Difficult Dialogues

DDI Cluster Courses

  • Border Crossings
    This cluster will interrogate the challenges and consequences of crossing the boundaries constructed when exclusionary identities become accepted.  Categories of nation, race, religion, sex, and class assume the existence of fixed borders.  In many cases, at many times, these boundaries are transgressed.  The cluster will examine how individuals and societies have responded to challenges to their boundaries. 
  • Evolution
    This course cluster will have three main purposes.  First, the core courses (different options for Biology and non-Biology majors) will introduce students to the theory of evolution, basic evolutionary mechanisms, and continuing applications of evolutionary theory in science today.  Second, the cluster will consider the varying disciplinary applications of, perspectives on, and appropriations of evolution as a theory, interpretive tool, and concept.  Third, the cluster will enable students to confront and analyze intelligently differing points of view about evolution—both its science-specific meanings and its broader resonance in cultural and political debate.  Students who complete the cluster will have a deeper, wider, and more informed appreciation of the powerful impact that the theory of evolution has had on human knowledge since the 19th century.    
  • Knowledge at the Crossroads: Religious and Scientific Cultures of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance
    This cluster of 8 courses, including two brand-new courses and one course offered by UNC faculty through a UNC study-abroad program, examines both the intersections and the conflicts between religious and scientific beliefs, institutions, and practices from around 1300 until 1750.  During this period of extraordinary intellectual ferment and religious and political conflict, writers and thinkers in various disciplines – poets and playwrights, painters and musicians, theologians and scientific practitioners, and moral and political philosophers – actively and variously reconfigure the relationship between faith and reason, between scripture and nature, and between religious belief and “scientific” knowledge. 

 

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What faculty and students are saying about Difficult Dialogues




“’Difficult Dialogues’ are in a sense what we’re engaged in here at the University. The issues expressed are core questions of the project of university education.”