FYF@Innis Seminars

POL192H1 introduces students to citizen political participation in democracies, with a focus on Canadian case studies. We examine theories of political participation and a range of methods by which citizens engage in political life including social movements, political party membership, deliberative mini-publics and more. We will also examine debates about the appropriate role for citizens in governance and considers barriers to equity in political participation in Canada.

This first-year seminar explores radical traditions of education beyond and in resistance to formal schooling. Transnational in scope — and journeying from the late nineteenth century to the present day — we will study the pedagogical innovations and grassroots struggles of anarchic youth, guerrilla intellectuals, and feminist revolutionaries who used education broadly, and historical inquiry in particular, as tools for empowerment and collective liberation.

The term "world-making” is often used to refer to transmedia storytelling, or the creation of story-worlds across serial narratives in entertainment media, ranging from games to comics. EAS197H1 looks at the ways that media producers and fans, alike, engage with media worlds. More importantly, the course situates these media worlds within a broader conception of "world-making," namely, the geopolitical and economic configuration of modern East Asia.

This course examines the political geographies of transnational migration, asking how spaces of migration and mobility are political — and how migration politics are tied to inequalities wrought through intersecting histories of race, class, and gender. We extend our understandings of migrants, borders, and mobility, and explore the processes through which mobility is produced, delimited, and structured. We also consider the transnational politics of migration, the militarization of border zones, and the political spaces of migrant displacement, dispossession, and dislocation.

This first-year seminar introduces key ideas in anthropology, psychoanalysis, and religion on bodies, personhood, and forms of reason. Focusing on anthropological accounts of personhood, Artificial Intelligence, and medieval and contemporary forms of mysticism, we ask how different technologies of reason may co-exist, emerge, and collide while shaping politically different forms of being in the world.

This seminar examines the meaning and mathematics of probabilities, and how they arise in our everyday lives. Specific topics may include: the nature of coincidences, the concept of luck, games involving dice and cards, long run averages in casinos, margins of error in polls, the interpretation of medical studies, crime statistics, decision making, pseudorandomness, and Monte Carlo algorithms.

Films create story worlds, imaginary environments in which characters live and act, and where events, large and small, transpire. Some story worlds are elaborate, fanciful constructs while others seem to capture the look and feel of the ‘real’ world. Understanding the rules of time and space in story worlds helps us understand cinema as a unique art form.