2019-2020 2020-2021 2021-2022 2022-2023 2023-2024
Browse
by subject...
    Schedule
view...
 

881 - 890 of 891 results for: all courses

THINK 66: Design that Understands Us

What is the nature of design¿and the meaning it holds in human life? Why do we bother to design beautiful things? Is it possible to design truth and conscience into technology? How do we reconcile deep uncertainties brought on by new technology, with the underlying values we hold as humans?nnWhat we make, in turn, makes us. This course examines the nature, purpose, and meaning of design in human life, seeking to understand its underlying universality as an interweaving of engineering, art, philosophy, and a radical synthesis of means-to-ends (things done for the sake of another purpose; e.g., technology) and ends-in-themselves (things valued for their intrinsic worth; e.g., truth, beauty, morality, the idea of play). It explores design as something that both embraces and confronts technology, not purely as means to yet another end, but also in its potential for humanistic meaning, understanding, and poignancy. It examines the idea that we should not always design from practical needs (as we are often taught) but also from the values underlying the needs; that technology should not be only an agent of change, survival, or happiness, but through what we do with it, also a mirror to define our own humanness.
Terms: Win | Units: 4 | UG Reqs: College, THINK, WAY-A-II, WAY-CE

THINK 67: What Makes Music Classical?

This course asks a question that can elicit a variety of responses. Classical music means different things to different people. For some it connotes Western art music of a particular historical era. According to this understanding, classical music follows baroque music and is superseded by romantic music; it develops a style, the classical style, as perfected by Haydn and Mozart. For others classical music has broader significance, referring to a cultural practice that predates the eighteenth century, going as far back as Gregorian chant and extending through the present. There are a variety of factors that define that practice, some more enduring than others: transmission through musical notation, theories of tonal systems, techniques of composition. Formal analysis, though often considered a sub-discipline of music theory and hence purely descriptive and objective, is hardly value free. Aesthetic interests and prejudices come into play, whether implicitly or explicitly.
Terms: Aut | Units: 4 | UG Reqs: College, THINK, WAY-A-II

URBANST 27Q: The Detective and the City

This seminar will analyze the social reality of three historic cities (London in the 1880s and 90s, San Francisco in the 1920s and 30s, and contemporary Shanghai) through the prism of popular crime fiction featuring three great literary detectives (Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes, Dashiell Hammett's Sam Spade, and Qiu Xiaolong's Chief Inspector Chen). As a student in this course, you will explore why crime fiction is so popular, why the fear of crime is so much a part of modern urban culture, and why the police detective and the private investigator have become iconic code heroes of pulp fiction, movies, TV shows, and even video games. If you take this class, you will have the opportunity to write a paper and present your research on one of the classic literary detectives or on one of today's related manifestations of the same impulse in mass-market tales of superheroes, vampires, and the zombie apocalypse.
Terms: Spr | Units: 3 | UG Reqs: WAY-A-II
Instructors: Stout, F. (PI)

URBANST 140F: Casablanca - Algiers - Tunis : Cities on the Edge (AFRICAAM 236B, CSRE 140S, FRENCH 236, FRENCH 336, HISTORY 245C)

Casablanca, Algiers and Tunis embody three territories, real and imaginary, which never cease to challenge the preconceptions of travelers setting sight on their shores. In this class, we will explore the myriad ways in which these cities of North Africa, on the edge of Europe and of Africa, have been narrated in literature, cinema, and popular culture. We will look at the historical development shaping their respective architecture and why they became the three major urban centers in North Africa. Home to Muslims, Christians, and Jews, they are an ebullient laboratory of social, political, religious, and cultural issues, global and local, between the nineteenth and twenty-first centuries. We will look at mass images of these cities, from films to maps, novels to photographs, sketching a new vision of these magnets as places where power, social rituals, legacies of the Ottoman and French colonial past, and the influence of the global economy collude and collide. Special focus on class, gender, and race. Open to both undergrad and grad students!
Terms: Aut | Units: 3-5 | UG Reqs: WAY-A-II, WAY-EDP
Instructors: Ulloa, M. (PI)

URBANST 153: CAPITALS: How Cities Shape Cultures, States, and People (COMPLIT 100, DLCL 100, FRENCH 175, GERMAN 175, HISTORY 206E, ILAC 175, ITALIAN 175)

This course takes students on a trip to major capital cities, at different moments in time: Renaissance Florence, Golden Age Madrid, Colonial Mexico City, Enlightenment and Romantic Paris, Existential and Revolutionary St. Petersburg, Roaring Berlin, Modernist Vienna, and bustling Buenos Aires. While exploring each place in a particular historical moment, we will also consider the relations between culture, power, and social life. How does the cultural life of a country intersect with the political activity of a capital? How do large cities shape our everyday experience, our aesthetic preferences, and our sense of history? Why do some cities become cultural capitals? Primary materials for this course will consist of literary, visual, sociological, and historical documents (in translation); authors we will read include Boccaccio, Dante, Sor Juana, Montesquieu, Baudelaire, Gogol, Irmgard Keun, Freud, and Borges. Note: To be eligible for WAYS credit, you must take the course for a Letter Grade.
Terms: Win | Units: 3-5 | UG Reqs: WAY-A-II, WAY-SI

