Associate Professor of Philosophy Katheryn Doran wrote about Hamilton’s Social, Structural, and Institutional Hierarchies (SSIH) requirement — added to the College’s educational goals and curriculum in 2016 — in a post published recently on the Blog of the American Philosophical Association.
Implemented in the 2017-18 academic year, the SSIH was designed to help students gain “an understanding of structural and institutional hierarchies based on one or more of the social categories of race, class, gender, ethnicity, nationality, religion, sexuality, age, and abilities/disabilities.”
“Syllabus Showcase: Philosophy and Film, Katheryn Doran” describes the challenges Doran faced in order to bring a lower level course into line with the new requirements.
Doran discussed the evolution of the course as she grappled with issues that included making it relevant for a wide range of students with varied backgrounds and academic interests, how to balance primary philosophy material and readings, choosing which movies to use, and what the writing assignments would look like.
The blog post includes Doran’s pre- and post-SSIH syllabi for the course.
