Courses

Interested in diving deeper into the themes of the 2023 On the Same Page selection Crip Camp? Consider enrolling in one or more of the following courses.

Instructors: If you are teaching a course in fall 2023 or spring 2024 that touches on the themes of Crip Camp, let us know!

Three people talking
UC Berkeley librarian Corliss Lee (left) speaks with Crip Camp filmmaker Nicole Newnham (center) and disability activist Denise Jacobson (right) at a reception in Durant Hall. Photo by Brittany Hosea-Small (2023)

Featured Courses (Fall 2023)

L&S 10: The On The Same Page Course
Aileen Liu
Class#: 23251

L&S 10 is a course for new students (first-year admits or transfers) who would like to engage with the On the Same Page book or theme for their year in a more in-depth way than the average student might. They will take full advantage of the On the Same Page events and programming planned for the fall of each year, and will enjoy opportunities to discuss the book or theme with faculty and fellow students.

“I was hoping that the course would offer new perspective and food for thought—and it absolutely did! I really loved the experience of this class start to finish, from reading this awesome book, to our in-class discussions, to the thought-provoking events hosted throughout the semester. Amazing class!”

“I signed up for the course because I thought it would be a good way to meet other people at Berkeley since I am a freshman. My hope was realized, I got to meet some new people and I even recommended the class to some friends that I met at the beginning of the semester.“

“As a transfer student, I was highly interested in the book chosen, the activities assigned to the course, and the chance to engage with the local community through the course. I thought it was a perfect gateway to both UC Berkeley and Berkeley. I was right! It’s been my favorite course this semester.”

UGIS 110: Introduction To Disability Studies
Emily Nusbaum
Class#: 23027

This course focuses on the social and personal meaning of disability and chronic illness. We will explore definitions and conceptual models for the study of disability, the history of disabled people, bio-ethical perspectives, the depiction of disability in literature and the arts, public attitudes, and legal and social policies. The course will investigate the interaction of disability with social factors such as gender, sexual orientation, race, ethnicity, and class. The course is for students with and without disabilities, and may be of special interest to students preparing for careers in the health professions, education, law, architecture, social work, or gerontology.

ANTHRO 189: Disability Ethnography And Design
Karen Nakamura
Class#: 30802

Various topics covering current research theory, method; issues of social and cultural concern; culture change, conflict, and adaptation. May combine more than one subdiscipline of Anthropology.

Additional Courses (Fall 2023)

ART 118: Advanced Drawing: Remixing The Figure
Indira Martina Morre
Class#: 23128

This studio course investigates representations of the human body across different periods and locations to explore what it means to depict the body in the 21st Century. How do dominant signifiers and various intersections of race, gender, class, religion, sexuality, and disability influence the rendering and image reception of human bodies? The studio component of the course will work from live models as well as creating full body self-portraits that challenge the parameters of the canon and conventional expectations. We will explore drawing across all mediums through art history lectures, student-led discussions, in-class prompts, field trips, and visiting artists.

Prerequisites: ART 12 or by permission of instructor.

ANTHRO 115: Introduction To Medical Anthropology
Corinne P Hayden
Class#: 30737

Cultural, psychological, and biological aspects of the definitions, causes, symptoms, and treatment of illness. Comparative study of medical systems, practitioners, and patients.

COLWRIT R4A 006: Reading and Composition– Living on the Edge of Life and Death
Michelle Baptiste
Class#: 26556

ENROLLMENT IS RESTRICTED TO STUDENTS WHOSE FIRST OR PRIMARY LANGUAGE IS NOT ENGLISH. We’ll delve into a new course theme – “Living on the Edge of Life & Death” as we learn about people pushed to the brink and how they have responded across the past 100 years–from members of the Osage Nation in the 1920s facing murder to disability rights advocates in the 1970s fighting for their own civil rights legislation. You’ll view films and read books–and write about both. We’ll view UC Berkeley’s On the Same Page documentary film: Newnham & LeBrecht’s 2020 Crip Camp during the Thursday, September 14th campus-wide screening and conversation with the filmmakers from 4-7pm. Then, after reading Grann’s 2017 history-laden true crime book by the same name, we’ll go as a class to a movie theater to view the Hollywood debut of Martin Scorseses’ 2023 Killers of the Flower Moon starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Lily Gladstone, Rose Marie Cardinal, & Robert De Niro. You’ll analyze other indigenous-focused films (Frozen River, Smoke Signals, and 100 Years) and diverse written texts (Anzaldua, Gardner, Hogan, Jordan, Zinn, and more) as you work toward creating and publishing your own multimodal capstone project.

