FWIS Courses
Spring

In this course, we will return to foundational texts in American political thought as well as contemporary scholarship in political science to examine whether the U.S. government serves as an effective representative of the people. The framers of the Constitution designed an intricate system of checks and balances, intentionally setting up institutions that are more or less responsive to changes in public opinion and to each other. We will analyze the U.S. Congress, courts, and executive, assessing how each branch of government operates in practice and whether they continue to function as intended in the modern era. How does American democracy work well, and where does it fall short? Is it possible to build a government that is truly of the people, by the people, and for the people?

This course will survey a variety of types of natural disasters that have–or could–impact much of the world. Special attention will be paid to recent natural disasters in the United States, but the course will also attend to disasters from far in the past and outside the US as well. Because of their national, sometimes worldwide attention, there is a rich scholarly and public attention on natural disasters and their impacts. This attention has produced a variety of rich texts, but also a number of non-textual sources that the course will consult as well. We will engage with this media, with special attention to how disasters happen, how we can better prepare for them, and how these disasters disproportionately impact some groups within the larger body politic.

This course examines various configurations of (what we today call) “queerness” across cultures, both ancient and contemporary. Engaging with a wide variety of texts across genres and mediums—myths, folktale, short stories, poetry, music, cinema, TV shows—we will study how conceptions of gender and sexuality vary widely between different historical and sociocultural contexts. We will also explore the complex and often fraught connections between different understandings of gender and sexuality and the broader systems of power and knowledge. Together, we will develop context-sensitive and diverse expressions of desire that support open, respectful ways of articulating queerness—as a way of being that goes beyond the conventional boundaries of gender and sexuality.

Who’s who in history? And what if we don’t know? This course explores historical examples of people disguising themselves in diverse ways for a variety of purposes. By examining how people from the past mis/represented themselves, this course asks students to think critically about identity and how it is constructed. Learners will also consider how membership and exclusion from certain groups shapes societal perception and one’s place in social hierarchies. Centering these ideas in the 19th and 20th century United States, this course assesses the impacts of the past on present perceptions and representation of race, gender, and other key characteristics of identity. By highlighting connections to student experiences and real-world examples, this class promotes the relevance of the past and historic bases of identity, a topic that remains central to our understanding of society.

What is "hustle culture" and where does it come from? In this course, we will draw on social theory, cultural studies, philosophy, and film to examine hustle culture as a social and ideological phenomenon. Through these sources, we will trace how hustle culture emerged from longer histories of capitalism, social inequality, and shifting labor conditions. Students will explore how factors such as race, gender, class, and immigration status shape work experiences and narratives of hustling. We will ask: who is valorized for hustling, who is merely expected to hustle, and who must hustle to survive? Analyzing the gig economy of the past two decades, we will also examine how work itself has become more individualized and precarious. Lastly, we will follow the movements of resistance to hustle culture ideology: from labor organizing to philosophical cases for rest and a life measured by alternatives to productivity.

"Discussions of ethics are central to our current moment; between a global pandemic, tumultuous presidential election, and rampant disinformation campaigns online, we find ourselves in a challenging time. How will we meet it? How can we be “good”? What do we owe to each other?

This course is designed to help you learn and practice critical writing and research skills as we investigate the ethical considerations of writing and research in the academy. Using The Good Place as our point of reference, along with readings by philosophers and theorists from Aristotle to Lao Tzu, we will discuss “what we owe to each other” across a range of contexts, from everyday communication and social niceties to issues of equity and access. Each student will research a different ethical question related to research methods or communication in their chosen field of study. "

From Mother’s Day flowers to political speeches, to divine mothers who embody sacrifice and purity, mothers are celebrated for their selflessness and praised for their tireless labor of love – but not all of them. In culture, politics, economics and the law, notions of good mothers and bad are narrowly defined along lines of social class, race, gender, sexuality, and other markers of social identity. This course is about the “bad” moms. Over the semester, we’ll examine the distance between the rhetoric and reality of American motherhood by looking at the experiences of mothering parents who do not fit the social ideal - working mothers, immigrant mothers, mothers who are single, young, absent, sick, mothers who are mad. Along the way, we’ll experiment with engaged reading and writing practices as we explore new ideas, examine our own assumptions, and work toward deeper understandings, and more meaningful modes of communication.

