A People's Geography of American Empire will look at U.S. expansion -- from "Manifest Destiny" and overseas imperialism, to present-day resource wars. The program will focus on the place-making processes inherent in each stage of expansion, and on the imprints they have left on the human and physical landscape. It will examine "imperial places" that have been shaped by each era of expansion, and in turn have shaped each era.

In addition to the origins and rationales underlying each stage of expansion, we will examine how and to what extent the world's landscape reflects and helps to (re)produce U.S. imperial power. The program will aim to interconnect global and local scales, "foreign" and "domestic" policies, and past histories and present-day legacies. It will examine the lasting effects of imperialism on real local places, in particular the expanding network of U.S. military bases around the world. Fort Lewis and other Pacific Northwest military installations will be examined as local case studies of military land acquisition and place-making (including a possible one-day field trip).

The program will identify the disproportionate role of small places such as Wounded Knee (Lakota Nation), Subic Bay (Philippines), Vieques (Puerto Rico), Okinawa (Japan), Diego Garcia (Indian Ocean), Guantánamo Bay (Cuba), Chalatenango (El Salvador), Fallujah (Iraq) and Bahrain (Persian Gulf), and locate them within a typology of imperial places. Such a typology could include internal colonies, ground zeros, emptied and erased places, poisoned places, and places of proxy terror, resistance and imperial restitution or justice.

As their class project, students will focus on a single local-scale case study, writing separate papers on its past history, present-day landscape, and a resident interview. Students will also turn in two discussion paragraphs on the readings in each seminar.

The program will make a geographical contribution to the study of American Empire by examining the making and remaking of "imperial places," and using place-based approaches to learning about imperialism. Possible article and book authors include Chalmers Johnson, Cynthia Enloe, Michael Klare, Walden Bello, Noam Chomsky, Arundhati Roy, Howard Zinn, Richard Drinnon, Woody Kipp, Michael Ignatieff, Thomas Barnett, and George W. Bush.

This program will examine the principal concepts and theories by which we describe and understand the physical world, from the realm of our immediate senses (classical physics) to the very small (quantum mechanics) to the vast (astrophysics). We will emphasize understanding the nature and formal structure of quantitative physical theories. We will focus on the unifying concepts and common mathematical structures that organize different physical theories into a coherent body of knowledge. This program is necessarily mathematical. Required mathematical skills will be developed as needed and in the context of their use in the physical sciences. The central role of mathematics in describing nature is one of the core intellectual issues in this program. Quantitative problem solving will be emphasized.

Physical Systems will be organized around concepts such as energy, conservation laws, and symmetries. Topics typically include classical mechanics, quantum mechanics, electromagnetism, thermodynamics, astrophysics and/or modern physics. Mathematical topics typically include multivariable calculus, linear algebra, differential equations and/or vector calculus. Computers will be used as appropriate for obtaining analytic and numerical solutions and for gaining qualitative insight into physical processes.

Students will do research on topics of interest, and share peer instruction in the classroom. Program activities will include lectures, seminars, hands-on workshops and laboratories, and group problem solving. Program details will be available online at http://academic.evergreen.edu/z/zita.

Integrated seminars on history, literature, philosophy and/or cultural studies of science will stimulate ongoing consideration of the context and meaning of science knowledge systems and practices through history and across cultures.

This program will be a rigorous and demanding course of study. Students will need to devote a minimum of 50 hours per week to their academic work. Students are encouraged to take Mathematical Methods during fall quarter.

This interdisciplinary program will focus on the study of the Jewish Diaspora and Jewish contributions to the culture of Europe and the Americas. We will explore some of the following questions in areas such as philosophy, cultural studies, humanities, sciences and art. Are there quintessentially Jewish ideas? What Jewish ideas have been co-opted by other cultures after the Roman sack of Jerusalem in the year 70 CE? Which ones made it into the larger culture? What are the unique Jewish contributions to American and world culture?

The program will engage the study of Jewish contributions to a wide range of areas of human knowledge and endeavor. Our studies will include possible connections between the Yiddish culture that developed in Europe and the Americas and political movements, the arts and intellectual ideas. Potential areas of interest may be Jewish influences on popular culture in areas such as Hollywood, Broadway, vaudeville, comedy and music. Students may choose to give special attention to individual thinkers, artists or writers.

In the world of ideas, the possibilities are endless. The program will explore the possible connections between Jewish Messianic ideas, Zionism, laws and ethics, immigration, politics and the Labor Movement in America and Europe. We may choose to study the philosophies of thinkers such as Maimonides, Walter Benjamin, Martin Buber, Theodor Adorno, Baruch Spinoza and other Jewish philosophers who have had enduring influence on the world of ideas.

