CSP 55 UFOs and Spirits of the Land

How do we decide what is true? Is it through our own experience that we determine what is real and what is fictional? Or through authorities such as institutions, texts, and society? What does it mean to believe in cryptids that live in the mountains, UFOs, or the spirits of ancestors? What do we dismiss as fictional, magic or superstitious, and why? Can we make room for what we cannot see or what science cannot measure in our lives and still retain our identity as critical thinkers? How do we accommodate truth claims that may be contradictory? This seminar will explore these questions through engaging in alternative constructions of reality through the rubrics of culture, religion, and space as they are presented in different forms of critical and creative writing and visual culture. Rather than dismiss alternative ways of seeing the world as being the product of these rubrics, we will consider what it means to displace our own assumptions and engage in this difference, thereby expanding our own tools for understanding and thinking.