Faculty Course Grants

Riel Bellow
Scripps
Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
FGSS 036 01: Introduction to Queer Studies
Through an intersectional lens, this course looks at queerness not only as an identity, but as a position, a modality, and both an inherent contestation and active means of resistance to settler colonial orientations of the heteronormative subject. An important section of this course focuses on pirate radio and queer organizing in the 80s and 90s. Students engage in a two-day Pirate Radio Workshop with Seth Cardinal Dodginghorse, an artist and pirate radio facilitator for indigenous youth in Canada. Students learn how to set up and code a pirate radio in collaboration with KSPC and the Native Initiatives Office. The workshop will culminate in a zine-making activity that includes directions on how to set up a pirate radio in the future.

Virginie Duzer
Pomona
Romance Languages and Literature/French
French 104: A Journey Through French Fashion
This course is designed to provide students with a glimpse of what French fashion is about, with instruction fully in French. Students design French-inspired clothing garments, and make them after learning to sew with sewing machines, using French language for instruction. Students gain insight into French fashion, while enriching their French vocabulary, and learning a new making skill.

Rachel Mayeri
Jia Yi Gu
Isabel Beavers
HMC
Humanities, Social Sciences and The Arts
ARCH 179: Special Topics Material Acts
ART 179X: HMC-01 Myth, Mystics, Matter: Beyond the Techno-Spiritual Binary
ART 179W: Special Topics: Art x Science x LA
As an experiential learning project, students visit three exhibitions of the Getty PST: Art and Science Collide series, exhibitions offering a unique exploration of the intersections between art and science, fostering experiential learning and critical thinking. Immersing students in these dynamic environments enhances their understanding of both disciplines, inspires creativity, and promotes interdisciplinary collaboration. The Getty PST: Art and Science Collide exhibitions present innovative works that challenge traditional boundaries between art and scientific inquiry. In an increasingly interconnected world, the ability to synthesize knowledge from diverse fields is essential. These exhibitions not only highlight the relevance of art and visual practices in scientific discourse but also showcase how scientific methods can enhance artistic practices. Students respond to the field trip experience through a range of creative and arts-based methods including hands-on making projects (video art, sculpture, drawings, and more), creative writing, oral presentation, and analytical writing on a public facing blog. The visits present students with the opportunity to integrate experiential learning in the Los Angeles arts ecosystem through a range of making activities.

Colleen Rosenfeld
Pomona
English
ENG 010: Intro to Close Reading
Close reading begins, not with the question, "What do these words mean?" but instead, the question, "What do these words say?" And then, "What if these words mean just what they say?" And then, "What would have to be true about the world in which this poem or story operates in order for these words to mean just what they say?" This course considers how literature compels us to revise what we know, or think we know, about the world and how it operates. Close reading allows us to understand poetic and fictional worlds according to their discrete and unique logic; it is the political gamble of this course that close reading the worlds of fiction and poetry permits us to see this world—the actual, real, or historical world—in its capacity to be otherwise. And what students see is created through making projects shared as final (re)presentations.

Total Proposals Submitted = 4
Total Grants Awarded = 4
Total Faculty and Staff Awarded = 6

Tim Berg
Bahar Acu
Pitzer
Art + Math
Limitless Boundaries: The Art and Math of Surfaces
Topology is the study of the properties of shapes that do not fundamentally change when they are bent and/or stretched without poking holes in them or ripping them apart. To a topologist, a donut and a coffee cup (with a handle) are the same thing, since one can be deformed into the other continuously. This hands-on course explores topological questions using primarily clay to better understand shapes and surfaces, and challenges students to think in multiple dimensions, creating compelling objects and sculptures.

