FALL 2024
CCJ 4938-0004 International Human Rights Law & State Crime
Terry Coonan
This course addresses a dilemma that is centuries-old: what can be done when a nation state or society perpetrates or allows crimes against its own citizens? The course will survey the framework of international human rights law that has evolved since 1945 in response to systematic state crimes such as torture, genocide, and forced disappearances, as well as human rights violations such as lynchings, female genital cutting, and human trafficking (that can occur when state is corrupt or turns a blind eye). Each of the books and the course itself surveys the human rights movement from the all-important perspective of human rights victims.
ENC 4218, Visual Rhetoric: Space, Place and Human Rights
Tarez Samra Graban
T 3:05-6:05PM WMS 319
This course introduces you to the principles of visual rhetoric, especially as it is enacted across diverse media, shaped by multiple genres, and designed to achieve different goals with different audiences. You learn to analyze the rhetorical function of imagery, use images to respond to and organize arguments, and create images that operate rhetorically. In this particular class this semester, we will extend that work toward the spatial, investigating genres, sites, and problems where the visual and the spatial intersect. Taking our cues from rhetorical ecologists, political geographers, and visual and spatial theorists, we'll consider the socio-spatial dialectics of monuments, memorials, archives, urban planning maps, and other situated performances around human rights. We'll look closely at visual arguments made in and about defined spaces of both conflict and celebration, reading them not only for stated and hidden agendas, but also for imaginative possibilities of how those spaces could be read into the future.
IDH3140-0001/0002, Freedom and Religion: Muslim and Liberal Perspectives
Ross Moret
This course addresses issues such as free speech, sexual mores and identity, and compulsory military service. The course examines the ways that Muslims and liberals negotiate the notions of freedom and religion.
REL 3170-0001, Religious Ethics and Contemporary Moral Problems
Rosemary Kellison
We live in a diverse society in which people's ethical stances are often shaped at least in part by widely varying religious perspectives. How can and should we address pressing moral problems in this context? Religious ethics involves the study of ethical arguments and practices that emerge from particular religious communities and traditions. This course will offer an introduction to the study of religious ethics in the form of a comparative study of religious ethical approaches to specific moral problems. In particular, we will study Christian and Muslim responses to particular moral questions associated with the issues of climate change, gender, war, and religious diversity.
REL 4190-0001/5195-0002, Debates in Contemporary Ethics of War
Rosemary Kellison
T 1:20PM- 4:05PM LSB 0214
This course will analyze recent developments in the study of the ethics of war, especially in the just war tradition. Among the issues we will discuss are international humanitarian law, harm to civilians during war, the moral status of individual soldiers, moral injury, and nonviolent and pacifist critiques of war.
SPRING 2025
REL 3145, Gender and Religion
Rosemary Kellison
Focusing on examples from Christianity and Islam, this course will analyze how gender has been interpreted in religious communities, both historically and in the contemporary world. We will study how gender appears in religious texts and practices as well as the lived experiences of Christians and Muslims. A major focus of the course will be how both communities both conserve and adapt their traditional understandings of gender in response to new personal, social, and scientific developments.
REL 4190/5195, Comparative Religious Ethics
Rosemary Kellison
Students in this course will gain a sophisticated understanding of the history and development of the field of religious ethics, as well as some of the contemporary trends and debates that shape the field today.