Images of Self and Others
The Offices of Academic Affairs and Campus Life and Student Affairs are pleased to offer a unique opportunity to incoming students for the 2012-2013 academic year. This program allows first-year residents to reside with classmates from their college seminar and connect with faculty and staff within their residence hall. The LLC theme is “Images of Self and Others,” and will be housed on the 2nd floor of Holloway Hall. Members of “Images” will begin their semester with a trip to a Broadway musical! Throughout the semester, students will participate in workshops, film viewings, and an end of the year project with fellow floor mates as part of their college seminar. The fall semester will end with a dinner celebration. Additionally, residents will decide on other fun and exciting activities for the spring semester, which will earn students an additional college credit.
“Images of Self and Others” will include the following three seminars:
- CSEM 1/1: Local and Global in Latin American Film
Instructor: Ada Ortuzar-Young
This seminar will study selected films from Argentina, Cuba and Mexico and consider how they capture changes in these societies at the turn of the new millennium. While these societies share a Hispanic cultural foundation, recently they have been impacted by global economic and political forces, and by real and virtual cultural exchanges due to commerce, exile, migrations, travel, tourism, in addition to the pervasive influence of Hollywood, American popular culture, and a globalized mass media and the internet. The class will reflect on this rapid process of globalization and cultural homogenization, and on the formation of new identities that are fluid, permeable, and in the process of change. How do cultures negotiate and adapt as they evolve? What do they accept and what do they reject? Are new technologies, global travel, and instant communication eroding borders and frontiers? To what degree does geography still matter? How different are students in our class from their counterparts in Argentina, Cuba or Mexico? - CSEM 1/2: Physics and Computing of the Future
Instructor: Minjoon Kouh
We will study the works of several innovators, who are opening up new possibilities and tackling important technological and scientific problems in transformative ways around the world. Taken as a group, they present a snapshot of how new technologies in energy, nanotechnology, and computing may affect our lives in the future. Some examples to be discussed in the seminar are: driverless car, artificial intelligence, robotics, nano-devices, quantum computers, solar and fusion energies, etc. Many of these scientific and technological transformations will be profound and perhaps controversial, reshaping our views of who we are and what we can do. - CSEM 1/3: Should Documentary Filmmaking Go Mainstream?
Instructor: Audrey Evrard
Long kept in the margins of the film industry, documentary filmmaking has recently enjoyed greater visibility and been used to raise public awareness about a wide range of controversial social, cultural and political issues. From Al Gore’s plea for environmental responsibility in An Inconvenient Truth to Michael Moore’s 2004 Grand Prize in Cannes for Fahrenheit 9/11, Morgan Spurlock’s Super Size Me, or more recently Charles Ferguson’s indictment of Wall Street’s reckless practices in Inside Job, the documentary genre has widely appealed to broader mainstream audiences. As we watch and discuss these films along with others from China, France, Brazil, we will reflect on the following questions: what defines a (successful) documentary in the early twenty-first century? What role does the notion of “point of view” play in the documentary genre? How does “going mainstream” affect the aesthetic and “truth-searching” principles of documentary filmmaking? What do documentary films teach us about “our” world?
Civic Scholars
First-year students who have enrolled in the Civic Scholar program will also be members of the Civic Scholar LLC and will reside together on the 1st floor of Holloway Hall. Through this LLC, students will have the opportunity to connect with their faculty and upper-class Civic Scholars within their residence hall. The two Civic Scholar professors are Amy Koritz and Jonathan Reader. For more information about the Civic Scholar program, please visit the Center for Civic Engagement website (link to site).
- CSEM 1/12 and 1/13: Community Service
Instructors: Amy Koritz and Jonathan Reader
While we believe community service to be a good thing, an activity that benefits others and improves our shared world, we may not have thought much about the meaning of community, or, indeed, of service. What constitutes a community? Do we belong to a single community or many? And is service always beneficial to those being served? We will explore assumptions and beliefs about these two key terms—both separately and together. This seminar is limited to Civic Scholars. Students will contribute 18-20 hours of community service over the course of the semester.
Contact Us
Space is limited in these exciting programs. For more information about either of our LLCs, please contact Residence Director Colleen Freund at cfreund@drew.edu or 973-408-3431.