COLWRIT R4A 008: Reading and Composition – Living on the Edge of Life and Death
Michelle Baptiste
Class#: 26558

We’ll delve into a new course theme – “Living on the Edge of Life & Death” as we learn about people pushed to the brink and how they have responded across the past 100 years–from members of the Osage Nation in the 1920s facing murder to disability rights advocates in the 1970s fighting for their own civil rights legislation. You’ll view films and read books–and write about both. We’ll view UC Berkeley’s On the Same Page documentary film: Newnham & LeBrecht’s 2020 Crip Camp during the Thursday, September 14th campus-wide screening and conversation with the filmmakers from 4-7pm. Then, after reading Grann’s 2017 history-laden true crime book by the same name, we’ll go as a class to a movie theater to view the Hollywood debut of Martin Scorseses’ 2023 Killers of the Flower Moon starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Lily Gladstone, Rose Marie Cardinal, & Robert De Niro. You’ll analyze other indigenous-focused films (Frozen River, Smoke Signals, and 100 Years) and diverse written texts (Anzaldua, Gardner, Hogan, Jordan, Zinn, and more) as you work toward creating and publishing your own multimodal capstone project.

XENGLIS R1A 009: Reading and Composition – Voices from the Margins
Cathleen Small
Class#: 30380

FPF Thread: Social Justice. In this course, we’ll explore the importance of hearing from voices that have historically been silenced. For years, we have read about marginalized groups through the voices of authors who do not share the background they’re writing about. While analyzing works from authors who themselves are part of the community they write about, we’ll explore themes of racism, ableism, poverty, mental health, and gender and sexual identity.

XENGLIS R1A 010: Reading and Composition – Voices from the Margins
Cathleen Small
Class#: 30381

FPF Thread: Social Justice. In this course, we’ll explore the importance of hearing from voices that have historically been silenced. For years, we have read about marginalized groups through the voices of authors who do not share the background they’re writing about. While analyzing works from authors who themselves are part of the community they write about, we’ll explore themes of racism, ableism, poverty, mental health, and gender and sexual identity.

EDUC 39D: Neurodiversity: Scholarship, Politics And Culture
Laura Sterponi
Class#: 32211

This seminar examines the emerging concepts of neurodiversity and neurodivergence—terms originally developed by autistic activists and self-advocates seeking to depathologize autism and other forms of neurological, mental, and cognitive difference. Lectures and readings will incorporate perspectives from a wide range of research programs, including neuroscience, disability studies, anthropology, rhetoric, and critical theory. Weekly dialogues with guest speakers will add liveliness to ideas and offer directions for advocacy and activism.

ENGLISH 100: Memoir And Memory
Elizabeth Abel
Class#: 25332

How do memoir and memory construct one another? What distinguishes a genre that bleeds easily into autobiography on one side and fiction on the other? What strategies enable a first-person account to enlist the curiosity of strangers? Why and how do formal experiments disrupt a linear narrative sequence? These are some of the questions we will ask as we investigate both the evolution of a genre that begins with Saint Augustine and its diversification through the multiplying cultural filters of the present.

Our readings will range across a spectrum of subgenres: the confessional memoir, the prison memoir, the queer memoir, the disability memoir, the immigrant memoir, the trauma memoir, and the graphic memoir. Our syllabus will include texts by St. Augustine, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Virginia Woolf, Vladimir Nabokov, Primo Levi, Eldridge Cleaver, Lucy Grealy, Audre Lorde, Cherrie Moraga, and Ruth Kluger. There will also be a course reader of essays about the neurophysiology of memory and the history and craft of a genre that has become pre-eminent in our times. Written assignments will include several critical essays and a first-hand exploration of the challenges of memoir writing through a brief creative undertaking.

