Everyday Monsters: How Ordinary Social Life Enables Extraordinary Harm
CHUM 300
Fall 2026
| Section:
01
|
Nuclear reactors melt down. Clergy abuse children for years before anyone intervenes. Police kill unarmed citizens on camera and walk free. Corporations defraud millions and file it as a rounding error. Every scandal needs a villain (the predator doctor, the rogue cop, the corrupt executive, the predator in vestments) someone monstrous enough to explain what happened. This course asks you to stop looking for the villain and look instead at the everyday machinery of social life as the engine behind the disasters that make headlines. Drawing on peer-reviewed research alongside memoir, documentary film, poetry, courtroom transcripts, and competing news broadcasts, we'll investigate how ordinary organizational routines can quietly manufacture catastrophe. Working across higher education, healthcare, religious institutions, and private industry, we trace how the systems built to prevent harm so often enable, conceal, and normalize it instead. With every case study, we will approach the material with compassionate curiosity rather than easy judgment or the convenience of a single villain to take the fall. |
|
| Credit: 1 |
Gen Ed Area Dept:
HA CHUM |
| Course Format: Seminar | Grading Mode: Student Option |
| Level: UGRD |
Prerequisites: None |
|
Fulfills a Requirement for: None |
| SECTION 01 |
| Instructor(s): Seigler,Carrie Times: .M.W... 10:50AM-12:10PM; Location: CFH106; |
| Total Enrollment Limit: 15 | | SR major: 0 | JR major: 0 | | |
| | GRAD: 0 | SR non-major: 0 | JR non-major: 0 | SO: 0 | FR: 0 |
|
|