Virtually Human

Instructor: Julius Fleming

How does play shape our humanity and national identity? We often define people by the work that they do, whereas we tend to think of leisure and after work playfulness as a release from that identity. This course takes up a particular form of play—nightlife—to reckon with how it shapes what it means to be human and how it impacts nationhood, particularly around matters of race and oppression. Spanning from slavery to the present, this course examines how nightlife has been used to deny black people’s humanity and been a vital site of playfulness, manifest as joy, resistance, self-making, and aesthetic innovation. Using theoretical insights of performance studies to analyze embodied performances and their surroundings as a way to make sense of the world, our explorations will range widely, from cakewalk dance competitions on plantations to queer night clubs. We will study literary, visual, and social media. Once students better understand how nightlife is vital to the making and the unmaking of black people’s humanity, they will be in a position to grapple with play as a meaning-maker in their own lives and in our modern democracy.

GenEd: SCIS, DSHU
Offered in: Fall 2021, Spring 2022, Spring 2023 (two sections)
Required/Optional: Required

Instructor: Alexandra Harlig

Anthropomorphized pets post on Instagram, FitBits transmit biodata, bots influence elections… In the digital world designed by and for human beings, all sorts of actors imitate people, while people are objectified through surveillance and data mining. Despite a frequent distinction between the internet and ‘IRL,’ physical bodies are wrapped up in every aspect of existence online: from the factory workers who build our technology to the postures and gestures those devices require us to adopt. Exploring this range of bodily phenomena, this course considers what constitutes a “human body” online and how digitality and connectivity inform our understanding of personhood. From RPGs and dance challenges to AI and visceral responses to internet content, students will analyze the complex relationships between the technological and the embodied, the social and the political, the past and the future.

GenEd: DSHU
Offered in: Fall 2021, Spring 2022, Fall 2022, Spring 2023
Required/Optional: Optional

Instructor: Stephan Blatti

Who you are is interesting and important, but not the subject of this course. What you are is closer to our topic but not yet specific enough; after all, you are many things: a student, a citizen, a driver, a Terp, and so on. This course asks a deeper and more elusive question: what kind of being are you? What is your fundamental nature — the nature you share with others and that simultaneously grounds your individuality? Engaging with material from philosophy and psychology to environmental studies and law, we will work to answer this question and to tease out its moral and practical implications. We’ll investigate the limits of our nature, from the possibilities of time travel and teletransportation to the realities of dissociative identity disorder and conjoined twins. The insights we glean will help us grapple with the nature of human existence — from what happens when you die, to our responsibilities toward others, to nothing less than the meaning of life.

GenEd: DSHU (under review)
Offered in: Spring 2022, Spring 2023
Required/Optional: Optional

Instructor: Halli Weiner

As humans, we share our lives with other animal species in diverse and conflicting ways. Non-human animals can be consumed as food, used for scientific research, and treasured as companions. They are commercialized, worshipped, and stereotyped. Our complex relationships with other animals emerge from and fuel debates about what makes “us” different from “them.” What roles do we open to (or force on) non-human animals in American culture and why? Who makes these decisions and what is their effect on animal life? This course explores the evolution of modern human-animal relationships to contextualize major social and scientific debates that have arisen in the last century and assess why they matter.

Offered in: Fall 2021, Fall 2022
Required/Optional: Optional