Professor Paula Gutierrez – Pitzer College
Course Number: Spanish 107

Professor Sushi Branfman – Scripps College
Course Number: DANC152IOSC

This course provides students with an opportunity to move together and create dance and performance based on what is happening in the world around them, especially focusing on the issues that are affecting the community that they live in. Emphasis will be on the creative processes that are employed in creating dance and performance, while engaging in contemporary issues of race, class, gender, and cultural identity. History of dance and performance as a catalyst for social change and performance that rises out of social movements and issues will be studied. The course culminates in a showing/performance of the work created, followed by a dialogue with the audience and individual writing about the experience and learning.

Professor Erin Runions – Pomona College
Course Number: RLST181 PO

Prison is often billed as a space for redemption through punishment, but the lived experience is often described as hindering personal growth. Critics of the prison system have called it cruel, dehumanizing, and colonizing. This course explores whether justice and redemption require harsh punishment. Does accountability always require pain? What other forms of justice have been imagined? We will investigate how Christian ideas of damnation, hell, and atonement have historically shaped the prison system in harmful ways, even while individuals may have found solace in Christianity. We will consider how religious ideas about punishment have disproportionally affected already marginalized groups of people. And we will learn about other approaches to dealing with social harm. African American, Indigenous, and Latinx communities have practiced restorative and transformative justice, often inspired by their own religious traditions. We will take an intersectional approach that understands how racial, sexual, and gender identities affect how people are treated in prison as well as how they imagine other forms of justice. The course readings will be interdisciplinary, combining religious studies with cultural studies to understand the forces that shape the prison industrial complex and alternatives to it. As an Inside/Out class, in-class learning will happen through reading and discussion with Claremont students. Assignments will include weekly reflection papers, a group presentation, and a final integrative project.

Professor Andre Wakefield – Pitzer College
Course Number: HIST 163 PZ

This course examines propaganda, past and present. We will look at everything from police state rhetoric to mass market advertising, investigating the ways in which propaganda has been mobilized in different times and places. The course will be based around reading and discussion. It is imperative, therefore, that you do all the reading and come to class prepared to discuss it.

Spring 2027

Risk and Resilience

This course will examine issues of developmental risk and resiliency in urban settings, both locally and in a more global context. Students will be studying numerous relevant literatures on the central topics of the class (effects of poverty, homelessness, mental health risk factors, protective/resiliency factors in development, racial/ethnic identity, AIDS/HIV, growing up in war-torn regions, child abuse, exposure to domestic violence etc.). The course will involve an examination of the theoretical underpinnings of the risk and resiliency literatures, and the various models used to examine risk and protective factors in development. Particular attention will be paid to the role of multiple risk factors, and the ways in which risk factors combine and interact, to affect children. Throughout the course, a main focus will be on how developmental risk factors affect children and families, and impact children’s educational aspirations and achievement, sense of self, and mental and physical well being. Students will also be learning about protective factors in development, and ways in which they can be enhanced and supported through comprehensive interventions that affect the child, family, and community. A final issue will be the question of evaluation research: how does one appropriately and effectively evaluate an intervention project, and what are the measurement issues involved in gauging the short-term and long-term consequences of an intervention?

Introduction to African American Literature

Introduction to Podcasting