We may be tethered to global networks, streaming content from around the planet, joining in conversation (or conspiracy) with folks from all corners of the earth, but we also live in places with local characters and concerns, among people with local needs and contributions. What happens when we lose the local media — the newspapers and broadcast outlets — that bind and inform our localized communities? In this course we’ll consider the important roles served by our place-based media, as well as what’s lost when our local modes of communication collapse. But we’ll also consider what might be gained if we think more generously about what constitutes local media — and if we imagine how they might be redesigned to better serve our communities, our broader society, and our planet. Through readings, listening and screening exercises, occasional in-class field trips and guest speakers, and low-barrier-to-entry in-class labs, we’ll study local news; local book cultures, including libraries and bookshops and independent printers; local music scenes, including performance venues and record shops and music reviewers; local infrastructures of connection and distribution, including post offices and community digital networks; local data creators and collectors; local signage and interactive public media; local emergency communication resources; local whisper networks and town gossip; and a selection of other case studies that reflect students’ interests.

An introduction to marine biology and oceanography. Topics will include chemical and physical oceanography, a survey of form, function and phylogeny of algae, invertebrates and vertebrates, and an examination of ecological and evolutionary principles as applied to marine organisms and ecosystems.

This course introduces the principles of material and energy balances and their applications to the analysis of single- and multiple-phase processes used in the chemical, pharmaceutical, and environmental industries. The course focuses on the conceptual understanding of properties of pure fluids, equations of state, and heat effects accompanying phase changes and chemical reactions, and problem-solving skills needed to solve a wide range of realistic, process-related problems.

This course will cover the fundamental materials science issues central to the design of sustainable energy technology. The goal of this course is to expose students to the emerging advances in materials science and materials chemistry that underpin technologies for energy conversion (fuel cells, thermoelectrics, photovoltaics, wind energy etc..), storage (biofuels, artificial photosynthesis, batteries etc) and distribution (smart grids and hydrogen and methane economy concepts etc..) and to place these in a real world context. This class will emphasize concepts in "green materials and green engineering practices" that are emerging with a global focus on "Sustainable Technology." "Sustainability is defined as meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their needs." Engineering materials and processes at all scales; molecular/nanometer, micro, and the macro-scale are critical to developing the tools society required to meet the growing needs for energy and sustainable materials for the built environment.

Throughout mankind's history, materials have played a critical role in civilization and technology. The selection of materials has been based on availability and functionality. The rapid advances of materials technologies in the last 150 years, however, have made nearly all classes and forms of materials available, at a cost. These costs include the dollars and cents costs that typically accompany the use of stronger, lighter materials, but environmental costs are also important and significant. Therefore, in theory at least, materials selection can now proceed on a rational basis as an optimization process involving performance and costs - both financial and environmental. In this course, we will focus on structural applications where mechanical design is central. By the end of the course, the students can expect to acquire a level of engineering familiarity with a broad range of materials, and be prepared to undertake responsible material design projects in the future.

This course will introduce strategies to improve materials sustainability, particularly with respect to reduced energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions during the extraction, synthesis and fabrication of materials. Innovative solutions will be described that include alternative feedstocks, materials substitutions, and materials waste reduction. This 0.5 CU course will primarily focus on metals and polymers. The course will present overarching concepts and illustrative examples that capture the global nature of materials supply chains. Students will explore issues through the framework of the materials lifecycle, including resource availability, manufacturing choices, and disposal options for materials appropriate for the application. The intention is for students to be able to make more informed material selection decisions and to identify critical needs for future material development to improve materials sustainability.

How does matter transform into material, and back again? What hidden labor, sites, social and ecological costs and processes go into the production of a “blank” canvas and other “raw” materials? And why-- for artists, designers, architects, preservationists, creative educators, builders, and anyone working with materials-- do these realities matter? This course connects arts and design learners to considerations, sites, and cycles around production and disposal of the defining materials of their creative fields (ex. paper, wood, glass, pigment, "the internet"), laying groundwork for creative practice rooted in social and ecological awareness, repair and care. A hybrid research seminar, field exploration, and studio investigation, the structure of this course alternates between reading/response/research, field trips and guest visitors (including a partnership affiliation with RAIR Philly), and time for responsive “making” and material experimentation/synthesis. In this course, students will collaboratively define key terms and concerns around material sustainability, discard studies, land and labor relations vis-a-vis creative work. Students will experience local sites of material extraction, production and disposal (through approx 5 field trips taking place during class time). Students will formulate individual or group questions around a specific material, leading to a final independent project, and class exhibition. This course will engage students in forming a material ethics to guide future creative work.

