Semester Global Courses

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ARC GU4250 Colonial Practices: Architecture as a Form of Knowledge: The seminar “Colonial Practices” considers colonial practices through architectures, institutions, and ecologies around the world. Each week, we study aesthetic and spatial practices alongside Black and Brown consciousness, Feminist, Indigenous, and anticolonial and decolonial theory. The places around which maps have been constructed, across which migrants have moved, and within which insurgents have configured form the intellectual problems of this course and strategic positions from which to sense, write, and think with the constructed environment. To study de/colonial practices using embodied methods across forms of difference, the course incorporates collaboration between students and faculty at Barnard College and Columbia University in New York, the Technical University of Kenya (TUK) in Nairobi, and the School of Environment and Architecture (SEA) in Mumbai. Participants engage in online discussion of shared readings in preparation for convening in Nairobi mid-semester in a travel-based module. The travel module, titled “Architecture as a Form of Knowledge,” involves intensive study with artists, architects, urbanists, and scholars, using architecture (broadly defined) as a basis for research methods of historical sites and institutions around the city.  Please note that travel is pending institutional approval.

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EESC BC3029 Bermuda Case Studies in Environmental Sustainability: This course focuses on the ecology, geology, and sustainability of Bermuda. Students will explore the local flora, fauna, geology and hydrology of various habitats in the context of environmental change brought on by issues such as climate change, invasive species, disease, and development. Classes will meet during the spring semester at Barnard in preparation for a field trip to Bermuda for five days during spring break (3/13/-3/18/2023).

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GERM BC3022 Vienna Stories: Filming Identities and Voices: In this course students explore film, podcasts and digital technology as tools for analyzing culture, language and identity. Integrated in this course is an in-person, on-site segment in one of Europe’s most diverse cities: Vienna, Austria. During a one-week stay in Vienna during the spring break, students will put their German-language, filming and digital technology skills to use and gather ethnographic material to produce a short German-language documentary film on identity, the notion of homeland, and stereotypes. Live encounters with native Viennese as well as with recent migrants from Turkey, Ukraine, Poland, former Yugoslavia, and/or Syria in formal and informal settings and a field study project will serve as the main sources for the video.

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ARC UN 3211 Advanced Architectural Research & Design: Design for Diplomacy examines embassy buildings. After an architectural review of selected historical, contemporary and newly commissioned embassies around the world, our focus for the studio projects will be on the US consulate in Casablanca, as an in-depth case study. We will visit a newly designed embassy compound under construction there, and students will propose collaborative alternative design proposals for the same site. Exploring a range of concerns, including national representation, security and openness, cultural exchange, citizenship, etc., we will explore how architectural design of an embassy, in a specific city, negotiates these complex issues. Additionally, Reimagining embassies as crucial diplomatic interfaces in foreign host cities, we will propose how urgent global challenges, such as climate crises or migration, might reshape these important geo-political and governmental institutions.

The studio integrates a trip to Casablanca and other cities in Morocco, where we will visit architecturally significant sites, including examples of multi-cultural traditional historical buildings as well as modern architecture in post-colonial Morocco. Our studio projects will include research assignments and speculative architectural design projects. 

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