The Open University' is an intermediate media production workshop. We will research community and distance learning projects and employing critical media studies frameworks, participants will conceive of the format, content, production, and transmission methods for a contemporary public education project. Our production toolkit will include: media analysis, content research, program development, pre-production planning, studio and field production, live television/streaming production, and post-production editing and distribution.

The aim of this course will be the comparative study of four ancient epics from India, Greece, Israel, and Italy. The core readings will comprise: the Ramayana, the Odyssey, the David Story, and the Aeneid. Each text will be considered both in its own historical and cultural context and in the larger shared context of bronze age epic, myth, and literature.

This course will offer intermediate and advanced photography students an opportunity to expand their photographic skills by working with large format cameras and making prints using alternative materials such as: gum-printing, platinum/palladium, cyanotype, kallitype, and carbon printing. These contact printing processes require negatives the same size as the desired print and students will learn to use large format cameras and produce digital negatives. This course is designed for experienced photo students with well-honed darkroom and basic Macintosh skills.

Dance in the Community: This course is designed for students interested in merging social activism, performing arts and teaching. It teaches students to use movement, dance and theatre in settings such as senior centers, schools, prisons, and youth recreation centers. In studio sessions, students will learn how to construct classes and dance exchanges or events for community sites. Students will reflect on movement practices that help inform the body as a site for community-based learning in dance.

This course will continue to develop skills in imagining and composing dances, now focusing on group forms, and the challenges to creating meaning, referential or abstract, in non-verbal, three-dimensional, motional and, most of all, embodied expression. In class we'll explore a variety of composition strategies used in group work, both classical and contemporary, and work with longer, more complex sequences. We'll play with such methods as layering, subtracting, juxtaposing, multiplicity, simultaneity, ambiguity, image, suggestion and statement.

The Improviser's Laboratory: This is a class for musicians interested in developing their expressive and creative skills through improvisation. It is open to all instrumentalists, including voice and electronics. It is open to students from any musical background. You will be challenged to expand your instrumental vocabulary, and to use these languages in a context of collective improvisation. We will look at improvisational music making from a multitude of angles, breaking it down and putting it together again.

This course explores the condition of work in the United States from the late nineteenth century through the mid-twentieth century. We will be reading historical essays and monographs, autobiographies and biographies, short stories and novels. Our reading will be supplemented by a weekly labor film screening and we will discuss documentary as a genre of storytelling. We will discuss the various critical approaches to the different narratives forms that workers, historians, fiction writers and filmmakers have chosen to tell their own and labor's varied stories.

How do we make sense of a meaningless world? How do we render meaninglessness in fiction without making it meaningful? Are we satisfied with literature that doesn't explain itself? Can we read without trying to explain? This course will examine novelists grappling with these questions as they try to find place for literature in the modern world.

In our increasingly fast-paced, multi-tasking technological culture, did you ever wonder what happens to the body? Falling out of sync, or losing touch with one's physical and sensory self can cause a host of problems including stress, injury and a decreased sense of wellbeing. These problems can also dampen creativity and undermine technique. What's a body to do? This course introduces students to several body based disciplines that offer helpful strategies for sustaining a healthy and creative body/mind.

This class explores the emerging interdisciplinary space between the architecture and anthropology fields. We study the ethics, methods, and subject interests of architectural anthropology in both theory (as a research approach to the built environment) and practice (specific proposals of building with and/or for cultural identity). This is a theory seminar with a visual analysis component.