“People become the stories they hear and the stories they tell.” So wrote Elie Wiesel after struggling for a decade thinking about whether and how he would tell his story of the Holocaust, a story that became the memoir "Night." If it is true that in some important sense, we are our stories, we do well to reflect on those that mean the most to us, those that we return to and those that come to us along the way, surprising and changing us. We will read and discuss diverse historical and contemporary examples of “life writing,” including memoirs, biographies, autobiographies, diaries, and letters. We will also do “field work,” collecting stories from friends, family members, or public figures. Our field experiences will be shared and workshopped, and we will use writing and/or visual storytelling to produce “unfinished memoirs” by the end of the semester.

Throughout the twentieth century, science and science fiction participated in a shared economy of inspiration, each stirring the other to new creative potential. While this trade also manifests in post-apocalyptic tales and stories of space exploration, nowhere is it more delightful, theoretical, and mind-boggling than in the dance between theoretical physics and time travel narratives. This course investigates the historical, aesthetic, and scientific connections between the authorial and scientific co-creation of time travel. Our central quests will be to define the relationship between scientific and narrative jumps through time, as well as forge, as a class, a general understanding of how our culture represents time travel, given not just technological limitations, but also the historico-cultural limiting factors of gender, race, politics, and language.

Our interactions with our environment shapes much of our daily lives. And yet, we often do not think critically about how our relationship with landscapes and nonhumans are shaped by culture. In this course, we will read texts from anthropology, geography, as well as works of fiction to introduce students to the various ways humans experience and interact with the environment. Across these disciplines we will consider how communities are entangled with nonhuman species and landscapes. By recognizing interactions with the environment are always mediated by culture, politics, and history, we will examine how factors such as gender, race, or class shape access to and relationships with land. Reading topics will range from studies of colonial expansion, to contemporary forms of extractive capitalism, to speculative works on the future of the world.

With all of the movies, TV shows, books, comics, video games, etc. that now constitute the Star Wars canon, it's easy to forget that the franchise began in 1977 with a single low-budget film that somehow captured the world's imagination. The original film (titled simply, "Star Wars") shattered box-office records, launched a merchandising empire, and changed popular culture forever. The subsequent release of The Empire Strikes Back and The Return of the Jedi further cemented the franchise as one of the most influential pop-culture phenomena of all time. In this course we'll immerse ourselves in the Star Wars era of the late 70s and early 80s as we try to unpack how the trilogy both shaped and was shaped by Reagan-Era U.S. culture, and try to understand what qualities of the trilogy enabled it to endure so far beyond the cultural moment that produced it.

A philosophically oriented course on one of the important concepts in contemporary ethics: consent. The first weeks will address the more abstract questions: What is consent? How does it work? Why do we need consent as a social and moral principle: is it to protect individuals from harm, to safeguard our personal autonomy, to foster trust? Under what conditions is consent morally valid: does a 'yes' always mean 'yes'? Should consent always be informed? The remainder of the course will be dedicated to the 'applied ethics' of consent: to the ethics of consent as it arises in different domains of life. We will focus on consent to sexual relations, consent to medical treatment, and consent to government. No prior background in philosophy is required; the course is open to students from all disciplines.

This course examines key philosophical questions through the lens of Black Mirror, the Netflix anthology series that explores the dark intersections of technology and human nature. Pairing episodes with philosophical texts, students will critically engage with issues that shape their daily lives. Is democracy truly the best form of government? (The Waldo Moment). How much freedom should individuals have in speech and action? (Hated in the Nation, Nosedive). Do I have free will? (Bandersnatch). If not, am I still responsible for my actions? (White Bear). What makes me the same person over time? (San Junipero). What are my moral obligations to others—human, animal, or artificial? (Be Right Back). By analyzing these themes, students will deepen their understanding of contemporary ethical dilemmas and the evolving relationship between technology and society.

