Dimensions of Culture

Overview

The Dimensions of Culture Program (DOC) is an introductory three-quarter social science/humanities core curriculum sequence that is required of all first-year students at Thurgood Marshall College at UCSD. Successful completion of the lower-division DOC sequence (1, 2, and 3) satisfies the University of California writing requirement.

The Fall Quarter course, DOC 1: Diversity, is designed to provide a broad overview of the histories of multiple communities and to explore the origins of social stratification in the United States. Students will acquire a basic understanding of some of the foundational ideas that underlie US history, as well as tools for analyzing the contradictions that arose as the nation developed.
The Winter Quarter course, DOC 2: Justice, explores tensions between the founding American promise of "equality for all" and its imperfect realization in various settings. Emphasis is given to the political movements and constitutional challenges that arose in post-World War II America to confront these tensions.
The Spring Quarter course, DOC 3: Imagination, plays out many of the themes raised in the previous two courses through various artifacts of modern American culture, particularly the novels, music, films, and television from the post-war period until the present. Of central importance is the understanding of representation and how to interpret cultural texts.
DOC 100: Special Topics Pending campus approval, Professor Dr. Jorge Mariscal will teach this course in SUMMER SESSION 2012.