Launch of New USP First-tier modules
For the upcoming semester of Academic Year 2011/12, USP introduces nine new USP first-tier modules. Open to all USP students, the new modules are:
- Monuments, Memorials, and Commemoration (UWC2102C);
- Writing and Research: Controversies in the History of Ideas (UWC2102B);
- Imagining War (ULT2298D);
- Ethics and Aesthetics: the Moral Value of Representational Art (UPI2207);
- Imagining Animals (UPI2208);
- Language, Cognition, and Culture (UHB2207);
- Singapore Studies: Archives, Biography, Memory (USE2311);
- Quantitative Reasoning Foundation: Mental Events (UQF2101B); and
- Quantitative Reasoning Foundation: DNA Evidence in a Court of Law (UQF2101C).
Monuments, Memorials, and Commemoration (UWC2102C)
In this Writing and Critical Thinking module, Dr Andrew Conroe will lead students to examine how monuments, memorials, and other forms of public commemoration represent the past and shape memory, culture, and politics in the present. Using a comparative approach with case studies from a number of different societies, the module will highlight the complexity and contested nature of processes of commemoration and memorialization. Although designers of monuments and memorials may portray them as telling the “true” version of historical events, the end results often hide controversies that may have been part of the process of creating these structures. Similarly, the meanings attached to monuments and memorials can change dramatically over time, as societies change and these structures are reinterpreted through new lenses. This module will also invite students to grapple with broader questions regarding the relationship between power, politics, and the (often contested) authority to articulate a “true” version of the past.
Writing and Research: Controversies in the History of Ideas (UWC2102B)
This module asks students to consider the complex pathways through which certain now-familiar scientific ideas developed and became adopted, as well as the potential insights to be had by researching “the history (or histories) of an idea”. Through emphasizing interdisciplinary inquiry, Dr Don Favareau offers students the possibility of discussion, debate, and research from a variety of disciplinary perspectives, including history, philosophy, and natural science. By independently researching the history of a concept often taken for granted – such as “gravity” or “nutrition” – students will develop an appreciation for the controversies, beliefs, motivations, and circumstances that go into the making and/or the widespread adoption of an explanatory “idea”. Over the course of exploring complex and nuanced ideas, they will further refine their skills in the researching, writing, and oral presentation of academic research papers.
Imagining War (ULT2298D)
War is the greatest common, man-made trauma that human beings undergo. We imagine war before, during, and after we fight it. We imagine it socially, as tribes or nations, generating a common understanding through books, movies, songs, and other representations. Those shared visions of war enable us to fight it and confront its trauma. Taught by Prof John Richardson, this module examines the changing imagination of war across history. Focusing mainly on English-speaking cultures, it explores the representation and imagination of war across a number of different mediums, including poems, books, films, songs, plays, news reports, letters, speeches, and TV programmes. It asks how they represent war, and how representations change over time and under pressure from technology, events, and political thought.
Ethics and Aesthetics: the Moral Value of Representational Art (UPI2207)
Taught by Dr Leung Wing Sze, this module examines the intersections between ethics (the study of what is right and wrong) and aesthetics (the study of beauty and taste) in light of two questions. We will explore, first, whether the appreciation of artworks makes us morally better persons, and second, whether an ethically problematic characteristic diminishes the artistic value of an artwork. Students will study both historical and contemporary debates about these two questions, and make use of examples of representational art – that is, artworks which depict an object, event or mental state – to explore and refine their own views. Examples of representational art examined in the module include: novels, paintings, films, photographs, and museum exhibits. The texts that students will be reading, likewise, are very interdisciplinary in nature, as they are written by a larger range of authors, such as philosophers, lawyers, art historians, finally, literary and museum critics.
Imagining Animals (UPI2208)
How have artists, philosophers, and writers of fiction imagined the relation between humans and animals? What are some of the implications of imagining humans as a species of animal, or as belonging to a realm of being that exceeds the lives of animals? What, if anything, distinguishes us from other animals: language, clothing, reason, or something else? In this course, Assoc Prof Johan Geertsema asks students to confront and examine some of the ways these questions have been explored in visual art, philosophy, and literary texts. Students will consider how we look at animals, read the views of influential philosophers, and immerse themselves in fiction that imagines animals. The course will conclude with an examination of a provocative text by the novelist J. M. Coetzee, who stages a confrontation between philosophy and literature on the question of imagining animals.
Language, Cognition, and Culture (UHB2207)
Taught by Dr Peter Vail, this module explores the deep interconnections between language, cognition and culture. It begins with a consideration of the ‘discursive mind’ - that is, the particularly human way of knowing that uses language as its primary tool and medium. Realizing how much of human cognition is language-dependent, we then explore the relations between language, cognition, and culture by looking at such everyday linguistic phenomena as code switching, metaphor, and gesture. Students will critically engage sociolinguistic and cognitive science theories by collecting and analyzing their own linguistic data and assessing to what extent current theories of language and culture explain cognitive differences.
Singapore Studies: Archives, Biography, Memory (USE2311)
This module examines the intersections between archival materials, historical memory, and the writing of biography. Prof Philip Holden raises important questions concerning how individual lives entwine with larger historical movements, why we select certain sources over others, and how archives enable us, through telling life stories, to do memory work relevant to the present day. It takes as a subject an archive in Singapore which has not been extensively used – the Lucien Wang archive at the Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts. The primary goal of the module is to encourage intellectual exploration of the concepts outlined above. Students will study theoretical work on archives and biography, and critically examine biographical work in different media, before producing biographical work of their own. They will also spend time in the archive doing practical work to acquaint themselves with the physical nature of the archive itself.
Quantitative Reasoning Foundation: Mental Events (UQF2101B)
Mental events are unobservable. But, as psychophysicists have shown, there is a sense that mental events not only can be measured, but measured in terms of their relationship to physical events. In this Quantitative Reasoning Foundation module, Assoc Prof Chua Fook Kee looks at how mental events might be quantified. The emphasis is not the technicalities of measurement. Rather, the goal is to get students to develop their quantitative reasoning capacities by considering the methods and data of the psychophysical approach.
Quantitative Reasoning Foundation: DNA Evidence in a Court of Law (UQF2101C)
Court cases involving identification of individuals are now routinely presented with genetic materials as evidence. In this module, students will explore the biological nature of such evidence and look at what the statement "the probability of a match for two unrelated individuals is 3 in 100 billion" means. How is the number calculated and how reliable is the number, and its interpretation? Assoc Prof Yap Von Bing will lead students to explore the fascinating intersection of law, biology, and statistics that has evolved through many legal and intellectual debates. The aim of this module is to gain some understanding of the basic issues with emphasis on the quantitative aspects of DNA evidence. Students will then apply the knowledge to interpret some real legal cases, and through the process, develop requisite knowledge in the relevant fields.
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