In this class, we will explore shifting definitions of the “human” in an increasingly technologized world through E.M. Forster’s “The Machine Stops” and Jeanette Winterson’s Frankissstein. We will examine how literature has shaped and challenged ideas about human identity, autonomy, and superiority and question whether the state of being human is fixed or fragile. Drawing from posthumanist theory, we will investigate how advances in digital technology and medical science are complicating our understanding of humanity. We will consider ethical questions about human rights - and who/what has rights to them - cyborgization, and what it means to lead a posthuman existence. Ultimately, we will ask whether we can survive the posthuman world we are creating.

This writing-intensive seminar examines Meiji period (1868-1912) women’s writings and what they tell us about women’s lives and cultural output at the start of Japan’s modern period. We will discuss fiction, speeches, diary entries, and newspaper articles and their historical, cultural, and literary contexts. Women were at the heart of transformations in education, the law, print media, and art. Students will participate in presentations that analyze women’s place in visual culture, fashion, and education of the period and these depictions still impact women’s social and literary identities today.

This course offers an introduction to the field of cultural studies by focusing on the significance of popular music in American culture. In addition to developing your interpretive toolkits, critical thinking skills, and writing abilities, it will allow you to explore a number of key questions about the aesthetics, poetics, and politics of popular music. From lessons on various forms of music writing to critical studies of subcultures and scenes, this class will help you to think more deeply not only about music itself, but about the other issues (identity, taste, race, gender, sexuality, class, etc.) we talk about—consciously or not—when we talk about music.

Iranian cinema is renowned worldwide for being both artistic and deeply emotional, often thriving despite strict government regulations. Because they have to follow strict censorship, filmmakers have become creative by using simple, low-budget stories that focus on real life rather than flashy spectacles. Generations of Iranian film directors have won top honors at major film festivals like Cannes, Berlin, and the Oscars. Key elements of Iranian cinema include Realism (everyday settings and non-professional actors to tell authentic, intimate stories); Subtlety (metaphors and hidden meanings to explore sensitive social issues, without directly violating censorship laws); and Universal Themes (human stories that anyone can relate to, such as honesty, dignity, and resilience). The course is structured around three writing assignments (analysis, argumentative, and a final research paper) based on seven major films, with class time divided between screening key scenes and discussion. Students can access the films through Fondren Library.

In the twentieth century and beyond, movies and television serve as an important source of mythologized national narratives (or somewhat “faked news”) from war movies, to westerns, to “biopics” of figures such as Kenneth Turing. Are their patterns of distortion at work we can identify? How do we correct them?

This First-Year Writing-Intensive Seminar invites students to explore how researchers study social inequality, with a focus on education. Instead of learning complex statistics, students will learn how to think with data: how researchers ask questions, use evidence, and make arguments about schools, opportunity, and fairness. The course uses a mix of research articles, short policy briefs, data visuals, and accessible journalism to show how evidence is used in real-world debates about education. Students will practice reading carefully, questioning assumptions, and explaining ideas clearly to different audiences. Writing is central to the course and used as a tool for thinking and learning. Through short, low-stakes assignments and larger projects, students will build skills in analyzing claims, supporting ideas with evidence, and communicating clearly in both written and visual formats. By the end of the course, students will be more confident readers, writers, and critical consumers of information.

This FWIS investigates ancient, historical, and modern cities and the ways their residents received water. A city must have water, and all cities depend on complex water systems. Waterworks are unique to each city, and they reflect the natural setting of the city as well as the choices made by residents and governments. We shall approach water and cities to understand how cities developed their water resources, how the delivery of water shaped city life, and how the environment was affected. Students will be able to select a city and a water topic of their choice for their final presentation and written assignment. The seminar will follow the strategies for teaching writing and effective communication developed by the FWIS program at Rice. The seminar meetings will emphasize discussion of common readings, effective writing, presentations of specific readings by students, and oral presentations of final projects.

