COR 332 Utopias & Dystopias

My primary aim in Utopias & Dystopias is to motivate you (the student) to deeply think about what YOU want the world to be like, and hopefully motivate you to strive towards making it that way. Organizing questions could be: What would a perfect society look like? Why is American so fascinated with post-apocalyptic entertainment? What roles do imagined futures play in our current social and political decision making? Such questions will orient this class where we wrestle with the cultural mirrors of utopia and dystopia that tell us so much about the times in which they were generated. For instance, what does the current societal fascination with zombie apocalypse tell us about this moment in time?

Exploring representations found in novels, films, and other formats, this course emphasizes integration across disciplines and frameworks of thought, requiring students to think critically and imaginatively. No one perspective can fully make sense of these topics, and as such we will fully embrace trespassing disciplinary boundaries. This will necessitate an engagement with sociology, religion, psychology, history, art, technology and environmental studies among others. This multifaceted approach will help us harness the power of multiple ways of thinking, as well as leverage the various expertise students bring with them from their diverse academic homes to better understand how societal fantasies and nightmares inform our present and future worlds.