Chronicles of Dissent (Art, Film, Literature, and Dictatorship) 
Faculty member teaching this course: Georgia Seminet

Does art have political impact? Is literature a meaningful way to challenge oppressive governments? In this course, students will work primarily with literature and film to ask how these forms have been used as both pro-government propaganda and tools of resistance. Using materials from across the globe, from fascist regimes in Europe to military dictatorships in South America, we will explore the political power of art in the 20th century and ask how this power may best be harnessed today.

The Global Media Lens 
Faculty member teaching this course: Jena Heath

Together, on our global campus, we will read, watch and listen to the news from countries around the world to gain a better understanding of the myriad laws and polices shaping it. We will work to gain a culturally specific understanding of the role media plays in all of our lives. We will consider how media, with its strengths and weaknesses, provides the lens through which we view one another. The course will include opportunities for experiential learning, such as visiting an Austin broadcast journalism newsroom and discussions with professional journalists both on and off campus. Students will be taught News Literacy skills designed to help them become thoughtful news consumers.

How We Got Here: Today’s World and History
Faculty member teaching this course: Peter Austin

Sometimes to understand our own time, we have to step back to see how we got here. In this class, we'll engage the world and the past on a continent-wide scale to consider the reasons why Europe, North America, Asia, and other places (even Texas) developed as they did, and why they look the way they do today - politically, economically, culturally, and geographically. The British Prime Minister Winston Churchill  once remarked, "The farther I look into the past, the further I can see into the future;" and this course will provide the large context to move into your college career, no matter what your major - from accounting to biology - in a grander and more literate way.

The Self and the World: Music, Movies, and Memoir
Faculty member teaching this course: Chris Flynn

Students will focus on various essayistic practices: memoirs, personal essays, modern familiar essays, the essay film, songs, self-portraits, etc., and use ideas of the self to explore how we engage with the concept of the public. As film critic Timothy Corrigan has written: “the essayistic indicates a kind of encounter between the self and the public domain, an encounter that measures the limits and possibilities of each as a conceptual activity.” This course will explain the implications of that assertion.