What is a museum? What role do they play in the modern world? This course fosters critical
thinking about how and why museums were important institutions. They emerged as sites of identity within and between local, regional, national, imperial and global networks. Globally, a diverse number of museums are at once beloved and controversial, commanding and irrelevant. These contradictions aren’t new. To address the future of museums we must understand the evolution of these institutions in their global pasts. Museums are neither neutral nor objective repositories of the past. The collection, interpretation, and display of objects allowed individuals, communities, states, and empires to use cultural heritage, art, memory, history, science, and material culture as tools for creating, protecting, or imposing multiple identities. Museums were systems of constructed knowledge embedded in structures of authority, race, citizenship, colonialism, and resistance that changed significantly over time and place. Museums are useful lenses with which to understand how the categories, hierarchies, and boundaries we often see as natural are actually historically constructed.

In this course, we will examine how artists, writers, and cultural institutions have crafted a distinctly Brazilian identity across different artistic media, from the beginning of the twentieth century to the present. Students will analyze works produced within both mainstream and countercultural contexts and engage with various artistic, literary, and musical movements, such as Cannibalism and Tropicália. By considering key historical events of the past century, including the establishment of the military dictatorship and the intensification of developmentalism, we will investigate how competing narratives of national identity have emerged and evolved over time. Throughout this course, we will also discuss topics that remain highly relevant to contemporary Brazil, such as racism, urban development, and climate change. Field trips to local art museums and galleries will complement our in-class discussions.

How, if at all, might I find lasting happiness? How might that be related to being a good person–someone who is self-possessed, courageous, just, generous, and wise? Where might friendship enter into the picture? How should we cope with suffering? What, if anything, might give my life meaning? In this course we’ll explore answers to such questions proposed by Western philosophers in the Ancient and Medieval period as well as more recent thinkers. Some answers will involve appeals to the notion of God; others will remain within a purely secular frame; others will be somewhere in between. In our reflections we’ll use the tools of philosophy to help us think about what accounts might be closer to the truth. Join us as we enter this great conversation in the company of thinkers like Plato, Aristotle, Epicurus, the Stoics, Boethius, St. Thomas Aquinas, Leo Tolstoy, Viktor Frankl, and more!

Since Bruce Lee’s iconic 1973 Enter the Dragon, East Asian martial arts have permeated live-action and animated film and television far beyond East Asian characters and settings. Through films such as The Matrix, Hong Kong martial artist and director Yuen Woo-ping has become arguably the most influential living fight choreographer. Even before martial arts films went mainstream in the West, spaghetti Westerns drew heavily on Japanese chambara: Sergio Leone’s A Fistful of Dollars so closely resembled Kurosawa’s Yojimbo that a copyright dispute led to Kurosawa receiving a share of the profits. East Asian martial arts have shaped not only fight choreography but also popular ideas about strategy, honor, spirituality, and health. In this class, we will view influential martial arts films, read classic sources behind their stories and philosophies, and learn to write stylistically aware, historically informed analyses of audiovisual media.

In this course we will study the early years of Diaghilev's Ballets Russes in Paris, with a particular focus on the three ballets that Igor Stravinsky composed between 1910 and 1913. The Paris performances of the Ballets Russes introduced Western Europe to Russian dance, music and art and became a seminal moment in the development of modernism. The three Stravinsky ballets were set to the radically new choreography of Michel Fokine and Vaslav Nijinsky, and featured sets and costumes by the Russian modernist artists Alexandre Benois, Léon Bakst, Nicholas Roerich. The stories were drawn from Russian folklore and fairy tales and were infused with the primitivism and ironic distance that defined the modernist movement.

In recent decades, we have witnessed increasing global indigenous environmental movements in response to interrelated crises of climate change, destruction of natural environments, and biodiversity loss. Although indigenous peoples comprise just 5% of the world’s population, 80% of the world’s remaining biodiversity are found within their ancestral lands. Indigenous environmental movements have been critical to protecting endangered species, fighting extractive industries, transitioning to more sustainable economies, and protecting some of the most carbon-rich places on earth.

