Seminars

Seminar Descriptions

• HON 113HA — Creativity Across Domains
  • Dr. William Plaff
  • M, W, F 11 – 11:50 a.m.
  • 3 credits

  This course explores ideas of creativity and the creative process, beginning with studies of recognized masters from multiple intellectual domains, including Albert Einstein, Pablo Picasso, Igor Stravinsky, T.S. Eliot, Martha Graham and Mahatma Gandhi. From these studies, students will develop an understanding of the connections that exist between inspiration, craft, and work methods, complex and unique creative processes, and, most crucially, the structure to explore their own creativity. 

  Readings and film viewings on creative luminaries will help students explore concepts of creativity and how the process is developed and shaped. These creative insights will be examined in larger contexts, with an emphasis on external influences that shape how we view creative output. Students will be encouraged to investigate and think critically about their own creative impulses. 

  Together, we will address and explore questions such as: 

  • What does it mean to be creative?
  • How does the creative process develop into a meaningful end result?
  • What are the societal constructs, economic circumstances, and issues of race and gender that impinge on or support creativity?
  • How do we translate insights about the creative experience into examination of creative output in a larger context?
  • How do societal constructs of an artistic hierarchy influence how we view art forms and their products?

  In exploring creativity, both their own and the process of others, students will be urged to think more deeply about the act of writing and critical expression. Written assignments will encourage students to develop confidence in their ability to analyze and effectively communicate their argument. Students will think, write critically, and actively discuss artists that they choose to research, providing opportunity to develop creative academic expression that is meaningful to them as emerging scholars. 

  Beginning with an investigation into documented masters, students will be encouraged to apply these critical thinking constructs to a range of creators with an emphasis on women and minorities. One of the essential goals of the course is to broaden the net of the students’ understanding of recognized contributors across multiple domains, setting students up to explore a wide-ranging world of dynamic creators outside the canon, beyond the socially accepted “greats.” 

  The nature of the course encourages students to see creativity as a path, rather than a finished product, impacting how they view their own work and the music they listen to, the books they read, and beyond, making them ultimately more observant, critical thinkers in society and more inclined to explore and develop their own creative pursuits. 

  This seminar will satisfy the Individual Expression/Humanities component of the SUNY Plattsburgh Cardinal Core/General Education program.

• HON 115HA — Queer Theater
  • Dr. Beth Glover
  • M, W  2 – 3:15 p.m.
  • 3 credits

  From Mae West to Aziza Barnes, this course will explore the historical, aesthetic, and political aspects of queer theatre and performance.  We will explore this through the following set of interrelated questions: Is queer theatre and performance inherently political? When did queer theatre and performance become mainstream? Or is it? 

  In addition to queer plays, films, performance art, and television shows will also be examined to answer these questions. We will consider the stereotypical and groundbreaking portrayals of queer people, themes of homophobia, self-hatred, acceptance, AIDS, and familial interaction, all within the heteronormative society.

  This seminar will satisfy the Individual Expression/Humanities component of the SUNY Plattsburgh Cardinal Core/General Education program.

• HON 127HA — Modern U.S. Social Movements
  • Dr. Mark Richard
  • MW 3 – 4:45 p.m.
  • 3 credits

  The Black Lives Matter movement has often been in the news in recent years. How do social movements originate and develop? What other social movements have arisen in modern U.S. history? This course will explore these and other questions by looking at some major social movements from the late nineteenth to the early twenty-first century. The Populist movement, the rise of the Second Ku Klux Klan, the Civil Rights movement, and the liberation movements that spun off the Civil Rights movement will provide us with our major case studies and will shed light on contemporary movements such as the Black Lives Matter movement.

  Active participation in class discussions, weekly reading summaries, two take-home essay exams, and a research paper on a modern U.S. social movement will constitute the course assessments.

  This seminar will satisfy the U.S. Identities/U.S. Civilization component of the SUNY Plattsburgh Cardinal Core/General Education program.

• HON 182HA — Democracy & Education: Banned Books
  • Dr. Tracie Church Guzzio
  • M, W, F 1 – 1:50 p.m.
  • 3 credits

  This course is designed to explore the connection between democracy and education. Throughout this semester, we will explore the broad question: what role does education have in a democracy? 

  This semester, we will discuss the recent rise in “book bans” in public schools and libraries. How does this activity threaten our view of democracy and the First Amendment? Reading actively and widely is seen as a pathway to individual agency, economic mobility, and civic engagement. Historically, philanthropists have funded libraries in communities and in schools to support democracy and encourage economic mobility. Other questions we will consider include: Should censorship have a role in what children and young adults read? Why has banning or restricting access to books become so politicized? What are the motivations and effects of censorship in a democratic society? What is the history (and outcome) of censorship in our society? How is book banning a method of silencing diverse or divergent voices? What role do parents have in making decisions about school libraries and classrooms in public education?

