Community-based learning melds theory and practice through experiential opportunities that support the in-classroom curriculum.
2022-23 Courses
On Multimodal Scholarship: The Use of Digital Technologies for Community-Oriented Research
Faculty Member: Yeong Ran Kim, Mellon Digital Media Fellow
Fall 2022
This course draws upon multimodal scholarship, encouraging students to express their critical thinking through not only the written word but through multiple forms of media, particularly in the context of community-oriented research. Media scholar Tara McPherson describes the multimodal humanist, who “deploy[s] new experiential, emotional and even tactile aspects of argument and expression [that] can open up fresh avenues of inquiry and research” and eventually “reconfigures the relationships among author, reader, and technology.” What kind of scholarly arguments and expressions can we shape through digital media? How is it different to create knowledge with multi-sensorial (visual, aural, and tactile) media from writing a research paper? How does multimodal scholarship change the relationships among artists, researchers, and community members? In class we will have multi-, trans-, and inter-disciplinary conversations in order to fundamentally transform the ways in which we approach critical inquiry in a community-oriented setting. In particular, we will focus on the idea and practice of intersectionality, a necessary component of co-creating knowledge with communities and across differences anchored in race, ethnicity, gender, disability, and class. As a conference project, students will work with the community youth from surrounding neighborhoods and create a multimedia project together in groups.
Everyday Archives: Digital Media and the Aesthetic Collaboration
Faculty Member: Yeong Ran Kim, Mellon Digital Media Fellow
Fall 2022
What kind of work is care work? Is it a form of labor? Love? Is care-taking a social or individual responsibility? And who pays for it? This course questions the role of care-taking in modern societies through a range of literary and sociological texts. We begin with the premise that care-taking is both fundamental to a functioning society and also grossly devalued. This devaluation is marked by the poor pay associated with care-taking professions, as well as the gendering and racializing of care-taking responsibilities. This course will draw on recent writing in Disability Studies, Gender Studies, Political Theory, and Ethnic Studies, as well as literary works such as Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go and Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping, to consider the experience of the individuals performing care work as well as those who require their care. We will discuss terms, like self-care and prenatal care, which have become commonplace, but that we often encounter as marketing concepts that have been stripped of their origins. This course aims to situate the concept of caring into historical, political, and aesthetic contexts. Reading work by Audre Lorde, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Silvia Federici, and others, students are encouraged to imagine the future of care work in a changing society. As part of this course, you will partner with a senior at Wartburg to complete an oral history, podcast, and catalogue entry for a digital exhibition.
Urban Health in a Multicultural Context: First Year Studies,
Faculty members: Linwood J. Lewis, Psychology
This FYS/ community partnership course will focus on the health of humans living within physical, social, and psychological urban spaces. We will use a constructivist, multidisciplinary, multilevel lens to examine the interrelationship between humans and the natural and built environment, to explore the impact of social group (ethnic, racial, sexuality/gender) membership on person/environment interactions, and to explore an overview of theoretical and research issues in the psychological study of health and illness across the lifespan. We will examine theoretical perspectives in the psychology of health, health cognition, illness prevention, stress, and coping with illness; and we will highlight research, methods, and applied issues. This class is appropriate for those interested in a variety of health careers or anyone interested in city life. The community-partnership/service-learning component is an important part of this class; for one morning or afternoon per week, students will work in local community agencies to promote health-adaptive, person-environment interactions within our community. Students will have an individual conference every other week and group conference on alternating weeks. In the group conferences, we will discuss the nature of academic work in general and practice research, reading, writing, and editing skills.