In this course, we will draw on a range of disciplines, including anthropology, environmental studies, and indigenous studies, as we examine various indigenous environmental movements through the lens of foundational concepts such as land as pedagogy, indigeneity, and settler-colonialism. This course is aimed to (1) introduce specific case studies of indigenous leadership, knowledge, and innovation in environmental protection initiatives; (2) equip students with skills they need to critically analyze and compare various indigenous environmental movements; and (3) engage students in cultivating heathier ways of relating to land and indigenous communities.

This course covers over 200 years of Australian culture. We begin in the nineteenth century with the many crises following the British invasion. Issues of Indigeneity and criminality are deeply significant in this context.

The latter units address the tumultuous twentieth century. Continuing our discussion of Indigeneity students will learn about The Stolen Generation by reading sections of the Bringing Them Home report. We will discuss how wars altered recognition of gender and sexuality. These units challenge students to write about multiple forms of media together and construct a coherent argument.

Finally, students will select a region in modern Australia and craft a research project around this place. After scaffolded activities designed to refine writing and research skills, students will craft multimedia presentations and educate their classmates. This final project will empower students to synthesize their knowledge in a public setting.

Although Houston is widely known as the Space City and the Energy Capital of the World, it is also home to one of the most diverse and historically important art scenes in the US. This course explores the breadth and depth of Houston’s art world by examining a selection of art museums, centers, and galleries within and beyond the Museum District, including Project Row Houses and the University Museum at Texas Southern University. For each site, we will consider its institutional history, mission statement, curatorial approach, and community engagement. We will also highlight the African American, Latin American, and Asian contributions to the making of Houston’s vibrant artistic landscape and delve into the city’s history of racial segregation and immigration. Students will experiment with a variety of writing genres such as museum wall labels and exhibition reviews and will collectively create an audio guide for navigating Houston’s art world.

How do we discern truth in public media? Since the 2016 presidential election, trust in traditional media sources has reached an all-time low, dividing the nation socially and politically. This writing-intensive seminar examines how and why the spread of disinformation has become increasingly more prevalent in our 21st century society and what impact it has on our democratic processes. We will take an interdisciplinary approach to discussing fake news, drawing from history, philosophy, journalism, media studies, and political science. Beginning with Plato’s Allegory of the Cave and Barry Levinson’s Wag the Dog (1997), we will discuss issues of mediated experiences, fabricated realities, and civic responsibility. Throughout the semester, we will explore topics surrounding pseudoscientific research methods (e.g., flat earth, fake moon landing), racialized disinformation (e.g., Obama citizenship conspiracy, great replacement theory), and the rise of authoritarianism and far-right white nationalism. Students will produce three formal written papers and an oral presentation. In addition, students will also write research summaries and produce low stakes reading responses that will serve as scaffolding for larger assignments and class discussion.

The 1920s and 30s in England saw the flourishing of detective fiction (particularly the murder mystery), a wildly popular genre that still has a major presence in the publishing and television industries. In addition to studying some of the major practitioners of the Golden Age, such as Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers, and Ngaio Marsh, we will wrestle with a variety of critical questions: How does detective fiction work? Why did the detective novel flourish between the world wars? Why is the Golden Age frequently dismissed by critics and does it deserve its reputation? What can this genre show us about the ways we think?

Sound surrounds us. And yet we often put little thought into what role it plays in our lives and the lives of our public spaces. This course aims to correct this oversight by offering an introduction to the field of sound studies focused on Houston’s audio environment, past and present. We will approach the topic in four ways. First, through an investigation into the audio epistemologies of sound studies. Second, through a cultural history of Houston’s musical legacy and the way in which aesthetic styles can be traced to local geographies. Third, through the production of a guided audio tour into one of Houston’s neighborhoods. And fourth, through a collaborative audio mapping project. In addition to developing students’ interpretive toolkits, critical thinking skills, and writing abilities, the course seeks to raise a number of key questions about the aesthetics, poetics, and politics of sound in the bayou city and beyond.