Barbara Junisbai
Stephanie Liu-Rojas
Tricia Morgan
Tessa Hicks Peterson
Kathy Yep
Pitzer
Asian American Studies, Cultural/Urban Studies, Organizational Studies, + Writing
Building a Community of Practice
What does it look like to center healing and accountability in our interpersonal and institutional relationships? How do we develop and sustain a culture of collective healing and accountability in the face of ongoing structural violence and interlocking oppressions? In this collaborative, co-taught course, students explore, experiment with, and linger on a variety of tools and frameworks intended to foster belonging and connectivity while working toward collective liberation. This course incorporates a diverse range of intentional practices, drawing on the Accountability History Network, Healing Justice and Transformative Tenets, Qi Gong, Spheres of Influence, and Kingian Theory, to help deepen and sustain human connection during challenging times.

Thomas Kim
Suchi Branfman
Sue Castagnetto
Anup Gampa
Mark Golub
Tessa Hicks-Peterson
Kimberly Miranda
Nancy Neiman
Heidi Rhodes
Erin Runions
George Ygarza
Scripps, Pomona, HMC, + Pitzer
Critical Global Studies, Dance, Humanities, Social Sciences and the Arts, Chicana/o Latina/o Transnational Studies, Gender and Women’s Studies, Politics, Religious Studies, Urban Studies, + Intercollegiate Feminist Center
A team of faculty and students, through the 5C Transformative and Restorative Justice Collective (5-C TJRJC), offer the Co-Creating Care-First and Radical Pedagogies course. This class delves into materials on past and present radical pedagogies while, simultaneously, developing a toolkit of Care-First teaching practices which center collective access, equity, accountability over punishment, grassroots knowledge/wisdom, and the wholeness of both students and professors as people. The classroom space engages both theory and praxis, experimenting with and building upon the concepts that make up the syllabus. Class projects involve the co-creation and dissemination of a Care-First Classroom toolkit.

Kim-Tran Tran
Doug Goodwin
Scripps
Art + Media Studies
Textiles and Technology
This interdisciplinary course combines fiber and textile arts with data, computation, and technology. Textile looms are arguably the world's first programmable devices, capable of weaving intricate and repeatable patterns from simple threads. Despite little change in these techniques since the mid-1700s, recent technological innovations and changing social dynamics could disrupt textile arts by advancing the manufacturing process and addressing environmental concerns, as well as labor practices. The course covers a range of methods, including algorithmic weaving, bio-designed textiles, parametric design, and computational textiles through hands-on projects and experimentation. This course re-examines the role of fiber arts in contemporary society, expanding fiber’s traditional status. While textiles have been commoditized by profit-driven industries, individual and extra-capitalist (often feminist) practices have been marginalized. By integrating fiber arts with data, computing, and technology, the conversation broadens and explores issues of labor, industry, the environment, gender inequality, and cultural production.

Total Proposals Submitted = 4
Total Grants Awarded = 4
Total Faculty and Staff Awarded = 20
Total Development Grant Awards = $20,000

Jasmine Baetz
Jih-Fei Cheng
Scripps
Art + Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
ART 126C: Special Topics in Ceramics: Feeling Brown
FGSS 184: Feminist Theories: Antiracist, Postcolonial and Queer Critiques
This class activates a fibers exploration and quilt-making project that supports student learning and engagement with the theories of José Esteban Muñoz, while also exploring intersectional feminist and queer theories as produced by U.S. women and trans people of color, and native, transnational and postcolonial scholars. Students select soft/fiber materials for use in both individual and collectively-created projects, engaging with a specific history encountered in course materials that they would like to represent in an assembled quilt. The student-created quilted squares are assembled together for display, and then disassembled after the course is concluded, so students keep their piece of the collective work.

Jasmine Baetz
Jih-Fei Cheng
Scripps
Art + Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
ART 126A: Special Topics in Ceramics: Making a Feminist Life
FGSS 183: Feminist and Queer Science
This class engages in a mold-making and casting exercise that focuses on foundational Feminism and Queer Science texts to inform students’ readings and interpretation of Sara Ahmed’s Feminist Killjoy Handbook. Students examine their artistic methodologies and identify openings for feminist art practice by learning mold-making and casting with mycelium, a less environmentally impactful material and one that carries with it the significance of mycelium, growth, and networking. Students select a compelling object they wish to explore and reiterate through casting, appreciating the conceptual basis of reiterative processes.

