Current Grand Challenge Seminars
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66-133 Grand Challenge First-Year Seminar: Race and Identity in the US
Race matters. How have social institutions and historical factors led to the belief systems and stereotypes that shape how race is experienced in American society, and how do these belief systems affect the way individuals come to view and define themselves and others?…
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66-136 Grand Challenge First-Year Seminar: Becoming Resilient in Challenging Times
What does it mean to be resilient — emotionally, relationally and collectively — in the face of disruption, uncertainty or change? In this course, we define resilience as an intersectional capacity of individuals, communities and systems to adapt,…
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66-141 Grand Challenge First-Year Seminar: Freedom of Speech & Academic Freedom
This Grand Challenge course offers a comprehensive exploration of the principles, controversies and significance of freedom of speech (FOS) and academic freedom (AF). By exploring actual and hypothetical cases, students will analyze the complex dilemmas that arise when we…
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66-143 Grand Challenge First-Year Seminar: Realizing Human Rights: The Challenge of Achieving Justice
This course will introduce first year students to the challenge of protecting and promoting human rights in a world fraught with conflict, political strife, economic exploitation, and environmental hazards. We will focus on how human rights frameworks can be used to make…
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66-144 Grand Challenge First-Year Seminar: In Transit: Exile, Migration, and Culture
In this course, we will examine the representation and self-representation of refugees and exiles through the multiple disciplinary lenses of, e.g., history, literature, philosophy, anthropology,and political science. This is a highly relevant topic, since the world is…
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66-146 Grand Challenge First-Year Seminar: From Pandemics to Politics: Modeling Complex Social Systems
Most of the major issues confronting humanity — such as injustice, discrimination, climate change, financial collapse, ecosystem survival and disease epidemics — are the result of complex social systems. Such systems have multiple interacting…
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66-147 Grand Challenge First-Year Seminar: (Mis)Trust in Research
Why is there declining public trust in research and expertise? What kinds of skills are needed to assess the quality of research, and how prevalent are they in the general public? Finally, what can experts do to address the erosion of trust in research?
This course will…
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66-152 Grand Challenge First-Year Seminar: Gender: Contemporary Issues
In recognition of the ubiquity of gender in politics, this course fosters a constructive dialogue on several contemporary debates on issues of gender. These issues will be addressed from a multi-disciplinary perspective, in particular humanistic and social psychological…
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66-153 Grand Challenge First-Year Seminar: TL;DR: Cultures and Challenges of Reading
Recent headlines (and data) suggest we have a growing reading problem. How much and well we read is increasingly a question, in and out of the classroom, from concerns about whether students have ever read a novel to shifting understandings of literacy in the age of AI. At…
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66-154 Grand Challenge First-Year Seminar: AI, Humanity, and the Future of Knowledge and Creativity
This course addresses the complex challenge of understanding the interplay between artificial intelligence (AI), humanity and the humanities. It examines how AI transforms humanity’s understanding of intelligence, creativity and knowledge at both individual and…
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66-155 Grand Challenge First-Year Seminar: Sports Betting, Highs and Lows: Your Brain on Stats
The Supreme Court’s 2018 decision in Murphy v. National Collegiate Athletic Association struck down the federal ban on sports betting. Since then, the United States sports betting industry has rapidly grown into a $10 billion industry. By 2023, 67% of all college…
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66-156 Grand Challenge First-Year Seminar: Authorship at Work: AI and Ethics
Course description forthcoming