COURSES
Academic Program Offerings
A 2-course sequence, counting for AUCC credits, that introduces students to the complexity of Humanities-based thinking, and investigating the way such thinking can enter into STEM concerns.
- IU174A-D: Questions for Human Flourishing
- IU173A-D: Thinking Toward a Thriving Planet
A certificate in interdisciplinary learning that includes IU173 and IU174 along with 9 additional upper-division courses in the CLA that further the vision of the Arts & Humanities and the STEM fields as necessary partners
IU174A-D
Questions for Human Flourishing
We call Questions for Human Flourishing our “Gold” course—color of ripe wheat and the nourishing grain, precious metal that keeps its luster across millennia. These classes approach concerns that have been our deepest cares since humans have been human. Devoted to discussion and inquiry, recent Gold classes have examined “Truth & Beauty,” “Happiness,” and the roots of “Inspiration”
IU173A-D
Thinking Toward a Thriving Planet
We call Thinking Toward a Thriving Planet our “Green” class—color of the lush meadow, color of the summer leaf. Our Green classes merge the Arts & Humanities with concerns that prevail in STEM fields, furthering our belief that interdisciplinary learning leads to mutual thriving. Recent courses explore the ethical and aesthetic relation of humans to the more-than-human-world, and a class investigating the various ways in which knowledge can be built.
AUCC Credits
All our courses count for the AUCC in four different categories:
- A = 1C Diversity, Equity, Inclusion
- B = 3B Arts & Humanities
- C = 3C Social Sciences
- D = 3D Historical Perspectives
Spring 2025 Classes
Gold: Questions for Human Flourishing
IU174B.002 (22366) – TR 9:30-10:45 Eddy 105, John Kneisley
What might it look like to venture into the realm of the dead, encounter ghosts and griefs both personal and mythological, only to emerge where we started, reattuning ourselves to life after being lost in its opposite? Our class will be structured as a route through the underworld of Greek mythology, using its iconic locations as touchstones to explore broader themes. What might we learn (or unlearn) from crossing Lethe – the river of oblivion and forgetfulness – about memory? How might we tend to loss in the meadows of Asphodel, and what, in our individual ways, might we hear the spirits there say? Upon our return, how might we understand the world we initially left – one undergoing constant cycles of death and regrowth?
To ground ourselves in these questions, we will engage with classical texts that place us in the underworld, as well as contemporary ones concerned with death, grief, memory, and rebirth. We will have the freedom to reflect and create in as many different ways as these texts will appear: through poetry, prose, art, music, and film. Although most of our work will occur in a classroom, we will take time to venture beyond it, visiting local cemeteries, rivers, and meadows to draw nearer to what the underworld might offer.
Ultimately, by treating death not only as an occurrence but as a place – one full of mysteries that may nevertheless inform our humanity – our aim is to discover what it might mean to better tend to the lives we live here, and situate ourselves at the unknowable center of Thales’s paradox, that “life and death are the same.”
Green: Thinking Toward a Thriving Planet
IU173B.001 (22339) TR from 9:30-10:45 in CABIN (Chem B316)
Robin Walter // Johnny Plastini
This course derives its name from a text by Feminist Philosopher, Donna J Harraway. Professor Haraway focuses on radical entanglements of matter and meaning while leading minds through the History of Consciousness program at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Steeped in Haraway’s ethos and fundamental to this course is the cultivation of a curious hunger that encourages students to view their life-long education as never fully being finished. We will explore human and non-human perspectives of interdisciplinary topics ranging from historic geologic timescales, pertinent climate crisis initiatives, and speculative philosophic questions that dance between science fiction and science fact. Students employ reading, writing, and visual communication strategies, including hands-on art projects, film viewings, and field trips to help them discover and relate their own position within the context of these conversations.
We’ll explore place and belonging via diverse modes of making, thinking, and being. Some of the fundamental questions we’ll consider include: How might we begin to understand words as thresholds that grant us passage into the world? How might art represent a threshold that ushers us from thought into feeling? How might engaging in the process of making invite us into a newfound threshold of experience?
We will grow curious about how these various thresholds take shape and form, change, evolve, and grow as we turn our attention towards some of humanity’s most enduring questions: How do we open ourselves to the world around us, and in turn, how does it open towards us? How is it that we extend ourselves to the more-than-human world, and what traditions and bodies of knowledge inform our approach?
The scope of these questions will require us to be expansive in the genres and disciplines towards which we turn. We will draw from ancient and modern literary, philosophical, artistic, and ecological traditions to support our inquiry. We will do our best not to theorize about the world, but rather learn to better live in it. As such, we will often find ourselves outside the traditional classroom.
We will be interested in the material processes of thinking, and will engage our hands in the process of making—with explorations in printmaking, poetry, and book arts. Throughout our time together, we will be working collaboratively with another Green & Gold Course with parallel interests. We will move fluidly between these two courses’ cares, concerns, techniques, and sensibilities, as we learn, think, and make in company.
Courses Taught
Gold
Green