Jessica Kizer
Pitzer
Sociology
SRX-Intro to Sociology
Instead of focusing on the “terrible” lesson of sociology, which is that society impacts our lives in many detrimental ways, limiting our opportunities and chances in life, this course focuses on the “magnificent” lesson of sociology, which is that we have the power to shape society in a meaningful way. Students provide in-person tutoring to elementary school children in the Pomona Unified School District through the Homework Club. Students write, illustrate, and publish a children’s book, using their sociological imagination, based on their research on a social issue. At the end of the semester, a book festival and author reading with their books will be held for the children they’ve been tutoring. Writing and illustrating a children’s book, where the characters come to see what they think is their own personal trouble to be a public issue that is impacting people beyond themselves and to work together to address it, allows students to make those connections. It also allows them to re-imagine the way things are now and to create a more equitable just world where people are working together to address important social issues.

Joyce Lu
Pomona
Theatre
THEA115O: Applied Theatre in Elementary Schools
Applied Theatre encompasses all theatrical interventions that are deployed outside of a traditional theater space for community building, problem solving, and healing justice. In this course, students learn techniques from Playback Theatre and Theatre of the Oppressed, the most widely known forms of Applied Theatre. They then apply these skills in a curriculum for Bullying Prevention and Transformative Social Emotional Learning at a local elementary school. This class allows the students to change the curriculum based on readings on relevant topics such as social emotional learning and visits to the school that will precede the final performances. This curriculum works to foster empathy, deep listening skills, and the capacity to use one’s voice responsibly to build a healthier school culture.

Thomas Muzart
Pomona
French
FREN188: Memorializing Minority Subjects in Francophone Literature
This course focuses on French-language humanistic cultural contributions that have participated in the process of representation and memorialization of minority subjects and groups. Engaging in contrapuntal analysis, students explore how minorities have been challenging conventional understandings of archives and realms of memory. One of the main components is “text remediation,” which transforms a traditional text into another medium (podcast, video, print, comic book, painting, art installation, performance), depending on students’ interests and creativity. Remediation gives students a concrete understanding of the process of memorialization, an active process that inscribes a memory into a cultural artifact, and is never finished and always in motion and remediation. By doing a “text remediation,” they participate in a collective movement and think (beyond the ideas exposed in the work they chose) about the rhetorical aspects of each medium and their effects on the targeted audience. Their remediation resonates with our time, gives students a concrete experience of the challenges of memorialization (from the conceptualization of a cultural artifact to its realization), determines what matters and what doesn’t, and what the mediation brings to or loses from the original form.

Aly Ogasian
Scripps
Art and Media Studies
Core 03: Art, Ecology and Fieldwork
This studio-based course engages with soil through place-based and experiential research, inside and outside, exploring soil through our senses and how shifting ecologies and landscape can be experienced through slowness. Soil reveals stories about climate, communities, and time. Students tune into the underworld of dirt as a material that has been used in forms of communication – from drawing, building, and ceremony, to boundary lines. They explore a range of methodologies and outputs; including working with scent, mark making/drawing, and the tools to make marks, and how our bodies are tuning in to navigate our relationship to environmental shifts. Through isolating the senses, students practice stillness, walking, running, and sitting, investigating how our olfactory senses (as a medium) are ignited moving at different speeds, temperatures and time, day and night. These experiences are then incorporated into visual artworks that use various forms of durational mark making and drawing with primitive tools into drawings or durational performative acts. Smelling aromatics and soil affects us on both a cellular and spiritual level and is connected to memory. As we breathe, aromatic molecules enter the physical, emotional, and spirit body, and through this alchemy, a plant may become part of our inner selves. Sharing their own DNA by merging with ours, plants can teach us how to survive, how to adapt. The embedded memory of plants is released through their essence and absorbed into ours.

Total Proposals Submitted = 9
Total Grants Awarded = 6
Total Faculty and Staff Awarded = 6
Total Grant Awards = $9500