A Telluride Association Summer Program (TASP) is a six-week educational experience for high school juniors that offers challenges and rewards rarely encountered in secondary school or even college.!

http://www.tellurideassociation.org/programs/high_school_students/tasp/tasp_general_info.html

A Telluride Association Summer Program (TASP) is a six-week educational experience for high school juniors that offers challenges and rewards rarely encountered in secondary school or even college.

Each program is designed to bring together young people from around the world who share a passion for learning. Telluride students, or TASPers, attend a seminar led by college and university scholars and participate in many other educational and social activities outside the classroom.

Students attend TASPs because they want a personal and intellectual challenge. Telluride Association seeks students from all kinds of educational backgrounds who demonstrate intellectual curiosity and motivation, rather than prior knowledge of the seminar's subject matter. TASPers participate solely for the pleasure and rewards of learning with other intelligent, highly motivated students of diverse backgrounds. The TASP offers no grades or college credit.

The TASP Seminar

TASP centers on an academic seminar that meets every weekday morning for three hours. Each seminar is led by a team of two faculty members, who are selected for the distinction of their scholarship and the excellence of their teaching. Classes emphasize group discussions rather than lectures. Participants can expect to spend several hours on assigned readings or other preparation for each class, and will complete a number of writing assignments over the six-week seminar. The discussions and essays allow the faculty and students to engage the material in detail and to form a close community of scholars. Students receive written and oral feedback from the faculty, but no grades.

Cornell I ProgramLiterature Takes on Moral ComplexityTelluride House, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York
June 23 - August 3, 2013
Faculty: Professor Kathleen Long and Professor Marilyn Migiel, Department of Romance Studies, Cornell University
Factotum: TBA
In this seminar, we will ask how literature helps us to formulate ethical questions, i.e., questions for which there is no single, objectively correct answer. We concentrate on literature, as opposed to philosophy or history, because certain aspects of literature make it ideal for taking on complex ethical questions. Literature can be used to persuade or even manipulate; it appeals to our emotions as well as our reason, and may even call into question the neat division between the two. It forges sympathies that tie us as readers to characters and narrators, even as we suspect their motives.

The seminar will focus on great writers and storytellers of early modern Europe (e.g., Boccaccio, Machiavelli, Montaigne, Marguerite de Navarre, Bandello), with additional consideration of how ethical questions posed by these early modern writers continue to surface in modern times (including in TV series, movies, and books). We will also discuss some of the writings by modern thinkers who have participated in debates on literature and ethical criticism.

Throughout, we will grapple with questions like: What obligations do I have to myself and to others? What does honor mean to me? Are any means acceptable to achieve desirable, even morally laudable, ends? What can a boss, a head of state, a family member legitimately demand of me? When I report information, what does it mean to report it “faithfully”? When is it OK to deceive others, to break the law, to take justice into my own hands? Is it right to use unethical means to trap an unethical person or to stop unethical behavior? How do I avoid doing harm in a world where the ethical choices are often unclear?

Cornell II ProgramTimes SquareTelluride House, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York
June 23 - August 3, 2013
Faculty: Nat Hurley, Department of English and Film Studies, University of Alberta, Canada; and Sara Warner, Department of Performing and Media Arts, Cornell University
Factotum: TBA
“Times Square” takes as its object of study the world’s most visited tourist attraction. The pulsing heart of Manhattan, Times Square is a major commercial intersection at the junction of Broadway and Seventh Avenue, stretching from West 42nd to West 47th Streets. Together we will consider the history, politics, art, entertainments, and economies (formal and informal) that make this geographical locale the “crossroads of the world” by mapping the emergence of contemporary Times Square from Longacre fields (vast countryside used before and after the American Revolution for farming and horse breeding) to the media-saturated, “continuous carnival” it is today. In spite of the vast changes that have taken place in this site, Times Square remains America’s agora: a place to gather, in good times and bad, to hear important news (e.g., the stock market crash of 1929), to mark momentous occasions (e.g., the end of World War II), to celebrate landmark events (e.g., World Series, presidential elections, and New Year’s Eve), and to engage in commercial pursuits (e.g., theater, shopping, and sex). Times Square is, above all else, a populist place occupied primarily by members of the working- and middle-classes, a site of continued struggle between the people and elected officials, residents and developers, workers and owners, private enterprise and big business over who has the right to occupy public space.

