MCWP 50 Course Descriptions

What issues arise when the United States’ government gives citizens 90 days to marry their foreign fiancé and what does this tell us about immigration law, gendered expectations, and cultural stereotypes? Since 2014, TLC’s 90 Day Fiancé has enthralled viewers with their take on the challenges faced by international couples. Taking into account the politicized, familial, cultural, and financial barriers faced by these couples, this course examines issues such as: the private and public role and romanticization of marriage; uses of technology in markets of desirability; implicit biases in the US immigration system; reality television and documentary storytelling; and racialized and gendered stereotypes. While the 90 Day Fiancé offers a useful framework, students may create their own research projects along any of the aforementioned categories. In keeping with the goals of MCWP 50, we will work to understand academic arguments’ structures while introducing and supporting your own research-based argument about an issue relevant to this course topic.

The interdisciplinary field of bioethics grapples with conflicts that arise in medical practice, such as patients’ refusal of life-saving treatment or how to allocate scarce resources such as organs. It also considers dilemmas that emerge in response to new biotechnologies, such as stem-cell research, human genetic engineering, and prenatal diagnostics. In this course, we will explore some of the ethical and legal questions that arise in healthcare, medical research, and the use of biotechnology and bioengineering. In keeping with the goals and requirements of MCWP 50, you will examine arguments about this topic in an effort to understand their structures while introducing and supporting your own informed research-based argument about an issue relevant to the course topic.

Everyone says we need to stop crime, but crime seems to happen whether we want it to or not. Some even make a living from it. How we treat those who have broken rules has changed over time as our morals and definitions of crimes have evolved.

In this course, we will consider how modern society identifies and reacts to criminals and how punishment is determined by examining a variety of scholarly arguments that cross crime with subjects such as the US Justice System, terrorism, revenge, class, gender, and pop culture.

Upwards of 43 million Americans are currently experiencing some kind of physical, cognitive, or sensory impairment, and that number is on the rise. And yet despite the pervasiveness of these kinds of disabilities among the U.S. population, and despite the fact that disabled people comprise one of the largest U.S. minority groups, disabled figures are often stereotyped in movies, comic books, commercials, novels, and on television shows, as being deserving of the viewer’s pity, or as being excessively courageous because of their ability to overcome what is often portrayed as a troubled or difficult existence. These stereotypes mark disabled people as ‘other’, thus marginalizing an already marginalized population. In this course, we will examine popular representations of disability to uncover assumptions about the normal or ideal body. We will read scholarship from a variety of perspectives that consider impairments in relation to history, nationality, race, gender, and sexuality. In the process, students will apply this scholarship—and their own independent research—to a popular cultural form with the objective of making and defending an argument about disability in a research paper.

The acronym BIPOC, which stands for “Black, Indigenous, and People of Color,” is increasingly deployed by activists, journalists, and scholars in broader conversations about systemic racism, social justice, and structural inequality.  While many use this term to highlight shared connections between the experiences of Black and Indigenous peoples, some critics argue that it is a term with the ability to obscure, rather than elevate, the unique experiences of these groups within the United States, as well as their differences.  In this course, we will explore issues central to Indigenous peoples and communities in the 21st century.  We will explore debates about land, culture, health care, resource management, economic development, tribal sovereignty, and the ongoing legacies of America’s colonial past. In keeping with the goals of MCWP 50, students will examine arguments by scholars and others in an effort to understand their structures while researching and writing an original, research-based argument about an issue relevant to the course topic.

With movements such as #OscarsSoWhite, Popular Culture institutions like Hollywood are increasingly critiqued for their nefarious lack of diversity, inclusion, and equity.  This course questions the historical legacies, and contemporary violences, of ideological and economic practices that have often marginalized and exploited people of color, LGBTQIA+ communities, and people with disabilities.  Focusing on media that blend narratives with visuals--film, television, commercials, public speeches, concerts, and music videos--students in this course will interrogate how Popular Culture has been, or can be, leveraged in the building or dismantling of systemic oppressions. Our class will examine the arguments and performances of scholars and public figures in our investigation of how Popular Culture renews, revises, and resists institutional and individual investments in white, wealthy, patriarchal, heteronormative, able-bodied privileges.   In keeping with the goals and requirements of MCWP 50, we will work to understand the arguments’ structures while introducing and supporting your own informed research-based argument about an issue relevant to this course topic.  

According to the CDC, Black individuals are approximately five times more likely to be hospitalized by—and twice as likely to die—from COVID-19 than their white counterparts. While these statistics are the most pressing to our current moment, similar ratios exist throughout the healthcare system, showing Black Americans to be dying from treatable illnesses at disproportionate rates. Access to healthcare in America is an economic privilege. As a result, BIPOC are far less likely to receive quality care. Moreover, healthcare professionals consistently dismiss or discredit complaints by marginalized communities, a habit intricately tied to the anti-Black, misogynist, and xenophobic roots of the American Medical Industrial Complex (MIC). In this course, we will examine how race, gender, and sexuality affect access to care in the MIC. We will read scholarship from a variety of perspectives that consider both the historical foundation for and contemporary perpetuation of these disparities. Students will apply this scholarship—and their own independent research—with the objective of making and defending an original focused argument about Anti-Blackness in the MIC in a research paper.

Photography is often conceived as simply a mode for (re)presenting the “real.” However, in this course, we will approach the phenomenon of photography as a means to question the act of documentation itself. This topic explores the discourses surrounding photography in contexts ranging from ethnography to social documentation, policing, medical imaging, portraiture, and the visual arts. We will ask such questions as: in what ways does photography intersect culture? How might photography reinforce or undermine social and historical dynamics? In this course, students will be given the opportunity to research and analyze the histories that lay dormant beneath the surface of images. In keeping with the goals and requirements of MCWP 50, students will examine a variety of arguments related to the course topic in an effort to understand their contents and structure. Students will be asked to introduce and support their own informed research-based argument about an issue relevant to the course themes.

Movies, music, TV, books, visual art — how do you decide which of it is any good? Importantly, where do those debates actually occur, how do various media shape these discourses, and why should it matter? Students in this course will read texts from media studies and the humanities about the social maintenance of standards for art and culture, particularly the sanctioned role of the arts critic and ways that online media have helped decentralize that gatekeeping role with varying impacts on culture’s creators, consumers, and capitalists. According to the mission of MCWP 50, these arguments will be examined in order to understand their structure and synthesize their claims before students craft their own informed, research-based argument about the roles of arts criticism in society.