In the sciences, we may trace the birth of modern psychology in Sigmund Freud and his followers and the groundbreaking theories of thinkers such as Albert Einstein. We intend to direct our attention to the connection of Jewish medical practice with the development of medical ethics.

An inevitable aspect of these studies will be a journey into the dark abyss of the Holocaust. We will look at the Holocaust’s impact on the cultural life and arts of Europe and study the impact on the Jewish world and emerging responses to the tragedy.

A part of our studies of Jewish beliefs and mysticism will include a look into the oral and written law, the mystical tradition of the Kabbalah, and current Jewish thought. Our endeavors will include an examination of Jewish rituals and life-cycle events, and the different roles that Jewish men and women have traditionally held in those events. We plan to explore the changing roles of Jewish women and men, as Jewish feminist leaders exert their influence on the culture.

As part of our learning about the Diaspora in which the Jews have lived for thousands of years, there will be workshops focused on the study of ethnic cuisine and customs. Guest presenters from a variety of Jewish cultural sub-groups will work side by side with students to provide meals that will highlight Jewish ritual laws, Kosher laws and other cultural aspects passed on through oral tradition. Quantitative thinking will be encouraged through the learning of another cultural mainstay of Jewish women since the 1920s: mah jongg.

The study of contemporary Jewish life will address the Jewish national movement, Zionism and study the state of Israel. We will attempt to learn about the complexity and difficulty of analyzing current events in the Middle East.

Participants will be asked to respond to the material of the class in a variety of forms and disciplines. This program will emphasize collaborative learning. Students will be expected to contribute to the program efforts with self-directed and intense work.

Although primarily known as a site of political conflict, war and terrorism, the Eastern Mediterranean is one of the richest areas of cultural, economic and political exchange in world history. Situated between Europe and the Middle East, this area includes the lands we know today as Greece, Turkey, Lebanon, Israel, Palestine, Cyprus and Egypt that are historically linked through a dense and longstanding web of intellectual, religious, economic and political interconnections. Appreciating this long history of political and cultural exchange is crucial for developing perspectives that transcend narrow notions of mutually exclusive “Western” and “Eastern” cultures and civilizations that underlie many contemporary global conflicts.

Taking a perspective drawn primarily from cultural and physical geography, and political economy analysis, the program will examine how landscapes, cultural processes and political and social institutions have been constructed and transformed over time in this region. It will trace this region’s evolution from interactions between ancient Greece and Egypt to the expansion of Christianity and Islam to the present expansion of the European Union and Euro-Med Free Trade Zone to the coast of North Africa and Egypt. In the process, we will explore how cultural identities and lived cultures were created and contested through these interactions, how the material and environmental bases of these cultures shaped daily life, and how different political and religious institutions have influenced and sought to organize the region. We will also focus on food and clothing, popular culture, intellectual and artistic production, and patterns of trade and commerce.

In the fall, the program will focus on travel narratives and the early history of political and cultural exchange in the region, such as that between ancient Greece and Egypt and the world of Christendom and Islam. Through field trips to selected sites in Washington state, students will learn how to conduct field studies and construct travel narratives that are attuned to physical and cultural landscapes and political institutions.

In the winter, the program will focus on the modern period by addressing the impact of European colonialism, the emergence of modern nation-states and the formation of new patterns of trade and cultural exchange. We will pay particular attention to the immense cultural and political dislocations imposed by the creation of territorial boundaries between Greece and Turkey and in the Middle East, especially the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. We will also examine how contemporary economic globalization and free-trade zones are transforming the region.

In the spring, students will travel abroad to the region, with extended stays in Turkey, including its coastal areas and Egypt. This four-week travel abroad program will examine how patterns of political and cultural exchange relate to contemporary realities in the region. Upon returning to campus, students will prepare papers and materials based on their travel experience.

This upper-division program will provide an interdisciplinary, in-depth focus on how land has been viewed and treated by humans historically and in contemporary times. We will give special attention to the political, economic, social/cultural and environmental contexts of land use. We will also look at land ethics, concepts of land ownership and efforts to regulate land uses and protect lands that have been defined as worthy by society.

To understand the context, role and purposes of land policy and regulation, several social science disciplines will be explored. Selected aspects of the following topics and disciplines will be used to evaluate human treatment of land primarily in the United States: history and economic development; the structure and function of American government and federalism; public policy formation and implementation; land use planning and growth management; elements of environmental and land use law; economics; fiscal analysis of state and local governments; and selected applications of qualitative and quantitative research methods. Taken together, these topics examine the diversity of ideas and skills required for developing an in-depth analysis of land issues.

