Arts and Letters Sheedy Family (ALSF)

"I want to... "...see how all of my educational interests relate" "...discern what I want my career to look like and how I will find meaning in the work I do" "...shape myself into a well-rounded person" "...bridge the gap between corporations and people on the ground." "... integrate my faith and my interest in business" If you are in this course - and the whole Sheedy Family Program - it is because you are seeking something. You have questions like, How can I connect my business major with my minor in psychology, or Spanish, or economics? Where can I learn the moral standards that will guide my actions in the business world? What do I tell my well-meaning relatives when they ask, of my liberal arts major, "What are you going to do with that??" How are degrees in business and the liberal arts mutually enriching - a "sum greater than the parts" situation? Those questions are the reasons we're all here together. In this course, the gateway to the Sheedy Family Program, we'll probe five of the most important questions informing the SFP's key terms: economy, enterprise, and society. You'll learn to dialogue with peers - a vital "real world" skill with deep roots in the liberal arts - and to flexibly integrate ideas from across disciplines and genres from ancient philosophy to modernist poetry to contemporary film. We look forward to thinking alongside you. Course Learning Goals - By the end of this course, you will... ...understand how business and the liberal arts mutually enrich one another, and identify and articulate some of the biggest questions that this intersection raises. ...know how to contribute constructively to, and facilitate, liberal arts-style dialogue and appreciate why it is valuable for community building, career discernment, and answering big questions. ...have laid the intellectual groundwork to navigate the Sheedy Family Program and the rest of their lives intentionally, including reading and communicating with people from diverse disciplines and backgrounds.

Work plays a deeply important role in our lives. Finding good work -- which, for many of us, means getting a meaningful job you're passionate about -- can seem like the crucial factor in determining whether your life goes well or poorly, and whether you end up happy and fulfilled or miserable and empty. But things aren't nearly so simple. What kind of work is available to anyone in particular is largely determined by factors outside of our control. And when it comes to work, we're notoriously bad at predicting what aspects of a job we'll find meaningful and fulfilling, and which will drain us of life and energy. In this course, we will focus on the most urgent questions facing anyone trying to discern what their life's work will be, such as: - What causes alienation, anxiety, and burnout at work, and are these things that can be avoided with foresight and careful planning? - What is "leisure" (as contrasted with "time off") and what role should it play if we want to be healthy, flourishing persons? Is there such a thing as "work-life balance"? - Do we live in a genuine meritocracy? And, if so, is this a good thing or a bad thing? How should we think about equity and equality in the workplace? - Is it dangerous (or perhaps wise) to see your work purely as an instrument of financial gain? Does work have the power to nurture (or destroy) your soul? The course will be organized by topic, and we'll read a broad range of thinkers from St. Benedict to Karl Marx and Max Weber to more contemporary thinkers like Alasdair MacIntyre, Michael Sandel, and David Graeber (author of the provocative book "Bullshit Jobs"). We'll also watch a lot of the TV show " Survivor." Students will leave the course with their own "philosophy of work," captured in a living document that details their core beliefs about the role of work in living a good life.

John Henry Newman once claimed that truth is upheld in the world not by systems, books, or arguments, but by “personal influence.” How might Newman’s statement apply in our era — one with declining in-person social interactions and a rise in online "influencers," personalized advertising, and parasocial (one-sided) relationships? Today, influence gurus peddle persuasion tactics, and it seems everyone has something to promote. Can we still discover the line between ethical influence and manipulation? This course explores this question through a deep look at the nature, danger, and promise of influence as seen in classic and contemporary texts and sources on Christian ethics. Classic texts will include Plato’s Phaedrus, Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, and Muriel Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. Students will examine the popular advice from some of the past century’s best-selling self-help and business books, including Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People, Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion by Robert Cialdini, and You Have More Influence Than You Think by Vanessa Bohns. Students will learn to analyze each approach through the lens of Christian ethics, drawing from Neo-Thomist, Girardian, and Personalist thought as well as from papal encyclical letters. Through contemporary case studies — including a look at the life of the recently-canonized Saint Carlo Acutis (“God’s Influencer”) — students will develop a robust framework for ethical persuasion. The course will culminate with each student composing a personal charter for his or her ethical influence. Whereas much of the professional writing about influence tends to sever professional life from personal values and purpose, this course will integrate them, resulting in a coherent and normative vision of the influential life.