Justice, Care and the Lifespan Revolution, Open Community-Based Seminar
Faculty member: David Peritz, Politics
Spring 2023
What does it mean to age with dignity? What is required, individually and socially, to provide the special care the elderly often require, fairly and with dignity? Special urgency attends these questions today, as we are in the midst of a lifespan revolution, with many people living more than twice as long as the average person did just a few generations earlier. This urgency is compounded by the fact that the organization and distribution of care labor does not reflect this lifespan revolution or the transition to highly mobile and less traditional societies characterized by rapid social and technological changes—changes that can make aging harder and care more difficult to provide. Societies in which an ever-larger portion their populations have entered elderhood face issues to do with justice in the distribution of care, the nature and forms of ageism, or the isolation of those deemed elderly from the rest of society. Meanwhile, the organization and distribution of care labor remains deeply structured by traditional assumptions and inequalities and prejudices that occupy the intersections of age, gender, and race. Viewed simultaneously from these angles, the lifespan revolution presents new and pressing ethical issues about how best to lead a complete and extended human life, but also issues of justice and civil rights about how society can productively incorporate while also respecting and caring for those living far longer than humans have in the past, and fairly distributing “loves labor” of caring. These will be among the most urgent issues of ethics and justice in the middle of the 21st century. This course will examine these issues in part by drawing on a variety of academic fields including philosophy, political theory, psychology, cognitive science, labor studies, and literature. It is also a community-based course, and we will partner with Wartburg, a diverse adult care community in Mount Vernon, NY, close to the College. In the first half of the course, students will study the range of issues described above, and begin to develop a more specific focus on how lifelong learning contributes to well-being in elderhood. This focus serves as preparation to offer “cognitive care” for the elderly members of this community, and will be accompanied by visits to the Wartburg so that students can get a sense for its members and their interests and have the opportunity to observe lifelong learning in practice. Students will also develop short classes or workshops to offer at the Wartburg as the main focus of their conference work. In the second half of the course, the study of specific issues of justice and care presented by the lifespan revolution will continue, but also be supplemented by engagement at the Wartburg as students offer the courses or workshops they have developed to the residents there.
The Methods of Theatre and Civic Engagement,
Faculty member: Allen Lang, Theatre
The Methods of Theatre and Civic Engagement course is for undergraduate and graduate students interested in sharing their creative skills meaningfully in the community. Using the language of theatre, students will explore methods and techniques, styles, and forms to develop a creative vocabulary for specific ongoing community placements that encourage community dialogue and exchanges that may lead to community projects and events. Throughout the course, students will explore the work of Paolo Freire, Augusto Boal, Viola Spolin, bell hooks, Suzanne Lacy, Pablo Helguera, and others. Fall 2022 - Spring 2023
Pattern: First Year Studies
Faculty member: Philip Ording, Math
This seminar will study patterns in nature and design from the mathematical point of view. Examples will be primarily visual, including beadwork, braids, tilings, trees, waves, and crystals, among others. The workshop format of the class will give students the opportunity to discover, collaboratively, the structures that govern patterns. Students can expect to use both visual and logical reasoning to answer open-ended problems that involve hands-on experimentation and creative problem solving. By the end of the year, students will know how to reproduce a given pattern in one, two, or three dimensions; how to identify its symmetries; and how to compare it to related structures. For conference, there is a possibility of service-learning placements in community-based organizations, depending on availability. No particular math background is required. During the fall semester, students will meet with the instructor weekly for individual conferences. In the spring, we will meet weekly or every other week, depending on students’ needs and the progress of their conference projects. This course is recommended for any student interested in mathematics as the science of patterns as well as those intending to study visual art or education.
Disability, Media, and Literature
Faculy member: Emily Bloom. Mellon Public Humanities Fellow and Literature
Fall 2022
This course examines representations of disability in literature and other media, while also exploring how disability shapes the experience of readers and spectators. Course readings will include stories such as H.G. Wells's "The Country of the Blind," novels like Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent, and poetry collections like Ilya Kaminsky's Deaf Republic. We will also watch films such as The Diving Bell and the Butterfly and Crip Camp. In addition to these works, we will read a range of secondary texts about the history of audiobooks for the blind and dyslexic, sign language poetics, and legislation for closed captioning, among other topics. Conference work will include community engagement with the Wartburg Adult Care Community. You will be asked to consider the access needs of seniors at Wartburg and work together to help make literature, music, and film more accessible to them.
