Regardless of what your major is at Northwestern, we all know the feeling of scrolling for hours on Caesar when classes drop. Trying to find distros that fit in your schedule and won’t bore you to sleep is a struggle, especially when it seems like all the classes are nothing out of the ordinary. But, what about the classes at Northwestern that are sort of…niche?
This Spring, a brand new class in the Humanities and Performance Studies departments is being taught. Lana Del Rey: Emotional Landscapes of U.S. Settler Colonialism caught the eye of many students for its incorporation of the 11-time Grammy nominated artist. I spoke with Madeleine Le Cesne, a fifth year PhD candidate in the Department of Performance Studies who is responsible for introducing this new class.
[Le Cesne] “I wanted to figure out a way to offer a course that honestly could, like, give me some reprieve from my dissertation materials, but that also spoke to students’ interests broadly. Even though this is like a very niche class, like the Catch-22 with performance studies is a lot of people don’t really know what we do. So, you know, I wanted to teach something that felt accessible to students.”
Not only does this class present an interesting intersection between Lana Del Rey and the notion of settler-colonialism, it does so in an untraditional way.
[Le Cesne] “So for this class, I think a much more interesting question is: How do the ethical failures and misgivings of this artist actually help me identify my own? Because I’m listening to this thing, I’m identifying with it. You know, I listen to Lana because a lot of her music speaks to me emotionally. So the critique isn’t outward facing, like ‘look at Lana finger wag,’ It’s actually ‘ look at ourselves and like, how can we dismantle our own settler-colonial desires as settlers and as settler-colonial subjects together in the classroom through our interest in this fraught artist’.”
SESP sophomore Malik Middleton has also had experience taking an untraditional class at Northwestern. This winter, Middleton was enrolled in Black Studies 327: New Black Music (Jazz) in Chicago, which offered students the chance to meet with local artists, booking agents, and tour managers involved in Chicago’s jazz scene.
[Middleton] “Our big culminating project was, basically as a class, producing and acting as the sort of support for the big Leon Forrest Panel that the Black Studies Department does every year. So we had all the artists that we’d spoken to, like come in and play and host a panel. It was really, really awesome. I wanted to be in this class so bad. Originally I think the class capacity was like 25. It ended up being like 40 people and they got a whole new room so that they could accommodate more people cause It was just in such demand.”
For Middleton, this experience was much more than just a class.
[Middleton]: “This is a once in a lifetime opportunity. This is what I came to Northwestern for. I think a school with this kind of prestige and these kinds of resources can afford to sort of push where education is going and like what that looks like and how classrooms operate. It’s exhilarating for students, but it’s also, it also seemed like it’s really, really fun and like engaging for professors too like, they get to do something different.”
Fellow Northwestern sophomore Sebastian Huerta is also enrolled in a class that extends the usual bounds that classes have to offer. Social History of Psychedelic Medicine is offered as a communication studies course in the School of Communications.
[Huerta] “It’s been interesting so far, but definitely a strange class and a strange experience. But I think it’s important for the university to offer classes like this because the whole point of college is to really learn and open new windows of things that you haven’t, you know, been exposed to before. And I mean it’s not like anybody’s taking a class on psychedelics in high school. So, I think it gives you interesting perspectives, which I think is the most important part of college.”
Who knew that untraditional classes could be what makes students feel like college is worthwhile?
For WNUR News, I’m Jessica Watts.
