CAT-002

CAT-002 courses (six units, winter quarter) are writing-intensive, foregrounding argumentation, revision, and writing as process by examining case studies of culture, art, and technology interacting in the present moment. Students must have passed CAT-001 in order to enroll in CAT-002.

Winter 2027

CAT-002: Unpacking the Car: Labor, Family, and the Automobile in American Culture

Matthew Irwin

Lecturer, CAT

Tuesday/Thursday 9:30-10:50 a.m.

The automobile is a pervasive and malleable feature of American life. In films like The Fast and the Furious and sporting events like NASCAR, it is a symbol of status, sex appeal, autonomy, domesticity, reliability, endurance, and/or a lack of these things. As a technology, it has almost no equal in terms of its impact on US social-political relations, from labor, economics, and trade to urban development and public safety. But the chasm between how we see the car and how it creates our material reality is so wide it will take more than 375 horsepower and a "Yee-Haw" to clear. Nevertheless, in this section of CAT-002, we will try. We will examine the ways in which media (television, film, music, and advertisements) hitch the automobile to a set of ideas and values about labor, family, and masculinity in the US. We will unpack the ways media not only sell cars but also manufacture car culture as this set of ideas and values. Going further, we will scrutinize the ways car culture obscures the material conditions and presence of the automobile, but we will also pause to look at car cultures that refuse the pace and influence of the automobile industry. In short, we will ask how cars are made as cultural objects and how they make us as citizens and social beings. Buckle up and get ready for a journey across American car culture from Motor City Detroit to traffic town LA.

CAT-002: Hopepunk and the Possibilities of Radical Accessibility

Jenni Marchisotto

Lecturer, CAT

Monday/Wednesday/Friday 10:00-10:50 a.m.

In the distant future, a crew of all shapes and sizes pilot a ship across the universe. Radically different in experience and physicality, they navigate galaxies together fighting for change along the way. In this CAT-002, we will read a variety of scholarship alongside Becky Chambers' hopepunk novel The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet to work through questions of identity and community. Hopepunk is a sub-genre of science fiction that centers on characters actively changing the world for the better through collaborative and interdependent care. With a special attention to disability studies, this class will ask you to analyze myriad elements that shape our relationship to the world around us and participate in academic conversations on identity and culture. By looking at identity politics specifically through a speculative lens, we will question the assumptions we take for granted and reassess the revolutionary possibilities of kindness, community, and hope.

CAT-002: Asian Diasporas in Film and Visual Media

Hoang Nguyen

Associate Professor, Literature

Tuesday/Thursday 12:30-1:50 p.m.

This course examines the "everywhere-all-at-once" presence of Asians outside of Asia in film and visual media. Asians are considered perpetual foreigners ("Where are you really from?") but also model minorities. On the one hand, they are deemed the threatening yellow peril and robotic workers taking over the West. On the other, Asians are loved and envied for their popular cultures (e.g. anime, K-Pop and K-dramas) and their cuisines (e.g. General Tso's Chicken, pad Thai, pho).

The course considers the reasons why Asians venture far from Asia: to seek asylum from war-torn countries, to pursue a good education and well-paying jobs, to search for and reunite with family, to look for love, to find a new home. The Asian diasporic figures we examine will include: the yellow peril, the immigrant, the exile, the transnational adoptee, the Internet bride, the care worker, and the restaurateur. We will consider the following questions: How does diaspora challenge and reinforce national identity? How does it disrupt gender and sexual norms? What intimate relationships does diaspora make possible and disallow? How does it interrogate notions of ethnic, racial, and cultural authenticity? In what ways does diaspora trouble, and reinvest in, the idea of an original homeland?

Students will develop and hone skills in film and media analysis, critical thinking, and writing and argumentation that can be applied to close readings of diverse visual and written texts.

CAT-002: Uses of Darkness: Contemporary Unsettling Fiction

Liz Popko

Assistant Teaching Professor, CAT

Monday/Wednesday/Friday 9:00-9:50 a.m.

In 1974, British author Angela Carter claimed "We live in gothic times." Carter, known for her dark and fantastic reimaginings of fairytales, was likely referencing the high cultural anxieties of the western world that pervaded the late twentieth century: energy crises, wars and revolutions in the Middle East, a sense of radical shifts in social values and power. To say that we, in the second decade of the twenty-first century, remain in "gothic times" would be a vast understatement. The turn of the millennium has brought endless wars, financial crises, polarizing politics, a global pandemic, and technology-induced existential dread. Consider that in 2008, the Oxford English Dictionary added a new definition to the term "dumpster fire": "figurative. A chaotic or disastrously mishandled situation; an embarrassing spectacle; a debacle, a shambles, a mess." These are definitely, gothic times. We need only turn to our screens to witness terrible violence, exploitation, amorality, and other general unpleasantness. Why would we turn to fiction for the same? And yet, since 2019, the publication of horror fiction and film has nearly doubled, according to Publisher's Weekly.

Philosopher Marianna Alessandri argues that, in contrast to dominant Western discourses, there is actually great value, truth, and even beauty in our "dark moods" such as anger, grief, and anxiety. Perhaps fiction offers us new ways to understand the horror of the world and our responses to that horror. This CAT-002 course seeks to answer the question: "What do unsettling stories offer us?" Throughout this course, you will develop your ability to analyze and synthesize complex ideas related to storytelling and discomfort. You will compose your own original arguments about the social/cultural/personal uses (or failures) of dark literature in the twenty-first century. And hopefully, you will develop a greater appreciation for the ways in which literary art—in a variety of forms—plays a very real role in daily life, no matter how horrific.