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This course will cultivate a sense of cultural curiosity that has self-awareness and humility as key attributes. The course is designed to facilitate students' active engagement with their host communities during study abroad and to direct thoughtful and impactful intellectual analysis and discussion of concepts of cultural identity, multiculturalism, and cosmopolitanism. The course will be aimed at students preparing for stints of study or internships abroad under BOSP and the SEED program. It will create opportunities for intercultural engagement and offer tools for intercultural analysis and strategy development through an exploration of various political, social, cultural, and artistic features of the host community. It will also encourage students to engage with the communities in which they will be living and question their own and others' perspectives, while learning to interact purposefully and respectfully with intercultural differences to achieve meaningful cross-cultural understanding.

The focus of this course is to examine the life cycle of African textiles and fashion industry and how these relate to fashion sustainability. We will explore the degree to which West African cultural practices and sartorial choices are inherently underpinned by sustainability principles, especially among women. The history of textiles in Africa also connects them to a transnational process dating from the pre-colonial and colonial periods from the 15th to the early 20th centuries, where Dutch, Danish, French and English merchants were responsible for introducing fabrics and styles from Indonesia, China, and India into the West African economy. The course will focus especially on the history of African print cloths popularized by Vlisco, a Dutch company first established in 1848 whose products have dominated the high-end textile economy since then but which is also being challenged by impressive knock-off versions of their patterns from China. African print cloth motifs have also appeared in the collections of some of the most upscale European fashion houses such as Dior, Balenciaga, Louis Vuitton, and Stella McCartney, among various others. The course will also focus on questions of sustainability, centering especially on the secondhand clothes markets in Accra, Lome, and Lagos. The global fashion industry is second only to the oil industry in terms of environmental pollution, and it is the secondhand clothes industry that shows the effects of this pollution most dramatically. We will follow the provenance of these clothes from Canada, the US, the UK, Australia, and China, how they are shipped to Accra and other places in West Africa, and the problems of waste disposal that they generate. This will then be tied to larger questions relating to global fashion sustainability in the Global North, where the rhetoric of environmental awareness increasingly demanded by customers and clients often conceals the long-held practice of dumping unused clothes in various locations in the Global South.

The novel has been defined as the kind of writing that emerges from "a world from which God has departed" (Lukacs Theory of the Novel). From this perspective, the theme of the novel is then limited to the individual, as opposed to a whole community, as in epic. Historically, the novel originates in the tension between the world of romance and that of reality, with Cervantes's Don Quijote as its primary instance, and irony is the determining and organizing principle of the novel's form. In our course, we will read a range of novels from early modern Spain and continental Europe; theories of the novel; 19th-century realism; modernist and postmodern experiments; and the contemporary avant gardes of the world, including especially writings from the hemispheric and transnational Americas and the Global South. Through our readings we will determine what novels are, what they are for, how should we read them, and how do novel help in constituting a world.

Digital inclusion is a major issue for linguistic justice: languages are shut out of the digital sphere when their script is not formally encoded in the Unicode standard, and when fonts and keyboards and other input methods do not exist. In this workshop, students will learn about the challenges faced by digitally-disadvantaged languages, and will engage in hands-on work on a project with the Unicode Consortium that takes concrete steps towards improving digital support for one or more languages, or improves the tools, workflows, and processes used by the consortium for improving digital inclusion.

For undergraduate majors in DLCL departments; required for honors students. Planning, researching, and writing an honors thesis. Oral presentations and peer workshops. Research and writing methodologies, and larger critical issues in literary studies.

How does something become "data", and how can we understand our data better through visualization and physicalization? This 1-credit course will explore data creation and methods for representing that data using textiles, which have a long history as a medium for capturing data. Students will get hands-on experience with different tools at the Textile Makerspace (sewing, knitting, embroidery, spinning, weaving) and create a data physicalization final project that uses skills developed during the class.

Materia is a focal group on post-anthropocentrism, Latin Americanist and otherwise. Building on and expanding the theoretical framework offered by thinkers such as Fernando Ortiz, Bruno Latour, and Jane Bennett, we engage with works of literature and criticism that de-center the human as object of study. To earn the unit, undergraduate and graduate students should attend the workshops held by the focal group, prepare the pre-circulated readings, and actively contribute to discussion throughout the year. The latter can take place during plenary, over office hours with faculty coordinators, or via contributions to the focal group's online platforms. A short quarterly response paper that relates group discussions with the student's ongoing research is recommended. May be repeated for credit.