The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art · Courses
SS
8 courses with the subject SS, each shown exactly as we captured it from the college's catalog, with every element we hold. Where the wording looks broken, that is our reading of the catalog, not the college's text.
SS 318Seminar in Social Science3
Seminar giving close attention to special topics in the Social Sciences. Recent topics have included sustainability and the economy. The seminar may be repeated for credit with the permission of the dean of the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences.
Subject
SS
Credits (min)
3
Credits (max)
3
Credit unit
Credits
Type
course
Repeatable
may be repeated for credit with the permission of the dean of the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences.
SS 334(Microeconomics) and SS-347 (Macroeconomics)
• Interdisciplinary Studies: Interdisciplinary Studies Minor is only available with explicit approval from the HSS Academic Advisor. Students will need to submit a 250-word proposal for a specific and clearly articulated Interdisciplinary research project that they expect to complete for this Minor. School of Engineering Students interested in an Interdisciplinary Minor must apply to the HSS Academic Advisor in their second year at Cooper for approval. • If awarded, the Minor will be designated on student transcripts at graduation 233
Every day, we hear news reporters, podcast hosts, TV show hosts, and even professors talking about various issues, and along the way, they make causal claims that do not necessarily make sense. They are simply confusing correlation with causation, a common logical fallacy. Think about the following question: Does getting your master’s degree cause you to earn higher income? By how much would those two additional years in school increase your earnings? Most people would say, “Yes, of course.” Having a master’s degree leads to a higher paying job. You can get data on various individuals, their educational attainments, and their earnings. You can examine the relationship between these two variables. But are you actually measuring the impact of having a master’s degree on earnings? There are many other questions that you can try to think about in the same manner – questions related to individual decisions, business decisions, and government policies. In this course, we will learn how to think about these questions in a systematic way. The course will make you think critically about many claims that are being thrown at you by news reporters and even your professors. The course will also teach you how to work with various types of datasets to answer various questions in economics, psychology, business, politics, and sciences. You will learn common ways to summarize and present data and find relationships between different variables.
In Macroeconomics, we explore answers to questions related to the performance of the US economy. What is unemployment? How is it related to the living standard? Why is there very high inflation? We examine why the economy experiences good days and bad days and what the government can do to minimize the negative effects of the bad days. We also address other interesting questions like why we have inflation and unemployment, and whether they are actually “bad” things.
SS 35120th Century History “What we are talking about when we talk3
about Fascism?” This is a transnational history course that seeks to sharpen our thinking about definitions and resonances of fascism; it examines the past and asks, how such investigation might help us to act in the present when we confront situations that seem to be, or are quickly termed, “fascist.” Using theoretical and historical sources, we will study the European origins of fascism beginning with the dramatic upheavals of World War I and the interwar years through World War II, the Holocaust, and its aftermath, and then turn our attention to the development of a new global authoritarian populism and right-wing nationalist xenophobic leaders and regimes in the 21st century. We will examine historical roots and current appeal as well as efforts at resistance, in a variety of contexts from Britain, Western and Eastern Europe to Russia, India, the Middle East, and East Asia. All of our work will require close analysis of entangled categories and experiences of race, class, nation, and gender and reference to “current events” in the United States as well as globally. General Course description: A study of the dramatic ruptures of Europe’s 20th century, haunted by imperialism, war and genocide. Topics include the First World War; modernity and modernism in interwar culture; fascism, National Socialism and the Holocaust; postwar displacements and migrations; decolonization, the cold war and the postwar economic miracle; 1968 and 1989 in both East and West; and the ongoing challenges of integration and multiculturalism.
SS 369Cognitive Pyschology: Conversations on Consciousness and Attention
Consciousness is often called the main mystery in cognitive science. At the same time conscious experience seems to be trivial, we don’t see changes in our awareness until we make a mistake in a simple cognitive task or someone tells us that we missed something salient. Consciousness studies is a multidisciplinary field in science that includes approaches and methods from neuroscience and physics, philosophy and anthropology, artificial intelligence and linguistics. We will try to learn more about the contribution of all these sciences, all aimed at answering one question: “What does it mean to have consciousness?” Some representative questions we will be discussing 244
This course provides an introduction to concepts in social-cultural anthropology. Students will rethink such concepts as culture, race, ethnicity, nationalism, transnationalism, gentrification, power and memory. We will use these concepts to address the questions of human universals and the origins of cultural differences. At the bases of these inquiries will be the question of the “Other.” Who are the “Others” in culture or society? History and Theory of Art Electives
