Course Sequence

Winter 2026

CAT 2CE: Popular Culture, Disability, and You

Jennifer Marchisotto

Lecturer, CAT

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

We are what we watch. Or read. Or listen to. Or are we? In this small, seminar-style course we will focus on the ways identity intersects with popular culture to better understand the ways our interactions with media at both individual and cultural scales help form and reform our understanding of the world. With a special attention to issues of disability, we will analyze the ways representation helps construct meaning and the effects of those constructions on individual lived experience. From books to social media to video games to television and film, we will think about how the media we consume contributes to our sense of self. Through an intersectional lens we will examine the ways physical bodies are shaped through social interaction and consumption of popular culture.

As part of this course, you will be required to participate in a number of experiential opportunities that will ask you to engage with popular culture in physical and tangible ways. Through these experiences you will be asked to reflect on your specific interactions with ideas and how those interactions shape your understanding of larger spaces and community.

Possible texts and authors include Johanna Hedva, Nirmala Erevelles, Margaret Price, Lamar Jurelle Bruce, A Long Way to a Small Angry Planet by Becky Chambers, and Freaks (1932).

Spring 2026

CAT 3CE: Environmental Futures: Community-Engaged Learning

Phoebe Bronstein

Associate Teaching Professor, CAT

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

Three-hour weekly volunteer shifts to be coordinated around student schedules

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.

CAT 3CE fulfills the university Jane Teranes Climate Change Education Requirement.

Future Quarter

CAT 90 or CAT 124

CAT 90 is a one-unit reflection seminar designed for students who engage in summer experiential learning activities. Its purpose is encouraging growth through facilitated reflection and analysis of students' experiential learning activities. Through guided prompts, discussions, and written reflections students will investigate their own perspectives, assumptions, and values and evaluate how these things informed their experience. Towards the end of the course, students will be asked to engage in reflection for action, a practice focused on improving student success by applying their cultivated knowledge to future career and academic decisions.

CAT 124 is Sixth College's own high-impact experiential learning course that gives students the opportunity to learn through community engagement, critical analysis, and small group discussion. The courses bring together an interdisciplinary faculty to expound on themes of culture, art, and technology, examining different topics each quarter and over the summer, through distinct experiential learning opportunities.

CAT 90 and CAT 124 fulfill the experiential learning requirement for Sixth College's general education requirements.