Network Collaborative Courses Archive

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A Lexicon of Migration

This course examines the history of migration from local, national, and global perspectives, with particular emphasis on the economic and political developments that have produced specific forms of mobility in the Americas, Europe, and the Middle East. It aims to provide students with the tools to engage critically with many of the concepts and buzzwords—among them “asylum,” “border,” “belonging,” “citizenship,” and “illegality”—that define contemporary public debates.

This course counts toward the Human Rights certificate.

Al-Quds Bard College offers this course under the name "Humanitarian Spaces".

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Building a Foundation: Key Teaching Strategies

This course will include teachers and professors from MAT Programs across the Bard network. Students will participate in four two-week modules designed to cover foundational teaching strategies such as differentiation, assessment, metacognition, educational technology, and cooperative learning. As a result of the readings, discussion, and class sessions, students will be able to design instructional components that they can use in your classroom.

Al-Quds University/Al-Quds Bard offers this course under the name "Theory and Practice of Teaching".
American University of Central Asia offers this course under the name "Teaching Practicum".
Bard College offers this course under the name "Theory and Practice of Teaching".

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Children's Rights

This course explores children as the subjects of government action and agents in their own right. Children are both specifically vulnerable and highly symbolic figures, requiring extra protection and lending themselves to specific kinds of policy and advocacy. We will explore the meanings of children’s rights in local and international contexts, and the challenges of promoting and protecting them, whether they pertain to health, education or care. Students will become familiar with the fundamental international conventions and organizations dedicated to children’s rights, including the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) and UNICEF. All sections of the class will explore the foundations of children’s rights through examination of the major principles enshrined in the CRC, different aspects of child rights (health, food, housing, education, environment etc) and their violation (child soldiers; unlawful detention, deportation and transfer, identity theft, etc), but may do so in different ways, and with different emphasis.

This network course includes an online section that is open to enrollment to OSUN students across the network. Please visit the OSUN Online Courses for further information.

This course counts toward the Human Rights certificate.

American University of Central Asia offers this course under the name "Child Rights Protection".
Al-Quds Bard College offers this course under the name "Women Children and Minority Rights".

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Chronicle Film Production

Adapted from the title of Edgar Morin and Jean Rouch’s famous 1960 Paris documentary "Chronicle of a Summer," this joint film production course is taught simultaneously on several campuses, including Bard Annandale, AUCA, Al-Quds, and OFF University in Istanbul, and creates a cinematic chronicle of each locality. The theme of these synchronized chronicles is also derived from Morin and Rouch’s film with each project asking the deceptively simple question, “Are you happy?” Ideally, the asking of this question prompts a discussion of the complexities of contemporary life in specific locations within a limited time frame, reveals points of connection for course participants, and provides opportunities to learn about the subtleties of contemporary life in each locality.

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Chronicle of a Season

This course takes as a source of inspiration, Edgar Morin and Jean Rouch’s well-known non-fiction film, Chronicle of a Summer (1960, France), which, by posing the deceptively simple question, “Are you happy?,” reveals a Paris filled with people grappling with how colonialism, war, capital, race and gender shape their personal and social experiences. The goal of our course is to create a cinematic chronicle of each participating locality (Bishkek, Berlin, Bogotá, Dhaka, Johannesburg, New York, and the West Bank) by tapping into the zeitgeist of the present moment. Through our filmmaking, we seek to show the complexities of contemporary life in our respective places and spaces. Our joint-taught media production course will be structured around initial viewings of Chronicle of a Summer, as well as other films that take up the style of cinema verité, direct cinema, observational cinema and their related incarnations. We will participate in shared conversations about the tools and techniques of these cinematic modes, and will make films, in parallel, derived by some version of the question, “Are you happy?” Through a series of short image and sound-making assignments, we will ultimately produce an omnibus film that will, ideally, reveal points of connection for course participants and provide opportunities to learn about the subtleties of contemporary life in each locality.

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Civic Engagement and Social Action

What does it mean to be engaged with your community? What can students participating in civic engagement projects learn from others in universities in places like Haiti, Ghana, Kyrgyzstan, Bangladesh and the United States? This course will examine historical, philosophical and practical elements of civic engagement while exploring the underlying question of what it means to be civically engaged in the early 21st century. Together, students will explore issues related to political participation, civil society, associational life, social justice, and personal responsibility, as well as how issues like race and socio-economic status impact civic participation. The class reflects a balance between study and practice of engagement which includes interrogating theoretical notions of civic life while also empowering students to be active participants in the communities in which they are situated. The culminating project asks students to propose a civic engagement project in their home or local community. Speakers and workshop leaders from will be presented by civic leaders, local officials, global not-for-profit leaders, and volunteers from communities proximate to participating OSUN campuses. This course will feature workshops, lectures and seminar discussions including students from all Network Collaborative sessions and the OSUN Online Civic Engagement Course.

This network course includes an online section that is open to enrollment to OSUN students across the network. Please visit the OSUN Online Courses for further information.

This course counts towards the Civic Engagement certificate.

Bard College Berlin offers this course under the name "Civic Engagement and Engaged Research: Berlin Lab".

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Course on Propaganda, Disinformation, and Hate Speech

This course draws on current social science research to understand the effects of false information and hate speech on politics and culture and to evaluate various private and public initiatives to regulate speech. It focuses on online hate speech – its content and characteristics, documented effects on listeners, and its link to hate crimes in the US, Europe, and Latin America.
Propaganda is an age-old phenomenon that has been analyzed at least since Aristotle’s Rhetoric in the 4th Century BCE, but there is something new about the immediacy and scale of speech on social media in the current global context. Hate speech and disinformation are increasingly prevalent online and they have reshaped our global politics, culture, and public discourse.
Drawing on recent social science research and legal scholarship, this course examines the effects of disinformation and hate speech on individual moral decision-making as well as wider politics and culture. The course also examines First Amendment and international human rights law of incitement and true threat and evaluates the measures taken by social media companies, the courts, and governmental agencies to regulate speech online.

