COMMRC 1072 - KNOWING HUMANS: AN INTRODUCTION TO RESEARCH IN THE HUMANITIES

Minimum Credits: 3
Maximum Credits: 3
Don't you just want to fix the world? Doesn't the world look broken in a thousand ways? Can't university researchers just tell us what to do to make all of this-once and for all-better? This course argues that research can provide no quick and final fixes. To be sure, research offers us lots of fixes, but then many of our fixes turn out to be problems in their own right, and we need to be better at recognizing and articulating the complexity of that kind of unintended consequence. In this course, you'll learn about how a cluster of disciplines called the humanities works on complexities of this kind. Why are our fixes so reliably unpredictable in their consequences? Because human beings and human societies are highly complex and because history compounds change. Created by the Co-Directors of Pitt's Humanities Center, this course wagers that the humanities deal with fields of inquiry where the relation between cases and rules is highly complex. In the real world, no rule can tell you definitively what to do in a particular case. In the real world, we're often called upon to recognize what's novel in an unusual case. And in the real world, we often have to create new rules of our own (where we're not just approximating laws of nature). Such work is both critical and creative: it critiques injustice, and it imagines things otherwise. We'll learn how different forms of humanities research push into these complexities of rules and cases: we'll learn how to work with archives, models, storytelling, feelings, genres, objects, play, games, fragments, commitments, and norms. You'll have the opportunity to articulate a humanities research question that matters to you. And you'll have the chance to develop that question into a research proposal that you can then explore in another class at Pitt or in a paid research opportunity that we'll mentor you toward-like the Humanities Center's own Undergraduate Fellowship.
Academic Career: Undergraduate
Course Component: Lecture
Grade Component: LG/SNC Elective Basis
Course Requirements: PREQ: ENG 0102 or ENGCMP (0002 or 0006 or 0020 or 0200 or 0203 or 0205 or 0207 or 0208 or 0210 or 0212 or 0213 or 0214) or ENGFLM 0210 or FP (0003 or 0006) *Applies to all WRIT Courses*

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