Bookmaking: From Stone Tablets to E-Readers
MDVL 180A/ENG180M and MDVL 280C/ENG 280N
Bridget Whearty
One of the things that unites us as humans is how we tell stories and make records, preserving who we are and what we love. Books carry these stories–which we can learn by reading the words on their pages and also by studying them as artifacts, looking for evidence of the people who made them (and how, and why), who read and cared for them in all the years that separate us from their creators, and who preserve and share them today. This course introduces students to the unique stories that books have to tell and the field of study known as “the history of the book,” as we explore texts from the earliest forms of writing to the newest digital media. Students in this course will work closely with librarians and archivists, learning how to do original research on under-studied rare books and medieval manuscripts using Binghamton University Libraries’ Special Collections as our course “lab.”
In the fall, students will undertake an experiential learning module, building their own book. You will begin by making your own “DIY-medieval manuscript,” using the techniques we study, and then copy it into print, and finally remake it in a new digital form. This hands-on learning will help you study “from the inside out” different technologies and tools that people have used to make books throughout history. Students will also get to work, hands-ons, with two special “case study” rare books:
- a real medieval manuscript made in the midst of the first wave of the Black Plague,
- and our copy of the Nuremberg Chronicle, a gorgeous and giant book created in the first decades after the invention of movable type print in western Europe.
Working together, we will uncover these books’ secrets and tell their stories. Then, in the spring semester, you will get to choose a rare book as the center of your own study, applying what you learned in your deep dive into book history to uncover and tell its unique history.
Students in this course sequence will gain knowledge of research methods in the humanities, including specialized training in how to do hands-on research in special collections, museums, and archives. You will also learn tools for digital and information literacy; as well as ways to communicate your findings–writing, revision, and public speaking for different audiences. This course will be of particular interest to students considering majors across the humanities, fine arts, and social sciences, including Art History, Digital & Data Sciences, English, History, Medieval and Renaissance Studies, Romance Languages, and Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, as well as any students considering careers in education and/or libraries. Special Collections Librarian Jeremy Dibbell will be contributing to the course activities and bringing students into the world of curation of rare books in the library setting.
Read more about Dr. Whearty's research.
The sequence will likely fulfill Oral Communication (O) general education requirements in the fall and Composition (C) and Information Literacy (I) in the spring.
The New Authoritarianism
Matthew Cole
When an upset victory in the 2016 Election brought Donald Trump to the White House, many observers sounded the alarm that America was lurching toward authoritarianism. Four turbulent years later, Trump refused to concede defeat in the 2020 Election and his supporters laid siege to the US Capitol in hopes of overturning the results, a moment of crisis for American democracy unlike anything since the Civil War. But Americans were hardly facing this crisis alone: in the last decade, many of the world’s democracies have seen demagogues and would-be dictators ascend to power. It’s not just that Russia’s Vladimir Putin and China’s Xi Jinping wield nearly unchallenged power in their respective nations, or that they increasingly exert that power on the world stage. In nations with long histories of democracy, emergent leaders like Hungary’s Viktor Orban, Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro, India’s Narendra Modi, Italy’s Georgia Meloni, and Argentina’s Javier Milei have brought authoritarian politics crashing into the mainstream. Like Trump, many of these leaders have stoked resentment toward minorities, especially immigrants, while undermining or ignoring checks on power, threatening their opposition, mainstreaming conspiracy theories, and establishing cults of personality.
In this course, we seek to understand the movements and leaders behind the authoritarian turn, and we’ll do so by drawing on perspectives from political science and political philosophy, psychology and sociology, history and journalism, art and literature. How do today’s authoritarians rise to power? What tactics do they use to solidify control and suppress opposition? What leads ordinary people to support authoritarian movements? What strategies can be used to resist authoritarianism and defend democracy? What are the implications of authoritarianism for global issues such as immigration and the climate crisis? Can the history of dictatorships and totalitarian regimes provide us with any insight into the workings of authoritarianism today? Our wide-ranging course materials will range from the classics of the twentieth century to the cutting edge of contemporary research, as we reckon with the rise of authoritarianism in America and the world.