ENGLISH 174: Literature And History: The Seventies
Scott Andrew Saul
Class#: 26003

As one writer quipped, it was the worst of times, it was the worst of times. “The Seventies” routinely come in for mockery as an era of bad taste — an era when enormous sideburns, leisure suits, extra-wide bell bottoms, pet rocks, and “diet” mackerel pudding made sense to all too many Americans. Even at the time, the 1970s were known as the decade when “it seemed like nothing happened.”

Yet we can see now that the ’70s was a time of great cultural renaissance and political ferment. It gave us the New Hollywood of Scorcese, Coppola and others; the “New Journalism” of Michael Herr, Joan Didion, and others; the music of funk, disco, punk and New Wave; the postmodern comedy of Saturday Night Live and the postmodern drama of Off-Off-Broadway; and a great range of literary fiction written by women authors from Ursula LeGuin and Margaret Atwood to Toni Morrison and Maxine Hong Kingston.

Rather than simply being a transitional period between the “liberal” 1960s and “conservative” 1980s, the ’70s were in fact a period of intense political realignment, with the United States roiled by the oil crisis, the fall of Nixon and the fall of Saigon; by the advent of women’s liberation, gay liberation, and environmentalism as mass grassroots movements; and by the rise of the Sunbelt and the dawning of the conservative revolution. One might even say that the ’70s were the most interesting decade of the post-WWII era — the period when the freedom dreams of the ‘60s were most intensely fulfilled even as a resurgent conservative movement challenged their underlying vision.

Lastly, the ’70s may be the decade closest to our own contemporary moment. We will consider how the roots of our current predicament lie in the earlier decade — with its backlash against movements for racial justice and gender equality, its gun culture, its corruption of the political process, its suspicion of the state, its transition to a postindustrial economy, its widening inequality, its fetish for self-fulfillment, and its fascination with the appeal of instant celebrity. We will, in turn, reflect on how Americans in the ’70s struggled with many of the dilemmas that we face now.

GWS 129: Bodies And Boundaries
Barbara A Barnes
Class#: 23770

Examines gender and embodiment in interdisciplinary transnational perspective. The human body as both a source of pleasure and as a site of coercion, which expresses individuality and reflects social worlds. Looks at bodies as gendered, raced, disabled/able-bodied, young or old, rich or poor, fat or thin, commodity or inalienable. Considers masculinity, women’s bodies, sexuality, sports, clothing, bodies constrained, in leisure, at work, in nation-building, at war, and as feminist theory.

GWS 130AC: Gender, Race, Nation, And Health
Brooke Lober
Class#: 30982

Examines the role of gender in health care status, in definitions and experiences of health, and in practices of medicine. Feminist perspectives on health care disparities, the medicalization of society, and transnational processes relating to health. Gender will be considered in dynamic interaction with race, ethnicity, sexuality, immigration status, religion, nation, age, and disability, and in both urban and rural settings.

LEGALST 137: Comparative Equality Law
Lindsay Elizabeth Harris
Class#: 25359

Comparative Equality Law uses a problem-based approach to examine how the law protects equality rights in different jurisdictions. The course will comparatively examine US, European, and other national, regional and international legal systems (including those of India, Brazil, Colombia, Canada and South Africa) and provide a global overview of legal protection from and legal responses to inequalities. The course covers 5 topic modules: Theories and sources of equality law; Employment discrimination law (race, sex, age, disability, LGBTQ+); Secularism, human rights and the legal rights of religious minorities; Sexual harassment/Violence; Affirmative action (race, caste, origin), and gender parity.

