Note that not all courses will be offered in all semesters. Check on Albert or with the NYU school for information on when a listed course is offered.
Critical Disaster Studies
Jacob Remes | IDSEM-UG 2070
It can seem like we are living in an era of constant disaster: climate change leads to more floods and droughts, heatwaves and storms; global urbanization to seismically active cities leads to massively destructive and fatal earthquakes; highly complex systems on which we increasingly rely fail; radiation, chemicals, and other effluvium of modernity go where they are not intended and harm us. This course takes up the idea of disaster to ask interpretive questions about how and why disasters operate in society. What constitutes a disaster? What makes disasters different from ordinary bad things? How does society shape the experience of disaster, and how does disaster shape society? What makes people vulnerable to disaster? What does it mean to be resilient? Disasters are moments of severe distress, deprivation—and also possibility. How people, organizations, and governments have responded and continue to respond to disasters says much about how we imagine society to be and how we hope it will be in the future. Readings may include texts by Kai Erikson, Eric Klinenberg, Rebecca Solnit, Dara Strolovitch, and others.
Hiroshima
Nina Cornyetz | IDSEM-UG 1340
On August 6, 1945 the city of Hiroshima in Japan was leveled by the first atomic bomb. On August 9, the city of Nagasaki was leveled by the second bomb. It is estimated that between 210,000 and 270,000 people were killed, some immediately, some from the radiation days or months later. These estimates do not include more long-term impacts of the radiation, such as birth defects, or various cancers. How can we, as human beings, make sense of these events? How can we cope with, and represent unthinkable trauma? What are the politics of such representation? What processes of healing are possible through remembering? Is it important to represent such traumas, and if so, why? This course will explore a selection of historical, literary, cinematic, and other venues in which this unrepresentable trauma was, and continues to be, indeed, represented. We will aim at exploring the processes of mourning, remembering, and representing collective cultural trauma. Readings will include: Hein and Selden, Living With the Bomb, Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, LaCapra, Writing History, Writing Trauma, Sigmund Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” and selected short fiction, poetry and photographs. We will also view documentary footage and the narrative film Black Rain.
Photographing Peace
Lauren Walsh | IDSEM-UG 2045
This seminar asks, “What does peace look like?” What are the visual narratives of post-conflict societies, and how do they conform to or complicate our generalized notions and expectations around what “peace” means? Taking into account a history of war photography, and the uses of such imagery in journalism and by humanitarian NGOs, we explore the impact of persistently negative visual narratives of countries or regions as we contemplate the value of “peace photography.” This seminar examines how the camera can be used to document and reframe received narratives. We study four post-conflict countries (Nicaragua, Bosnia, Rwanda, and Colombia), delving into bodies of postwar photographic documentation; we look at each country on its own and also compare countries to see if there are “tropes of peace.” Such tropes can have global ramifications, affecting geopolitics, humanitarian endeavor, and, as we’ll see, they play out on a highly personal level as well. Students write analytic papers as well as produce visual projects, and our texts cover journalistic, sociological, historical, and human rights studies while spanning photographic, written, and filmic forms. Guest speakers, photographers who have covered war and/or peace, will deepen our conversations.
Visual Journalism and Written Reportage of Violence
Lauren Walsh and Oscar Martinez | IDSEM-UG
Volcanoes: The Sublime and the Scientific
Karen Holmberg | IDSEM-UG 1852
The volcano is a double-edged sword; volcanism provides the world’s most fertile soils and useful natural resources, yet is also the source of immense natural hazard and some of the most extreme global climate changes in human experience. What are the myths, ancient and modern, around volcanoes? How was their early modern scientific observation and conception linked to the Romantic sublime? What role do they play in 21st century conceptions of geoengineering to combat climate change? And what could go wrong? Over the course of this semester, the ongoing, unpredictable volcanic activity will help determine how we cover these questions and others, so that, like our subject, our class will be a dynamic, living entity. Other themes may include fake volcanoes, deep sea vents and the first life, extinction-level events, eruptions that never happened, Caribbean slavery, and geoheritage. In addition to scientific journal articles we will draw upon a newly published open-access edited volume, Observing the Volcano World (2018). Discussions of who has access to science, video interviews with leading volcanologists about their research, and incorporation of creative depictions of geophysical processes in the music of Nina Simone and Bjork, films of Werner Herzog, poetry of Anne Carson, or movie depictions such as the 1913 silent film The Last Days of Pompeii or the 1990 Tom Hanks film Joe versus the Volcano are all fair game as ways to examine and explore Earth science methods and concepts and how we intersect with the Earth.
