Hamilton Courses

Incarceration's Witnesses: American Prison Writing

5

The U.S. incarcerates a larger number and percentage of its own citizens than any nation on earth: larger than China, Russia, Cuba, or Iran. American ex-offenders are arrested again at a rate of 67% within three years, and 75% within five years of release. This course looks inside U.S. prisons, through the history of literary witness produced by incarcerated people. This history will help us to understand the mass-scale prison’s rise, its day-to-day practices, and why it fails so badly at the task of rehabilitation. Through prison witness, we may hope to begin to understand what is needed to make the U.S. prison a more socially constructive institution. Among other texts, we will read and discuss Fourth City: Essays from the Prison in America, The (online) American Prison Writing Archive, hosted and made possible by Hamilton College's Digital Humanities Initiative, and come to a sense of the moral weight that prison witness must carry in any truly democratic debate on the criminal justice system.

Spirituality and Sensuality: Sacred Objects in Religious Life

3.5

Playing drums, telling stories, touching stones, creating wildly colorful altars, dancing, eating and drinking special substances are all basic religious activities. Examples will range across Native American, Buddhist, Hindu, Muslim, Christian, and Jewish rituals and symbols, and materials will traverse fields from art history to anthropology, philosophy to poetry, science to religious studies. We will toggle between broad theories of religions and specific case studies. An introductory week will be followed by a week on each of the five senses, and a concluding week. Each week we will incorporate lectures, readings, podcasts, images, and videos, and students will be challenged to spend a little time "offline" and taking notice of the sensual-spiritual elements that make up our cultural life.

Ethics of Sports: Do Sports Morally Matter?

0

While sport sometimes is dismissed as frivolous, it not only raises fundamental ethical questions, such as what counts as fair play, but is an important cultural phenomenon attracting the interests of millions of people around the globe. Love sports or hate them, their cultural role or influence cannot easily be dismissed.In this course, we will explore some of the fundamental ethical issues raised by sport, ranging from investigation of the nature of sports to see what values, if any, sports do and should promote and the educational significance of sports especially in higher education in the U.S, violence in sports, gender equity in sports, and the ethics of using performance enhancing drugs.We hope that through brief lectures on videos, hearty debate in the discussion board, interactive media, and some selected readings to promote not only better understanding of the ethics of sport, but also appreciation for the role of reasoned discourse in advancing our understanding of ethical issues and how to approach them.