Reflections Seminars: Fall 2025
First Semester Students
How To Pay Attention
- Joseph Rosen (Humanities) and Jay Shea (English)
- Monday 2:30 – 5:30 & Wednesday 2:30-6:30
- CREDITS: Humanities 345-101 and English 603-101
Attention is the most valuable resource in the world: the people who keep your eyeballs glued to social media are billionaires. But YOU are the source of that wealth. How will you spend it before you die?
This co-taught Reflections seminar sees curiosity and heightened attention as the basis of fresh knowledges: whether it’s learning to feel the cadence of life’s rhythms in a line of poetry or in the footfall of an urban stroll. In our class, we’ll do some improvisational, experiential exercises (both inside and outside of the classroom) that explore the multi-sensory and embodied nature of attention. We’ll sit still, become quiet, and see what we can learn from being present and, sometimes, being bored. We’ll move: through the pages of books, in performance-based exercises, and on walks. With fresh eyes and child’s mind we’ll feel our way through the landscapes that shape us. The grass beneath our feet, the faces in the crowd are ready to come alive, if only we pay attention.
How can experiments in observation and focus lead to fresh understandings of ourselves, our relationships with each other, and the world around us? Can they lead to new forms of Freedom? Love? Beauty? Democracy? Who knows, but let’s learn together by paying attention!
In the English portion of this class, we’ll read from a range of genres—from literary essays, to haiku and modernist poetry, to gothic fiction and film. Authors may include Basho, Baudelaire, Rilke, Edgar Allen Poe, Thich Nhat Hanh, Walt Whitman, Mary Shelly, and Virginia Woolf.
In the Humanities portion of this class, we’ll read Blaise Pascal, Simone Weil, Martin Buber, Johann Hari, Jenny Odell and others—though ultimately your own experience will be the guide to understanding the nature of your attention.
The Story of I: Theories of the Self in Posthuman World
- Mikaela Bobiy (Humanities) and Rebecca Million (English)
- Wednesday 11:30-2:30 & Friday 10:30-2:30
- CREDITS: Humanities 345-101 and English 603-101
Where does the story of “I” begin? Is The Self an essence that is you from the moment you’re born, or is selfhood something you develop along the way? Is the self like a river, ever-changing, fluid? Is it a puzzle that only becomes complete as we age, or is it like The Matrix, a sophisticated illusion? Maybe we perform our selves into being …
Theories of the self comprise a field of knowledge that allows us to consider questions about our very nature(s) and how our conception of the self changes with changing times. Posthumanism invites us to consider how the development of new technologies might affect our sense of self: will we need to come up with radical redefinitions of what it means to be or have a self? Might selfhood be shared among non-human entities like other animals and even machines? Are we destined to become something other than human, or, as some theorists suggest, are we already cyborgs?
As well as considering such philosophical questions, in this paired course we will read and explore literature from different periods to discover how our changing ideas of selfhood find expression in new literary genres and themes. Together we will investigate all these ideas and more, through various mediums including art, literature, philosophy, and film. Students will be encouraged to explore ideas of self through autobiographical and analytical writing and creative activities and assignments.
Third Semester Students
The New Entity: The Second Coming
- Gray Miles (Humanities) and Jessica Cadieux (English)
- Tuesday and Thursday 11:30-2:30
- CREDITS: Humanities Ethics 345-BXH and English Applied Themes 603-103
- Pre-requisites: Humanities 101 & 102 and English 101 & 102
Is there already an alien intelligence among us, restructuring how we learn, reshaping our society and conception of the self? Is the landscape of our work and how we assign value shifting under our feet? How will Artificial Intelligence change the world and humanity? Like ancient navigators reading the signs of the coming weather in the sky, or modern seismologists measuring the likelihood of an earthquake, in this class we will glean what we can from novels, poems, movies and television about what might happen soon. Together we will look at the work of social historians, economists and journalists as they project the impact AI will have on society. This constellation of texts charts the possibilities of how AI might reconfigure both society and notions of a human soul. We may be left with more questions than answers, but the process will help clarify what makes us human.
Questions? Contact Gabrielle Bernardin, Reflections Administrative Assistant: at gbernardin@dawsoncollege.qc.ca or by MIO.