Ongoing climate crises, militarization, racial injustice, and mass migration have torn apart social fabrics and have further exposed the unequal structures of power that have defined health, how it is realized, and for whom. The massive human toll of COVID-19 and demands for reparations from communities around the world confront health institutions and expose their colonial, scientific, and epistemic underpinnings. From colonial histories of medicine to movements to decolonize global and planetary health, this seminar charts how anthropological and trans-disciplinary forms of research can help shift knowledge claims about injury and vulnerability away from hegemonic centers to frontline communities. This shift implies tracking the lived aspects of health both in and beyond clinical spaces and into multiple environments (from low-wage work to toxic exposures and militarized zones) that perpetuate human/nonhuman vulnerabilities and unequal exposures to disease. As we consider multi-faceted efforts (including traditions of mutual aid and care, de-occupation and, more recently, abolition medicine) to reverse such trends, we probe innovations, forms of resistance, and ethical and political potentials unleashed by diverse justice struggles, and through which diverse planetary futures are imagined and realized.

Latin American nations as we know them today emerged in the nineteenth century after violent independence struggles against the Spanish Empire. Since independence, mestizaje has been an influential ideology that seeks to portray the identity of Latin American nations as comprised of a unique cultural and racial fusion between Amerindian, European, and African peoples. Through historical, anthropological, and STS approaches this course examines how concerns with racial fusion and purity have shaped the design and implementation of public health programmes in Latin America after independence and into the 20th century. Topics include: tropical medicine and race; public health and urbanization; toxicity and exposure in industrialized settings; biomedicine and social control; indigenous health; genomics and health; food and nutrition.

Latin American nations as we know them today emerged in the nineteenth century after violent independence struggles against the Spanish Empire. Since independence, mestizaje has been an influential ideology that seeks to portray the identity of Latin American nations as comprised of a unique cultural and racial fusion between Amerindian, European, and African peoples. Through historical, anthropological, and STS approaches this course examines how concerns with racial fusion and purity have shaped the design and implementation of public health programmes in Latin America after independence and into the 20th century. Topics include: tropical medicine and race; public health and urbanization; toxicity and exposure in industrialized settings; biomedicine and social control; indigenous health; genomics and health; food and nutrition.

This course offers a broad and practical introduction to the acquisition, storage, retrieval, maintenance, use, and presentation of digital cartographic data with both image and drawing based geographic information systems (GIS) for a variety of environmental science, planning, and management applications. Its major objectives are to provide the training necessary to make productive use of at least two well known software packages, and to establish the conceptual foundation on which to build further skills and knowledge in late practice.

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This interdisciplinary seminar explores various ways that culture and cultural productions have been affected by 20th and 21st century antisystemic movements – that is, social and popular movements that have organized against injustices of the capitalist world-system, including socialist, communist, anticolonial, national liberation, antiracist, feminist, and ecological movements, among others. In addition to mobilizing and organizing people and transforming political systems and institutions, movements also shape culture, produce knowledge, engage in ideological struggles, and politicize sites that had been previously treated as extraneous to ‘politics proper.’ We will examine the ways that the multifaceted capacities of movements have been theorized by scholars, as well as by intellectuals of socialist, anticolonial, and liberation movements who have argued that radical or revolutionary projects of social transformation must also transform culture and produce new types of subjects. We will also examine critical analyses of the cultural apparatus and the social relations of cultural and intellectual production, as well as theories of the role of intellectuals in egalitarian and emancipatory struggles. We will examine specific movements and cultural productions that emerged from them, including 20th century national revolutionary movements in Latin America and the Caribbean, Black and Chicano liberation movements in the U.S., Zapatismo, the anti-globalization movement, and international socialist and communist movements. The cultural productions we examine will include manifestoes, poetry, novels, autobiography, visual art, theater, and film. Students will also have the opportunity to develop and workshop their own research project as part of the course.

