Bard Common Courses

Faculty: Michael Sadowski, Claudette Aldebot, Elena Kim, and Seth Halvorson

This course introduces students to theories that posit relational connection as a foundation of human development, drawing on evidence from psychology, sociology, primatology, neuroscience, and other fields. Course readings will be drawn from texts such as Franz de Waal’s The Age of Empathy (primatology), Matthew Lieberman’s Social: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Connect (neuroscience), and Carol Gilligan’s In a Human Voice (psychology). After an introduction to this evidence, the class will engage with this question: What gets in the way of human connection? In this part of the course, we will examine the cultural forces that disrupt connection and relationships, and the different ways this disconnection manifests across cultures. Patriarchy, racism, homophobia and transphobia, interpersonal conflict, war, and other social issues will be examined as manifestations of cultural breaks in relationship. In the final segment of the course, readings and discussion will shift to a final question: How do we reconnect as human beings within cultures that drive us to separate, create divisions and hierarchies among people, and alienate us from one another? Perspectives from psychology, education, the arts, and other fields will be brought to bear on this question as students consider ways to cultivate individual and societal resilience to the forces that breed separation and division. Important Note: Students considering this course should be advised that readings address issues such as race- and gender-based violence, homophobia and transphobia, ableism, and related issues, and that personal writing and sharing will be an important aspect of the class.

Faculty: Nicholas Lewis and Drew Thompson

Ralph Ellison is traditionally known and celebrated as a literary writer. However, Ellison’s earliest artistic interests resided in classical music, as both a composer and performer on trumpet. Over the course of his life, Ellison engaged in serious, extended practice of sculpture, music, and photography. Through his explorations, Ellison cultivated relationships with Black cultural producers, including sculptor Richmond Barthé, painter Romare Bearden, writer and social activist Langston Hughes, photographer Gordon Parks, and writer and critic Albert Murray. Such exchanges inspired a range of creative outputs that proved fundamental to Ellison’s crafting of a Black aesthetic. This common course invites students to explore Ellison’s crafting of a Black aesthetic, and the material and relational worlds he constructed with other Black artists, intellectuals, and cultural producers. Readings will include correspondences between Ellison and his interlocutors and will address the socio-political and -cultural times in which they occurred. Participatory lectures, small group discussions, and public dialogues with leading contemporary artists and thinkers will introduce students to the creative outputs, institutions, and movements that resulted from these exchanges. Assignments ranging from dialogical journaling to visual and historical analysis are geared to students developing their own Black aesthetic and cultivating strategies for community building. Only in an interdisciplinary model consisting of visual, historical, cultural, and performance studies can students access and ascertain the multidimensionality of Ellison’s artistic practice and the ways in which people build and nurture community through the arts. This course will introduce students to possibilities for continuing their studies as part of Bard’s New York City study away program.

Faculty: Yarran Hominh, Ingrid Becker, and Yebel Gallegos

Movement is both a metaphysical or cosmological concept and an essential human concept that is shaped by and shapes everyday cultural practices. Metaphysically, according to some philosophies, everything is movement—whether the process of Becoming that creates all things or the Way that is followed by all creatures. Practices of physical movement inherently connect a person to themselves and, in turn, to the space around them. This course examines the multiple meanings of movement, both literal and metaphorical, embodied and imagined, individual and social, that are central to our conceptions of ourselves and the world and how we live in it. The theoretical component will be text-based. The core transformative texts will be Gloria Anzaldúa’s Luz en Lo Oscuro/The Light in the Dark and Laozi’s Dao de Jing, with additional supplementary readings. The practical component focuses on exploring and expressing these concepts through improvisational prompts and martial arts-inspired practices. Throughout the course, we will ask questions such as: Where does movement begin in the body or mind, and how can it extend in space or figurative thought? How do our relationships with other bodies impact our understanding of our relationship with our own bodies, from our internal “fibers of being” to social gestures, including those that suggest tension and invite connection? How can we conceptualize or physically inhabit the feelings of stuckness and static experienced by selves/bodies in detention or dominated by normative social arrangements, and what forms of individual or collective movement can disrupt borders and invent new spaces of freedom? The assessment for this course will include weekly writing and in-class engagement with embodied practices, a midterm individual project, and a final group project that incorporates physical movement and a reflective component.

Faculty: Julia Rosenbaum, Yuka Suzuki, and Krista Caballero

A bright blue ring of baubles frames the entrance. An elaborate arch welcomes potential visitors. While we tend to associate human architects with the structures we call home, nonhuman animals such as Bowerbirds are also creative designers, carefully constructing environments like the one described above. What is at stake in distinguishing between the spaces that Bowerbirds and humans create and inhabit? Inspired by feminist and Indigenous frameworks, this course introduces students to the concept of home on multiple scales to explore how human and nonhuman animals imagine and make a sense of place. How, for example, do we define home and habitat? Whose homes and habitats do we interact with and move through? How do memory and storytelling shape our understandings of such places? How have ideas and practices of home and habitat changed and what will they look like in the future? This course addresses such questions through four specific themes: place-making and belonging; mobility and rootedness; aesthetics and animals; and site/non-site. Each section includes human and nonhuman experiences and is anchored with two to three key texts, a set of case studies, and interdisciplinary practices of art making.

Faculty: Michelle Murray, Simon Gilhooley, and Ani Mitra

This course aims to (re)introduce students to the important issues and ideas at stake in the 2024 election, to interrogate our own relationship to them, and to offer students the tools necessary to be politically literate citizens. Many consider the right to vote to be one of, if not the most important right that American citizens hold. It is through regular, contested elections that individuals make their preferences known, and in doing so, we shape our collective fate as citizens and endow our institutions with legitimacy. And yet, despite the ostensible power of the franchise, confidence in the health of American democracy has been in steady decline. Growing political polarization that makes compromise difficult, the increasing influence of corporate interests in politics, and the urgency of the problems we face—from climate change to war to economic inequality—have left individual citizens increasingly skeptical of institutions and overcome with political despair. What does it mean to participate in electoral politics, and why is such participation important to the health of democracy? How can citizens navigate an information environment saturated with misinformation? What role does and should domestic political issues, the economy, and foreign policy play in presidential elections? How can citizens–and especially young citizens–overcome the politics of despair, reclaim their political agency, and author the collective future they desire? To answer these questions and others, this course will use the framework of “keywords” to interrogate the vocabularies we use in the conversations we have with each other about this election. Keywords are meant to help individuals understand the concepts and ideas they encounter in their daily interactions with others and observe in our public discourse, to map controversies and disagreements about them, and to treat these terms as sites of unresolved contestation.