Why do slavery, human trafficking and other forms of servitude thrive today globally, including the USA, and what can we do about it?

Orlando Patterson

We often think of slavery as being a dark chapter in our past, but this is a tragic oversimplification. What defines slavery in the modern world, and what are the moral, political and social implications of its continued existence? As we explore its underpinnings, we discover that all of us may be in some way complicit in its survival.... Read more about Human Trafficking, Slavery and Abolition in the Modern World (Gen Ed 1115)

How are we to cope with the inevitability that some of what we most love in life we will lose?

Kathleen Coleman

Loss is an inevitable fact of human existence. Small losses most of us learn to bear with equanimity. But enormous, wrenching, life-changing losses open voids in our lives for which we can never feel adequately prepared, even if we can see them coming. This course tries to understand the nature of loss on a physical and emotional level, to give us some framework for coping with it and to help us develop some empathy in those very difficult situations when someone else has faced a loss and we do not know how to react.... Read more about Loss (Gen Ed 1131)

How do we know ourselves through things and what does it mean to think with our hands, to innovate and to productively fail as a tool of self knowledge?

Katarina Burin

How do we know ourselves through things?

This course fosters a hands-on, studio-art-based approach to thinking about our lives with objects—the things we make, the things we buy, the things we break.... Read more about Making Things (Breaking Things) (Gen Ed 1191)

How can we understand the appeal of psychotherapy, widely recognized as the preferred antidote to human unhappiness and misery, and what does it offer that friends, family, self-help, and psychopharmacological remedies do not?

Elizabeth Lunbeck

What does psychotherapy offer our distressed selves that friends, family, self-help, and psychopharmacological remedies do not? The demand for therapy is currently at an all-time high, bolstering its century-long hegemony as the preferred antidote to human unhappiness and misery, even as it is under sustained attack from critics characterizing it as self-indulgent as well as from platforms that would replace human therapists with chatbots, analysts with algorithms.... Read more about Psychotherapy and the Modern Self (Gen Ed 1179)

What is a just society, and how should we think our way through the ethical choices we confront in politics and in our everyday lives?

Michael Sandel

This course explores classical and contemporary theories of justice and applies them to some of the most contested civic questions of our time: debates about equality and inequality; meritocracy; affirmative action; free speech v. hate speech; the moral limits of markets; immigration; climate change; the role of religion in politics; the ethics of algorithms and AI. 

... Read more about Justice: Ethical Reasoning in Polarized Times (Gen Ed 1200)

Who are we, how did we get here... and how far back in time do we have to go to start asking the question?

Matthew J. Liebmann and Daniel Lord Smail

When does history begin? To judge by the typical history textbook, the answer is straightforward: six thousand years ago. So what about the tens of thousands of years of human existence described by archaeology and related disciplines? Is that history too?... Read more about Deep History (Gen Ed 1044)