Unfolding the academic year

Marking the start of the fall semester, thousands of students set off for their first class last week.

“I was immediately amazed to see the diversity of students coming from many different U.S. territories and countries,” Amber Henry, assistant professor in African and African American Studies, said. “I’m excited to have people with so much experience in countries outside of the United States in the class, bringing that richness of experience as we’re thinking about what travel and tourism might look like, and its alternatives, both in places in the Americas and also some of continental Africa.”

Henry is teaching “The Politics of Paradise: Tourism in Latin America & the Caribbean,” a lecture course in the Barker Center that discusses how different experiences of power are tied to tourism, the notion of paradise, and how the concept of paradise has been mobilized in search of the “ideal place.” For the first day, Henry’s students were asked to bring an item that presents the most generic tourist representation of a place.

“It was a wonderful opportunity to think about what types of experiences people are invited to have when they visit a place as a tourist location, and how those experiences might diverge from a kind of deeper, more intimate history that might be gleaned from someone who has a longer experience living there,” she said.

Across campus, students in Louis Deslauriers’ “Introductory Electromagnetism Physics” class were treated to dynamic physics experiments. “You always get lots of clapping,” joked Deslauriers, director of Science Teaching and Learning in FAS and senior preceptor in physics, about the flashy demonstrations which deal with electricity and magnetism.

The core course for physics concentrators largely welcomes first-years and sophomores and covers several topics, including electric currents, Maxwell’s equations, magnetic fields in materials, and some notions in kinetic theory. The goal, Deslauriers notes, is to master this introductory knowledge.

“I make them a promise, that by the end of the course, they’re going to feel powerful,” he said. “By powerful, I mean that when you objectively have a better understanding of the world around you, there’s a power that comes from that.”