This course introduces the interdisciplinary field of cognitive science. Lectures and readings will survey research from artificial intelligence, psychology, linguistics, philosophy, and neuroscience, and will cover topics such as the nature of knowledge, thinking, remembering, vision, imagery, language, and consciousness. Sections will demonstrate some of the major methodologies.

This course will review various theories that explore the relationship between environmental drivers and socio-economic outcomes as they relate to the Latinx community. In addition, the course will use case studies to illustrate methodological approaches and topic specific impacts of environmental conditions on socioeconomic outcomes. Topics such as climate change adaptation, agricultural labor chemical exposure, access to clean water, the impact of education on environmental outcomes and others areas will be explored. Environmental equity and justice will permeate and are fundamentally integrated in all topics as they address the Latinx communities.

A survey of Mexican and Chicano art from Mesoamerican period to contemporary Chicano art. Special focus on the mural movements and the relationship between artistic production and the development of Chicano symbols and cultural production.

For the last 30 years, the themes of identity and liberation have dominated the social ethic and religious thought of subaltern subjectivities in the Americas. The centrality of these ideas respond to the increasing awareness of and opposition to the legacies of the history of conquest, colonization, racism, and sexism in the region. In this course, we are going to study the intellectual production of various ethnic groups in the Americas, particularly Latinas and Latinos in the 20th century, in order to clarify the ties between concerns for cultural and religious identity and the articulation of alternative ethical and political visions.

Trips, visions, psychedelic experiences: this course will trace the theme of hallucinations through literature from the 19th to 21st century, with some diversions into film, the visual arts, and music. Beginning with early attempts by writers and ending with hallucinations in recent film and literature, this course will focus on a broad treatment of the issue, including novels influenced by schizophrenic experience, works inspired by experiences under the influence of drugs, hippies and other countercultural figures, dreams, spiritual and religious visions, and more. We will look at contemporary discussions of the topic, including science on altered states of mind, philosophical essays, and real first-hand accounts. Students will be encouraged to explore their own interests in the topic, and the culmination of the course will be a research paper due at the end of the course. Required Texts: Course Reader available at Metro Publishing Sally Rooney, Conversations with Friends, New York: Hogarth, 1997

This course is an introduction to space exploration. Where we’ve been, where we are and where we’re going. From the people, jobs and industries on the ground, to the paradigm-changing Moon missions of Apollo to living and working in LEO (low earth orbit) to the push to Mars and beyond, we’ll explore what it takes to put humans and robots in space and why we’re doing it. So Buckle up Starfleet wannabes, and get ready for one giant leap from your desk to the stars.

This class centers on the response of literary and visual artists to two major calamities that occurred in Armenia in the late Soviet and early post-Soviet periods: the earthquake of 1988 and the first war of Artsakh (1988-1994). This course covers a range of texts to look at the differing ways these calamities were represented: novels, short stories, poems, films, photographs, philosophical essays, and academic articles. We will start the course by looking at these moments first in a historical context and then examining the responses of manly writers and filmmakers that represented these two calamities in their texts both in the Republic of Arminia and its transnational diaspora, which include those from Georgia, Lebanon, Syria, Egypt and other parts of North Africa, Turkey, Russia, Portugal, Canada, and the United States. Some of the questions we will examine in this class include: how does poetry represent calamity and trauma? How does film? What are the ways in which these texts attempts to serve as witnesses to genocide, war, exile, and displacement? Can they serve witness? In what ways? What are the limitations of such representations? What do these forms of creation offer that oral histories cannot? What is the role of fiction versus testimony in working through the past? How does one deal with moving forward? The end of this course will offer also insight into the movement of Armenian Futurism, and will look at the ways in which this movement finds parallels with other futurism, primarily Afro-futurism and Indigenous futurisms? How are the ways in which cultures can use visual and literary storytelling to heal from such traumas and look to a future that both acknowledges its past, but can also generate a healthy understanding and community from it.

During the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, UC Berkeley was more than just California’s flagship public university. It became a potent and often powerful cultural symbol. To invoke Berkeley or Cal became shorthand for academic excellence, or transformative student activism, or radical politics, or the devastating power of nuclear war. But when the university was founded over one hundred and fifty years ago, it was, simply, the University of California: California’s first land grant university, tasked with the responsibility of educating the people of the country’s then-westernmost state. Yet from its inception, the University of California’s purpose was fraught, contested, and contingent. The founding Organic Act proclaimed that the state would build this new university on “donat[ed] land” that was granted “to the State of California under and by the provisions of an Act of Congress”—yet this land was composed of over 2,300 uncompensated Indigenous land parcels. What—and whom—was the University of California actually for? Through six weeks of lecture, readings, campus field trips, and hands-on research with documents from university archives and library collections, this class will examine UC Berkeley’s first fifty years—from its founding in 1868 through the establishment of the system’s second campus, a southern branch in Los Angeles, in 1919. In this class, Berkeley students will become Berkeley scholars as we engage in a critical examination of early Berkeley as a place, and consider both the formation of the institution’s cultural meaning and how it has changed over time. By combining history, geography, material culture, and popular media, our interdisciplinary study of early Berkeley will consider what the early history of this campus can teach us about politics, public education, race, gender, class, colonialism, identity, and power in the United States. This class fulfills the American Cultures requirement. For American Studies majors, it fulfills the Place requirement and the Pre-1900 requirement.

This course is an interdisciplinary analysis of the aesthetics and politics of the US through a focus on Black popular music since WWII with an emphasis on the “Black Awakening” of the 1960s. With the African American experience at the center, this course will explore constructions of whiteness through the lens of jazz, disco and hip hop identity formation, as well as works of members of the Asian American and Latinx musical communities in the US as they impacted and were influenced by the Black music world.

Special Topics on race and law will vary each semester.