| Course Info | Class Number: 2752
The Balch Seminars introduce all first-year students at Bryn Mawr to a critical, probing, thoughtful approach to the world and our roles in it. These challenging seminars are taught by scholar/teachers of distinction within their fields and across academic disciplines. They facilitate the seminars as active discussions among students, not lectures. Through intensive reading and writing, the thought-provoking Balch Seminars challenge students to think about complex, wide-ranging issues from a variety of perspectives.
Current topic description: In a world of injustice and exploitation,
how does change occur? What is the role of protest, art, humor,
science, money, violence? How do communities imagine and achieve
better futures? This course will examine efforts to imagine new ways
of resolving economic and political conflict ("peace"), building
families and friendships ("love"), and simply seeing and gaining a
knowledge of each other and the world ("understanding"). Such
efforts sometimes give rise to inspiration and hope and sometimes
elicit tears. They can also be funny. The materials we will read,
view, and experience will include the inspirational, the
heartbreaking, and the comic. Throughout the course, we will make use
of the "critical, probing, thoughtful approach" common to all the
Balch seminars. We also consider what it might mean to bring instead
a supportive, embracing, and heartful approach to these topics. Our
readings will include celebrations of protest, love stories, and
speculative fiction. We'll look at building community within prisons,
schools, hospitals, refugee camps, and even spaceships. Students will
write reflective and argumentative essays and will also have the
opportunity at points in the semester to engage in collaborative,
creative, contemplative, or activist practice. Authors and creators
will include Aristophanes, James Baldwin, Octavia Butler, Mohsin
Hamid, N.K. Jemisin, Arundhati Roy, and Ursula Le Guin. |
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