Second-Year Experience

Jonathan Banfill

In this course, you will explore how technological innovation shapes global power dynamics
through an in-depth examination of China’s rapid technological transformation since 2020.
You’ll engage with multiple theoretical frameworks—such as theories of platform capitalism,
technological sovereignty, and innovation leapfrogging—to understand how China has
developed alternative pathways to technological modernity. The course title “Manufacturing
Futures” captures both China’s dominance in global production and the ways technological
choices actively construct possible futures. Through theoretical texts (including Dan Wang’s
Breakneck), case studies (Apple in China), Chinese cinema (Jia Zhangke’s films), and
speculative fiction (The Three-Body Problem), you’ll learn to apply different theoretical lenses to
make sense of complex phenomena like China’s electric vehicle revolution, AI development,
and green energy infrastructure. The goal is not to master one theory but to understand how
different frameworks reveal different aspects of China’s technological rise and what this means
for the industries you’ll enter after graduation.

How do we understand the relationship of urban-rural? In this course, we’ll explore and debate
the theory of “urbanormativity” (the resource dependency of the urban on the rural) and
critically engage it with local Vermont case studies including: a library that straddles the
Vermont-Quebec border, the colonial history of Vermont’s white pines, Vermont’s dairy industry
use of migrant labor, and the “Vailification” of outdoor sport in Vermont.

Weiling Deng

When the panopticon was invented in the late 18th century, it did not just make the surveillance
of prisoners easier. The all-seeing architecture changed the systems of social control and
marked the society’s transition to a disciplinary power. Concurrently, an extremely similar
structure housing 360-degree panoramic landscape paintings was invented, enabling an
immersive optical experience that visualized for the European viewers a world in motion and
one that would be further colonized. This course explores a wide range of techniques and
media of vision, from camera obscura to photography and film, from sketches to digital display,
from panorama to virtual reality and computer-aided surveillance, and investigates how they
construct a “society of spectacle” that in turn shapes our relationship with the world. This
course draws on theories from art history, visual culture, architecture, museum studies,
philosophy of history, gender and ethnic studies, postcolonial studies, and information and
communication studies to examine these techniques of seeing. Through making basic versions
of some of these techniques, you will learn to understand these techniques as tools that
reorganize knowledge and social practices and materialize “modernity” as everyday life, rather
than just an artistic experiment of the avant-garde isolated from larger economic, technological,
and intellectual contexts. Instead of delivering a “true history” of vision, the goal is to reflect on,
theorize, decolonize, and apply in re-creating some of the above-mentioned techniques, how
what we call “present,” “modern,” and “global” are configured materially through the visual.

David Kite

Ethics is the theory of deliberation and choice in human affairs. Students will study traditional
systems of moral philosophy and will use these to analyze relevant issues in personal, social
and political spaces. The goal will be to develop skills of thoughtful and reflective deliberation
about ethical values, choices and actions.

How do we understand the relationship of urban-rural? In this course, we’ll explore and debate
the theory of “urbanormativity” (the resource dependency of the urban on the rural) and
critically engage it with local Vermont case studies including: a library that straddles the
Vermont-Quebec border, the colonial history of Vermont’s white pines, Vermont’s dairy industry
use of migrant labor, and the “Vailification” of outdoor sport in Vermont.

Kerry Noonan

The Illuminati? Q-Anon? 5-G? Area 51? Lizard people? Conspiracy theories seem to be everywhere, showing up in politics, healthcare, and other important areas of our lives. What makes these narratives compelling? Why do people come to believe them? What function do they serve? How are they spread from person to person? We will use the tools and theories from the academic discipline of folklore to examine the history of such beliefs, look at how they are spread, analyze their types and structures, explore psychological and cultural reasons for their acceptance, and delve into the symbolic content and possible meanings of these narratives that offer to explain the inexplicable.

Kerry Noonan

The Illuminati? Q-Anon? 5-G? Area 51? Lizard people? Conspiracy theories seem to be
everywhere, showing up in politics, healthcare, and other important areas of our lives. What
makes these narratives compelling? Why do people come to believe them? What function do
they serve? How are they spread from person to person? We will use the tools and theories
from the academic discipline of folklore to examine the history of such beliefs, look at how they
are spread, analyze their types and structures, explore psychological and cultural reasons for
their acceptance, and delve into the symbolic content and possible meanings of these
narratives that offer to explain the inexplicable.

Gary Scudder

We live in an age when terms like Socialist and Fascist are thrown around casually, and clumsily, and yet there may be no time in recent memory when we need to understand their meaning more clearly. Students in this class will make use of a variety of texts, some literary (Yevegeny Zamyatin’s We and Jason Stanley’s How Fascism Works) and some cinematic (The Human Condition, Closely Watched Trains, Triumph of the Will, Terrestrial Verses), to explore the history and nature of Fascism.

Steve Wehmeyer

Magic, Sorcery, Witchcraft: These are concepts that animate our literature, films, games, live
entertainment, and vernacular belief and practice. Forbidden by some, desired by others,
dismissed as fraud or embraced as otherworldly reality; the concept of Magic has preoccupied
scholars from a number of academic disciplines. Anthropologists, Archaeologists, Historians,
Psychologists, Biologists, Artists, and Religious Studies scholars have passionately explored
the widespread and multi-cultural concept of Magic. What is it? What do we mean by this
term? Different disciplinary theories and perspectives about Magic have been proposed,
discussed, decried, or defended, as scholars strive to understand these mysterious aspects of
culture. Through a deep dive into those theories, we’ll address and analyze the question of
why human beings – around the world and throughout time (including the present day) have
imagined, embraced, and evolved the idea of an enchanted world. And we’ll explore how this
specific question – together with a solid grounding in theory in general – is relevant to the
personal, creative and future professional lives of Champlain students. Do you believe in
Magic?

Steve Wehmeyer

Magic, Sorcery, Witchcraft: These are concepts that animate our literature, films, games, live
entertainment, and vernacular belief and practice. Forbidden by some, desired by others,
dismissed as fraud or embraced as otherworldly reality; the concept of Magic has preoccupied
scholars from a number of academic disciplines. Anthropologists, Archaeologists, Historians,
Psychologists, Biologists, Artists, and Religious Studies scholars have passionately explored
the widespread and multi-cultural concept of Magic. What is it? What do we mean by this
term? Different disciplinary theories and perspectives about Magic have been proposed,
discussed, decried, or defended, as scholars strive to understand these mysterious aspects of
culture. Through a deep dive into those theories, we’ll address and analyze the question of
why human beings – around the world and throughout time (including the present day) have
imagined, embraced, and evolved the idea of an enchanted world. And we’ll explore how this
specific question – together with a solid grounding in theory in general – is relevant to the
personal, creative and future professional lives of Champlain students. Do you believe in
Magic?

Gary Scudder

We live in an age when terms like Socialist and Fascist are thrown around casually, and clumsily, and yet there may be no time in recent memory when we need to understand their meaning more clearly. Students in this class will make use of a variety of texts, some literary (Yevegeny Zamyatin’s We and Jason Stanley’s How Fascism Works) and some cinematic (The Human Condition, Closely Watched Trains, Triumph of the Will, Terrestrial Verses), to explore the history and nature of Fascism.