The fall semester introduces students to a range of key concepts, theories, and research questions reflecting a range of disciplinary perspectives. Students engage closely with both foundational and cutting-edge work in the social sciences and humanities, discussing and responding to works addressing the historical parallels between twentieth century totalitarianism and modern authoritarianism, the social psychology of authoritarian movements, the political science and strategy of civil resistance, and the policy implications of authoritarianism for human rights, among other topics.
In the spring semester, students develop and pursue a unique research agenda extending from their work. After learning the fundamentals of database research, they take an important first step from reader to researcher by assembling an annotated bibliography and critical literature review on the topic of their choice. From there, they have the opportunity to try out a variety of qualitative and interpretive research methods, and to learn key scholarly maneuvers such as testing a theory, constructing a case study, and intervening in a debate. In addition to generating an original piece of scholarship, students get to explore methods for sharing research with broad audiences in engaging multimedia formats: curating a digital exhibit, creating a podcast or explainer video, or exploring other creative applications of their research.
Climate Justice
Matthew Cole
For decades now, we have understood that climate change is caused by human carbon emissions and that it poses a threat to the lives, livelihoods, and basic human rights of every person on earth, with the most severe and rapidly escalating consequences for the inhabitants of the world’s poorest nations. Experts agree that a total elimination of carbon emissions by 2050 is necessary to prevent devastating and irreparable damage to the planet and the human communities that depend on it. The pathway to a secure and livable future is narrowing, and realizing it poses considerable challenges: for scientific and technological research, economic and industrial policy, democratic politics and international cooperation.
It also raises numerous problems of justice. The ongoing effects of climate change exacerbate existing problems of poverty and inequality and compound legacies of colonial exploitation as well as long-standing disparities of race, gender, and class. Even as it multiplies real injustices, climate change raises novel challenges to our ideas about justice and to related ideas about responsibility, rights, and government. It forces us to grapple with obligations that extend around the globe, forward in time, and across a multitude of human and non-human beings – obligations that neither our conventional wisdom nor our extant institutions are well-equipped to fulfill.
In this course, we explore the fraught politics of the climate crisis with an emphasis on issues of justice. We examine the political and ideological forces that have entrenched climate injustice, campaigns of resistance from vulnerable frontline communities, and possibilities for a just transition advanced by activists and policymakers around the world. Our course materials weave together the past, present, and future of life on earth, highlighting the connections between climate justice and the regeneration of democratic institutions, the repair of historical injustices, the rebuilding of international solidarity, and the reimagination of global governance. Though our course will be grounded in political theory and related social science disciplines, we also converse with scientists, journalists, policymakers, activists, and artists who have engaged the public to imagine the stakes of the crisis and the possible alternatives.
The fall semester introduces students to a range of key concepts, theories, and research questions reflecting a range of disciplinary perspectives. Students engage closely with both foundational and cutting-edge work in the social sciences and humanities, discussing and responding to works addressing the social psychology of climate change denial, policy designs for a just transition, the historical connections between colonialism and the climate crisis, the philosophical case for climate reparations, and more.
In the spring semester, students develop and pursue a unique research agenda extending from their work. After learning the fundamentals of database research, they take an important first step from reader to researcher by assembling an annotated bibliography and critical literature review on the topic of their choice. From there, they have the opportunity to try out a variety of qualitative and interpretive research methods, and to learn key scholarly maneuvers such as testing a theory, constructing a case study, and intervening in a debate. In addition to generating an original piece of scholarship, students get to explore methods for sharing research with broad audiences in engaging multimedia formats: curating a digital exhibit, creating a podcast or explainer video, or exploring other creative applications of their research.
Debating Basic Income
PHIL 180A/ENG 180N/ECON 181A and PHIL 280A/ENG 280N/ECON 181B
Will Glovinsky
In the past decade, the idea that governments should give people regular, unconditional cash payments has become an unexpectedly mainstream policy proposal. From Switzerland to Stockton to Kenya, pilot programs and campaigns for universal basic income have made headlines at a time of mounting uncertainty about the future of work in an age of automation and artificial intelligence. What is less well known is that the idea of basic income has been robustly debated for 250 years. In this research stream, students will approach the concept of “income for all” from philosophical, economic, literary, historical, and public policy perspectives. Our premise will be that we cannot rigorously evaluate the potential effects of this compelling yet controversial idea without understanding where it comes from, how it has been argued for, and why it has repeatedly captured imaginations over centuries.