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Cultures of Hate and Oppression: Antisemitism, the Holocaust, Colonialism and Gender – Connecting the Conversations

This network collaborative course promotes new teaching and thinking about four distinct but overlapping areas of inquiry: antisemitism, the Holocaust, colonialism, and gender. Each of these terms is a lens through which we examine prejudice, discrimination, race and hate in their historical and contemporary manifestations. At the same time, these terms mark out historical experiences which are generally discussed in parallel and sometimes antagonistic ways. Antisemitism and the Holocaust are very often studied separately from forms of racism rooted in colonial legacies, and all three detached, too often, from considerations of gender. The aim of this course is to reframe discussions that at present take place in parallel, and sometimes in an antagonistic manner. Faculty and students explore together how we may use teaching and learning to clarify and work through intellectual divisions which have real-world implications and manifest in diverse national and regional contexts: for instance, in battles over the practice of public memory and in debates over conflict in Israel/Palestine.
This course counts toward the Human Rights certificate.

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Economic Perspectives for Policy Making

This course demonstrates how contemporary discussions about economic and social policy are influenced and framed by the ideas and concerns of classical political economy and early 20th-century economic thought, through a survey of the diverse traditions in economics. Since Adam Smith, economists have pondered the organization of society and the role of markets, governments, and institutions. The discipline is in a continual flux, shaping and reshaping its core ideas. As economic systems evolved, so have the theories used to explain different economic phenomena and problems, as well as the policies designed to address them. In this course, students will study several intellectual traditions, including Classical Political Economy, Marxian, Neoclassical, Old American Institutionalist, Post Keynesian, Modern Monetary Theory, Black Political Economy, Radical Political Economy, Feminist, and Ecological and Green economics. The aim of this course is for students to gain a broad understanding of the methods and specific problems that these traditions emphasize, and the contributions to theory and policy that they have made. Thus, we will examine not only the evolution of these ideas and theories, but also their practical application today. Some of the issues we will cover include economic stability, the causes and cures for unemployment, the interactions between markets and government policy, the nexus between ethics and markets, the evolution and interaction of culture, technology and money in shaping the modern world. As we contemplate alternative proposals, it is critical to appreciate the intellectual roots of the policy solutions on offer. To this end, we will pay close attention to the underlying assumptions of these different theories and their relevance to real-world issues. The “great conversation” of economic ideas through the ages is not only the key to understanding present debates, but also a well of ideas from which to draw inspiration for today’s policies.

This course counts toward the certificate in Public Policy and Economic Analysis.

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Economic Perspectives for Policy Making

This course demonstrates how contemporary discussions about economic and social policy are influenced and framed by the ideas and concerns of classical political economy and early 20th-century economic thought, through a survey of the diverse traditions in economics. Since Adam Smith, economists have pondered the organization of society and the role of markets, governments, and institutions. The discipline is in a continual flux, shaping and reshaping its core ideas. As economic systems evolved, so have the theories used to explain different economic phenomena and problems, as well as the policies designed to address them. In this course, students will study several intellectual traditions, including Classical Political Economy, Marxian, Neoclassical, Old American Institutionalist, Post Keynesian, Modern Monetary Theory, Black Political Economy, Radical Political Economy, Feminist, and Ecological and Green economics. The aim of this course is for students to gain a broad understanding of the methods and specific problems that these traditions emphasize, and the contributions to theory and policy that they have made. Thus, we will examine not only the evolution of these ideas and theories, but also their practical application today. Some of the issues we will cover include economic stability, the causes and cures for unemployment, the interactions between markets and government policy, the nexus between ethics and markets, the evolution and interaction of culture, technology and money in shaping the modern world. As we contemplate alternative proposals, it is critical to appreciate the intellectual roots of the policy solutions on offer. To this end, we will pay close attention to the underlying assumptions of these different theories and their relevance to real-world issues. The “great conversation” of economic ideas through the ages is not only the key to understanding present debates, but also a well of ideas from which to draw inspiration for today’s policies.

This course counts toward the certificate in Public Policy and Economic Analysis.

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Education and Development in a Global Era/Global Education Colloquium

This colloquium-style course will feature talks by invited speakers - practitioners and advocates of educational development from around the globe, scholars from across the OSUN network – and challenge students to reimagine the possible. The COLLOQUIUM builds on the conceptual foundations of the GLOBALED CORE Course and encourages participants to consider what can be done to disrupt the status quo that leaves behind millions of children worldwide in a vicious cycle of poverty and under-education.

This course counts towards the Certificate in Global Education Development.
 

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Epistemology of Conspiracy Theories

This interdisciplinary course explores the rise of conspiracy theory and disinformation as a current manifestation of the perennial struggle between truth and power. As an antidote to the idea we now live in a ‘post-truth’ world we employ epistemology, a foundational branch of philosophy that asks how do you know what you think you know is true? We examine Plato on the Noble Lie, Alfarabi on hierarchies of truth, Machiavelli and Chanakya on perception and power, as well as works of Lyotard, Baudrillard and Orwell’s 1984. We explore theories of manipulating consent in politics and commerce, along with historical conspiracy case studies, concluding with student research on current instances of narrative manipulation.

This network course includes an online section that is open to enrollment to OSUN students across the network. Please visit the OSUN Online Courses for further information.

Al-Quds Bard College offers this course under "Special Topics in Social and Political Thought: Conspiracy Theories".

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Ethical Leadership

This Network Collaborative Course explores approaches to ethical leadership not just in the abstract, but as a discipline that is focused on action. As an approach to thinking through ethical leadership, the course is structured around the concerns explored in Dr. Mary Gentile's Giving Voice to Values framework. Students will read case studies, develop their own, and share with peers from across the globe, from New York to Bangladesh, Myanmar, Ghana and Colombia.

