“I’ve seen justice for all genders and classes and sexualities, and it was as alien to me as the extra-terrestrial creatures who practiced it. This image of justice sprang from my own imagination, taking place on another planet, in another time, for a species of people very unlike humans. It took science fiction for me to see a clear picture of what justice could be. And at the end of the day, that’s all it was – fiction.”

The Statue of Liberty with welcome torch always raised. The Hollywood sign against golden California hills. Subways and freeways running like arteries above and below ground, offering to transport us around and across the city. Many iconic images of New York City and Los Angeles construct U.S. urban centers as a space of endless movement and possibility.

Three incommensurable claims form the basis of America’s origin stories: America was found; America was founded; America was self-made.

What is meant when we say someone or something “sounds American”? Can a person sound like a certain gender, social class, sexuality, or race? How would we possibly define that sound? And what might it mean to think of a culture by the ways it sounds and listens, instead of how it looks or sees? This course will explore these questions and others by studying podcasts, poems, songs, novels, and the changing forms of sonic technologies like microphones, radios, mp3s, turntables, and more.

This course will explore the concept of contagion and the fears, real and imagined, that surround
it. What does it mean for a body, a place, a community to be “clean” or “unclean”? What does
life look like in “plague-time”? And finally, what can we learn from these fictional and historical
sites of contamination? We’ll be examining the idea of pollution in a variety of contexts in order
to compare the ways that humans respond to crisis, from the level of the individual to the global.

In this course we are going to explore the world of comics and graphic novels from their origins in the 1930s to the present day. Comics and graphic novels will open us up to a series of broader questions: what happens when divergent media are united (image with text)?  How should we think about the figure of the author and artist (and the attendant legal category of creative copyright) within a context of collaboration (a writer working with an illustrator, or many writers with many illustrators), not mention amid the pressures of a publishing industry?