Learning & Inquiry 3
Course Description
“Intersectional Justice in the U.S.” uses Berea’s Great Commitments as a foundation to orient students toward an understanding of how to address institutional and social inequity in the United States. Berea’s history and ongoing mission, and the Great Commitments, serve as an entry point to larger social-justice issues relevant to the U.S. Specifically, each section explores the intersection of at least two of the systems of social identification affiliated with the Great Commitments (including, but not limited to, race, ethnicity, regionality, gender, sexuality, religion, socioeconomic class, and disability) through a critical lens and with an orientation toward social change and justice, thus going beyond a simple exploration of diverse identities. In so doing, students reflect on their own place and role within these issues and build their capacity to work sensitively across differences toward change and justice.
L&I 3: Intersectional Justice in the U.S.: Student Learning Outcomes
Students will be able to:
Reflect on how power, access, and structured inequality (by social identities affiliated with Berea’s Great Commitments) inform their own experiences and the experiences of others [Habits of Mind #2, Skills #2].Section Descriptions
By working with pieces of Berea’s founding and mission, demonstrate how institutions (governmental, social, etc.) have come to affect the social identity affiliated with Berea’s Great Commitments (including, but not limited to, race, ethnicity, regionality, gender, sexuality, religion, socioeconomic class, and disability). [Knowledge].
Section Descriptions
Adam Edelman:
“Nature Is What We Know / But Have No Art To Say”: Intersections of Sustainability and Christian Theology in 19thCentury American Poetics
This course examines the intersection of Christian theology and sustainability through the lens of 19th century American poetics. By investigating how writers such as Samson Occom, William Apess, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Herman Melville, Edgar Allan Poe, and others negotiated concepts of faith, nature, and ethical responsibility in a rapidly industrializing world, students will engage with a range of literary and theoretical perspectives, interrogating how changes in poetic form reflect a larger history of ideas and culture around divinity and nature. Through a selection of readings in poetry, prose, and scholarly texts, we will discuss and compare instances of Christian theological frameworks informing philosophies of transcendentalism, conceptions of land stewardship, indigenous resistance to colonial expansion, and the ethical problems underlying American ideas of modernization and progress.
The course will highlight the poetic imagination as a catalyst for ethical and spiritual inquiry by asking how literary texts bridge theological and ecological concepts and critiques. We will consider the extent to which 19th-century American poets and writers anticipate contemporary environmental and theological debates and formulate scholarly arguments about what their works might offer today’s conversations on sustainability, faith, and the literary imagination.
Chris Green:
Just Berea Stories. This class mixes dramatic practices, historical research, cultural geography, and critical reflection.
Who are you? How did you get to Berea? Where did you come from and who are your people? How about the others in our class? Who else lives and has lived in Berea and the surrounding area? What was our college like, say, in 1878? Who lived here 2,000 years ago? What mattered to them? What became of everyone? What will become of us? And what are WE going to do for the future?
We will share your answer to those questions by embodying the truths you discover (about ourselves, about Berea, and about the history and area we are part of) in living character portraits and create a historical pageant. I think it will be quite an experience!
Tara Kohn:
Becoming American: The Immigrant Journey in Art and Culture
This course explores histories of immigration, assimilation, and the revival of cultural distinctiveness in the United States across a broad chronological period, focusing primarily on the legacies of immigration that shaped the early decades of the twentieth century and their reverberations in contemporary art and culture. Centering on migratory groups—from a range of ethnic and geographic backgrounds—who relocated to the United States in hopes of finding a better life, the class is designed to frame the complex processes of becoming American as both an achievement and as a painful loss of cultural difference. We will engage with shifting constructs of national identity and legacies of rupture and resettling through a careful study of film, photography, literature, curatorial practices, painting, sculpture, architecture, the graphic arts, performance, and visual culture.