This network course includes an online section that is open to enrollment to OSUN students across the network. Please visit the OSUN Online Courses for further information.

This course counts towards the Civic Engagement certificate.

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Feminism and Community 

Advanced course - As a political project with deep roots in the Enlightenment, feminism has been concerned with the relationship between individuals and their political and social communities from its inception. For centuries women had experienced that the societies they inhabited did not consider them as individuals, citizens, and members of the community with equal rights.

The course examines a variety of feminist projects as they grew out of these experiences, and took on distinctive shapes, developing practices and theoretical frameworks all geared toward assessing, questioning, and refashioning women’s places, voices, and legal status in their respective societies, thus also addressing notions of community, collectivity, and democracy. We will also look at today’s globally connected community-building practices and examine how these joint efforts have given way to newly conceived notions of society and community in intersectional feminist theories.

Students will examine texts and practices of reading, writing, and conversation ranging from the sociability cultivated by elite women during the Haskala (the Jewish Enlightenment in Germany) to contemporary feminist theories of intersectionality, via the literary and political works of feminist artists and activists through the twentieth century. Amongst the authors read in the course are: Henriette Herz, Rahel Varnhagen, Hannah Arendt, Fanny Lewald, Mary Wollstonecraft, Rosa Luxemburg, Clara Zetkin, Alexandra Kollontai, Virginia Woolf, Georg Simmel, Ferdinand Tönnies, Claudia Jones, Vandana Shiva, Maria Mies, Uma Narayan, Saba Mahmood, Gloria Anzaldúa, Alice Walker, bell hooks, Adrienne Rich, Silvia Federici, Judith Butler, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Alice Walker, Bernardine Evaristo. Students from all campuses will work on group assignments throughout the semester, aimed at preparing online resources together with faculty.

This course counts toward the certificate in Public Policy and Economic Analysis.

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First-Year Seminar/Sophomore Year Seminar

This proposal stems from the Strengthening the Core initiative. FYSEM (First-Year Seminar) and SSEM (Sophomore Year Seminar) are core academic programs on Bard degree-granting campuses, and several other OSUN institutions are interested in developing their own versions of the course.

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First-Year Seminar/Sophomore Year Seminar

FYSEM (First-Year Seminar) and SSEM (Sophomore Year Seminar) are core academic programs on Bard degree-granting campuses, and several other OSUN institutions are interested in developing their own versions of the course.

American University in Bulgaria offers this course under the name "Frankenstwin Frankenstein".

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Freedom of Expression

This course provides an introduction to debates about freedom of expression. What is ‘freedom of speech’? Is there a right to say anything? Why? The course investigates who has had this right, where and why, and what it has had to do in particular with politics and culture. What powers does speech have, and for what? Debates about censorship, dissidence and protest, hate speech, the First Amendment and Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights are obvious starting points, but the course also explores some less obvious questions: about faith and the secular, the rights of minorities, migration, surveillance, speaking and political agency, law and politics, social media, and the force(s) of words. In asking about the status of the speaking human subject, the course looks at how the subject of rights, and indeed the thought of human rights itself, derives from an experience of claiming, speaking, and speaking up. These questions are examined, if not answered, across a variety of philosophical, legal, journalistic, and political texts, with a heavy dose of case studies (many of them happening right now) and readings in contemporary critical and legal theory. Taught in parallel with OSUN partner institutions where many assignments and activities are shared, and students work jointly with peers at other schools.

This network course includes an online section that is open to enrollment to OSUN students across the network. Please visit the OSUN Online Courses for further information.

This course counts toward the Human Rights certificate and the Civic Engagement certificate.

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Global Citizenship

What does it mean to be a global citizen? This question has gained increasing salience as the world has become more globalized. With globalization new problems surface that cut across national borders and fall outside the jurisdiction of individual nation-states. In response new forms of political organization have emerged to address these problems, which challenge the state as the primary locus of political authority and ultimate source of individual rights. In particular, these individuals and groups have appealed to a kind of global citizenship from below to call for action on and demand redress for the harms created by globalization. This interdisciplinary course critically examines the conceptual and theoretical foundations of the concept of global citizenship and investigates how the idea might work in practice. We begin by considering the conceptual, philosophical and historical debates about citizenship. What does it mean to be a citizen of a particular state? What obligations and responsibilities accompany citizenship? How have understandings of citizenship changed and expanded over time? What is global citizenship and how does it differ from national citizenship? Next we evaluate these ideas about citizenship in the context of globalization and the new problems created by an increasingly interdependent world. Topics covered may include: migration and refugees; the environment and resources; (in)security and borders; health and infectious disease; and development and inequality. We conclude by assessing the role (if any) global citizenship can play in global governance and consider how the international system might be transformed to better address the challenges of globalization. 

This course counts toward the Civic Engagement and Human Rights certificates.

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Global History Dialogues

The Global History Lab offers a blended, free, and open-access course on The History of the World since 1300 covering the history of globalization. The course, taught at Princeton University to students around the world, is a platform for learning, skill development, and collaboration in the creation of new narratives across global divides. Using cutting-edge technologies, innovative pedagogical practices, and training in oral history and documentary methods, the Global History Lab prepares students to understand the global past and put their lived experiences in wider contexts. Students interact across OSUN's network and learn global history globally. 28 partner institutions provide tutors and in-class engagement. The GHL program begins with its first course, History of the World or "HOW," which is a course about world history from 1300 to the present. The GHL's second course, Global History Dialogues, carries deep exchange one more step by enabling all of the GHL's learners, including refugee learners, and their collaborators to transition from consumers of knowledge into producers of knowledge. 

Bard College offers this course under the name "Total Recall: Memory-studies Seminar".
 