URBANST 180Q: How to be Governed Otherwise: Art, Activism, and the City (ARTSINST 180Q, CEE 131Q)

This course will introduce you to contemporary art¿s engagement with political activism. This introduction will focus on the city as, at once, a field and target of activism¿a field of public appearance, artistic intervention, and political action, as well as a target of claims to residence, livelihood, recognition, justice, and collectivity. We will pose activist politics, artistic intervention, and urban space as mutually imbricated, each shaping the possibilities, programs, and histories of the other¿a perspective that offers insights into the spatiality, materiality, and visuality of political identity, agency, and action. Over the quarter, we will study some of the many artistic interventions that are encompassed by urban activism, from informal and everyday practices to protest, resistance, and occupation. Comparative case studies will be drawn from a global context. You will investigate these case studies through both research on urban activism and activist practice; the seminar will therefore invite you to explore the militant possibilities of research, the research possibilities of activism, and the implications of each for the production of art.
Last offered: Winter 2017 | UG Reqs: WAY-A-II

URBANST 181A: Art, Gentrification, & Intersectional Racial Politics (AFRICAAM 181, ARTSINST 181)

This course addresses the role of artists and art bureaucracies in the gentrification of minority neighborhoods, examining contested sites in New York, Oakland, East LA, and New Orleans. Students consider histories of underdevelopment and displacement, asking what these processes may reveal about greater contests over space, aesthetics, power, and knowledge. The course serves as an opportunity to engage urban cultural politics from the perspectives of critical race theory, queer studies, and feminist critique as well as through encounters with works by William Pope.L, Laura Aguilar, Paul Chan, and others.
Terms: Win | Units: 4-5 | UG Reqs: WAY-A-II, WAY-EDP
Instructors: Gamso, N. (PI)

URBANST 182: Activating Urban Spaces: Materializing Hidden Narratives in the Urban Environment (ARTSINST 182)

This course will investigate the organization and shaping of public space from the perspective of story and narrative. The course will consider how authorized narratives feature in the built environment and in the social spaces and usage of the city and how unauthorized, sometimes contentious narratives lurk beneath the surface and persist on the "skin" of the city. It will investigate the role of artists and the arts in "mapping" or surfacing alternative stories, concepts and imaginations of how the city is or can be. Inspired by the writings of Michel DeCerteau and Italo Calvino, this class explores the role of narrative in the city and the imagination from the perspective of cultural memory, lived experience, usage of space and organization of the built infrastructure. It offers an alternative approach to thinking about cities, how they are formed and how they function. This class will utilize and combine active field research methods with creative practice. Locations for our field research and excursions will include areas around Stanford and the Bay Area. The class will function as a hybrid seminar and collaborative studio workspace supporting students interested in applying creative practices to field research to develop methods for materializing narratives in various forms of public performance or place-specific art. Students will develop research for projects tailored to a particular location of their choosing and will explore the idea of the 'hidden city' its histories and its communities.
Last offered: Spring 2018 | UG Reqs: WAY-A-II, WAY-SI

URBANST 183A: Creative Climate Futures: Art, Climate Change & Urban Life (ARTSINST 183)

Climate change is a defining factor of this generation, and yet while scientists unanimously warn of the inevitability of climate change, it remains a looming specter. This course builds an intersectional and structural understanding of climate change, and explores how art activates the intangibility of climate change, making it visible, visceral, and political. We will examine how the geographies of colonialism, racial capitalism, and migration produce climate change inequities, and how the climate justice movement addresses these through creative forms of resistance. We will undertake this exploration in three parts: first, by engaging with the cities of New Orleans and San Juan, to understand how climate catastrophe aggravates existing inequalities, and how residents creatively respond to disaster. From there we will consider how art serves as a form of politics, how it is taken up in social movements to provoke shifts in political consciousness. Lastly, we will engage directly with political art forms that address climate change, with a particular focus on those that centralize the experiences of populations most at risk of climate catastrophe. These art forms call attention to who bears the disproportionate burden of climatic shift, which geographies are most at risk, and how these creative interpretations envision climate futures. The course will culminate in a collective creative project in which students address climate change and climate futures from their own lived experiences.
Terms: Spr | Units: 4 | UG Reqs: WAY-A-II
Instructors: Ramirez, M. (PI)

URBANST 184: Paris: Capital of the Modern World (FRENCH 140, FRENCH 340, HISTORY 230C)

This course explores how Paris, between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries, became the political, cultural, and artistic capital of the modern world. It considers how the city has both shaped and been shaped by the tumultuous events of modern history- class conflict, industrialization, imperialism, war, and occupation. It will also explore why Paris became the major world destination for intellectuals, artists and writers. Sources will include films, paintings, architecture, novels, travel journals, and memoirs. Course taught in English with an optional French section.
Terms: Win | Units: 4-5 | UG Reqs: WAY-A-II, WAY-SI
Filter Results:
term offered
updating results...
teaching presence
updating results...
number of units
updating results...
time offered
updating results...
days
updating results...
UG Requirements (GERs)
updating results...
component
updating results...
career
updating results...
© Stanford University | Terms of Use | Copyright Complaints