In the fall, students will explore primary sources related to the origins and development of basic income. We will begin by immersing ourselves in the circle of late-eighteenth-century English ultra radicals led by Thomas Spence, who first proposed an economic system in which individuals will rent land from parish governments rather than private landlords, with the rental income then distributed equally to all residents, male and female, as a regular cash dividend. Students will examine Spence’s philosophical milieu as well as the strikingly literary quality of his writings, which include a sequel to Robinson Crusoe where the islanders implement a basic income and ballads sung in taverns to spread his views among the London working class. Since these radical ideas were inspired by colonial accounts of Indigenous resource sharing, students will then turn to Lahontan’s 1703 Dialogue with a Savage (adapted from conversations with the Wyandot diplomat Kandiaronk) to trace the transatlantic intellectual exchanges that contributed to Enlightenment egalitarianism. Later units will focus on documents relating to the Jamaican abolitionist Robert Wedderburn, Henry George’s “single tax” movement, Martin Luther King, Jr.’s writings on guaranteed income, Juliet Rhys-Williams and Milton Friedman’s “negative income tax”, and the Canadian “Mincome'' experiment run during the 1970s. Over the semester, students will gain skills in using close textual analysis to ask questions about historical documents while also locating individual works within broader intellectual genealogies. Our guiding questions will examine how the divergent philosophical premises—ranging from socialism to neoliberalism—underlying basic income proposals have shaped their structures, justifications, and popular receptions. Is basic income a political entitlement or something owed to people as a natural right? How would it be funded, and who would be eligible? What would be its effects on labor, family, and the environment?
In the spring, students will select a subset of disciplinary methods and formulate a research project that explores one chapter in the history of basic income. A series of workshops will introduce students to both archival resources and digital databases, and they will present their works-in-progress throughout the semester. As part of their final projects, students will publish from their findings by curating an entry in a multimedia digital timeline providing accessible histories and analyses of basic income’s sources.
The sequence will likely fulfill Humanities (H), Information Literacy (I), Critical Thinking and Reasoning (T), and Harpur College Writing (W) general education requirements in the fall and Oral Communication (O) and Harpur College Writing (W) in the spring.
Empathy, Ethics, and Narrative
PHIL 180B/ENG 180O and PHIL 280B/ENG 280O
Will Glovinsky
From #empath TikTok to social justice movements, claims about the powers and perils of empathy are ubiquitous in contemporary life. The ability to share someone else’s feelings and see the world from their perspective can, according to various authorities, make us better partners, friends, doctors, managers, and citizens. Yet the valorization of empathy has also been blamed for licensing cultures of voyeurism in war reporting and social media, flattering the egos of privileged spectators, and inflaming social tensions with misguided conceptions of other peoples’ cultures. Empathy is hailed as a defining human trait, yet bonobos may match us at it. This Source Project research stream will invite students to pull back the curtain on an everyday concept and consider empathy's colorful history, its philosophical underpinnings, and its centrality to literature, art, politics, psychology, and medicine. We will ask what empathy really is (a matter of considerable debate), what role it plays in social change, and what it can—and can’t—do for us.
The fall semester will introduce students to how empathy (and its related forerunner, sympathy) has been understood in a variety of disciplines, including philosophy, psychology, literary theory, primatology, and the history of science. We will then delve into a series of case studies to scrutinize empathy's real-world effects. After reading Enlightenment theories of fellow-feeling and an early slave narrative, we'll consider their relationship to the growth of abolitionism and the first boycotts on slave-produced goods. Later units will examine how novelists sought to spotlight the suffering of workers during the Industrial Revolution, how activists passed the first animal welfare laws, and how conflict mediators and healthcare workers leverage perspective-taking in their work today. Throughout, our goal will be to define empathy's uses and limitations, and to describe the ways in which narratives may mobilize or mislead us ethically.
By the end of the fall semester, students will draw on the methodologies we have discussed to identify a research agenda culminating in a capstone project. We will work in small groups to narrow down topics and revise research questions and then meet over the course of the spring to workshop ideas, set goals, and revise written work. Students will present their projects in campus-wide poster sessions and other multimedia forums.