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Global Modernisms

The course explores a wide range of aspects of modernism, seeking to understand the period in relation to the broader terms “modernity” and “modernization," and to the complex dynamics of transnational dialogue, influences and the circulation of ideas. It will focus on three related
topics, which will be investigated in relation to each other through a variety of literary, philosophical and theoretical texts from across the globe:
1) theories of modernism, modernity and modernization; 2) the role played cities as increasingly dominant cultural centers, hegemonic forces and subject matter of modernist literature; 3) the increasing expansion of industry, colonization and global commerce, with a particular focus on literary responses to the perceived dehumanization brought about by technological advancement, bureaucracy and exploitation of the environment.

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GlobalEd Colloquium: Education and Development in a Global Era

This colloquium style course will feature talks by invited speakers - practitioners and advocates of educational development from around the globe, scholars from across the OSUN network – and challenge students to reimagine the possible. The COLLOQUIUM builds on the conceptual foundations of the GLOBALED CORE Course and encourages participants to consider what can be done to disrupt the status quo that leaves behind millions of children worldwide in a vicious cycle of poverty and under-education. 

This network course includes an online section that is open to enrollment to OSUN students across the network. Please visit the OSUN Online Courses for further information.

This course counts toward the Global Education and Development Certificate.

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GlobalEd Core - Policy and Practice in Global Education

This course has been designed to introduce students to some of the key themes and critical issues in international educational development. It is widely understood that the forces of globalization are profoundly changing the experiences and opportunity structures of young people in an increasingly interdependent world. Yet, while there is a growing recognition that the knowledge-based global economy requires a new paradigm for education in the 21st century, a significant number of children and adolescents in the world remain vulnerable, disengaged, and disenfranchised from education. Against this backdrop, the course will examine the social, political, economic, and cultural forces that keep children excluded from schools and learning in different parts of the world. The syllabus embodies an intersectional framework – where thematic domain-specific issues will be explored in conjunction with socio-cultural and historical contexts. Through the readings, assignments and discussions in the course, students would be able to: analyze critical policy choices for educational equity and develop a systems perspective and examine issues shaping education in their interconnectedness - both globally and locally. Learning about the global to interrogate and act innovatively at the local is an overarching objective of this course. The collaborative, cross-continental GLOBALED learning experience will not only encourage asking “why” but will normalize asking “why not”.

This course counts toward the Global Education and Development Certificate.

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History of the World Since 1300

This course offers a blended, free, and open-access course on History of the World since 1300 covering the history of globalization. The course, taught at Cambridge University to students around the world, is a platform for learning, skill development, and collaboration in the creation of new narratives across global divides. Using cutting-edge technologies, innovative pedagogical practices, and training in oral history and documentary methods, the Global History Lab prepares students to understand the global past and their lived experiences in wider contexts. Students interact across OSUN’s network and learn global history globally. Twenty-eight partner institutions provide tutors and in-class engagement.
 

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Human Rights Advocacy

This seminar serves as an introduction to human rights and humanitarian advocacy, with a practical component. Half of the course focuses on the history and theory of human rights and humanitarian advocacy: what are the bases, overlaps and differences of human rights and humanitarianism? What is it to make claims for human rights, or to denounce suffering or rights violation, especially on behalf of others? How and when and why have individuals and groups spoken out, mounted campaigns, published reports and exposés? How do they address, challenge, and sometimes work with governments and international organizations like the United Nations, particularly through transnational advocacy networks? What allows some campaigns to succeed while others fail? As we look at humanitarian and human rights advocacy from the campaign to abolish the slave trade to the advent of digital activism, this half of the course serves as an introduction to human rights work as a mode of legal, political and cultural practice. The other half of the course involves hands-on work with the human rights organization Scholars at Risk (SAR) to support detained and disappeared Uyghur scholars in China. We will research events and individuals, communicate with families and lawyers and other advocates, write country and case profiles, propose strategies and tactics for pressuring governments and other powerful actors, and develop appeals to public opinion -- all while recognizing the ethical and political risks this work may involve.

American University of Central Asia offers this course under the name "International Human Rights Law".

This course counts toward the Human Rights certificate.

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Human Rights and Modern Society: The Case of China and Taiwan

This network course examines two visions of modern society: that of 19th and early 20th-century liberalism on the one hand, and of classical Marxism and Leninism on the other. Probing the place of human rights as a normative ideal in each of those visions, the course traces how these different understandings played out in the modern history of the Mandarin-speaking world. Our point of departure is Tocqueville’s assertion that democracy defined by the principles of equality and popular sovereignty is on the rise the world over; as well as his projection that whether modern democratic societies enshrine and protect individual rights or sacrifice them on the altar of omnipotent statehood will depend on a host of factors that shape the trajectory of modernization. A key among those factors is how the modern age itself is understood.

After tracing the conceptualization of modernity and human rights in the liberal discourse of the 19th and 20th centuries, and its critique by the left radical tradition, we take up the 20th history of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and the Republic of China (Taiwan) as case studies. Starting from related cultural legacy and ideological standpoints, China and Taiwan have developed two distinct paths to modernity. To understand how and why this happened, in the second part of the course we’ll probe the political history as well as the theoretical and cultural debates that have shaped both countries and their interrelation.

This course counts toward the Human Rights Certificate.

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International Investment Dispute Settlement, Human Rights, and Justice

This course aims to provide students with in-depth knowledge and critical understanding of key legal and policy issues related to investment law and investment dispute settlement, highlighting their nexus with human rights and justice. A particular emphasis will be placed on the current initiatives to reform international investment law, aimed at ensuring a proper balance between the protection of foreign investment, human rights, and sustainable development.

This course counts toward the Human Rights certificate.

