This course stresses contact with primary texts, along with listed key buildings, projects, and documents, through which weekly topics and questions are posed. The type of reading you will be required to do in this class moves beyond finding information or locating an authors purpose or identifying main ideas and dig deep in theoretical texts to reveal meaning, systems of relationships between ideas, and examine your own response to these ideas and their impact on the world around them. You might imagine that you are engaged in a conversation with the author, and you are in a position to speak back, to say something of your own. Such critical reading requires that you question intensely, make your own conclusions and synthesis, and follow your own agenda.