Interdisciplinary Studies

As we listen to people discussing critical issues facing individuals, communities, countries and the planet, what do we see happening? Is communication occurring? Do the sides hear each other and seek to understand another point of view, even if in disagreement? Is the goal truth or the best policy or victory for a side? What skills, approaches, and conditions lead to genuine discussion and productive argument? How can we cultivate these as individuals and communities? This Argument and Inquiry seminar addresses these questions in both theory and practice by allowing students the opportunity to read, view, discuss, and analyze theoretical discussions and case studies drawn from the past and present on a range of controversial topics.

Data visualization (turning evidence into images) and activism have a common goal: to make the invisible more visible. How can graphs be used for activist work? Through discussion, reading, production, and reflection, this seminar will teach students how to read and think critically about graphs, produce graphs for public audiences, and consider the ethical dimensions of data access and representation. We will learn from data visualization pioneers such as W.E.B. Du Bois, who combined graphs and photographs for the 1900 Paris World’s Fair to tell a complex story of the agency, sophistication, and oppression of African Americans in post-emancipation America. As we discuss the role of data viz in activism, we will learn to experiment with creating our own visual arguments; our final project will be in partnership with a local community organization. No previous experience with statistics or graphing software is necessary.

In this seminar, we will use games (both by studying them and by playing them) as a lens through which we can explore all manner of fascinating questions. How do the games we play shape our culture and our communities? What makes a game fun, engaging, addictive, boring, brutal, or banal? How can games encourage certain kinds of behavior, even after we’ve stopped playing them? Could we make Carleton itself a bit better–or at least more fun–if we gamified certain aspects of life here? To aid our exploration, we’ll draw on readings from multiple genres and employ a variety of research methods to analyze games from social, textual, and design perspectives. This course will also include weekly lab sessions on Wednesday evenings (6:15-8:30PM). Students will be required to attend at least eight out of ten lab sessions.

From Starbucks’ failed “Race together” initiative to debates about Rachel Dolezal’s racial identity to the Black Lives Matter movement, it is clear that race still matters in America. These incidents also demonstrate the difficulties of having discussions about race, especially across racial lines. Drawing on texts from multiple disciplines, this course will examine the history of racial categories with a particular emphasis on how race matters in higher education. This course will also incorporate readings and activities that will help students develop further their skills to have productive discussions about race, especially in the context of a small residential college.

In this course students participate in peer-led conversations about diversity and community at Carleton. Students complete readings and engage in experiential exercises that invite them to reflect on their own social identities and their attitudes toward race, gender, class, and sexuality. By taking risks and engaging in honest conversations and self-reflection, students work together to understand differences and to explore how to build communities that are welcoming and open to diversity. Students keep a weekly journal and write two reflective essays that are graded by faculty members.

This course will enhance students’ quantitative skills and provide opportunities to apply those skills to authentic problems. Topics covered will vary depending on students in the class; possible topics include unit conversions, significant figures and estimation, exponents, logarithms, algebra, geometry, probability, and statistics. We will explore how these skills are relevant in contexts ranging from making personal finance decisions to understanding medical research reports.

This course will address a cluster of topics related to a broad gender-based context for computing. The starting point is Alan Turing himself: a hero for his code-breaking work during the war, Turing was also a gay man chemically castrated by the British government who (likely) died by suicide after enduring that treatment. The course will spiral outward from Turing to include a broader set of topics related to gender and sexuality in computing, ranging from Turing’s era to the present. Specific topics will vary based on the interests of available experts in aspects of gender and computing.

We will meet once a week to read and discuss Books 1 and 2 of Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War in Thomas Hobbes’s famed translation of 1628 (subsequent books will be discussed in courses offered in the Winter and Spring terms). We will attend to the literary art and to the political and social contexts of the original Greek, as well as to Hobbes’s recontextualization of it to the England of the 1620s. This bifocal approach may provoke insights into our current predicament. 

We will meet once a week to read and discuss Books 3-5 of Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War in Thomas Hobbes’s famed translation of 1628 (subsequent books will be discussed in the course offered in the Spring term). We will attend to the literary art and to the political and social contexts of the original Greek, as well as to Hobbes’s recontextualization of it to the England of the 1620s. This bifocal approach may provoke insights into our current predicament. 

We will meet once a week to read and discuss Books 6-8 of Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War in Thomas Hobbes’s famed translation of 1628. We will attend to the literary art and to the political and social contexts of the original Greek, as well as to Hobbes’s recontextualization of it to the England of the 1620s. This bifocal approach may provoke insights into our current predicament. 