“Professionalizing with Purpose” offers students in the Sheedy Family Program structured opportunities for discerning their career path and narrating their professional identity. To achieve these goals, students will meet and hear the stories of business professionals from diverse fields. They will also complete online diagnostic exercises and self-reflection activities, including drawing upon resources from Beyond the Dome and the Career Center. Additionally, students will create, workshop, and present a professional pitch deck, an email boilerplate to send to employers, and a one-minute ‘Who am I?’ to present to the class.

If you are in this course - and the whole Sheedy Family Program - it is because you are seeking something. You have questions like, How can I connect my business major with my minor in psychology, or Spanish, or economics? Where can I learn the moral standards that will guide my actions in the business world? What do I tell my well-meaning relatives when they ask of my liberal arts major, "What are you going to do with that?" How are degrees in business and the liberal arts mutually enriching - a "sum greater than the parts" situation? Those questions are the reasons that this course, the gateway course in the Sheedy Family Program in Economy, Enterprise, and Society, exists. Together, we'll probe big philosophical questions related to the SFP's three key terms: economy, enterprise, and society. You'll learn to dialogue with peers - a vital "real world" skill with deep roots in the liberal arts - and to flexibly integrate ideas from across disciplines. You'll grapple with texts in genres from ancient philosophy to modernist poetry to contemporary film. We look forward to thinking in community with you. This course is limited to students accepted into the Sheedy Family Program.

A generation ago, students interested in media were likely journalism, broadcasting, or FTT majors aspiring to work full-time for big TV networks or newspapers. Today, that’s not usually true. Digital tools have blown open what it means to create and consume media. Whether you see yourself as a creative, a community organizer, an entrepreneur, or an influencer, you no longer have to launch your content through established channels, hoping to someday catch your big break. You could manage a YouTube channel with thousands of subscribers from your dorm room. Some of you probably already do. But how do you monetize such ventures? How do you turn a cool hobby or vision into a side hustle or career? In Media Entrepreneurship, we’ll explore how you can combine your passion, skills, and awareness of social needs to capitalize on the media's exciting new frontier. You’ll gain the knowledge, tools, and confidence to see creating your own digital media startup as a realistic possibility. And it’s not just about you. When you hear the phrase “media entrepreneur,” you might think of a tech bro pitching an idea to venture capitalists on Shark Tank. But, at its best, media entrepreneurship is an act of service. It’s about identifying community needs, building trust with audiences, and expanding whose voices we hear as a society. In this course, you’ll practice conceiving of a media project and working with a team to create a startup business plan.

In this course, we’ll explore 'women’s work' in three senses. First, we’ll consider the history of gendered "separate spheres" in the United States, the way in which some kinds of labor – care work, teaching, and domestic chores, for example – came to be seen as properly the concern of women, while other kinds of work, like business careers and scholarly pursuits, became coded masculine. Second, we’ll understand ‘work’ in the sense of a work of literature: we’ll read popular novels by and about working women and probe how their fictional representations compare and contrast with women’s lived realities. Finally, we’ll take ‘women’s work’ as the starting place for you to engage in your own purpose-driven career discernment, taking gender as a key, always-present variable. Through partnerships with ND Women Connect and ThinkND, we’ll interview, read fiction alongside, and dialogue with ND alumni, probing how 21st century women (and men, too) are overcoming gendered barriers in the workplace and finding meaning in their work. We’ll approach stories – literary and personal – as a form of data and use that data collaboratively to interrogate the gendered working life.

Policy Lab: Sustainable Finance (by Tara Kenney and Brendan Maher) This course will explore the role of global business in reducing poverty, inequality and attending to the needs of all stakeholders. Students will be introduced to the rapidly growing fields of impact investing and sustainable finance which support socially conscious and environmentally friendly innovations. Students will gain a broad overview of the financial and economic tools available, beyond government assistance and philanthropy, to support broad based wealth creation, equality of opportunity and natural resource preservation. Students will be invited to participate in policy debates on certain topics and will read mini case studies on subjects such as microfinance, "place based" community investment and the role of CDFIs, and the issuance of green/blue sustainability bonds. Guest speakers/practitioners will be invited to engage the students in real world problem solving. The course will culminate in a small group project or paper to "reexamine business" as a force for good, which will be presented in class. It is open to students of all intended majors with no prerequisites, and should serve as a foray to several future areas of study such as global affairs, social entrepreneurship and sustainability.

