Spring 2026 Course Search

Historical Dress: The Park-McCullough Project Spring ‘26

Accessibility describes the practice of freeing a space or an event so it might be visited by more people in more ways than one could ever presume at the outset. In this course, we will explore the litany of practices that allow more people (and in particular, disabled, mad, and chronically ill people) into all spheres of public life with a particular focus on performance events.

How do we transition to a low-carbon economy in a manner that doesn’t reinscribe the social and environmental injustices that have plagued our fossil-fueled economy? On one hand, the continued burning of fossil fuels is producing environmental crises that threaten to destabilize the very foundations of collective life, with poor and historically marginalized communities bearing the brunt of the suffering. On the other hand, renewable energy technologies are far from environmentally and socially benign.

Catastrophic events—droughts, earthquakes, floods, hurricanes, and landslides—are growing in frequency and intensity around the world. As more of the global population concentrates in urban areas, the nature and consequences of these natural hazards are taking on a distinct and often violent shape in today’s metropolises and megacities. This course investigates how urban life reshapes both the impact of disasters and our capacity to respond to them.

Economic inequality is often described in terms of uneven distribution of income and wealth. Yet, more importantly, it reflects uneven access to opportunities, advantages, and life chances. Why do some people enjoy a higher standard of living and better quality of life than others? Are such inequalities fair and just? What role do history, policy, and institutions play in sustaining or reducing inequality?

Why does chronic hunger endure even in times of prosperity? How can famine devastate entire regions in extreme cases, while food deserts quietly persist in wealthy countries like the United States? And what does it mean to treat nourishment not as charity or commodity, but as a right of citizenship?

To be LGBTQIA and AAPI is to occupy two disparate, marginalized identities that seem to be be in constant flux. What might the literature of this intersection teach us about larger questions of community, belonging, and resistance? This 2000-level class attempts to locate a Queer Asian Pacific America through literature, from Chinese American lesbian poets of the 1980s to Fatimah Asghar's recent cross-genre coming-of-age novel; from David Henry Hwang’s reimagining of Madame Butterfly to queer Hawaiian reclamations of aloha; and beyond.

Drawing from news articles, interviews, archival materials, and more, writers throughout the 20th and 21st Centuries have sought to document the world through poetry.

The CAPA Workshop is for Seniors who are engaged in their advanced work and want to complete a project as part of it in Public Action.Students are able to connect this work to any area of study at Bennington College. Each student will be required to assemble a digital portfolio that will include their research or thesis, along with a description and implementation of their project during the term. A proposal form will be required once admitted to the class. Projects, can be local, national or international. 

This class will introduce students to creating digital archive that includes digitizing photographs, documents, videotapes and basic types of metadata. We will have discussions about why digitizing personal collections is so important. Students will be expected to bring their own materials to the class. 

Journalism & Democracy is the result of a grant and partnership with the Center for Community News at the University of Vermont, a national network of student journalism programs around the United States. The course recognizes the essential role that the arts and culture play in a healthy democracy. Arts and culture invite us to experience perspectives and ways of life different from our own; they shape conversations about freedom, equal rights and other values that are at the core of American society; and they help us engage with the world in new and important ways.

In this course, students will document the lived experiences of individuals during this immensely challenging period in American history. Students will receive training in the methods of oral history, interviewing techniques, historical ethics, and archival work. They will conduct interviews of classmates and community members. These narratives will then be preserved in order to provide future generations with a firsthand account of the United States during this period of history. 

Qualitative inquiry seeks to discover and to describe in narrative reporting what particular people do in their everyday lives and what the actions mean to them. This course is intended for students who wish to learn more about the impact of theoretical frameworks on their ongoing knowledge projects at Bennington College.

This class will investigate various pedagogical approaches to food studies by examining curriculums, topics and discourses being taught at some academic institutions. More importantly, we will put focus on researching art collectives, contemporary civic engagement practices, and other non-institutional models developed by creative practitioners and activists, which engage with food as a conduit to undertake social, political and cultural identity issues and to enhance their community cohesion.