Results for LIFE

Explores the foundational skills for a meaningful life. Features lectures by faculty from across the university and labs for experiential practice. Draws on research and practices from fields related to psychology, philosophy, literature, and neuroscience, as well as wisdom traditions from around the world. Focuses on developing human capacities necessary for a meaningful life including; attention, courage, devotion, resilience, imagination, and gratitude. Exposure to these capacities influences personal growth and its development in communities.

Utilize an anthropological lens to combine traditional analytic research with experiential contemplative practice to strengthen awareness of the body and embodied experiences. Explore cultural norms around the body as influenced by racial stereotypes, gender hierarchies, and political/economic/religious history. Investigate and express one's own body narrative through written, verbal, and creative methodologies.

An advanced writing course in nonfiction craft, drawing, and contemplative practice. a significant portion of each class meeting will focus on the development and sharpening of writing craft, especially of the essay, in a hybrid form both scholarly and personal. We will also explore writing as meditative practice, through examples and through short exercises. We will deepen our cultural understanding of the desert and its impact, through art, literature, philosophy, film, and contemplative practice, and the course will build toward a four-day camping trip to the dunes of Death Valley, six weeks into the quarter.

In this course we will examine the meaning, processes, and challenges of urbanization. Through a series of targeted readings across history and geography and through the study of varied means of representation (anthropology, literature, cartography, film, etc), the class will analyze the ways in which urban forms have come into being and created, met, and/or ignored challenges such as disease, water, transport, religious and class conflict, colonialism, labor, and trade. Students will read anthropology in conjunction with other disciplines (literature, urban planning, public health, architecture, and economics) to learn the ways in which ethnographies of immigration, urban poverty, class disparity, economic development and indicators, noise, and transportation substantively augment our understandings of how people live within globalization.

In this theory and practice-based course, students will examine performances by and scholarly texts about artists who critically and mindfully engage race, gender, and sexuality. Students will cultivate their skills as artist-scholars through written assignments and the creation of performances in response to the assigned material. Attendance and written reflection about a live performance event on campus are required. Students will also learn various meditation practices as tools for making and critiquing performance, in both our seminar discussions and performance workshops. We will approach mindfulness as method and theory in our own practice, as well as in relation to the works studied. We will also consider the ethics and current debates concerning the mindfulness industry. Examples of artists studied include James Luna, Nao Bustamante, Renee Cox, William Pope.L, Cassils, boychild, Curious, Adrian Piper, Xandra Ibarra, Valérie Reding, Guillermo Gomez-Peña, and Ana Mendieta.

This course examines how the dancing body has been viewed, exhibited, analyzed, and interpreted from the late nineteenth century to the present. We will discuss how ideologies about race, gender, and sexual orientation are mapped onto the body, as well as investigate the body's place in discourses on religion, health, war, performance, and consumer culture. We will explore how people create meaning through dance and how dance, in turn, shapes social norms, political institutions, and cultural practices. The course's structure challenges the Western/non-Western binary by comparing dance forms across the globe.

Translate theoretical knowledge and acquired skills into actionable projects or initiatives that make positive impact within and/or beyond the Stanford community. Students work in collaborative groups or individually under the mentorship of the course instructor(s) to design, deliver, and evaluate an initiative or project.

Exploration of a topic (to be determined) not covered by the standard curriculum but of interest to faculty/instructor(s) and students in a particular quarter. May be repeated with change of content. For more information regarding specific course titles and topics, please refer to the notes of each course section.