What is a “natural” disaster? What is the difference between a natural and man-made disaster? How do we collect information before and after a disaster event, and how do the processes of curation and memory-keeping frame our understanding of community resilience and humanitarian response?
Our class will examine the interdisciplinary field of Critical Disaster Studies and the various and sometimes shifting ways that disasters are framed. Throughout the semester, students will read and write across genres and modalities—fiction, social media, government briefs, digital disaster archives—and will consider the temporally, socially, and economically disparate layers of disaster and the complex relationship between digital records and humanitarian aid. Our semester will culminate in the production of a collaborative digital writing and mapping project that examines disaster events in the Houston area. Through our readings and explorations, we will ultimately grapple with a core idea: There are, in fact, no natural disasters.

This course introduces students to performing arts of China, Japan, and Korea, like Noh, P’ansori, Beijing opera, and Butoh, with a focus on their psychological and multimedia aspects. We will introduce the field of performance studies, including how to think and write about singing, dancing, storytelling, and drama from perspectives like ritual, gender, musicology, choreography, costume, stage design, and literary criticism. Readings/viewings will be in translation/subtitled, and no background in East Asian languages is required, but interested students may request help with locating and analyzing original-language material.

Scrooge, Sherlock, Elphaba, Dracula, Lizzie Bennet. Many of our favorite characters and our greatest stories exist in multiple incarnations across different media. This course will examine the intersection between story content and storytelling form—how the ways we tell stories affect the stories themselves.
Why do we adapt stories? Simply to translate the experience of a story from one medium to another (and is that ever truly possible)? Or is something more transformative happening, such as a horror story becoming a comedy or Shakespeare’s Hamlet turning into Disney’s Lion King? What does it mean to adapt “faithfully”? Can a later version of a story become more authoritative than the original?
While most of our examples will be drawn from novels, short stories, plays, and films, the course will also touch on more unusual media for adaptation: video games, tabletop games, theme parks, and so on.

Recently, monogamy has been considered the norm. However, alternative relationship structures are gaining increasing visibility. Scholars have been quick to examine this diversification of relationships.

“Relationship Structures” introduces students to this new field of scholarship. For example, a wide-ranging study disproved the myth that monogamy is necessarily superior (Anderson et. al.2025 ). Instead researchers found that both monogamy and alternatives are equally satisfying to individuals. Yet, monogamy remains dominant. In this course we examine why that might be the case. This course equips students with the research and cultural analysis skills necessary to investigate the histories and weigh the benefits of many different relationship styles.

By way of cultural analysis, “Relationship Structures” examines the diverse range of relationship styles that make up our contemporary society. Writing about our individual connections with institutions and the state will allow students to conduct research that unearths the limits of interpersonal freedoms today.

This seminar uses medieval visual and textual sources to explore how love, sex, desire, and gender were expressed, negotiated, and imagined across the Middle Ages. Medieval culture tells a far more complex story than the persistent myth of the “Dark Ages” defined by rigid piety, strict moral codes, and a narrow understanding of human experience. The objects and texts we will study — ranging from illuminated manuscripts and devotional sculpture to courtly poetry and theological treatises — regularly transgress the boundaries we might expect, blurring the lines between male and female, sacred and profane, friend and lover. Through close engagement with primary sources and attention to the visual language of medieval art, students will ask not only what these works depict, but what they were meant to feel like and for whom.

Utopian and dystopian imaginings saturate our contemporary society. While some see technological progress as the solution to a challenging twenty-first century, others view nuclear war, global warming, and state surveillance as signs of a 1984-like future. Throughout history, utopias have been created as fictional or nonfictional narratives to influence public opinion and impact the world in real ways, and spatial constructs like ‘the American West,’ ‘the uncivilized desert,’ or ‘the national homeland’ often go hand-in-hand with utopian thinking. In this course, we will embark on a journey to study examples of utopias and dystopias across different media (essays, novels, films, animation, comics, etc.). We will travel across the world from Plato's Greece to Margaret Atwood’s New England, making stops in places like Atlantis and Wakanda. We will critique the utopic visions of both capitalism and communism, seeing how different political ideologies have transformed the land, cities, and people's livelihoods.