NYC Coastlines: Past, Present, Future
Karen Holmberg | IDSEM-UG 2004
This course entwines archaeology, geomorphology, climate change considerations, and science fiction to think about the changing coastlines of New York City and the impact of urbanism on the natural environment. We will examine the past, present, and future of our waterways and become familiar with the range of marine biology projects currently in place in the New York harbor area. The course will entail several field trips, including to The River Project wetlab, the NYC Archaeology Repository, and the CoGen power plant. A major portion of the course will be centered around the artifact that each student will choose to examine from an archaeological site located in early landfilled sites from the 16th-century. In addition to scientific publications, we will draw from historic representations such as The Big Oyster by Mark Kurlansky, the futuristic imaginations of Kim Stanley Robinson’s NY 2140, and contemporary efforts such as the Billion Oyster Project to regenerate the waterways in order to envision the relationship between the historical, contemporary, and future material culture and coastlines of New York City.
Radical Ecologies (RadLab)
Karen Holmberg, Elizabeth Henaff, and Tega Brain | IDSEM-UG 2078 and DM-UY 4114 section A
Building on influences and dreamworlds from theorists, artists, designers, and scientists, RadLab offers an invitation to address what we are calling ‘radical ecologies’, or collective forms of life. We will incorporate experimental methods and field-based techniques in humanities-centered modes of social and cultural analyses to more critically and creatively examine the increasingly porous boundaries that structure our social and biological existence. Some of the topics we will discuss and experiment with include indeterminacy versus risk, multispecies work, the temporality of toxicity, and how we perceive planetary phenomena. Scholars and artists such as Karen Barad, Donna Harraway, Anna Tsing, and Mel Chen are representative of some of the work that will be drawn into our conversations of scientific readings. Students will combine oral presentation, creative projects, and written work to experiment with critical-creative apparatuses that might teach us how to attend and attune more intimately with the materialities of novel, unfamiliar ecologies in everyday lives.
A Practical Guide To Resilience: Designing Adaptive Systems For Basic Needs
Benedetta Piantella and Elizabeth Henaff | DM-GY 9103 K
We rely on innumerous centralized systems for most of our basic needs including power, communication, healthcare and food. In times of crisis these centralized systems become major points of failure and their infrastructure is slow to adapt and change. In this course we will explore open challenges and flexible responses to real-world disruptions such as when the NYC power grid goes down, when street level flooding impedes transport or when a virus outbreak occurs. This course is a choose-your-own-adventure citizen science & design research class that aims to leverage resource constraints as design opportunities. The course is organized around four modules based on real-world scenarios which will introduce tools, methods and practical skills around fermentation, wireless networking, energy production and harvesting, citizen science and environmental sensing. The modules include expert lectures, collaborations with local Community-Based Organizations (CBOs), hands-on workshops and field trips. Students will work in groups and individually to respond to design briefs within a specific context and its constraints through a series of short assignments. The class aims to empower students to contribute to the resiliency of their communities in the face of change and uncertainty.
The Social Challenges of Climate Change
Eric Klinenberg | SOC-UA 454
This seminar examines how sociology can help us understand the challenge of climate change. We will briefly overview the climate science and learn about the rise of “weird weather,” but the core themes of the course concern questions about communication and cognition, cultural values and material consumption, politics and persuasion, mitigation and adaptation, economics and social justice, power and social movements, and the possibility of creating new, more sustainable ways of living on earth. We will dedicate several sessions dedicated to Superstorm Sandy and its aftermath, with a focus on the question of how to rebuild a more resilient city and region in anticipation of more extreme weather events.
Disaster Nursing & Emergency Preparedness
Theresa Bucco | NURSE-UG 1311
This course explores the emergency response and management in different disasters, including environmental, mass casualty, public health emergencies, terrorism, and bioterrorism with emphasis on the interdisciplinary role of nursing. The discussion on disaster planning and management will be organized around the four phases of disaster, (1) mitigation, (2) preparedness, (3) response, and (4) recovery. The course will also address leadership, management and policy issues in disaster nursing to deepen understanding of the importance of protecting all aspects of health throughout the disaster life cycle. Students will also discuss the historical perspective of disaster management and learn to prepare for future disasters, their risks and impact on the communities with particular emphasis on the organization, management and mobilization of resources. The student will discuss the humanitarian aspects of emergencies and disasters, in particular, the preparedness response and recovery to lessen the socio-economic, psychological and health impact. The role of information technology as well as legal, ethical, and psychosocial implications of disasters and emergencies will be addressed. Partnering with local officials, a case study scenario of a disaster management in the community will be used to teach the care of the vulnerable populations for safe evacuation and mitigation of harm.