Course Sequence

Winter 2027

CAT-002CE: Hopepunk and the Possibilities of Radical Accessibility

Jennifer Marchisotto

Lecturer, CAT

Monday/Wednesday/Friday 12:00-12:50 p.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.

Spring 2027

CAT-003CE: Environmental Futures: Children's Media and Humanistic Approaches to the Climate Crisis

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-003CE 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-003CE fulfills the university Jane Teranes Climate Change Education Requirement.

Future Quarter

CAT-090 or CAT-124

CAT-090 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-090 and CAT-124 fulfill the experiential learning requirement for Sixth College's general education requirements.

Past Projects

Check out an example of a CAT-003CE final project: a children's book educating elementary students about a climate topic.

"Disruption in the Desert" | Mac Carroll, Laura Díaz Rodríguez, Aya Jaffer, and Maia Lazor | Spring 2024

View Work