This course introduces students to the critical and historical study of science, technology,
and medicine by investigating “The Scientific Revolution.” While the extent to which it is
singular, scientific, and/or revolutionary continues to be debated, from 1450 to 1750, the world and how humans came to know, engage, and change it were dramatically and rapidly
transformed. This course surveys both traditional topics in the history of early modern science—like Copernicus and Heliocentrism, Science and Religion, and Newtonian Dynamics—as well as more recent reappraisals of this period, highlighting the relationship between the development of science and race, colonialism and imperialism, and new forms of
capitalism. Bringing together both scientific and humanistic topics of inquiry, the course explores both the mythological rise of science as a way of knowing and changing the world,
as well as the darker sides of modernity that still haunt our present.

It should be easy to be human. After all, what else can we be? But when it comes to how we communicate with others and how we present ourselves to the world, we often hesitate to reveal our full humanity—our flaws and fears, our confidences and contradictions, and the many complexities that constitute our unique, imperfect selves. This course will consider the personal essay as a unique vehicle for both expressing and wrestling with our humanity. We’ll read personal essays by the inventor of the form, Michel de Montaigne, as well as work by celebrated 20th and 21st century essayists like James Baldwin, E.B. White, Leslie Jamison, Hanif Abdurraqib, and Zadie Smith. Along the way, we’ll examine how the personal essay can model habits of mind like intellectual confidence, humility, and self-scrutiny. We’ll also wrestle with complex questions about authenticity, voice, and honesty in the age of AI-generated writing.

In 2024, Scarlett Johansson accused OpenAI of using her voice for its ChatGPT assistant without permission, noting that Sam Altman had described her voice as “comforting.” The controversy recalled Johansson’s role in Her (2013), where she voiced an operating system whose expressions and experiences of intimacy blur the line between human and machine. But Johansson is hardly alone: for decades, Apple’s Siri, Amazon’s Alexa, and Microsoft’s Cortana have made female voices the default sound of artificial intelligence. Why do we so often hear AI as female? What makes a voice “comforting,” and what does this say about gendered expectations of technology? In this course, we’ll explore how film and literature imagine the relationship between femaleness and AI. Together we’ll examine how cultural narratives of voice, gender, and identity shape and are shaped by emerging technologies, asking what it means for the future when “the future” itself sounds female.

In his aptly named study Garbology: Our Dirty Love Affair with Trash, Pulitzer Prize-winning
journalist Edward Humes asserts that the average American produces 102 tons of garbage in their lifetime. That’s a lot of waste, but it’s also a lot of artifacts, each with its own story to tell us about ourselves and the choices we make. In this class, we will be using Humes’ book along with Alan Weisman’s The World Without Us, a projection of what our planet might look like without human-caused environmental degradation, to first take stock of our own production of trash and depletion of natural resources and to then incite real change. To do this, we will engage with community partners to learn more about how trash circulates and accrues in and beyond our homes and how we, the mass manufacturers of garbage, can be less trashy.

Is anthropogenic climate change real? Do vaccines cause autism? Are genetically modified crops safe? What is homeopathy? Questions like these illustrate the difficulty that so often arises when dealing with the plethora of complicated topics and issues that are pervasive in modern culture. We can’t be experts in every field, so how do we tell good science from pseudoscience?

This course aims to address this issue by focusing on the application of scientific skepticism and critical thinking to questions like those mentioned above, and many others. We will discuss the inherent fallibility of human perception and memory, as well as the cognitive biases and logical fallacies that we so often fall victim to.

We will apply these concepts to various examples of pseudoscience. The topics will range from the absurd (astrology, flat earth theory), to more sophisticated and controversial examples that have significant societal impact (climate change denial, alternative medicine).

Rather than assessing these practices on their effectiveness, The Lucky Course works to understand the logics of these belief systems and how they are functioning in people’s individual lives and cultures. Course discussion and writing will cover case studies on; personal astrological and magical systems, gambling culture, natural resource prospecting, economic speculation, AI divination, and future modeling. By looking at these practices through the lens of lived religion, the course asks: How do humans build systems of certainty in a chaotic world? What counts as evidence and authority? How do people move from skepticism to belief? And what role do narratives of destiny or personal power play in all of this? Though these questions the course examines how the rituals of luck-making offer both possibilities and limitations for human agency.