The sequence will likely fulfill Humanities (H), Information Literacy (I), Critical Thinking and Reasoning (T), and Harpur College Writing (W) general education requirements in the fall and Oral Communication (O) and Harpur College Writing (W) in the spring.
Human Rights
HMRT 176 and HMRT 276
Alexandra Moore
These courses take a two-fold approach to human rights research. First, we will discuss the histories and concepts that constitute human rights. Are they best described as legal instruments, social norms, cultural practices, discourses, political ideologies, or institutions? What are some of the historical roots of the so-called “human rights regime”? Is it a fatally flawed set of norms that should be abandoned in our contemporary moment; or, do the recent attacks on those norms by the forces of xenophobia, racism, and other forms of fear and hate demand that we re-double our efforts to promote human rights? To help explore those questions with rigor and insight, we will consider how different academic and professional disciplines approach human rights work and research. We will read texts from History, Philosophy, Political Science, English/Literary Studies, Law, International Relations, Visual Media Studies, and Anthropology, and we will work with Binghamton professors who represent many of those departments. In considering human rights from different perspectives, we will continually ask how different methodologies and research questions shape one another. Because human rights is an inherently interdisciplinary area of study, we will also consider the challenges and rewards that human rights research demands. In the second semester, students will choose to join a current research group in the Human Rights Institute to investigate topics such as incarceration, fascism, indigenous rights, terrorism, women’s rights and more.
The sequence will likely fulfill the Global Interdependencies (G), Humanities (H), Social Sciences (N), and/or Harpur Writing (W) general education requirements.
Living in a Material World: The Stuff of Memory and the Pursuit of History
YIDD 180A/JUST 180C/HIST 180B and YIDD 280A/JUST 284A
Gina Glasman
This class will be dedicated to a single question: how can we use the artifacts of everyday life to better understand the history of a community? To explore this question, we will focus on a particular cultural vehicle, museums—institutions rooted in the notion that “objects” can speak! In the Spring semester, students will create their own digital exhibit, using the themes, approaches and concepts we have explored together in class. Students can choose to focus their research on any community.
To help us with this task, we will divide our study into several parts. We will begin with the earliest efforts by historians—often Marxist inflected - to chart the lives of “everyday people.” This approach was sometimes twinned with a new interest in the material world. From there, we will take a look at recent histories of the immigrant city, with a focus on Jewish, or Yiddish immigrant New York in the early twentieth century. Here too, we will find a focus on ordinary things, as part of the investigation of the urban landscape—from a discarded candy wrapper in the street, to the latest cut in city fashion. Recorded memory - or oral history - is also key to this kind of analysis, as a way to access the culture of everyday life. Finally, students will research, design and mount a digital exhibit of their own creation, based on the questions addressed in class. In preparation for this project, we will also consider the uses of material culture in the work of social history museums, as well as comparable initiatives in the fields of anthropology and public archaeology.
The sequence will likely fulfill Joint Composition and Oral Communication (J) and Social Sciences (N) general education requirements in the fall and Joint Composition and Oral Communication (J) in the spring.
Mapping American Prejudice
HIST 180A and HIST 280A
Wendy Wall
Racial and religious prejudice are expressed through both private actions and public policies, and the targets of prejudice change across space and time. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Jim Crow segregation spread across the South; the federal government imposed a sweeping immigration ban targeting Chinese; and prominent intellectuals in many parts of the country embraced a pseudo-scientific hierarchy of races that placed "Nordics" above "Mediterraneans," and both above people of African and Asian descent. In the 1920s, a revived Ku Klux Klan spread from the Atlantic to the Pacific Coast, denouncing Catholics and Jews, as much as people of color. As housing tracts multiplied over the next few decades, many homebuilders used "restrictive covenants" to prevent the sale of homes to non-whites, "aliens," and occasionally groups like Italians and Jews. Many European immigrants eventually made their way into the white middle-class, and a burgeoning civil rights movement discredited the more virulent forms of racism. At the same time, however, federal "redlining" policies, urban renewal projects, and other public and private policies further entrenched structural racism.
How do the parameters of prejudice change over time? How do both private actions and public policy embed discrimination in the landscape around us? And how does structural racism continue to shape lives, even as overt expressions of intolerance fade?