Our goal is to have students leave the program with a comprehensive understanding of the complexity of issues surrounding land. The program will include lectures, seminars, guest speakers, research workshops, field trips in western Washington and individual and group research projects and presentations.

This program is designed to introduce students to the major concepts, historical developments and theories in political economy and to provide a foundation for more advanced work in political economy and the social sciences. We will examine the historical construction of U.S. political economy, the role social movements have played in its development, and future possibilities for social justice, self-determination and equality.

A central goal is to gain a clear understanding of how and why the U.S. economy has been organized and reorganized over time, how it has been controlled, who has and has not benefited from it, the nature of exploitation, racism and sexism, and how social movements, particularly those based on race, class and gender, have resisted and shaped its direction. We will analyze everyday understandings of our human experience and social relations and how they are influenced by media, schools, dominant ideology and popular culture. We will also examine the current and future direction of the United States economy and society, and how various social movements are responding to the changing political economy, locally, nationally and globally. The effects of the U.S. political economy on meeting people’s needs in the United States and in other societies will be major themes of this program.

Fall quarter’s work will focus primarily on the historical development of the United States while we learn and critique ideologies such as liberalism, feminist theories, Marxism, anarchism and neoclassical economics. A question of ongoing importance will be how economic exploitation relates to other forms of social oppression such as racism, sexism and homophobia. Current economic restructuring efforts and the reorganization of the social welfare state will also be examined. We will study, in depth, changes and continuities in the post-September 11 period with regards to militarism, attacks on dissent and new forms of racism. Key issues and topics such as the growing inequality of income and wealth, work and unions, police militarization and prisons, poverty, and privatization will be studied historically and in the present. For each of these topics we will examine the role of race, class, nation and gender and the relationships among them, as well as short/long run solutions to related social problems.

Winter quarter’s work will center on the interrelationship between the U.S. economy and the changing global system, as well as the history of capitalism and its rise to global prominence. We will study the causes and consequences of the globalization of capital and its effects in our daily lives, the role of multilateral institutions such as the World Bank, the IMF and the WTO, the meaning of various trade agreements and regional organizations, and the response of social movements opposing this emerging global order. We will pay attention to the human consequences of imperialist globalization, and resistance to it in case studies from the global South and global North. We will look at alternatives to neoliberal capitalism including socialism, participatory economies and community-based economies.

We will study microeconomics and macroeconomics historically, and integrate major concepts from economics into the entire program. Students will be introduced to key social statistics such as the poverty, inflation, and unemployment rates, measures of inequality of income, and wealth and the quality of life.

Films will be shown throughout the program. There will be a substantial amount of reading in a variety of genres. Workshops and role playing exercises in economics, international relations, writing and organizing for social change will be used. Students will write a series of analytical papers, learn popular education and participatory research methodologies and take part in projects using these methods.

For the West and Japan, the 19th century was a heady century that embraced the utopian notion of perfectibility of human society through science and technology. However, by the beginning of the 20th century this giddy sense of human perfectibility was severely diminished by various iconoclastic ideas, such as Freudian psychoanalytical theory, Einstein’s theory of relativity and Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle. A sense of confusion, anarchy and dread expressed in various art works in the early 20th century is strikingly similar to that of our time, which suffers perhaps a more radical and real disillusionment regarding humanity and its future through its experience of the Nazi holocaust and the atomic bomb explosions in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Our time, at the dawn of the 21st century, is generally and vaguely called the postmodern time or postmodernity. But, what is postmodernity? What is postmodernism?

We will examine, through lectures, book and essay seminars, films, film seminars and a workshop, the state of our contemporary world, postmodernity, as manifested in the literary works of John Barth, Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo and Haruki Murakami, as well as in the films directed by Godard, Lynch, and other contemporary filmmakers, while exploring the significance and implications of such literary and cinematic works through the various theoretical works of Baudrillard, Foucault, Lyotard, Jameson, Habermas, and the like. Students are expected to respond in writing to each of the required readings, in order to facilitate a productive seminar, and to each of the films that we view and discuss, in order to develop reflective thoughts. Students are also expected to write a few formal expository essays during the quarter and one final synthesis paper at the end of the quarter.

This program focuses on the issue of power in American society. In our analysis, we will investigate the nature of economic, political, social, military, ideological and interpersonal power. The interrelationship of these dimensions will be a primary area of study. We will explore these themes through lectures, films, seminars, a journal and writing short papers.

The analysis will be guided by the following questions, as well as others that may emerge from our discussions: What is meant by the term “power”? Are there different kinds of power and how are they interrelated? Who has power in American society? Who is relatively powerless? Why? How is power accumulated? What resources are involved? How is power utilized and with what impact on various sectors of the population? What characterizes the struggle for power? How does domestic power relate to international power? How is international power used? How are people affected by the current power structure? What responsibilities do citizens have to alter the structure of power? What alternative structures are possible, probable, necessary or desirable?

