This course will familiarize the student with some of the basic creative applications of electronics. A central element in this process will be examining and modifying common electronic devices. This approach focuses on the physical and functional aspects of electronics and encourages an understanding of application through hands on experience rather than a study of theory. This also encourages the student to look to pre existing devices for artistic materials rather than building everything from scratch.

This course will explore the work of scholars, essayists, and creative writers in order to use their prose as models for our own. We'll analyze scholarly explication and argument, and we'll appreciate the artistry in our finest personal essays and short fiction. Students will complete a series of critical essays in the humanities and natural sciences and follow with a personal essay and a piece of short fiction. Students will have an opportunity to submit their work for peer review and discussion; students will also meet individually with the instructors.

This course is an exploration of the complex and shifting relationships between law and non-human entities. How does law reflect, reinforce or challenge key categorical distinctions such as nature/culture, human/non-human, subject/object, and living/non-living? Through examination of a range of theoretical perspectives and specific case studies, we will focus on the epistemological underpinnings of law, especially in the Anglo-American legal tradition, and the enduring question of law's anthropocentrism.

How is Buddhism engaged in the world? This course explores how Buddhism is being used in Asia and the United States to address contemporary issues such as human rights, environmentalism, economic development and race and gender relations. Buddhist concepts such as morality, interdependence, and liberation will be examined in comparison with Western ideas of human rights, democracy, and freedom. We will explore how globalization and cultural traditions influence religious and cultural change as people deal with social problems.

How do we study a reality as complex and contested as that of Cuba? This course proposes an interdisciplinary approach that critically interrogates the available frameworks (geopolitical, historical, and cultural) for undertaking such a study. First, what images of Cuba-circulating in US popular and official culture-must we recognize and displace even to begin our study? What constructions of race, gender, and sexuality have defined the Cuban nation and Cuban transnationalism?

Students often approach the field of psychology with a desire to both understand themselves and to help alleviate the suffering of others. Many are also motivated by a desire to work towards social justice. Yet psychology and the mental health disciplines, along with their myriad forms of inquiry and intervention, are inextricably entangled with current social and political arrangements.

This course will investigate the roles of law, culture and technology in creating and re-defining families. We will focus on the ways in which systems of reproduction reinforce and/or challenge inequalities of class, race and gender. We will examine the issues of entitlement to parenthood, domestic and international adoption, surrogacy, birthing and parenting for people in prison, and the uses, consequences and ethics of new reproductive technologies designed to help people give birth to biologically-related children.

This interdisciplinary course will combine critical studies of literature with critical approaches to childhood and psychological and psychoanalytic perspectives (particularly the writings of D. W. Winnicott). This course focuses on literary texts written for adults that feature children as subjects as well as texts written for a child audience. We will explore questions about the representation of children and childhood; the relation of child and adult worlds; childhood and memory or forbidden knowledge; and children, imagination, and language.

Economic ideas and the policies that are informed by these ideas exert a major influence on many aspects of our lives. But where do economic ideas come from? This course explores the ideas of a selection of influential economists over the centuries and the social forces that shaped their thinking. A central goal of the course is to track the ways in which economic thought has developed historically both as a response to inadequacies of previous theory and as a reflection of new economic problems emerging as economies and societies evolve over time.

This course is designed for students transitioning into Division II to introduce them to the School of Critical Social Inquiry: the kinds of questions we ask, methodologies we use, and writing we produce. Each week CSI faculty will share a recent research project, taking students "behind the scenes" to examine the methodological dilemmas and choices that drove their research and forms of knowledge they produced.