This colloquium is designed to give students participating in the Focusing on Cultivating Scientists program an opportunity to learn and use skills in scientific study, reasoning, and modeling. The topics of this project-based colloquium will vary each term, and allow students to develop competencies in areas relevant to multiple science disciplines.

This course prepares students to facilitate peer-led conversations about diversity in the Critical Conversations Program. Students learn about categories and theories related to social identity, power, and inequality, and explore how identities including race, gender, class, and sexual orientation affect individual experience and communal structures. Students engage in experiential exercises that invite them to reflect on their own social identities and their reactions to difference, diversity, and conflict. Students are required to keep a weekly journal and to participate in class leadership. Participants in this class may apply to facilitate sections of IDSC 103, a 2-credit student-led course in winter term.

This course will explore the many dimensions of public health within the United States and provide an introduction to community based work and research. Public health is by nature interdisciplinary and the course will address local public health issues through the lenses of social, biological, and physical determinants of health. In addition to readings and discussions, the course will incorporate the expertise of visiting public health practitioners and include site visits to local public health agencies. Students will work collaboratively with a community partner on a public health-related civic engagement project selected during Fall term and continued during Winter Break. This is the first course of a two course winter break program.

This course is the second part of a two-term sequence beginning with Perspectives in Public Health. Over the winter break, students will spend two weeks exploring a variety of public health organizations both locally (Minneapolis/St. Paul) and nationally. During the winter term, students will complete their final public health-related civic engagement project in collaboration with a community partner, set their individual project back into the wider context of public health, and prepare to present their experience to a broader audience.

Vaccines are often touted as one of humankind’s greatest biomedical achievements. They have undoubtedly prevented hundreds of millions of deaths from infectious diseases since their discovery. Yet, there remain many obstacles that prevent their wider development and dissemination. Among these are the technological challenges associated with vaccine development, the well-funded anti-vaccination movements that often thrive on and spread misinformation, and economic hurdles that affect the production and equitable distribution of vaccines. Through an interdisciplinary lens that incorporates material from biology, psychology, and economics, this course will allow students to reach an integrated understanding of vaccines.

If you had to explain to a blind person the nature of color, how would you describe it? Is it a property of objects, oscillations of an electric field, a feature of how the eye generates electrochemical signals to send to the brain, or perhaps a property of the experiences themselves? This team-taught course takes  a multidisciplinary approach to color, drawing from physics, psychology, and philosophy. We will explore topics such as the nature of light, visual anatomy, the process by which light is converted to a neural code, color mixing, linguistic differences in color processing, and how color leads us to confront the tension that sometimes exists between appearance and reality.

This project is a collaboration between two courses—Grassland Ecology and Field Drawing—that will foster an interdisciplinary dialogue on the Tallgrass Prairie Ecosystem. Students will work together to develop a project that explores how ecological study and artistic expression can deepen their understanding of this landscape. The course will involve field trips in the Carleton Arboretum, guest speakers, directed readings and culminate in a gallery exhibition.

Almost every global challenge confronting humankind requires some level of engagement with science and technology. However, finding solutions to our most pressing problems also requires an understanding of how science operates within its social, political, and cultural context. This course will explore the relationship between science and society by examining a series of controversies in science from both the past and the present. We will investigate topics such as biological and social concepts of race, the use of unethically obtained scientific results, the ethics of genomics research, legislation over vaccination mandates, “parachute” science, and climate change denial. Examining the role of science in society will help us understand issues related to the use of evidence, expertise, and the relationship between science and politics. By wrestling with current and historic scientific controversies, we will examine the ways in which scientific disagreements are often as much about values as they are about research methods.

Carleton does not grant credit for internships, but valuable off-campus learning experiences can be integrated into the academic program. Although the specific nature of internship experiences will vary, internships are opportunities to apply and extend one’s academic skills and interests into work in non-academic settings. This course will involve carefully monitored work experiences in which a student has intentional learning goals. Achieving these goals will be measured through reflective writing assignments, as well as written work in connection with assigned readings.

This course explores vexing ethical questions raised in academic civic engagement practice. With structured reflection on students’ varied civic engagement experiences and a group project aligned with the instructor’s work, students will consider questions arising from asymmetries of power, the relationships between scholarship and advocacy, scholarly and community knowledges, empathy with others and a student’s own moral commitments, and practices of civic engagement and community organizing. Offered biennially by rotating faculty, course themes will vary accordingly. The 2023 theme is Indigenous engagement in Minnesota.