This course will revolve around questions of power, pleasure, and what it means to be a citizen in contemporary urban space. Tracing seismic shifts in public tastes, journalism, architecture, advertising, theater, and social policies, we will explore plays, novels, memoirs, films, and television shows that are set in or are about Times Square along with critical and theoretical tracts that offer vocabularies and frameworks for analyses of these topics. top
Michigan I ProgramFOODUniversity of Michigan, Ann Arbor
June 23 - August 3, 2013

Faculty: Christian Stayner, Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning, University of Michigan; and Jason Goldman, Independent Scholar
Factotum:TBA
Few aspects of daily life are as elemental and multifaceted as food. While our dependence on food may seem self-evident, the cultivation, preparation, and consumption of food are not mere responses to a fixed biological need. Rather, these activities are replete with cultural, environmental, ethical, and aesthetic dimensions. Insofar as preparing and eating food are physical activities rooted in the material world, they are also practices that crystallize larger social conventions, broader relations of power, and myriad ethical questions. In effect, one’s diet on any given day might reflect such varied forces as personal taste, individual ethics, socio-economic class, regional or national cuisine, government policy, industrial food science, and the global economy, among others.

This seminar undertakes an interdisciplinary study of food in contemporary U.S. culture with a focus on the ethics of food cultivation, distribution, and consumption. Together, we will theorize the everyday activities of cooking and eating, and develop a critical framework for describing our collective but varied relationships to food. Also, in concentrating on U.S. food culture from roughly 1950 to the present, we will examine a period of dramatic, if not unprecedented, changes in the American diet. How is food produced, distributed, sold, and eaten today? What do we know about the food we eat and how do we know it? How do consumerism and capitalism structure food production, food-related labor, and eating habits? What are the key ethical questions surrounding food and how might we develop an ethics of eating? What political or activist strategies exist for creating a more equitable and just system of food distribution? What is at stake in our becoming socially and environmentally conscious eaters? Our engagement with these questions will center on key texts by philosophers, historians, policymakers, food writers, and community activists, among others.top
Michigan II ProgramDark Phrases of Womanhood: Black Feminist Approaches to History and LiteratureUniversity of Michigan, Ann Arbor
June 23 - August 3, 2013

Faculty: Tayana L. Hardin, Department of English, Rutgers University; and Grace L. B. Sanders, Departments of History and Women’s Studies, University of Michigan
Factotum: TBA
The term “black feminism” emerged in public discourse amid the social, political, and cultural turbulence of the 1960s. The roots of black feminism, however, are much older, easily reaching back to the work of black women abolitionists and social critics of the 19th century. The concept continued to grow and evolve in the work of 20th century black women writers, journalists, activists, and educators as they sought to document black women’s lives. Collectively, their work established black feminism as a political practice dedicated to the equality of all people. Furthermore, it became characterized by an understanding that race, class, gender, and sexuality are inextricably interconnected. Consequently, black feminism was and remains identifiable as both theory and practice.

Using materials such as 19th century slave narratives, social criticism, oral histories, and archival sources, this course will explore the theoretical and practical applications of black feminist thought. More specifically, we will ask: What is the significance of black feminism in the 21st century? What symbols and practices do black women use to document their lives? How do these methods of documentation inform our understandings of the term “black feminism”? Finally, how do concepts such as “gender,” “race,” “memory,” and “the archive,” which are central to black feminism, help us explore the dynamics of documenting and crafting life stories? Students will undertake this exploration using creative writing, painting, dramatic presentation, and critical writing exercises. These questions, concepts, and exercises will enable us to build an evolving vocabulary to unravel the methodological and creative relevance of black feminism for scholars and critically engaged citizens in the 21st century.