Humanities Expanded Course Descriptions
Winter 2021 - Remote Instruction
- For day, time, room, and TA information, see our PDF schedule or the course search tool https://registrar-apps.ucdavis.edu/courses/search/index.cfm.
- For all courses not listed below, please refer to the General Catalog course descriptions: https://ucdavis.pubs.curricunet.com/Catalog/fre-courses-sc
HUM 2A
Prof. Carlee Arnett
International Crime Fiction
CRN 28557
No prereqs
GE Credit: AH, WC, We
Do you like to read mysteries? This course on contemporary crime fiction will introduce you to the genre’s newest and most exciting detectives! Smilla Japersen of Denmark investigates the death of a Greenlandic boy, while fighting her own demons and feelings about her Greenlandic heritage. In Palestine, Rania Bakara struggles to solve a murder on the Israeli border as the only female detective on the West Bank. Meanwhile in North Korea, Inspector O fights against political forces to solve a murder in a prominent park while wishing he could calm his mind with his beloved polished pieces of wood. In South Africa in the 1950’s, English speaking Detective Emmanuel Cooper navigates between the English and Afrikaner settlers and the local native tribes to stop crime on the border with Madagascar. Written by authors who have lived in the countries portrayed, we will explore how these mysteries add to the Noir genre that was reborn in the past 20 years in Scandinavia. This course is worldwide Noir!
HUM 2A: Consent
Prof. Grace Delmolino
CRN 28558
No prerequisites
GE Credit: AH, WC, WE
The presence of consent is what distinguishes sex from rape, democracy from dictatorship, surgery from assault, employment from slavery. You’re probably used to thinking about consent as a choice you make on a personal level, but it’s more complicated than that. Apps on your phone collect data about your lifestyle, browsing habits, health, and contacts—you agreed to this by default when you installed the app, but did you really consent? In the Middle Ages, a father could legally consent to marriage on behalf of his 13-year-old child—do you think that is truly consent? What if you agreed to participate in a medical study on your life-threatening illness, but partway through the study, a cure was discovered and the researchers withheld it from you—would you feel like your consent was violated, even though you agreed to the terms of the study? These some of the real-life examples we’ll discuss. For millennia, people have attempted to define consent in philosophy, literature, and theory; we will use a humanistic approach to study what makes for valid consent in the domains of data privacy, medicine, voting, sex, and more.