Professor: Tobin Hansen
4 credits
This course examines close human relationships. We will question how people make their lives together—or desire to—through sharing or longing to share. We will examine the following questions (and others): How do relationships emerge, change, become remade, strengthen, drift, and fray? How do social identities—e.g., race, gender, sexuality, and social class—and regional contexts shape people’s understandings and experiences of close human relationships? And what are the implications of human relationships for the legal and political structures and cultural contexts within which, or outside of which, they exist?
We will engage the liberal arts through reading, writing, discussion, and research. The course utilizes various liberal arts approaches, within and across scholarly disciplines, to explore understandings of human entanglements and, simultaneously, better understand the intellectual cultures of the liberal arts and their potential for understanding big ideas and solving big problems.