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International Organizations and Advocacy for Human Rights

This seminar exposes students to the practical work of human rights actors in the context of securing and advocating for human rights through inter- and supranational organizations. It is divided into two sections. Section A begins by giving students a general overview of the role of key players in creating and implementing human rights. It then delves into the processes, institutions and material factors that influence inter- and supranational behaviors vis-a-vis human rights obligations. Lectures look in-depth at the role of individuals and collectives of peoples in campaigning for human rights and addressing respective violations. This will culminate into the analysis of cases that have been key in shaping the international human rights regime. Section B familiarizes students with the practical abilities needed to run human rights advocacy campaigns. Through guest lecturers, students will be introduced to insight and expertise on lobbying; campaigning; and research, monitoring and reporting. These campaigns will be centered around their chosen cases that lobby specific inter- or supranational organizations with a possible two-day training with Amnesty International in Berlin. Finally, students will develop human rights-based approaches and strategies to create their own advocacy campaign. At the end of the semester, all students of the seminar will meet in Berlin and visit organizations such as the representative office of the European Union and meet with experts from Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, the Berlin office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, as well as the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights. They will get a two-day training with Amnesty International and work for the organization’s Digital Verification Corps. Their findings will be used by Amnesty to hold human rights perpetrators accountable.

This course counts toward the Human Rights certificate.

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Introduction to Geospatial Analysis

The overall aim of the course is to develop a basic understanding of spatially referenced data analysis and to explore the potential of using Geographic Information Systems (GIS) in various OSUN's core research domains, including environmental, social sciences, and history. In this course, students continue developing their mapping and data visualization skills and will get familiar with spatial analysis using ArcGIS software.

Bard College offers this course under the name "GIS for Environmental Justice".

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Introduction to Geospatial Data Visualization

The ability to work with spatial data has become an essential skill, not only in academic research but also in our daily lives. These skills encompass various aspects, including data collection, storage, visualization, and analysis. The aim of this course is to develop a basic understanding of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) principles, familiarize students with spatially referenced data, and cultivate fundamental skills in geospatial data visualization (mapping). While the course primarily focuses on practical mapping skills for societal and environmental phenomena, it also provides a brief introduction to alternative data collection technologies, such as satellite imagery, crowdsourcing, and expert knowledge.

Participants learn about the types of data that can be stored in online geospatial datasets, as well as how to obtain, develop, and share them. Additionally, students gain an understanding of map design considerations for different purposes, including internet-based publications and journal articles. The course explores both desktop and online mapping solutions, including Google Earth Pro, Google Maps, and qGIS. QuantumGIS (qGIS), the most popular and widely used open-source GIS package, serves as the primary software for illustrating geospatial data collection, generation, and visualization techniques. Through practical individual and group online exercises using qGIS, participants acquire the foundations of working with a typical GIS package and learn essential mapping principles. To successfully complete the course, students are be required to develop their own mapping project on a topic of their interest. Please note that no audit option is available for this course.

American University of Central Asia offers this course under the name "Applied GIS for Urban Analysis".
Bard College offers this course under the name "GIS for Environmental Justice".

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Introduction to Media

This course offers a foundation in media history and theory, with particular focus on how artists have experimented with emerging technologies and changing media landscapes in ways that both reflect and transform culture. We will consider old and new forms alike, from print media to social media, from the camera obscura to photography, from broadcast television to early net.art, and from the diorama to virtual reality, as we explore how media have continually constructed our perceptions of time, space, knowledge, and identity. We will read media theorists such as Walter Benjamin, Marshall McLuhan, Jessica Marie Johnson, Donna Haraway, Lev Manovich, Erkki Huhtamo, and Lisa Nakamura alongside examining the work of artists such as Nam June Paik, Stephanie Dinkins, Guillermo Goméz-Peña, Wendy Red Star, Ricardo Dominquez, Mary Flanagan, and Will Wilson. We will also spend hands-on time working creatively with media, in order to assess our own positions as producers as well as users and consumers of media.

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Leading Change for Sustainability

This is a cross-institution course where student teams develop and advance proposals for organizational innovation within the university: local food, day-care, decarbonization. Students interact weekly with other OSUN campuses, combined with weekly in-person labs. Topics include understanding why change often fails, key factors that drive successful change, the role of the change facilitator, and tools for designing and facilitating processes that bring forth group intelligence. 

This network course includes an online section that is open to enrollment to OSUN students across the network. Please visit the OSUN Online Courses for further information.

This course counts towards the Sustainability and Leading Change certificate.

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Literatures of the Roma (Gypsies); From Imagination to Self-Representation

Fascination with the Roma (Gypsies) have resulted in a plethora of works produced over centuries by non-Roma authors. These works, in turn, have shaped societal perceptions and norms of engagement and played a central role in the fictitious and exceedingly negative stereotyping and persecution of the Roma. Little attention has been paid to the literature and art produced by the Roma to counter their exoticized and often dehumanizing images and allow for their self-representation. The course provides an opportunity for students to examine stereotypes associated with the Roma as well as engage with primary resources (poetry, prose, essays, art) produced by Roma authors and also drawn from collective forms of Romani art (fairy tales and songs). Students will explore themes of “the other,” identity, class, race, gender, location (and dislocation) and time, and the often overlooked experiences of Romani slavery and the Holocaust, amongst others. Teamwork is promoted through active engagement with the texts and through the application of interview and translation skills (workshops will be provided) to the cross-network collaborative projects. Students will have the choice to either interview Roma writers, authors or other significant cultural figures or translate a short text written by a Roma author that is not available in English. The course is an OSUN network collaborative course that engages students from Bard College and Central European University in cross-network collaboration.

