Courses

• KHC SM 102: Creative Collaboration
  Today, lone creators appear increasingly obsolete, as teams and larger groups become the dominant mode through which new ideas enter the world. This course explores the challenges of leading and participating in groups and teams engaged in solving difficult problems and creating new ideas. It emphasizes the role of leadership in composing teams, motivating members, and creating an environment that fosters learning and creativity. This course will use cases, experiential exercises, and design projects to help students both understand group dynamics and the creative process, while developing the skills to shape them. To achieve these goals, students will initiate creative collaborations, which will serve as a laboratory for exploring group dynamics and design thinking.
• KHC ST 111: Studio I
  The studios foster writing, research, and quantitative skills by exploring fundamental ethical, aesthetic, and social issues. They focus on the themes and problems raised by provocative modernist texts drawn from literature, film, psychology, philosophy, and the arts.
• KHC ST 112: Studio II
  Much of social science research consists of formulating and evaluating claims about how processes unfold in our interconnected world. Increasingly, quantitative methods are used to evaluate such hypotheses and to suggest fruitful grounds for new research. The goals of this studio are threefold. First, the course endeavors to give students both a basic mathematical and a conceptual understanding of several statistical tools most commonly used by researchers across the social sciences. The course does not require any prior mathematical background beyond high school algebra. Armed with only a few simple tools, everyone can understand the basics behind descriptive statistics, correlation, regression analysis, and hypothesis testing. Second, the course examines how social scientists try to make sense of the world: how they frame questions, develop theories of causation, operationalize key concepts, and test hypotheses. Third and finally, the course will instruct students in the use of a statistical software package, STATA, and equip them with the necessary tools to use and transform existing data sets, create new ones, and conduct original empirical research. The Quantitative Studio meets weekly in the first part of the spring semester
• KHC UC 102: Watching Film, Thinking About Film, Making Film
  This course will begin with considering how we watch films and how the ways in which we watch films are relevant to our appraisal of them. We will then turn in parallel to discussing some philosophical issues connected with film -- in what sense film is art and how it is related to other arts, the nature of genre, what we react to and how we react when we watch films, what the images and sounds in films represent, etc. -- and begin working on short films (and working through some of the basics of editing, filming, etc.). The class will include both seminar and studio components and stress will be placed on bringing philosophical thinking about film viewing, filmmaking, and films as artistic experiences to bear on the process of filmmaking. The class will involve active discussion, watching at least a film a week (more often two) , writing a series of short papers, making a short "film", and presenting the film as it is being made for critique/discussion.
• KHC VA 101: Art for the City
  Visual Art is a universal language where diverse areas of professional specialization can intersect and find a new voice and way of speaking to many people instead of an esoteric and isolated few. Significant social, political, and moral issues of our time require the ability to think from multiple points of view. This ability can be developed into a visionary skill, which in turn can be embodied in enduring and powerful forms of artistic communication. In this course students will examine the ways that visual art embodies contemporary issues and how these issues relate to content found in the liberal arts study disciplines including The Social Sciences, The Natural Sciences, and Life Sciences. This course will include a diverse range of contemporary practices in many art forms that we will discuss as a group through frank discourse. We will investigate the impact of visual arts on diverse domains of 'real world' industries and communities locally in the Boston Area and compare these with projects made worldwide. We will do this through lecture presentations, peer to peer dialogue, student to professional dialogue and research. The course will culminate with individual illustrated reports in the form of online portfolios.
• KHC VA 102: Spaces of Art: The Place of Art in the Contemporary Museum, Gallery and Studio
  The goal of this course is for students to experience and reflect upon works of art within an architectural, institutional and cultural context. Students in this seminar will visit Boston-area museums to look closely at and question the role of art in the contemporary museum and beyond. In contrast to much of contemporary visual experience, which is mediated through screens and via printed material, students in this course will have the opportunity to give in-depth consideration to primary sources. Through experiencing the presentation of the work in the context of an exhibition, and in conversation with artists, curators, and other museum professionals, students will be challenged to think critically about the role of material form as related to meaning in specific works, and more broadly about the larger social context surrounding groups of work in an exhibition.

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