predictions that are scientifically sound. They are invaluable tools for any subject of study. In this introductory course to mathematical probability we will cover topics that include the calculus of probability, combinatorial analysis, random variables, expectation, distribution functions, moment-generating functions, central limit theorem and joint distributions. Computers will be used throughout.

This course develops the basic geometric, algebraic, and computational foundations of vector spaces and matrices and applies them to a wide range of problems and models. The material will be accessible to students who have taken at least one semester of calculus and is useful to most consumers of mathematics. The course focuses on real finite dimensional vector spaces and inner product spaces, although abstract and infinite-dimensional vector spaces will be discussed toward the end of the semester.

In this course, you will become familiar with foundational figures and arguments in social-political philosophy, with a focus on the tradition of liberal social contract theory. Given that liberalism has been the central tradition in political thought since its emergence, there is an equally important tradition of dissent that we will address.

In this photography workshop, each student will use African photographic practices as inspiration for their own photographic work during the semester. It has long been presumed that Europeans and Americans introduced the practices of early photography around the world - as explorers, merchants, colonizers, scholars, archaeologists, anthropologists and tourists. Yet we are increasingly aware of photography produced by people on the African continent.

This class explores the relationship between new media technologies, global youth and transnational environmental social movements. While the class looks at new media technologies broadly, a large part of the course will focus on the role and impact of social media in developing participatory networks that are complementary to on-ground academic-activist movements in the global north or south, with a special focus on Asia and the US.

Topics may include: the design of environmental and natural resource policies, particularly incentive-based policies; the analysis and control of environmental risks; cost-benefit analyses of specific environmental policies; critiques of cost-benefit analysis, international environmental cooperation; environmental and natural resource policy in the developing world; sustainability, and the conservation of biodiversity.