AMST 120 - Hunger Games: Map and Mirror for the 21st Century

This introductory-level course approaches the youth-oriented Hunger Games series as a “map and mirror” for our times and a platform for launching adult, scholarly conversations about systems of extraction and exploitation, surveillance and the politics of Reality TV, environmental justice and public health, trauma due to war, and the possibilities for building a Culture of Peace. We will take an interdisciplinary American Cultural Studies approach as we read and watch everything in the Hunger Games series (the trilogy + two prequels) in the first half of the semester. In the second half of the semester, we will connect to various texts including: Parable of the Sower (Octavia Butler), The Autobiography of Mother Jones, Ministry for the Future (Kim Stanley Robinson), and The Future Earth: A Radical Vision for What’s Possible in the Age of Warming (Eric Holthaus). A major goal of the course is to open up our hearts and minds, and to discover more precisely what we hunger for-as scholars, citizens, and human residents of the planet Earth. Fall semester only. (4 Credits)