English

The course invites students to consider the ways in which the investments of literary and critical theory—most centrally language, class, race, gender, and sexuality—have intersected and overlapped in relation to socio-political transformations from the 1970s to the present. Each week is organized around one or more of these intersections, which students address though discussions of critical and literary texts and films. Topics of discussion might include the relationship between waged and unwaged work, and the systems of gender and race that are organized around the poles of this relationship; the construction of categories that are presented as “normal”; the category of the human; the relationship between finance and representation; the politics of visibility; the relationship between aesthetics and social structure; the challenge of trying to define the social, political, and cultural characteristics of the present (and the recent past). 

This course explores the new role of brand activism as a tool to forge consumer-brand relationships, manage corporate brand reputation, and drive social and environmental impact. It examines both the promise and the pitfalls of brand activism and evaluates how storytelling and digital enhancement can support brand activism. The course covers how brands are increasingly embracing social, environmental, and political ideologies as a way to build their brand-centered identity and engage with various stakeholder groups. It explores this phenomena as an off-shoot of corporate social responsibility and more traditional branding strategies. It examines the corporate brand as the embodiment of the firm’s value position. After an introduction to what is meant by brand activism, the course moves to examine several planning issues, including how to connect with stakeholders, choosing values and causes that are authentic, and determining risk exposure. It then moves to explore how storytelling, digital enhancement, and partnerships can all magnify the impact of brand activism. 

This course examines different ways of defining the economy and their implications for measuring, managing, and changing it. We will engage with a range of critical theoretical perspectives, some of which suggest broad interpretations of the economy that extends beyond corporations to consider domains such as unpaid household labor and different scales of government, as well as the role of social categories such as gender and race in shaping economies. As students build up a sophisticated conceptual understanding, they explore competing explanations for geographical differences in economic activities, wealth and development, as well as the relations between places.

This course covers the principles and applications of electrical engineering. Topics include resistive circuits; inductance and capacitance; rransients; steady-state sinusoidal analysis; frequency response, bode plots, and resonance; amplifiers; operational amplifiers; diodes; and logic circuits.