Class, Race, and Ethnicity

Thing Lab provides a critical, hands-on exploration of the intersection between design and art in a truly interdisciplinary learning environment. Students from design, art, and writing backgrounds will create works that address the convergence of design and art, engaging and perhaps questioning the market forces of taste-making and power relationships in the world of collecting. The studio will culminate in a group exhibition at a major national or international art fair.

This course provides an overview of historical, ideological, and economic influences of white supremacy, capitalism, and patriarchy on democracy, public life, and schooling. Teacher candidates critically investigate prevalent forms of multicultural education including conservative, plural, liberal, essential, and critical theories and practices.

This course provides an overview of historical, ideological, and economic influences of white supremacy, capitalism, and patriarchy on democracy, public life, and schooling. Teacher candidates critically investigate prevalent forms of multicultural education including conservative, plural, liberal, essential, and critical theories and practices.

Topics: Confronting the Abject The idea of power found in the perverse is a subverted and an imperative critical understanding to possess in consciously interacting with contemporary art, cinema and performance art. This class will investigate the power situated within the abject, through the sexual body as desire, the attraction in the combination of death and eroticism, what is to 'look' at the 'othered' body and the imperative implication of the 'gaze' in creating visual media. These topics will be investigated in relation to contemporary art and how it functions within the abject and resists it simultaneously.

Thing Lab provides a critical, hands-on exploration of the intersection between design and art in a truly interdisciplinary learning environment. Students from design, art, and writing backgrounds will create works that address the convergence of design and art, engaging and perhaps questioning the market forces of taste-making and power relationships in the world of collecting. The studio will culminate in a group exhibition at a major national or international art fair.

Thing Lab provides a critical, hands-on exploration of the intersection between design and art in a truly interdisciplinary learning environment. Students from design, art, and writing backgrounds will create works that address the convergence of design and art, engaging and perhaps questioning the market forces of taste-making and power relationships in the world of collecting. The studio will culminate in a group exhibition at a major national or international art fair.

This course provides an overview of historical, ideological, and economic influences of white supremacy, capitalism, and patriarchy on democracy, public life, and schooling. Teacher candidates critically investigate prevalent forms of multicultural education including conservative, plural, liberal, essential, and critical theories and practices.

This course examines urban history in the United States from the late nineteenth century to the present. Using a variety of sources and cities, we will investigate major themes in urban history including industrialization and economic shifts, transportation, architecture, urban policy and reform, migration, suburbanization, deindustrialization, postindustrial urban culture, and the roles of race, gender, and class in shaping urban geography. This course utilizes both primary and secondary sources to illuminate and interrogate ideological, spatial, social, and political transformations in American cities and suburbs.

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, nearly every newscast dealing with Cuba seems to recite the same theme: 'Castro's Cuba: The End of the Dream,' 'Cuba Alone,' and 'Cuba: Forbidden Paradise.' However, Americans have been predicting the fall of this charismatic leader for over three decades and over eight American presidencies. Yet Castro has remained in power and the drama continues. The Cuban Revolution is one of the most remarkable examples on record of the ability of one individual to make history. To misunderstand Fidel Castro is to misunderstand the revolution. This course will seek to explain the Cuban Revolution by examining such topics as the Bay of Pigs, the 1962 Missile Crisis, the Russian connection, the Social/Cultural Revolution, and the New World Order through a Cuban perspective. Resource materials for this course include films, novels, music, contemporary news accounts, and guest speakers.

Now, more than ever, sculpture is the most inclusive category of artmaking. Yet even at the height of this expanded field, a residual hierarchy remains when it comes to means associated with craft. In this course students examine traditional sculpture and craft processes in relation to notions of taste, class, gender, age. Students consider skill or craftsmanship; utility and decoration; commercial pressures vs. aesthetics standards and are encouraged to examine their own relationship to specific materials, processes, and techniques as a source of meaning and foundation for sculptural practice.

This course explores various modeling techniques, both haptic and digital, for creating sculptural projects. Students investigate perceptual modeling via the direct manipulation of media and 3-D computer imaging and output. prototype development and schematics for large scale sculptures. Several projects will incorporate the making of a sculpture or model developed from direct observation. Class discussions will also address questions such as prototype development, how to use schematics and make proposals for large-scale sculpture.

Thing Lab provides a critical, hands-on exploration of the intersection between design and art in a truly interdisciplinary learning environment. Students from design, art, and writing backgrounds will create works that address the convergence of design and art, engaging and perhaps questioning the market forces of taste-making and power relationships in the world of collecting. The studio will culminate in a group exhibition at a major national or international art fair.