Engineering is progressing to ever smaller scales, enabling new technologies, materials, devices, and applications. This course will provide an introduction to nano-scale tribology and the critical role it plays in the developing areas of nanoscience and nanotechnology. We will discuss how contact, adhesion, friction, lubrication, and wear at interfaces originate, using an integrated approach that combines concepts of mechanics, materials science, chemistry, and physics. We will cover a range of concepts and applications, drawing connections to both established and new approaches. We will discuss the limits of continuum mechanics and present newly developed theories and experiments tailored to describe micro- and nano-scale phenomena. We will emphasize specific applications throughout the course. Reading of scientific literature, critical peer discussion, individual and team problem assignments, and a peer-reviewed literature research project will be assigned as part of the course.

This seminar will explore the ideas surrounding the theories, discourses, and practices surrounding natural and cultural heritage. Heritage has become inscribed in the planning of urban and rural landscapes, designed as tourist destinations, and considered a universal good in global cosmopolitan society. But it would be well to ask: what kind of "nature" and "culture" has been labeled as heritage? What kind of organizations, economics, and politics are necessary to sustain it? How are these put in place? By whom? For whom? Over the course of the semester, students will engage with readings that discuss how cultural and natural heritage is communicated to the public and the relationship between academic critique and pragmatic social engagement.

Natural disasters play a fundamental role in shaping landscapes and structuring ecosystems. The purpose of this course is to introduce you to both the natural and social science of disasters. This course will explore the geologic processes that cause natural disasters, the ecological and social consequences of disasters, and the role of human behavior in disaster management and mitigation. Through exploring these concepts, this class will provide you with a broad background in the geosciences and the basic tools needed to understand: how earthquakes, volcanoes, landslides, and hurricanes occur; the myriad of ways that we can mitigate against their impacts; and the way in which we can "calculate the cost" of these disasters.

In the sixteenth century, the notion of nature as fecund spawned not only images of lushness but also analogies to the artist's mind as a fertile place. The idea of "natural law" was also appealed to as a presumably primal condition, one that established how the earth's resources were to be distributed among its people. Yet the taste for artistic objects in gold, silver, wax, and wood--materials that could be worked into shapes attesting to the owner's dominium over land--led to harvesting processes which met the awareness that nature's resources could run low or even run out. Untappable nature was a functional metaphor, but scarcity was a reality. As a collective effort to write the other side of the story of Renaissance abundance, this seminar will proceed by addressing the question of how the history of art might be told as a description of materials and their potential for the expenditure of natural and human resources. We will address this question by focusing on primary texts, theoretical interventions, and a selection of objects, images, and early books from collections near at hand.

Water wars, deforestation, climate change. Amidst many uncertain crises, in this course we will explore the emergent relationship between people and the environment in different parts of the world. How do people access the resources they need to live? How, when and for whom does 'nature' come to matter? Why does it matter? And what analytical tools we might use to think, mitigate and adapt to the effects of climate change? Drawing together classical anthropological texts and some of the emergent debates in the field of climate studies and environmental justice, in this class we focus on the social-ecological processes through which different groups of humans imagine, produce and inhabit anthropogenic environments.

This course is designed to introduce students to an emerging field, one that explores the connections between nature and human health. A growing body of literature suggests that exposure to natural settings supports human health in a variety of ways. The healing powers of nature appear to be demonstrable scientifically, with research studies spanning various aspects of social, mental, and physical health. The course also invites students to consider the ways in which humans can contribute to the healing of ecosystems. Contemplative practices (e.g., meditation, journaling) will be woven throughout. The course will be linked to the Nature Rx@Penn Program, with opportunities for active and experiential learning.

The United States is "nature's nation." Blessed with an enormous, resource-rich geographically diverse and sparsely settled territory, Americans have long seen "nature" as central to their identity, prosperity, politics and power, and have transformed their natural environment accordingly. But what does it mean to be "nature's nation? This course describes and explores how American "nature" has changed over time. How and why has American nature changed over the last four centuries? What have Americans believed about the nation's nature, what have they known about the environment, how did they know it and how have they acted on beliefs and knowledge? What didn't or don't they know? How have political institutions, economic arrangements, social groups and cultural values shaped attitudes and policies? How have natural actors (such landscape features, weather events, plants, animals, microorganisms) played roles in national history? In addition to exploring the history of American nature, we will look for the nature in American history. Where is "nature" in some of the key events of American history that may not, on the surface, appear to be "environmental?"