This course sequence explores such questions by focusing on Broome County, New York, the home of Binghamton University, the birthplace of IBM, and an area long known as the Valley of Opportunity. In the antebellum period, Binghamton and surrounding areas were a major hub on the Underground Railroad. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Southern and Eastern European immigrants flocked to the area's cigar and shoe factories, and local corporations pioneered an approach known as "welfare capitalism." During the Cold War, the area's concentration of electronics firms and defense manufacturers drew high-tech workers. Yet such oft-retold stories of freedom and opportunity obscure a darker and more troubled past that is too easily forgotten. At the turn of the 21st century, Broome County was more than 90% white, in part a reflection of this history. The last two decades have seen an influx of immigrants and refugees from across the globe, and Americans of all races have come to the area for a more affordable life. Still, the historic politics of prejudice remain inscribed in various ways on the urban landscape.
How might public-facing history begin to redress both individual prejudice and structural racism by sparking civic dialogue? In the fall, students will explore these issues through a combination of reading, historical research, and community engagement. We will peruse newspapers and pamphlets produced by the KKK in the early 1920s, when Binghamton was the Klan's New York State headquarters. We will work with newly digitized deeds, locating and mapping racial covenants in Broome County. Finally, we will examine federal "redlining" maps and photographs and documents charting the path of urban renewal. Students will also learn digital and other techniques for disseminating their findings to a broader public. In the spring, students will conduct an individual research project of their design and disseminate their findings in a campus-wide poster session and through other appropriate outlets.
The sequence will likely fulfill Community Engaged Learning (CEL), Information Literacy (I), Social Sciences (N), Critical Thinking and Reasoning (T), and Harpur College Writing (W) general education requirements in the fall and Information Literacy (I), Social Sciences (N), Critical Thinking and Reasoning (T), and Harpur College Writing (W) in the spring.
Migrations and Diasporas in Upstate New York
ANTH
Şule Can
This course devotes two successive semesters to understanding migration in/from the Middle East and North Africa through a historical and anthropological lens in collaboration with the American Civic Association. The course will engage with a range of theoretical debates, issues and concepts surrounding the phenomenon of migration; provide the historical background and context for the waves of displacements and dispossessions, which made the Middle East a producer of forced migrants in the 20th century and onwards. It will focus on refugee resettlement processes and immigration into the US from the Middle East. In doing so, the course is designed to study and assist in the work of the American Civic Association (ACA). The ACA is a local non-profit community organization that has assisted individuals and families with immigration services and refugee resettlement in New York’s Southern Tier since 1939. The first semester introduces students to the work of the ACA, including local, national, and global immigration and refugee issues and needs. A particular focus will be on developing interdisciplinary knowledge base, critical thinking and research skills related to immigration and refugees within New York and the United States more generally. Additionally, students will work under the direction of the course instructor to help process, preserve, and organize the ACA’s extensive archive of case files, material culture, documents, programming, and photographs related to local immigrant and refugee communities. During the 2nd semester and under the continued guidance of the course instructor, students will continue working with the ACA and develop research projects based upon the archival materials and ethnographic knowledge about immigrant and refugee communities in Upstate New York. The end goal is to complete their projects and present their findings to the broader Binghamton and university communities.
The sequence will likely fulfill Social Sciences (N), Community Engaged Learning (CEL),
and Joint Composition and Oral Communication (J).
People, Politics and the Environment
PLSC 180A and PLSC 180B
Robert A. Holahan
Societies emerge and develop to take advantage of the natural and engineered environments that define their landscapes. This can be a local process but is also inescapably tied to global dynamics in which social, ecological, economic, and environmental interact to create new understandings of what it means to be a person living in a place at a time. We will develop an approach to studying the place you are as a new college student—Binghamton—as an example of the broader processes at work in local social-ecological systems. You will practice a variety of research methods from the social sciences and environmental science to demonstrate the need to integrate perspectives and approaches when studying the relationship among people, places, and the environment.
The sequence will likely fulfill Social Sciences (N) and Critical Thinking and Reasoning (T) in the fall and Community Engaged Learning (CEL) and Joint Composition and Oral Communication (J) in the spring.