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Modernism and Fascism: Cultural Heritage and Memory

Is it possible to think of modernity without taking into account fascism? Why were so many modernists, from Ezra Pound to F.T. Marinetti and Gertrude Stein fascinated by fascist dystopia and actively contributed to its propaganda? This course approaches the rise of fascism in Italy as an expression of political and social palingenesis, and focuses on the transnational reach of its memory and cultural heritage. Through the literary works of Anna Banti, Curzio Malaparte, Ennio Flaiano and Maaza Mengiste, and films by Federico Fellini, Lina Wertmüller and Liliana Cavani we will analyze how the memory of fascism and modernism has been shaped according to the needs of the political present and successively contested, reframed, and reused. Still today, fascist heritage haunts the cityscapes of Italy and the countries it occupied in East Africa and the Mediterranean through monuments, modernist architecture, and the isolation of Roman ruins. The course finally examines how visual artists, activists and writers take cues from this difficult heritage, in order to challenge collective memories and the culture of empire. This is an OSUN Network Collaborative Course taught in cooperation with courses on global modernism offered at the American University of Beirut (Lebanon), Bard College (USA), Bard College Berlin (Germany), BRAC University (Bangladesh), and the Universidad de los Andes (Colombia). Common sessions, lectures, readings, and/or assignments will offer opportunities for connections across the network, but the core teaching of the course will be fully in person. It is also an elective course in the OSUN MA Program in Human Rights and the Arts.

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Nosedive: Luxury and Oppression in the World of Fragrance

The course introduces the students to the ethics, economics and aesthetics of perfume and examines the lives and social standing of producers and users of fragrances. It is designed to engage students in an immersive, multi-sensorial way by looking at fragrance from the perspective of cultural historians, economists, human rights activists, ingredients and bottle producers, perfumers, fragrance critics, and advertisers.

This course counts toward the Human Rights certificate.

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Performance and Digital Culture

Formally this course was called "Digital Theaters". What happens when theatres go digital? This course addresses how theatre and performance as live embodied practices and forms of communal encounter have permanently changed due to pandemic restrictions. Together we want to investigate the new dispersed digital formats - WhatsApp and Instagram performances, VR/AR experiences, Zoom Theatres -- that have expanded our idea of theatre. But how do these new networked performance experiences alter common social and cultural functions of theatre? Through this course students explore performance and digitality, while working together across a great distance to create various digital performance works.

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Policy and Practice in Global Education – Critical Perspectives

This course has been designed to introduce students to some of the key themes and critical issues in international educational development. It is widely understood that forces of globalization are profoundly changing the experiences and opportunity structures of young people in an increasingly interdependent world. Yet, while there is a growing recognition that the knowledge-based global economy requires a new paradigm for education in the 21st century, a significant number of children and adolescents in the world remain vulnerable, disengaged, and disenfranchised from education. COVID-19 has further exacerbated the level and intensity of this inequality. Against this backdrop, the course examines the social, political, economic, and cultural forces that keep children excluded from schools and learning in different parts of the world.

This course counts toward the Global Education and Development Certificate.

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Religious Pluralism, Religious Freedom, and Dialogue in the Modern World

The course accounts for religions' collisions in the modern world and the ways in which colonialism and empire, nation states and legal mechanisms create conflict over cohesion. Students will be exposed to the history, politics and sociology of inter and intra religious conflicts through some recent cases along with attempts at inter-faith dialogue and action.

This course counts toward the Human Rights certificate.

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Research Creation: Historical and Artistic Responses to 1945 and the Post-War Migration Regime

This cross-campus class, taught in collaboration with Universidad de los Andes (Bogotá, Colombia) and University of the Witwatersrand (Johannesburg, South Africa) explores the way research-based art-making generates new kinds of knowledge about migration, displacement, and exile. This semester we focus on 1945, the end of the Second World War 80 years ago, and its effects on and consequences for migration and movement globally. In the “Research” part of the class we will gain an overview of the relevant global historical events and the concept of the “migration regime” before delving into primary sources from three different regions. These include legal documents, pictures, historical film footage, and letters. Students then develop a topic for their individual projects on 1945 from a region of their choice, and research the original historical sources that they want to work with. In the “Creation” part of the class, students will translate their research into works of art – preferably zines, poems, collages, or other combinations of text and images that can be printed. In three shared online sessions with the Bogotá and the Johannesburg groups we will learn about our partner classes’ responses to post-1945 migration and the arts, and discuss individual student projects with a global perspective. Projects from all three campuses will be presented in public events in Berlin, Bogotá and Johannesburg, and on the OSUN Research Creation website. Our closing event at BCB will be a mixed faculty-student-artist conference on the significance of 1945 today that combines historical and artistic approaches.

This course counts toward the Human Rights certificate.

American University in Bulgaria offers this course under the name "Cultural Studies Seminar: Borders, movements and Cultural Studies".
University of the Witwatersrand offers this course under the name "Research-Creation: Migration and the Arts".

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Right to Employment

Right to Employment is an interdisciplinary network course that traces the history of the struggle to secure the right to employment for all. It focuses on social, economic, legal, and policy developments, and introduces students to many international initiatives and innovative programs. Students read economic analyses, policy proposals, legislative documents, and program reviews. The course can be tailored to the discipline, research interests, and capacity of each OSUN partner—including adjustments for the particular OSUN program, context, and location. Right to Employment is a network course that was created in collaboration with OSUN partner institutions and engages students across the network.

This course counts toward the Human Rights certificate and Public Policy and Economic Analysis certificate.

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Social Entrepreneurship

This is a collaborative, cross-institution course in social entrepreneurship, where student teams ideate and develop models for social enterprises. Social entrepreneurship is the process of building new organizations that offer scalable solutions to social and environmental challenges. Social enterprise can be either for-profit, or non-profit. The course features a global classroom, with students enrolled convening each week in a common zoom space to share ideas. Participating schools include BRAC University in Bangladesh, Al Quds University in Palestine, the American Universities of Central Asia (in Kyrgyzstan) and of Bulgaria, Universidad de Los Andes in Colombia, and Bard. Past certificate courses have incubated powerful social business ideas in Bangladesh and Palestine. The course will culminate in a “shark tank for sustainability” among and between teams from the different universities, with winning teams then competing at the Bard MBA’s annual Disrupt to Sustain pitch competition in December. The course includes readings and discussion focused on social issues related to entrepreneurship: drivers of change, from decarbonization to AI; delinking growth from material throughput; urban-based innovation ecosystems; social obstacles to risk taking; working on multi-disciplinary teams; language, power and gender dynamics in entrepreneurship; deconstructing the archetypes of entrepreneurship. The practice of social entrepreneurship explores the full suite of liberal learning: critical analysis, persuasive writing, oral communication, quantitative reasoning, design thinking, and group social dynamics.