Economics of Environmental Justice in Yonkers
Faculty member: An Li. Economics Faculty
Spring 2023
Environmental injustice is both an outcome and a process. As an outcome, environmental injustice is the unequal distribution of environmental burdens (or benefits) in a society. As a process, it is the history and institutions that project political, economic, and social inequalities into the environmental sphere. In this course, we will focus on our immediate community - Yonkers, NY. We will first measure the disproportionate environmental burdens in Yonkers's low-income and minority neighborhoods. Then, we will utilize economics to examine the causal mechanisms of environmental injustice - we will focus on the evolution of the housing market, the changing demographics of Yonkers, the location choice of major pollution sources, and zoning policies. We will draw knowledge from multiple fields, such as economics, politics, sociology, geography, etc. We will examine the issue using multiple methodologies and assess different policy options for improving environmental and climate justice in Yonkers. There will be service-learning opportunities at local community organizations.
Everyday Cosmopolitanism in Yonkers Seminar
Faculty member: Parthiban Muniandy. Sociology
Spring 2023
Cities and urban spaces are important places in which the marginalized poor and other underprivileged communities seek refuge and shelter by engaging in forms of rebuilding and placemaking that tend to fall outside of the purview and control of the state and authorities. Here, we take a transnational perspective on how the precarious and vulnerable urban poor develop strategies and practices of living, geared toward securing greater autonomy and dignity, primarily through forms of peripheral development and informality. We will explore interconnected themes of family, kinship, work, gender, and social reproduction as they pertain to the urban poor. We will also pay attention to how diversity and difference are negotiated daily by communities of faith, creed, color, ethnicity, and gender who share the same urban work and communal spaces. Some of the theories and concepts that we will read include: Teresa Caldeira’s “autoconstruction,” Asef Bayat’s “quiet encroachment of the ordinary,” Henri Lefebvre’s “right to the city,” Ananya Roy’s “subaltern urbanism,” and Mignolo’s “border thinking.” The City of Yonkers will be a case study for many of those themes of difference, informality, everyday cosmopolitanism, and hyperdiversity.
This course will take the city of Yonkers as an urban center for the ethnographic study of life in a cosmopolitan setting. Students will have the opportunity to work with organizations such as the Yonkers Public Library and ArtsWestchester to explore some of the questions around difference, diversity and everyday cosmopolitanism among the various communities in the city. The course will include a fieldwork component where students will couple ongoing participant observations with the writing of fieldnotes each week.
Advanced Intermediate Spanish: Political Creativity
Faculty Member: Heather Cleary, Spanish Language and Literature
Fall/Spring (year-long)
his course looks at ways that individuals and communities across the Spanish-speaking world have gotten creative about politics, and political about creativity. Students will develop analytic skills and explore social justice issues through literature, film, music, and visual art by Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, Sara Gómez, Samanta Schweblin, Yásnaya E. Aguilar Gil, Lia García La Novia Sirena, and many more; we will also study the politically creative actions of communities and organizations working outside the structures of the nation state. An important aspect of this course will involve following activist movements in real time and working with social justice initiatives in Yonkers and its surroundings, especially in the area of language justice through translation. Students will produce both critical and creative written work. This discussion-based course will be conducted in Spanish, and is intended for students who wish to further hone their communication and comprehension skills through advanced grammar review. The Spanish placement test is required prior to interviewing with the instructor (contact hcleary@ for information on taking the exam).
Globalization Past and Present: Global and Local Communities in Yonkers
Faculty member: Margarita Fajardo, History
This course is an introduction to thinking globally and acting locally: it examines how different regional, national, and local communities see their place in the world and how events, processes, or structures that cross national and regional boundaries affect specific communities and individuals. The course examines the cultural, economic, and political origins of globalization and how globalization transforms over time. The course assumes globalization as both historical and contemporary and thus, it is divided in two parts. The first part of the course explores globalization in a long-term historical perspective including ancient world precedents, fourteenth century exchanges before European hegemony, the encounter and collision of Europe, Africa, and the Americas in the modern world, the Enlightenment and the Age of Revolutions, the Industrial Revolution and the Great Divergence, among others. The second part of the course explores major transnational issues today in historical perspective including climate change and environmentalism, social justice and human rights, movement of diseases and global health, world trade and financial inequality, migration and labor movements, and world religions and multiculturalism, among others. The course has a community work component: it asks students to interrogate the concepts, practices, processes, and events studied in class through and within their work with the Yonkers and beyond community. The course will help students situate the experience of migration, labor, finance, health, education, religion, and culture of Yonkers and beyond communities and individuals within wider and longer patterns of flows, structures, and networks between the Americas and the world.