Love and death, worms and drums

Courses from "Architecture and Utopia" to "Sex, Drugs, Guns, Money, Corruption and Globalized Black Market Trade" are part of this spring semester, beginning in late January. Examples of other intriguing, integrative course titles across the disciplines:

"Regenerative Urban Ecologies" offers a cognitive and practical toolkit—from top-down governance and policy concepts to grassroots, hands-on technologies—for building resilient, sustainable cities. Its instructor is Scott Kellogg, who wrote Toolbox for Sustainable City Living. A partner on Skidmore's environmental studies faculty, he is also an author, educator, and leader of Albany's Radix Center, which researches and demonstrates environmental methods and micro-industries, such as an integrated food production system using fish, plants, rabbits, chickens, ducks, worms, and flies.

"Biology of Poverty" is a biocultural look at poverty and health. It uses science and ethnography to investigate how the causes and effects of poverty have shifted over time, and how people with few resources manage to navigate those challenges. Robin Nelson—who also teaches medical anthropology, Caribbean culture, and "Anthropology of Love, Sex, and War"—promises to "turn a critical eye toward discussions of the 'poverty problem' or 'culture of poverty.' We will develop a more nuanced understanding of the conditions that create and reinforce these inequities, and how they give rise to biological feedback mechanisms that influence individual health outcomes."  

"Lyric Flights of Love and Death" considers the beauty of language and how poetry may be construed as "language straining at its very limits to become music," says its professor, John Anzalone. The course interrogates "how peak experiences like love and death are represented and 'sung' in French lyric poems spanning four centuries," from Corneille to Rimbaud to the modern Oulipo group's experiments with mathematical permutations and language mechanics (such as writing in palindromes or limiting which letters are used). Also on the syllabus is the interface between poetry and art criticism.

"Flesh: Thinking (with) Bodies" is taught by philosopher Reg Lilly, using psychology and neuroscience as well. Western culture still embraces Descartes's  early viewpoint that "tends to see the body as a container, a mechanical adjunct to the mind/spirit." But today some philosophy, psychoanalysis, gender and race studies, and arts challenge this dualism—and so does his course, "exploring embodiment," he says, "in our various ways of 'being in the world.' This 'lived body' or 'embodied mind' I call 'flesh.'" Lilly's class tackles such ideas as identities embodied in gender and race and age, bodies in sports and other performance, the mortal and sexual body, and caress vs. trauma.

"Taiko and the Asian American Experience," a musicology course that also counts toward Skidmore's cultural diversity requirement, addresses Taiko drumming traditions in Japan and recently in North America, including in the Asian American Movement. The professor, Lei Ouyang Bryant, teaches in Skidmore's music, Asian Studies, and intergroup relations programs. Her Taiko course is literally hands-on, with practice of drumming techniques. Through the integration of academics and performance, Bryant says, she helps students to experience Taiko firsthand as a rich, dynamic performing art.