College Foundations: Kite

Catalog description

This course is focused on key concepts important to the human experience. From our position in a twenty-first-century American university, we will consider together the following questions that people have engaged with throughout the world over time: How should we live, and live together, despite our differences? What gets to count as knowledge and how is it passed on to others? To whom are we connected and obliged in this world, and how do we express those connections and obligations? When bad things happen, how do people find meaning in suffering? What is the role of art and artists in the world? How do we change and transform ourselves and our world over time? Assigned readings, viewings, and listenings, while not comprehensive, will draw from a range of cultural contexts. This course will introduce you to some ways that the humanities and the qualitative social sciences approach the past and present of humanity as well as how we might meet the twists and turns of the future.