In this period of war and economic, social and political crisis, a good deal of our study will focus on international relations in a systematic and intellectual manner. This is a serious class for serious people. There will be a good deal of reading and some weeks will be more complex than others. Please be prepared to work hard and to challenge your and others’ thinking.

This program integrates the theoretical and practical aspects of small-scale organic farming in the Pacific Northwest throughout the spring, summer and fall quarters. Each week includes eight hours of classroom instruction and twenty hours of hands-on work on Evergreen’s Organic Farm. This program is designed to compliment the broader and ecological systems focus of the Ecological Agriculture program.

Students will explore basic farm management, which will include seasonal crop production, nutrient management, animal husbandry, irrigation, plant breeding for seed production, weed and pest control, as well as direct and wholesale marketing. Working with state-of-the-art facilities will introduce students to vermiculture, composting and biodiesel production. These topics will provide a framework and foundation for more specific concepts to be explored each season.

The fall quarter will focus on winter crop production, cover crops, entomology and plant pathology, genetics and seed saving, compost biology, food storage and farm business planning.

In spring, the program will focus on soils, practical horticulture, greenhouse management, crop rotation and equipment maintenance. In the summer, students will explore their personal agricultural interests through a research project. The program will also visit a wide range of diverse alternative and conventional organic farms. Summer topics will include reproductive crop biology, fruit production and food preservation, as well as outbuilding construction, with basic workshops on plumbing and electricity.

After completing the Practice of Sustainable Agriculture program, students will have an understanding of a whole systems approach to small-scale sustainable farm management in the Pacific Northwest.

This two-quarter program offers several perspectives on the art of poetry. The fall quarter features a series of intensive readings in ancient and classical poetry, and the compositional efforts of modern and contemporary avant-garde writers to reinvent or renew those works. The central questions of the quarter are: What is the relationship in poetry between original and translation? How are ancient works renewed or reinvented? Thus we will study, among other exempla, the classical Chinese poet Li Po in relationship to Ezra Pound’s transformation of that poetry in his 20th-century work Cathay; Homer’s The Iliad and its contemporary realization as Christopher Logue’s War Music; various contemporary translations of Cantos from Dante’s Inferno ; and the American poet H.D’s invention of Egypt in Trilogy . Students will work intensively on their own writing practices, both creative and critical.

The winter quarter will continue the poetry writing workshop, but shift in focus to the relationship between philosophical texts and those dimensions of poetry that philosophy can bring to the fore. This quarter the central focus will be on the relationship between image and idea and how, in language, one transforms into the other, with an eye (and a mind) towards exploring new territories of poetic composition. This will be accomplished by paired texts, in which the work of an individual poet is read in juxtaposition to a theoretical text. These pairings will include the critical theorist Theodor Adorno and the German language poet Paul Celan, the feminist philosopher Helene Cixous and the American poet Alice Notley, the philosopher Hannah Arendt and New American poet Robin Blaser, and the novelist Marguerite Duras and Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish. During each quarter, the program also involves an ongoing poetry writing workshop and a guest reading series.

This program intensively examines the concept and reality of protected areas in the United States and internationally. The central focus of the class will be to develop a supported answer to the question: In what senses are these areas protected? We will explore the question from a number of perspectives such as: for whom, by whom, for what purposes, in what ways, for how long and in the face of what threats and/or challenges? Other variables will include indigenous rights, biodiversity and conservation, the tension between access and protecting natural resources, use patterns within and/or near protected areas, governance, and the roles of domestic and international organizations and agencies that work with protected areas. We will study terrestrial and marine protected areas.

Students will gain an introduction to a range of issues for domestic and international protected areas. They will learn how to find information about protected areas and related issues and which agencies and organizations are involved with protected area interests. Students will share their new knowledge through seminars, presentations and research and will evaluate that learning at the end of the quarter.

This program will involve the exploration of the disciplines of poetics, experimental puppet theater and performance. How do words, light, sound and bodies interact? Is there a mode of distraction which does not weaken each of these senses, but allows one to discover shadows of each in the other? Students will be required to complete reading, writing and artistic projects towards these ends. The poetry and theater writing of Antonin Artaud will be central to our work.

Faculty will support student work by offering workshop components in poetry, puppet theater and movement. Students will be required to produce weekly projects that combine and explore the relationship of puppet theater and poetry in experimental modes. Readings will include the works of such authors as Artaud, Tadeusz Kantor, Paul CĂ©lan, Gaston Bachelard, Kamau Brathwaite, Hannah Arendt and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Student work and progress will be presented weekly in all-program critique sessions.