This OSUN network-collaborative course will convene students from courses at the European Humanities University and Bard College, Annandale to examine the concept of “experimentation” across a wide range of academic disciplines. Confronting the twinned spatial coordinates of the “laboratory” and the “city” as a means to bridge between experimental practices and civic engagement, the course will traverse a variety of disciplinary domains (philosophy, the natural sciences, literature, theater, sociology, and urbanism). Students will study the development of laboratory work through readings in the History of Science and Science and Technology Studies before examining how this work relates to modern approaches to sociology, civil engineering, and urban design. The networked format will allow the course to not only draw on the expertise of professors with different disciplinary backgrounds (Desai: literature and history of science / Liubimau: sociology, urbanism and civic experimentation), but also to situate their learning within both a global intellectual context and within their local civic environments. Students will work together, in groups of mixed Bard and EHU students, to identify civic problems and issues in communities local to Bard (Kingston, NY) and EHU (Vilnius, Lithuania), and then use this shared research, in groups, to write proposals for civic experimentation in real-world contexts.
This course is not offered every semester. If your campus is offering the course, visit your institutions' course registration site to enroll.
US
Bard College
LIT 2XX: The City and the Experiment
LITHUANIA
European Humanities University
Theory of the Experiment: The Laboratory and the City
