Sophomore Seminar (TASS) | 2009 Programs
INDIANA UNIVERSITY PROGRAM
Health and Illness in the African American Community: Social and Neurobiological Perspectives
Indiana University, Bloomington
June 28 – August 8, 2009
Faculty: Maresa Murray, Department of Applied Health Science; and Sharlene Newman, Department of Psychological and Brain Science, Indiana University
Tutors: TBA
The African American community experiences negative health issues in disproportion to its numbers. What are the social factors that influence this fact, and how can we describe the related biological processes? In this course, students will explore answers to these questions, looking in the first half of the course at social and cultural aspects of the African American community. Are there typical African American attitudes and behaviors surrounding food, physical activity, and body image? Does the African American community, which is also disproportionately affected by poverty, face particular problems because of the place many of its members have in society? In the second half of the course, students will examine the neuroscience that supports perceptions and experiences of health and bodies, looking for links to these social and cultural factors. Students will be introduced to some basic ideas in neuroscience and will be exposed to neuroimaging techniques such as fMRI. They will also discuss some recent fMRI studies of the neural underpinnings of stigma, obesity, and eating disorders. Finally, students will have the opportunity to develop a neuroimaging study of their own and collect the necessary data.
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN TASS PROGRAM
Imaging Race in Literature and Visual Culture
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
June 28 – August 8, 2009
Faculty: Joshua L. Miller, Department of English, University of Michigan; and Ruby C. Tapia, Department of Comparative Studies, Ohio State University
Tutors: TBA
Contemporary U.S. society is characterized by a constant flow of images. On billboards, TVs, buses, and sculptures; in novels, newspapers, airport terminals, and the Internet; the fast-paced production of images has revolutionized the ways we communicate with each other and understand community. At the same time, there is a longstanding critical tradition of studying how we look at objects that encourages us to reflect thoughtfully on the meaning and power of images and icons. We derive pleasure from looking at photographs, paintings, buildings, and bodies, but we rarely stand back from this experience and ask how visual culture works and how it affects the ways we think and interact with one another.
In this course, we’ll explore ways to read and critically analyze visual culture, both as objects in the world and as a field of study about ways of seeing. Although most of our image-based texts will be from the 19th- and 20th-century United States, we will also discuss how contemporary visual media move across the globe through advertising, foreign films, photo-novels, and mash-up videos. In the process, we’ll consider how categories of difference—particularly race, gender, and sexuality—are communicated to illuminate what images tell us about ourselves, our histories, our communities, our ideas about the past, and our visions of the future.