  Exploration of the above questions will be undertaken by drawing upon a variety of sources, including history, theory, and the critical analysis of banned and challenged titles. Besides class discussion, there will be presentations, papers, and projects. We will read several challenged or banned titles in the course.

  This seminar will satisfy the World Cultures/Western Civilization component of the SUNY Plattsburgh General Education program.

• HON 315HA — Climate Politics in Fiction & Film 
  • Dr. John McMahon
  • T, Th 2 – 3:15 p.m.
  • 3 credits

  How have fiction and film responded to climate change, and transformed our cultural and political understandings of climate change in the process? When we turn to “cli-fi” (climate fiction) or films about climate change, are we seeking to find political ideas and inspiration, hope, disaster, a wake-up-call, doomism, resolve, persistence, or something else entirely? To explore these and related questions, this class will engage climate politics through the humanities in order to think about the significance of fiction and film in confronting something as daunting as climate change. We will also reflect broadly on what film and fiction can (and cannot) teach us about politics and consider how genre expectations shape the political thought expressed through film and fiction.

  In this seminar, we will read the novels Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler and The Deluge by Stephen Markley; read short fiction from anthologies such as I’m With the Bears: Short Stories from a Damaged Planet; and watch feature films (such as How to Blow up a Pipeline, Snowpiercer, and Don’t Look Up) and documentaries (such as Taming the Garden and Thank You for the Rain). Readings from political science and philosophy will guide our engagement with fiction and film. Engaging with these materials through dialogue and writing will challenge and change our own environmental political thinking and environmental imaginations. 

  Students will complete analytical and reflective writing and videos about what we read and watch, and as a class will curate, present, and facilitate discussion about a small climate film series on campus. 

  This seminar will satisfy the Individual Expression/Arts component of the SUNY Plattsburgh Cardinal Core/General Education program or Global Issues Gen Ed, if matriculation before fall 2021.

• HON 335HA — Flora Mirabilis: Humans & Plants in History
  • Dr. Gillian Crane-Kramer
  • T, Th 3:30 – 4:45 p.m.
  • 3 Credits

  Throughout our evolution, humans have lived in intimate association with other animals, plants, fungi and microorganisms. The activities of these organisms over past periods of time have created the environment in which our ancestors evolved. In turn, we have depended upon these other species and properties to support our lives. A great shift in the nature of this relationship occurred roughly 10, 500 years ago with the Neolithic revolution and rise of agriculture. The period when crops and domestic animals supplied most of our food spans only roughly 400 human generations; a short span of time, but one in which humans have experienced tremendous social, political, economic dietary and ritual change. This course focuses upon this period of transformation, moving chronologically from the Origins of Agriculture (per-history- 1450 A.D.) through the periods of Discovery (1450-1650), Exploration (1650-1770 A.D.), Enlightenment (1770-1840), Empire (1840-1900) and Science (1900 to the present). In each section, we will focus on specific plants that had an important role in the transformation of human society. Assignments include exercises, presentations, and a final paper.

  This seminar will satisfy the Human Communities/Social Science component of the SUNY Plattsburgh Cardinal Core/General Education program.

• HON 341HA — Modeling Dynamic Systems
  • Dr. Kevin O'Neill
  • T, Th 12:30 – 1:45 p.m.
  • 3 Credits

  This course introduces you to system dynamics modeling and systems thinking applied to the analysis of global complexities. You will learn to visualize the environmental, social, economic, physical, and biological policy arenas in terms of the structures that create dynamics and regulate performance.

  Accelerating economic, technological, social, and environmental change requires policy makers to adapt. Increasingly, we must learn how to manage complex systems with multiple feedback effects, long time delays, and nonlinear responses to our decisions. Yet learning in such environments is difficult precisely because we never confront many of the consequences of our most important decisions. You can probably think of a host of examples illustrating this point from the Covid pandemic to global climate change. Effective learning in such environments requires methods to develop systems thinking, to represent and assess such dynamic complexity—and tools that can be used to accelerate learning by policy makers.

  System dynamics allows us to create “micro-worlds,” manage flight simulators where space and time can be compressed, slowed, and stopped to assess the long-term side effects of decisions. We can also explore new strategies and develop better understandings of systems. In this class we will use role playing games, simulation models, case studies, and policy flight simulators to develop principles of policy design for the complexities we now face.

  This course will help you understand the dynamic, simultaneous, and inter-relational nature of intra and extra systems activity through causal loop making and system dynamic simulations. Students will create models that represent complex, non-linear feedback systems of personal or professional interests to them. Some of the simulations we will explore include global concerns such as population growth, epidemics, economic, environmental, and social change, among other policy arenas.

  Students will keep a weekly journal and participate in a group project formulating, designing, and simulating a systems project that is interesting to you and your team. You will also complete other assignments focused on individual modeling and problem-solving homework.

  This seminar will satisfy the Global Issues Gen Ed, if matriculation before fall 2021, or the Quantitative Reasoning component of the SUNY Plattsburgh Cardinal Core program.