This course counts toward the Sustainability and Social Enterprise certificate.

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Solving Each Other's Public Health Problems

In this one semester Network course students recruited from different universities around the world will work with their professors to develop program proposals to address public health challenges in other students’ countries.
For example, Liberian students will identify and then write a proposal to address key public health issues in the US, such as the US opioid epidemic; Al Quds students might devise infectious disease control
programs for Kyrgyzstan; students from AUCA might develop a program to reduce maternal mortality in Liberia...then the students from the host countries will evaluate those proposals. Such an exercise will introduce students to the foreign aid and international development systems and the social, economic, political and cultural advantages and challenges of trying to solve other people's problems. The course will meet once a week for two hours and twenty minutes. For most sessions, students will meet in person, with their local professors. However, three or four sessions during the semester will be online and include the entire group. During these periods students will share findings, give presentations etc. The time differences among the various campuses are large—up to 11 hours. Therefore, we propose that the in-person sessions be scheduled at the convenience of the professors and students at the various schools. The “network” sessions will have to be scheduled for the morning in the US, afternoon or evening in Europe, Africa, Asia and the Middle East. Some sessions will be devoted guest lectures from experts in international public health, community health or other fields. These could be pre-recorded so that students can watch them at their convenience. The students will then be required to formulate questions, in writing, for the speaker, who would then respond, either synchronously or asynchronously.

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Special Topics in Social Thought, Family, Kinship, and Gender; Transnational Feminist Perspectives

This course is developed with third- and fourth-year undergrads in mind. The course will enable students to outline the histories and uses of transnational feminisms and identify the challenges feminism faces across various political contexts. Students will connect across campuses to critically evaluate the subject of feminist inquiry and analyze case studies with focus on social justice. While the individual syllabi will reflect faculty’s unique expertise and interests (ranging from sociology through psychology to political science), the course will have several shared elements, including 6–8 core readings, 3–4 cross-campus blended-learning sessions, and 3–4 shared assignments. The course readings and assignments will be chosen carefully to reflect the needs and interests of students expected to enroll in the courses.

Transnational Feminism, Solidarity, and Social Justice seeks to develop promising connections available via OSUN to foster feminist collaborations in academia and beyond. It offers a sustainable platform for students and faculty from OSUN institutions to engage in rigorous academic work, inspire each other through artistic practice, and work closely with local and international initiatives to further the feminist agenda for social justice.

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Sustainable Development and Social Enterprise

One way to achieve the UN SDGs is through social enterprise: creating mission-drive businesses and non-profit organizations. This cross-institution course provides a critical introduction to the SDGs, and the forces behind global change.   Students will work with and learn from other classes in the global OSUN network, while conducting and sharing research projects on local enterprise solutions to issues like energy, food, affordable housing, immigration, or gender equity.

This course counts towards the Sustainability and Social Enterprise certificate.

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Sustainable Local Food in Global Context

A core course for the Certificate in Food Studies offered by OSUN in collaboration with the Center for Food Studies at Bard College at Simon's Rock, this course offers an introduction to the theory and practice of sustainable eating in a local food system. The course will consist of classroom discussion of current topics related to sustainable agriculture and food consumption and an experiential component featuring demonstrations and hands-on workshops with farmers and practitioners in students' local communities. We will examine sustainable food and “farm to table” eating from multiple perspectives: consumers, farmers/producers, and policymakers.

Central European University offers this course under the name "Political Ecology: Sustainable Local Food in Global Contexts".

This course counts toward the Food Studies certificate.

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The Belly Is a Garden

Inspired by the Palestinian saying El Batin Bustan (The Belly is a Garden) this course explores bio-cultural diversity and the question of being of the earth and part of its diverse terrains. How biodiversity and human diversity can serve as a way towards well-being and how we can understand ourselves as co-creators with nature are fundamental questions we will be exploring. This course is designed as an experiential journey that students will take through a multitude of mediums including readings, class discussions, fieldwork, nature walks, writing, workshops, and other art forms that will be decided upon in a collaborative exercise between the instructor and students. In an attempt to deconstruct colonial forms of being we will be exploring ourselves as living beings navigating a global landscape that is both in crisis and in constant transformation. How do we relate to the soil beneath our feet? How can we be informed by other living beings in our surroundings? Between the question of settler and indigenous, how can we better understand ourselves, and our place in the world, while engaging in collaborative designs of new possible futures?

This course counts towards the Food Studies certificate.

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The Laboratory and the City: Critical Approaches in Urban Studies

The course explores how cities act as laboratories for social and political change. Over the course of the semester, we study urban transformations and breaking points in the modern era. We learn about critical theories and concepts born through situated urban research. We delve into questions of infrastructures and the provisioning of public goods at the intersection of race, gender, and class. Perspectives of the Eastern European city (Post-)Socialist city, Islamic City or Middle Eastern City are interrogated to develop a shared vocabulary and toolkit of multi-sited de-centered urban studies. We reflect on changing trends of the so-called Second and Third World urbanization and subsequent topics of emerging prominence. The course is taught in cooperation between the European Humanities University in Vilnius and the American University of Beirut. The class experiments with the formats of research-based narrative, collage, and video documentation from the perspectives of each city.

This course counts towards the Civic Engagement certificate and Human Rights certificate.

American University of Beirut offers this course under the name "Introduction to Anthropology".

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The Peculiar Institution and Its Afterlives, North and South

This course will examine a unique form of chattel slavery – one that was created between 1500 and 1800 in the Atlantic World, generationally racialized for people of African descent, and not abolished until the late nineteenth century. We will study this form of human bondage and its resonances in colonial British North America and the United States.