Students enrolled in Media Entrepreneurship must also register for a weekly discussion section. Students will participate in small group discussions, activities, and writing workshops as they work to envision and craft a business plan for their own media startup.

Students will participate in Sheedy Family Program enrichment opportunities, including dinners with guest speakers, a weekend-long fall retreat, writing bootcamps, and professional development events. These out-of-class activities will serve the Sheedy Family Program's three primary goals: community building, purpose-driven career discernment, and offering insights into how business and the liberal arts intersect. Students in the Sheedy Family Program will enroll in this 1-credit course concurrently with the gateway course "Business in Context."

If, as John David Rhodes argues, “the detached single family home is one of the most powerful metonymic signifiers of American cultural life – of the dreams of privacy, enclosure, freedom, autonomy, independence, stability, and prosperity that animate national life in the United States,” that is not to say that then home in American cinema is by no means a simple or stable construct, but is, if anything, represented most often as troubled, precarious, invaded, porous, unstable, or out of reach. This class considers meanings of home in American cinema by looking at films that confront the problem of how to live in a home, offer alternate structures, and show the fantasy of home to be out of reach. The class will analyze films about unhoused figures during the Depression, housing shortages during World War II, the rise of modern homelessness in the 1980s, and contemporary precarity. We will consider fantasies of home related to family, class status, age, and race. We will consider the roles of banks, landlords, gentrification, and other institutions and structural causes of home insecurity and homelessness. Students will read various theories and histories of housing and homelessness to frame understanding of films. Students will write weekly one page reflections, an 8-10 page paper, and a 15 minute conference presentation. Films may include: Wild Boys of the Road (Wellman 1933) Modern Times (Chaplin 1936) You Can’t Take It With You (Capra 1938) The Wizard of Oz (Fleming 1939) Tender Comrade (Dymytryk 1943) Meet Me in St. Louis (Minnelli 1944) Mr. Blandings Builds his Dream House (Potter 1948) All That Heaven Allows (Sirk 1955) A Raisin in the Sun (Petrie 1961) Down and Out in Beverly Hills (Mazursky 1986) The Money Pit (Benjamin 1986) The Fisher King (Gilliam 1991) Straight Outta Brooklyn (Rich 1991) Where the Day Takes You (Rocco 1992) Public Housing (Wiseman 1997) The Pursuit of Happiness (Muccinno 2006) Wendy and Lucy (Reichardt 2008) 99 Homes (Bahrani 2014) The Last Black Man in San Francisco (Talbot 2019) Nomadland (Zhao 2020)

What is the status of "work" today? This course takes up the history and current crisis of the idea of work by focusing on its philosophy and its aesthetic representation. We are at the cusp of a civilizational shift that has work at its center: the implacable rise of automation and artificial intelligence suggests that by the next decade there will be many, many more people than there will be jobs. And yet why should we think of this as a crisis at all? Since work's emergence as a modern idea, dreams of human emancipation have revolved around the liberation from the toil that it implies. Adam Smith, the foundational bard of capitalism, saw in the free market the opportunity to reduce "work" to a few hours per week; two-and-a-half centuries later the World Health Organization has identified "overwork" as a public health crisis, with its most consequential symptom—"death by overwork"—common enough to be reducible to a concept, what in Japan is called karoshi. And a major world language reminds us that negócio, the modern frame for all work, is precisely a negation: of ócio, idleness, leisure, pleasure. Nation-states themselves take on as a major function of their administrative existence the regulation of who can work within their borders, and entire regions of the world—such as Latin America, which will be a focus of this course—are thought about in the popular imagination as warehouses of work, the mano de obra of the global economy. In posing the question "what is work?", this course will move to some basic concepualizations of its form (Smith, Marx, Freud, Veblen, Foucault, etc) to a set of topics where work is at stake, for example: work and inequality; forced work (e.g. slavery); work and (im)migration; work and race; unremunerated work (‘house work'); sex work; violence work; work as commodity; work and identity; global divisions of labor; the end of work. As a way of getting into these topics, we will draw on their problematization by cultural producers, especially through contemporary film, including works by, for example, Mendonça, Herzog, Reygadas, Rivero, González Iñárritu, Martel, Cuarón, Joon-ho, Loach, Reichardt, Zhao. This class will be taught in English. Comparative work is encouraged.

