Curriculum Manager

Does consumption shape culture or does culture shape consumption? As even the most mundane purchase becomes socially symbolic and culturally meaningful we can persuasively argue that the concept of "need" has been transformed. Analyzing a variety of physical and virtual consumer venues, the goal of this seminar is to understand and to analyze historical and contemporary issues related to a culture of consumption. We investigate social and political-economic factors that impact when and how people purchase goods and argue that behavior attached to consumption includes a nexus of influences that may change periodically in response to external factors. Readings and research assignments are interdisciplinary and require a critical analyses of global/local linkages. The city of Philadelphia becomes the seminar's laboratory as we ask how have issues of culture, consumption, and global capitalism become intertwined around the world?

This seminar analyzes Mexico’s drugs war of the last two decades in historical and comparative context. Outside representations of Mexico tend to swing between the sublime and the ridiculous; the contemporary period is no exception. On one hand, the country’s peaceful democratic transition wins plaudits. On the other, the volume and violence of the international drugs trade, which is credited with some 30,000 deaths in the last four years, are represented as auguries of imminent state collapse. Students will question both of these simplifications by examining Mexico’s peculiar modern history, spanning one of the world’s great social revolutions and the “perfect dictatorship” that ended it. The recent past can then be explored as the meeting of that peculiar history with the standard pressures and incentives of one of the world’s great businesses: selling drugs. Students in this course will read across the social sciences and beyond, incorporating short stories, journalism, cartoons and films (all in translation) to gain an interdisciplinary grasp of why the drugs war exists and what it means for contemporary Mexicans.

Continuation of year-long seminar from the fall. Students enrolled in the fall need to register again for the spring portion of this course.

Structural biology is the scientific method of describing, predicting and changing the properties of living organisms, including humans, based on “complete” genome chemical structures (sequence) and 3-dimensional structures of cellular components. The intellectual and technical revolutions that occurred during the 20th century made this possible. It is today's approach to understanding biology and solving problems in medicine. 
 We will discuss how macroscopic biological properties, such as reproduction, locomotion and viral infection, are determined by the physics and chemistry of proteins and nucleic acids. Changes in biological function, in hereditary diseases like cystic fibrosis or sickle cell anemia, result from minute changes in individual proteins. Much larger changes in genome and protein structure are often tolerated without consequence. Understanding and exploiting these phenomena at the molecular level is the basis of new technology in the agricultural, energy and drug industries. The broad range of medical, social and political problems associated with the advances will be considered. We will attempt to distinguish real progress from fads and fashion. 
The weekly reading assignment will be Science and the Tuesday New York Times. This is a two-semester seminar for students in the Vagelos Molecular Life Sciences program that continues from fall 2010 with 0.5 credit unit each semester.

Designed to introduce students to the interdisciplinary field of Latin American and Latino Studies, this is a seminar oriented toward first and second year students. Readings will range widely, from scholarly work on the colonial world that followed from and pushed back against the "conquest"; to literary and artistic explorations of Latin American identities; to social scientists' explorations of how Latinos are changing the United States in the current generation.