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The Struggle for Voting Rights at Colleges

The course is a historical and interdisciplinary examination of the 26th Amendment, using it as a prism to examine the history of disenfranchisement, the role of college communities, and the fight for voting rights in the United States. The materials developed for this course are Open Educational Resources and free to use for non-commercial purposes. View the course materials.

Bard College offers this course under the name "Student Voting: Power, Politics and Race in the Fight for American Democracy".
Tuskegee University offers this course under the name "The Black Experience".

This course counts toward the Civic Engagement Certificate and the Human Rights Certificate.

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Visual Politics

Film, photography, media, and art shape how we process and deal with political and social phenomena as diverse as war, disease, border violence, migration and displacement, the securitization of states, and global financial crises. While it is widely recognized that we live in a visual age, how we read our world visually and how our world shapes our visual reality are questions that require more attention in college curricula. As “human experience is now more visual and visualized than ever before” -- as visual theorist Nicholas Mirzoeff observes -- it is crucial to learn how to “read” the visual as a site of power, struggle, order, and change. Further, as Ariella Azoulay argues, migrating images make up a "universal language of citizenship and revolution," which is developed in response to the "universal language of power" -- increasing our students’ visual literacy is therefore paramount both in terms of their academic development and civic engagement.

The proposed OSUN titled “Visual Politics” will give students the tools and theoretical know-how to understand how institutions as diverse as governments, political and humanitarian organizations, culture industry, and civil society shape what images people see and how they make sense of them. Bringing together together the subjects of politics, global studies, postcolonial studies, visual art, as well as media and cultural studies, the course will introduce students to critical theories of race, empire, nation, development, and sovereignty as well as the key tools of visual analysis.

The course is envisioned as 1) a site of shared learning and knowledge-production between students across campuses and 2) a site of innovative pedagogy that emphasizes skills based learning that combines theoretical and critical reflection with a range of technologies. Participating students will be expected to intern or do research with cultural organizations, NGOs and other civil society initiatives that take image-making, circulation, and/or reception to be their core of their missions

As an international, interdisciplinary initiative, Visual Politics will support the OSUN mission to integrate curricula and teaching across partner institutions, expand critical literacy, and support civic engagement. It is also in line with the initiatives spearheaded by Bard’s Center for Experimental Humanities.

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Visual Storytelling for Civic Engagement

This class introduces students to the uses of video for civic engagement and development projects, and trains students in the basics of smartphone-based documentary film techniques. The class is built around a series of case studies in which students explore theoretical readings on the use of media in social movements, as well as the practical aspects of documentary film technique, and culminates in a team documentary project. Guest speakers will explore documentary and media production issues, as well as their experiences in using video and other media in advocacy and reporting projects. This is a group- and project-based class, in which students will work in teams of 3-5 student on semester-long video projects, including at least 4 days of location based filming (to be done over the course of the semester). See videos produced in previous years here.

Classwork is in three parts: pre-recorded videos and tutorials, live class meetings on Zoom, and a series of small group trainings and follow-ups to support teams in their class projects. Students will learn the basics of visual storytelling, field production, interviewing techniques, and basic video editing. It is open to OSUN students across eight campuses (Annandale, AQB, AUCA, BRAC, Columbia/SIPA, EHU, HUBS, UNIANDES). All participating campuses will have smartphone stabilizers, tripods, lights and audio kits available for student use. All required gear and software will be provided. For more information contact Adam Stepan, Eva Egensteiner, or Seamus Heady.
    
Al-Quds University offers this course under the name "Introduction to Non-Fiction Film".
BRAC University offers this course under the name "Documentary Film - Theory and Practice".
Picker Center for Executive Education, Columbia University offers this course under the name "Digital Case Study Projects".
Universidad de los Andes offers this course under the name "Reportaje Audiovisual y Narrativas de Paz".

This course counts toward the Civic Engagement certificate.
 

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Water

The goal of water sustainability, having an adequate supply of clean water to meet our needs, is a moving target. Climate change and the interconnected effects of population growth, migration, poverty, land use, and energy choices impact our water resources. Despite this complexity, universal concern about water availability (or lack thereof) can serve as a means to connect communities. The impacts of climate change (e.g., increased temperature, sea level rise, precipitation patterns, natural hazards) vary significantly according to location. Differences in geography as well as resources influence the degree to which a community will be affected. Community access to scientific and political tools to mitigate these challenges often is dictated by issues of class, race, and gender. By comparing and contrasting local water resources and the impacts of climate change across participating network campuses, this course will explore how science can inform action in response to climate change. We are all part of water communities. For communities located along rivers, rivers provide transportation, food, recreation, and a variety of ecosystem services. Rivers are sources of drinking water and a means to dispose of waste. The actions of upstream communities directly impact the water quality of communities downstream. Climate change threatens access to drinkable water and communities with a lack of infrastructure and resources will be increasingly burdened. To solve this problem, social, economic, and scientific capacity must be developed so that better community-led management decisions can be made. The ability to prepare for and adapt to climate change and its associated impacts is essential. This will require community engagement, education, and the connection of geographically disparate resources (e.g., knowledge, people, and tools).

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When the People Rule: Popular Sovereignty in Theory and Practice

This is a sample course description semester-long OSUN Network class is a project-based course designed to help introduce students to documentary film techniques, and help student teams produce documentaries on local issues. The course offers rich custom-produced guides to smartphone filming, interviewing techniques, field production, and editing, as well as small group mentoring sessions and workshops. This course can be used to make final projects for OSUN classes. Students in other classes and majors are encouraged to apply and join. All video projects would need to be approved by each course instructor. Students from previous versions of this course have made amazing films and digital case studies, many of which are now used in OSUN classes or used in social media campaigns by NGOs and other organizations.