Arts and Global Change Major

This course explores the relationship between art making and entrepreneurship with an active focus on self-actualization. The course includes a historical survey of entrepreneurship in the arts through an investigation of the questions: What is art? What is business/entrepreneurship? and What is a commodity? Students will engage in discussions about historical artists/entrepreneurs going back to the Renaissance and will have the chance to learn about and meet with contemporary artists/ entrepreneurs. Students will also engage in a process of philosophical inquiry about the questions and concepts raised in the process of combining art with commodity. The course culminates with students investigating a personal, practical application of course concepts by developing an entrepreneurial business plan in the arts.

Cross-cultural conflicts permeate social landscapes worldwide and peacebuilding initiatives have embraced creativity in an attempt to bridge such conflicts. In this class, students explore the complex dynamics of conflict with a focus on evaluating the impact of the arts as a method of peacebuilding. Utilizing primary and secondary sources, the students analyze the strategic use of arts (music, visual art, dance, theater, and spoken word) as methods of promoting peace and conflict resolution in regions of political and social unrest.

This course provides a sustained cross-cultural experience in conjunction with local schools and community organizations. Students engage in personal creative development through various hands-on art projects. The course provides the opportunity for students to take their creative expression to the community in order to explore the power of art to bring people together, create connections across differences, and re-create community spaces. The course concludes with an art exhibit of student work to be shared with the Arcadia community, friends and family. The class will stretch students beyond the familiar as they meet new people and engage in individual and community art making.

This course explores war and violent conflict from a socio-cultural perspective that centers on students’ own critical interrogation of and re-telling of war stories. Not only do war and violent conflict result in humanitarian crises at the social level and atrocities and tragedy at the personal level, but they also fundamentally alter people's social worlds, life trajectories, imagined communities and understanding of their position in time and space. As economic and political structures become destabilized or changed, wars and violent conflicts radically rupture social realities in ways that outlive the original conflict. War and violent conflict reconstitute our identities and create new socio-political structures and cultural processes in which we are all implicated. Understanding this requires a personal interrogation of one’s own positionality and identity vis a vis historical and contemporary forms of political violence. Students will learn to critically read and analyze accounts of war and political violence as they show up in scholarship, fiction, journalism, creative nonfiction, and other forms of media. Students will also author their own accounts of their relationship with war and violent conflict. This course enhances and complicates understanding of what conflict is and what it means for people and social groups who are forced to endure it.

This course will teach students the essential skills to create, manage and publish a content-rich Wordpress blog/website around a hobby or professional interest or for a small business or non-profit organization. From choosing and customizing a theme and creating visual appeal to writing audience-centered content optimized for search engine optimization and promoting their content on social media, students will get hands-on experience in key facets of managing and maintaining a web presence. Students develop marketing strategies aimed at building subscribers and driving conversations and learn how to measure their success using analytics and KPIs. How to acquire a domain name, hosting options and legal and copyright issues for digital and web publishers will also be discussed.