How can we co-produce – with the Planet – thriving futures? Travels back in time to understand how we got to where we are, and forward in time to define scenarios where well-being is attainable for all. Uses virtual reality, simulations, design challenges and other innovative approaches to consider system interdependencies and reciprocity, legacies of past values and decision-making, envisioning and designing alternative futures, and evaluation of implications.
This course explores how rivers shape political alliances, ecological consciousness, and international law in Europe. Focusing on the Rhine and Danube, students investigate how water has influenced diplomacy, technological development, and environmental crises across borders. We examine how pollution, drought, and hydroelectric projects require collaborative governance, and how decisions in one country ripple into others downstream. Through literature, film, history, and policy documents, students gain a deep understanding of the political ecologies of shared waterways. Topics include Cold War infrastructure, EU sustainability goals, environmental justice, and cultural memory of rivers in both Western and Eastern Europe. Case studies on Environmental disasters on the Rhine, the Iron Gates dam, and the Danube Delta help students understand the challenges and promises of transnational cooperation in a time of ecological uncertainty. No prior knowledge is required.
This course examines the political impact of technology in Central and Eastern European nations of the former Eastern Bloc, from the Cold War to the digital present, and focuses on how technology reflects and shapes identity, power, and resistance. Through interdisciplinary approaches, we explore how societies responded to technological change; and how technology, or its absence, shaped visions of the future. Topics include the symbolism of the space race, limited access to entertainment, the dissident media hero, and the role of communication technologies like telephones and satellites in bridging or reinforcing ideological divides. A key focus is the use of surveillance technologies under totalitarian regimes and their lasting effects on privacy, freedom, and daily life. We also trace post-1989 transformations, including the rise of online shopping and digital education, the cultural impact of social media and TikTok, and current debates around data exposure and algorithmic influence.
This interdisciplinary course explores the intersections of ecology and power across Eastern and Central Europe, where authoritarian regimes sought to control not only people, but also the land itself. From collectivized agriculture to state-engineered scarcity, we’ll examine how landscapes and kitchens alike became contested spaces of survival, resistance, and imagination. This course will trace how scarcity affected everyday life and social interactions, and how official narratives responded to ecological and political constraints by mourning what was lost and by creating visions for better futures. As we move from the shortages and surveillance of the communist era into the environmental aftermath of post-1989 transitions, we will consider how unruly ecologies (abandoned farms, overgrown gardens, polluted fields and rivers) became unlikely sites of refuge, critique, and hopeful expectation.
In present-day discourse we commonly hear supporters of this or that platform, party, or politician accuse their opponents of being on the “wrong side of history.” Behind this rhetoric is a belief that history has a trajectory, that over time the human experience changes from worse to better as good ideas, institutions, and practices replace bad ones. This is to say that faith in progress undergirds the various conceptualizations of a “right side of history.” From where does this trust in historical progress spring? And is it warranted? If so, how does positive change come about? Is it fate or the hand of God at play? Is it the work of so-called great men of history? Is it a result of successive class struggles? If, on the other hand, we are wrong to expect a better future, then toward what should we aspire, and why? In this course, we will examine competing theories of history and their interplay with political thought. We will start by looking at major texts of the late Enlightenment and end by considering narratives of progress in light of World Wars I and II. Figures whose work we will read include Voltaire, Immanuel Kant, G.W.F. Hegel, Karl Marx, and Friedrich Nietzsche.