CAT 3

CAT 3 courses (six units, spring quarter) are writing- and research-intensive, focusing on collaboration, research, and art-making by speculating on how the relationships between culture, art, and technology will be transformed in the future. Students must have passed CAT 2 in order to enroll in CAT 3.

Spring 2025 Courses

CAT 3: What If?: Fearsome Futures and Possible Presents

Jennifer Marchisotto

Lecturer, CAT

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

Imagination is subversive. Creators of speculative art have long used it to undermine power structures, providing alternative views of what our world could look like. This CAT 3 course will look at the ways creators use art to warn us of pending catastrophe or show us the possibility of a different present, directing our gaze to better understand contemporary experience by reflecting it in fantastic, fun, and sometimes horrifying ways. We will read, watch, and listen to texts that contemplate the ways ability, gender, race, and other elements of identity intersect with contemporary culture and the environment to say something about who we are and where we are going.

CAT 3: How to Survive the Zombie Future

Liz Popko

Assistant Teaching Professor, CAT

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

In this CAT 3 course, you will use your research and analysis skills to speculate about a post-apocalyptic/dystopian zombie future. Specifically, you will use your own areas of expertise to imagine what kind of zombie future awaits us and offer insights into how we might manifest or avoid those destinies. We will look at the ways zombies have been imagined in fiction, film, and other texts, particularly as they are used to signal different anxieties about the past, present, and future world. Some questions that this class will consider include: What counts as a zombie? How does the zombie symbolize different kinds of human relationships and social organizations? What could be done now to prepare us for a world with zombies? What does ethics look like amidst a zombie crisis and catastrophe?

CAT 3: Translation

Amelia Glaser

Professor, Literature

Tuesday/Thursday 11:00 a.m.-12:20 p.m.

How have humans, from the ancient world to the present, made themselves understood across languages? What methods have proved the most effective and under what circumstances? This course seeks to answer these questions by examining innovations in translation from the Rosetta Stone, to Biblical translation, to web-based language technology. You will read essays and articles exploring the possibilities and impossibilities of translating jokes, slang, and terms of endearment. We will discuss how translators, the "work horses of literature," have sought to render poetry into different languages. We will test new technologies that are changing the way we approach foreign texts. In-class exercises will allow you to try your hand at a variety of translation techniques. You do not need to know a foreign language for this class, but if you do you might have a chance to use it.

CAT 3: Listening to the Future: Speculating through Soundscapes and Sonification

Joe Bigham

Lecturer, CAT

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

Speculation is a powerful tool that allows us to "see" the possibilities that lay before us. But what about the sounds of the future? Can the hum of electricity and droning of circuits be understood as the murmurs of a future still to come? How have artists used sound to give voice to their hopes and concerns? This CAT 3 course considers how we hear and make heard potential trajectories for people, technology, and culture through analysis and creation of sound.

This course engages with theories and ideas from a cross-section of disciplines, including Film Studies, Popular Music Studies, and Sound Studies. We start by considering the use of sound in science fiction film sound design and soundtracks, such as 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Matrix, and Arrival. We then turn to the types of messages and issues addressed by musicians with futurist and speculative aesthetics, such as Parliament/Funkadelic, Björk, and Janelle Monáe. Lastly, we focus on the sound worlds we are already immersed within and analyze what those sounds say about the present moment. Taken in total, these sounds, ideas, and analyses will serve as the basis for students' collaborative multimedia works that speculate through sound.

CAT 3CE: Environmental Futures: Community-Engaged Learning

Phoebe Bronstein

Associate Teaching Professor, CAT

Monday/Wednesday 10:00-11:50 a.m.

This CAT 3CE course is only open to students who have applied for and been accepted to the Community-Engaged Honors Program.

This small, seminar-style CAT 3CE course will examine how popular culture—magazine/newspaper articles, literature, film, and television—has and continues to imagine the environment, with particular attention to the climate crisis. From contemporary films like Okja and Weathering with You to Hollywood's The Day After Tomorrow, we will examine how mass media promotes, questions, and reinforces environmental politics. Paired with our course content, this course will foreground community engagement by having students volunteer with local elementary schools in partnership with the Sage Garden Project. Through discussion and reflection on both the course content and your volunteer experiences, we will ask how these stories we tell help shape and propel environmental change. For instance, how can these future worlds help us understand and engage with our past, current, and future relationship to the environment? How do these films shape our own relationship with the planet? How do these visions sooth or exacerbate anxieties about topics like global warming? Potential topics we will cover include (but are not limited to) the climate crisis; capitalism and the environment; race, gender, and the environment; technology and the environment; and the politics of food.

This CAT 3CE class is approved to fulfill the university Jane Teranes Climate Change Education Requirement.