PLAN, Manage Your Professional Development as a Graduate Student
In an effort to support and encourage interdisciplinary study within the graduate school, Rackham offers courses team-taught by faculty from different disciplines which are designed to bring together students from various fields of study in an effort to spark new ideas, explore new topics, and seed new interdisciplinary research projects.
This course invites students to explore the opportunities presented by two vibrant and emerging fields: Positive Psychology and Positive
Organizational Scholarship (POS).
Positive Psychology is a movement that challenges the field of psychology to reconsider the positive aspects of life. Instead of drawing exclusively from a disease model, it encourages research on strengths as well as weaknesses, on building the best things in life as well as on repairing the worst, and on making the lives of normal people fulfilling as well as on healing pathology. Topics of study include happiness, positive emotions, resilience, creativity, finding meaning, and optimism. One basic premise of positive psychology is that human flourishing, a life rich in purpose, relationships, and enjoyment -- will not result simply by curing pathology and eliminating behavioral and emotional problems. Rather, flourishing requires building and capitalizing on human strengths and capacities.
Positive Organizational Scholarship (POS) investigates collective and emergent processes of optimal functioning, at the levels of individuals in
organizations, groups in organizations, and organizations as a whole. POS focuses on the generative dynamics in organizing that enable individual and collective resilience, thriving, creativity, compassion and other indicators of human flourishing. POS is premised on the belief that enabling human flourishing in organizations involves unlocking or building potential resources, capabilities and capacities in people, groups and systems. The focus on generative dynamics leads researchers to consider the role of positive emotions, positive meaning, and positive relationships, among other mechanisms as keys to explaining human and collective flourishing. POS does not adopt one particular theory or framework, but, instead, draws from the full spectrum of organizational theories.
This course will challenge students to engage with the core topics and foundational theories of both POS and positive psychology, and to
investigate their interface. Coursework will involve reading, group exercises, and personal reflections. The seminar will draw from the wealth
of local resources at the University of Michigan, a founding center of POS and a leader in the positive psychology movement.
It is important that the students who take this course understand that we are embarking on an adventure into the co-creation of knowledge. POS and positive psychology are young disciplines, with new ideas and connections waiting to be discovered. We will be trying out new ideas, pushing ourselves with questions, and challenging each other to find, co-create and disseminate new knowledge. All students entering this course should chose to take it with this spirit of adventure and exploration. Our hope is that as you learn about these academic topics, you will also learn about how to optimize your own health and happiness and that of the communities and organizations around you.
Sponsored by the University of Michigan Initiative in Disability Studies (UMInDS)
“Topics in Disability Studies” provides an interdisciplinary approach to disability studies, including focus on the arts and humanities, natural and social sciences, and professional schools. Some topics include the history and cultural representation of disability, advocacy, health, rehabilitation, built environment, independent living, and public policy. The point of departure of the course is the idea that disability provides a critical framework that reorients the basic assumptions of various fields of knowledge, from political science to architecture, from engineering to art history, from genetics to law, from public policy to education, from biology to poetry, and so on. Disability Studies views people with disabilities not as objects but as producers of knowledge whose common history has generated a wide variety of art, music, literature, and science infused with the experience of disability. Students will have the opportunity to interact with visiting speakers from a broad range of fields. The course is offered for 1 or 3 credits. Accessible classroom with realtime captioning. For more information, please contact Tobin Siebers or Kristine Mulhorn.
In this seminar we will pursue a set of questions directed at the gendered practices and political frameworks in which contemporary mental health care currently exists. We will direct our attention to the experiences of women as subjects and objects of clinical understanding and intervention and situate mental health praxis in the social, economic and cultural contexts that give rise to emotional health and dysfunction. While taking a feminist, historical perspective on our subject/s, we will explore how cultures, at different periods of history, have developed and employed concepts of mental and moral fitness to assign, control and women’s roles, forms of self-expression, and behavior. An examination of multiple interactions among ideas and practices—derived primarily from western religious teachings (especially Christianity), from post-industrial US social welfare policies concerning mental and moral hygiene, and psychoanalytic understandings of personality development – will help explicate our gendered constructions of the “mentally healthy woman,” “well-adjusted woman,” and the “disturbed woman.”
The relationships among social/political/economic power, race/ethnicity and acculturation, and their impacts on women’s material experience and psychological adjustment will be examined. Ideas from feminist psychoanalytic thinkers, post-modern theorists and ethnographers, and contemporary mental health researchers (Judith Butler, Beverly Greene, Jane Flax, Karen Horney, Juliette Mitchell, Jean Baker Miller, Nancy Chodorow, Arthur Kleinman, Richard Castillo, Susan Nolen-Hoeksema, Carol Mowbray and others) will help us contextualize our understandings of women’s developing sense of identity, agency, sexuality, and well-being. The gendering of contemporary mental health practice will be explored, with emphases on the hegemonic medical frameworks for diagnosis and treatment (DSM, psychopharmaco-therapies, etc.) and the interactions of class status, poverty, and illness. Directed readings, discussions following guest presentations, and published narratives will help us illustrate the often obscure(d) relationships among virulent forms of prejudice, physical and sexual abuse, marginalization, gender role deviance, and violence in women’s lies and the potential for victim-blaming and pathologizing difference.
Participating faculty (among others): Jane Hassinger, Women's Studies and Social Work; Orli Aviyonah, Psychology, ; Susan Nolen-Hoeksema, Psychology and Psychiatry; Laura Kohn-Woods, Psychology; Julia S. Seng, Nursing/OB-Gyn; Sioban Harlow, Public Health, International Institute; Sheila Marcus, Psychiatry, Depression Center; Jonathan Metzl, Psychiatry and Women's Studies; Carol Mowbray, Social Work and Psychology
For more information and to enroll in this seminar, please contact: Jane Hassinger, , (734) 761-1015
9/11 represents a watershed in world history in more ways than one. The destruction of the world's most famous symbolic icon of modernity has brought to a catastrophic climax a debate about the ways in which modernity, broadly conceived, seems to have invented, framed, and produced ruins. Is there a possible elective affinity between ruins and modernity?
Ruins began to be perceived and preserved as ruins only during the Renaissance, when the awareness of historical discontinuities, the demise of ancient civilizations, raised the status of traces from the past. These traces--architectural remnants which had long lost their functionality and meaning--could be invested with various attributes, historical, aesthetic, political and otherwise. A desire for preservation in the interest of historical continuity barely concealed political exploitations of ruins, in particular in the context of revolutionary upheaval, colonial expansion, or totalitarian aesthetic ideology.
This course will explore this nexus between ruins and modernity from a broad inter-disciplinary perspective and with case studies relating to east and west, north and south. Theoretical readings by Benjamin, Simmel, Freud, Adorno and others.
Topics to be discussed include the representation of ruins in Piranesi and Robert; the uses of ruins in Romantic ideology, constructions of nationhood, and imperial self-legitimation; the productions of ruins in the revolutions of 1789 and 1917; the Nazi and Stalinist monumentalization of ruins; the German and Soviet receptions of WW2; the status of remnants of the Holocaust; ruins of history in 1989/91; September 11; and the re-allocation of industrial ruins in a postindustrial age.
This seminar wass designed for a selected group of MA, MFA and Ph.D. graduate students from the arts, humanities, and social sciences to acquire knowledge on major works of performance theories pertinent to their chosen subjects and to develop their research projects. The focus of the seminar was on the ways in which intellectual activity and academic scholarship are organized and enacted as genres of social performance, forms of imaginative identities, and modes of cultural productions.