LEGALST 159: Law & Sexuality
Sonia Katyal
Class#: 25989

This course focuses on the legal regulation of sexuality, and the social and historical norms and frameworks that affect its intersection with sex, gender, race, disability, and class. We will critically examine how the law shapes sexuality and how sexuality shapes the law. Our subject matter is mostly constitutional, covering sexuality’s intersection with privacy, freedom of expression, gender identity and expression, equal protection, reproduction, kinship, and family formation, among other subjects. We will study case law, legal articles, and other texts (including visual works) that critically engage issues of sexuality, citizenship, nationhood, religion, and the public and private spheres domestically and internationally.

LINGUIS 1A: American Sign Language I
Sherry L Hicks
Class#: 21892

Introduction of the fundamentals of American Sign Language: comprehension skills, grammatical structures, practice in the production aspects of the language, and exposure to Deaf culture.

PSYCH 22: Neurons in Context
Linda Wilbrecht

This course will introduce students to the basics of neurobiology while exploring how experience of adversity, enrichment, and other variables can shape brain development and behavior. We will survey the basic biology of neurons, mechanisms underlying experience dependent plasticity, hormones, and responses to different forms of stress and adversity. Students will spend time discussing how their knowledge of neurobiology can be integrated with their knowledge of history, sociology, and philosophy and how we can design new strategies to support the development of youth.

PSYCH 131: Developmental Psychopathology
Qing Zhou
Class#: 26077

This course will discuss linkages between developmental processes and child psychopathology. Included will be discussion of cognitive impairments in children, including learning disabilities and mental retardation; internalizing disorders, such as anxiety, withdrawal, and depression; externalizing disorders, such as attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder and conduct disorder; and child abuse and neglect. Psychobiological, familial, legal, and societal factors will be emphasized.

SOCIOL C115: Sociology Of Health And Medicine
Marina Caitlin M Daniel
Class#: 30765

This course provides an introduction to core topics in the sociology of health and illness, with an emphasis on the social and cultural structuring of health, illness, and health care. Specific topics include: 1) the social determinants of health and health disparities; 2) the social construction and production of health; 3) the medical profession; 4) the political economy of health; and 5) activism and alternatives.

SOCIOL 169C 002: Cross-Cultural Communications
Marina Romani
Class#: 19010

This course is designed to interrogate different aspects of cross-cultural communication and cultural differences: family life, social relationships, the workplace, government, education, gender, romance, and religion. Throughout exploring these topics, we will strive to engage in personal self-reflection, hands-on experience, and to understand the connections to larger social structures. The cornerstone of the course is being involved in a cultural subgroup that you are not familiar with in or around the East Bay (e.g. student group, church, volunteer organization, internship, etc.). You will be expected to join this co-culture regularly (weekly or biweekly) throughout the semester and write a final paper on the experience.

SOCIOL 190 002: Reproductive Health, Politics, And Inequalities
Instructor TBA
Class#: 16943

This course grounds the biological process of human reproduction in social processes and institutions. We will examine social scientific research on a wide range of reproductive topics, including contraception, abortion, assisted reproductive technologies, pregnancy, and birth. We will discuss how the politics of reproduction are shaped by the intersecting inequalities of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, class, disability, and nationality. This course includes readings about reproduction around the globe with particular attention to the current US context.

THEATER R1A 003: Performance: Writing and Research: Acts of Solidarity
Chelsea M Gregory
Class#: 30664

In this course we will examine acts of solidarity through performance, and we will watch and analyze performances of solidarity that have taken place in formal theater spaces as well as in public spaces such as the streets, in front of prisons and other oppressive institutions, in war zones, in work places, in TV and film, and on social media. We will also consider our own personal and social identities as they relate to the conversations we are having, and discuss performances of solidarity that we have seen or experienced firsthand. Through dialogue and writing we will explore the efficacy of these performances, as well as the distinction between “performative” activism and active solidarity. As we explore these ideas together, the course will also support you in developing the reading and writing skills necessary to succeed in this course and beyond. These skills will help you develop your critical thinking, which will be of benefit in both your life and academic work. To develop these skills we will engage in discussion of readings and performances, develop written responses to these materials, original written work, and offer guided peer feedback. You will strengthen all of the steps of your writing process from formulating a topic and finding sources to outlining, drafting, and revising a paper.