Interdisciplinary Seminars & Courses
Previous Interdisciplinary Seminars
Fall 2005
Positive Organizational Scholarship and Positive Psychology: New Frontiers in the Study of Human Flourishing at Work
- PSYCH 808.006
- Jane E. Dutton and Barbara L. Fredrickson
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.
Fall 2004
Topics in Disability Studies
- RACKHAM 580 Section 1, ARCH 609, EDUC 580, ENGLISH 528, KINESLGY 505, PMR 580, SOCWK 572, WOMENSTD 590; and at Flint, HCR 570 and PUB 570
- Kristine Mulhorn & Tobin Siebers
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.
Gender and Mental Health and Illness
- Rackham 570; Section 1
- Jane Hassinger and Ori Ovi-Yonah
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, jahass@umich.edu, (734) 761-1015
Ruins of Modernity
- Rackham 570; Section 2
- Julia Hell and Andreas Schonle
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.
Winter 2004
World Performance Series
- Glenda Dickerson, Professor of Theater and Drama. School of Music
- Mbala Nkanga, Assistant Professor of Afroamerican and African Studies, LS&A, Assistant Professor of Theater and Drama, School of Music
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.
Previous Cantor Seminars
The following are previous courses in a series of interdisciplinary seminars founded to honor the legacy of former Provost and Dean of the Graduate School Nancy Cantor, with her cardinal commitments to diversity, interdisciplinarity, and public goods. Jointly sponsored by the Rackham School of Graduate Studies and the Provost’s Office.
Fall 2008
Rackham 575, History 698, English 627: Thinking About Culture
- Geoffrey H. Eley, Professor, Department of History
- Joshua Miller, Associate Professor, Department of English Language and Literature
The purpose of the seminar will be to examine a range of theoretical approaches to the study of “culture” across the disciplines, which are only partially and amorphously described by what we’ve come to know as “cultural studies.” We now think about culture in an intellectual environment both decisively reshaped by the cultural studies of the 1980s and early 1990s and un-moored by the ebbing of that movement. In complicated ways, it might be said, we are now living in the aftermath of cultural studies as a relatively coherent and purposive movement. Certain kinds of interdisciplinarity have palpably “won” across the humanities and social sciences, especially in this particular university, but the precise character and implications of that victory are no longer as clear as many of us imagined they might be. In that sense (to quote the first sentence of our abbreviated syllabus), we’d like this course to explore “the contemporary intellectual landscape of interdisciplinarity mapped and illuminated – but sometimes flattened and obscured – by what we now call the cultural turn.” Finally, within the constraints of time, manageability, and our own expertise we’ve tried to cast our net very widely across the possible literatures and approaches, but necessarily there’ll be many omissions and foreshortenings.
Winter 2006
Rackham 575: Thinking About Culture
- Geoffrey H. Eley, Professor, Department of History
This seminar will explore the contemporary intellectual landscape of interdisciplinarity mapped and illuminated — but sometimes flattened and obscured — by what we now call the "cultural turn." Most of the so-called human sciences have been influenced and even entirely recast by the remarkable popularity of cultural studies since the later 1980s. Some form of a turning to culture has become central to both contemporary social theory and historical understanding. Likewise, if anthropology has opened itself increasingly to approaches drawn from the literary and visual disciplines, those disciplines have in their turn sought to broaden and historicize their understandings of culture in far more material ways than before. Similar might be said of the "new art history," the "new photography," the extraordinary flourishing of film studies, the cross-disciplinary interest in visual culture, and so forth. Yet the concepts of culture running through these contemporary intellectual movements remain as rich, complex, and confusing as they are pervasive. Edward Thompson called culture "a clumpish term, which by gathering up so many activities and attributes into one common bundle may actually confuse or disguise discriminations that should be made between them."
In seeking to pin down this notoriously difficult and disorderly term, the seminar will seek to address a wide range of issues in cultural theory, cultural history, and cultural studies. As currently practiced, cultural analysis reaches from the arts, letters, and aesthetics, through some generalized notion of the life of the mind, to an extremely open-ended range of analytical domains. For example, these may include institutional, sociological, and social historical perspectives on the public sphere of artistic and intellectual activity, the educational system, other institutions of higher learning, the contexts and practices of the avant-garde, and so on (broadly speaking, everything encompassed by the "high-cultural" tradition of scholarship); the realm of symbolic and ritual meaning in a society’s forms of cohesion and overall ethos (the anthropological field of approaches); current social-science theories of agency and action; and what Terry Eagleton calls "the whole complex of signifying practices and symbolic processes in a particular society" (or Raymond Williams called "a whole way of life"), which has become the domain of cultural studies. Over the course of the term, each of these areas will be explored. We will also consider a range of theoretical debates about the place of "culture" in defining (or refusing) a (post)modern totality. What images of the whole do such debates propose, and why? What modes of connection are considered, or exploded, especially between socio-economic and cultural logics? What distinctive theories of the individual and of situated forms of subjectivity have emerged during the past several decades? How can we recognize the varying, contingent and constructed forms of identity and the self, while using theoretical lenses that presume those very categories as foundations? How do we describe the spaces in which new types of personhood can be produced? Finally, the seminar will explore the range of meanings entailed by concepts of modernism and postmodernism in cultural theory and the arts, focusing especially on the relations between the production of theory per se, political visions, and historical formations of society and culture. In all of these ways, the seminar will approach its subject as an exercise in the intellectual history of the present, embracing the impact of a wide array of theories, scholarship, and wider intellectual work across the disciplines between the 1960s and now.
Winter 2005
Rackham 575: The Museum and Public Culture
- James Steward, Professor, History of Art, School of Art & Design, Museum of Art
For the past 30 years, museums have substantially reconceived their purpose to move away from the isolated study and presentation of the objects they collect to a focus on the visitor experience. This shift has arguably brought with it increased engagement with issues at large in civic life—responding to motivations as diverse as a commitment to building attendance, to answering the desires of corporate and foundation sponsors, to a desire to be “relevant,” to a deeper understanding of the museum’s educational role. But is the museum still clinging to simplistic, Victorian notions of “improvement”? Has it done enough? Through both 1) guided philosophical investigations into areas such as cultural policy, the breakdown of the communal in American life, and the hunger for “authentic” experience, and 2) case studies illustrating how museums have engaged with issues ranging from diversity and globalization to reconciliation and restitution, this course will explore the efforts museums have made to insert themselves more actively into the public cultural dialogue and where they may have failed. Our goal will be to understand the best purposes museums might serve in public cultural life, and to envision new paths for these institutions in a time of troubled social and political cohesion.
The course is open to graduate students from all disciplines, with permission of the instructor. The course will be offered on a discussion-based seminar format so enrollment will be limited. Further information can be obtained by e-mailing jsteward@umich.edu.
Read more about the Cantor Seminar in The University Record
Winter 2004
Rackham 575.01: Doctoral Seminar on Education for a Diverse Democracy
- Barry Checkoway, Professor, Social Work and Urban Planning
- Pat Gurin, Professor Emerita, Psychology
- Earl Lewis, Dean of the Graduate School and, Professor of History, African-American Studies
This doctoral seminar will examine strategies for strengthening higher education for a diverse democracy. It will provide perspectives on the changing context of democracy and diversity, several strategies for increasing their integration in higher education, and specific initiatives for advancing this purpose in the research university. It will include discussions of student learning and teaching, scholarship of engagement, faculty roles and rewards, university-community partnerships, bridging diversity and democracy, and other topics.
Read more about the Cantor Seminar in The University Record