Before Spanish colonization, Maya people wrote, inscribed, and painted in their native script. Maya civilization is known for their use of the number zero, their astronomical feats, and great ancient cities. After many years of attempting to read the hieroglyphs that the ancient Maya left behind, major breakthroughs by scholars with help from the Maya locals unlocked a wealth of information and allowed both Maya and non-Maya people to learn about Maya history in their own words. If you are a student eager to engage in cultural exploration or problem solving, this course is for you! By learning about the Maya writing system, we can challenge assumptions we make about writing such as its structure and its beauty.

What is the "everyday" and how does that relate to our lives? What is the relationship between us and the objects around us? What is the relationship between reality and our social interactions? In this class, we will delve into the question and debate on social constructionism. We will engage in the decades long debate, and think for ourselves the real and the fiction.

"This Land Is Your Land" is one of the staples of American Folk music. During President Joe Biden’s inauguration, Jennifer Lopez performed some verses alongside “America the Beautiful” and a Spanish translation of the Pledge of Allegiance. American folk music holds history and meaning, not just to the writers but to the workers that sang these songs and fought. In this class, we will look at the revival of the American folk genre and its root in the socialist and anti-fascist movements of the early and mid-20th century. We will also analyze some lyrics in conjunction with history and politics to understand what were the motivations behind the folk music sung today.

In just three years of her debut, the Japanese virtual singer Hatsune Miku was featured in over 100,000 songs. Domino’s Pizza and Lady Gaga have both made use of Miku’s brand and vocals. Voice synthesis software in the last 15 years have changed the course of music in popular and niche ways. Ever heard of the Donald Trump and Barack Obama cover of “We Don’t Talk anymore”? In this course, we will have a brief introduction to vocal synthesis programs through the freeware program UTAU. What processes and problems are faced when one tries to make a computer program sing their songs? What are the benefits and uniqueness of programs like these? By the end of this class, you would know the steps needed to produce your own UTAUloid vocals. No knowledge of music is required.

Your middle school library? Or your local library? What about the Yale Research libraries? Libraries and archives occupy a space in our lives around us. But let’s be honest, do you even know where your local library is (I didn’t for a long time)? In this class, we will examine what is a library and what is an archive? What purposes do they hold and what can we use them for? How did they come into existence? Should you ditch the internet for a library and archives?

Social construction has surfaced American political discourse in recent years. The notion of gender and race for instance received praise and scrutiny among intellectuals, politicians, and the general public. But gender and race are not the only ways social constructionism is applied. In this class, we will learn of different thinkers who influenced and commented on social construction theory. By learning of what social constructionism is from the theorists themselves, we will examine and critique these ideas and consider the following questions. How do these ideas relate to our lives? What do these theories exclude? Are these theories even worth considering?

When one think of Japan, one may picture a society of hierarchy and order. But for activists in the late 19th and early 20th century, that was exactly what wrong with Japan. How did anarchism find itself in Japan? Where did Yale Divinity School, christianity, and Esperanto play into this? How did anarchism set the foundations of Japanese feminism? In this class, we will take a brief look at the history of anarchism in Japan and analyze primary sources to understand the beliefs and lives of three anarcha-feminists: Ito Noe, Fumiko Kaneko, and Kanno Sugako.