Since the financial collapse of 2008, it has been common to declare that capitalism is in “crisis”. But capitalism was born in crisis: from its earliest moments, it has been associated with boom-and-bust cycles, breathtaking stock bubbles, financial ruin, forced labor, and conquest. Moreover, as a historical social relation that in ways large and small organizes our lives, it is notoriously difficult to explain. Scholars of capitalism—historians, economists, sociologists—do not at all agree on what capitalism is; less agreement stands on its origins, its development, its future possibilities, even its current existence (more than one prominent thinker has declared capitalism “as we know it” to have ended). And yet at the same time, so overwhelming is the elusive presence of capitalism in our lives that one philosoher’s pithy remark has been repeated to the point of cliché: it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. Which begs the question: is human civilization, simply, capitalism? With particular focus on the comparative experience of historical capitalism in the Americas, this course revolves around three broad problems: the contested origins of capitalism; the bifurcation of experiences of capitalism through uneven development; and the possible futures of capitalism. Each problem will be dealt with through a set of texts. On the one hand, we will engage some basic scholarly (historical and philosophical) texts in order to build conceptual language and identify points of controversy. On the other hand, we will draw on creative (narrative fiction and film) texts in order to contemplate the lived experience of capitalism and its contradictions in a range of settings. Language of instruction is English. Comparative work is encouraged.

Note: This class is only available to seniors in the Sheedy Family Program. Investing and the Good Life seeks to provide the definitive curriculum on the role of investment and compounding in the context of a well-lived life by curating guest teachers who are among the greatest investors, company builders, and human beings. In doing so, we strive to inspire a community of lifelong learners who embrace the time horizon of eternity in pursuit of the good life. The class is animated by the Notre Dame Mission Statement, especially the following aspects: The University is dedicated to the pursuit and sharing of truth for its own sake. The intellectual interchange essential to a university requires, and is enriched by, the presence and voices of diverse scholars and students. One of Notre Dame’s distinctive goals is to provide a forum where, through free inquiry and open discussion, the various lines of Catholic thought may intersect with all the forms of knowledge found in the arts, sciences, professions, and every other area of human scholarship and creativity. Thus, the students will come from various backgrounds and majors and be expected to bring their insights to bear on case studies and readings for each class session. An important feature of this course is the willingness to participate in discussions and the ability to manage both detailed and broad discussion topics regarding companies, markets, case studies, and human behavior. Specific goals include: - To gain an understanding that investing is a ubiquitous profession; that is, leaders in any field are called to allocate time and resources to their highest and best use. - To be exposed to numerous models of success in investing, business, and elsewhere to reframe what is possible. - To be equipped with new knowledge about investing, human biases, organization structure, incentives, and emerging themes in the investing and business world.

Economic actions like working, buying, selling, saving, and giving are a fundamental part of everyday life, and all spheres of society, from family to religion to politics, are interrelated with the economy. Sociologists examine how social relationships from small networks to transnational linkages affect economic actions and their outcomes, and the ways cultural meanings and political strategies shape those social relationships. The goal of this class is to provide students with new perspectives on economic actions by reading recent sociological studies of topics like money, markets, work, businesses, industries, and consumer society.

Students in the Sheedy Family Program can apply for the Scholars track in the fall of their junior year. The Scholars track is designed for students who seek a more research-intensive experience in the Sheedy Family Program: likely students who envision graduate school in their future, or whose career preparation demands an in-depth analysis of a specific topic within the intersection of business and the liberal arts. Sheedy Scholars will hone interdisciplinary research skills and develop expertise on a subject of their choice - a subject that brings together questions, methods, and sources from business and the liberal arts. The 1-credit Sheedy Honors Thesis course is designed to supplement any standard thesis writing courses or hours that Sheedy Scholars take within their majors during their senior year. The Sheedy Scholars meet as a cohort every other week to set goals, workshop drafts, and receive faculty feedback on their writing. Students on the Scholars Track should plan to enroll in the 1-credit course during both the fall and spring semesters of their senior year.

Students admitted to the Scholars Track of the Sheedy Family Program whose primary majors or departments do not offer them the option to write a senior thesis may enroll in thesis hours directly through the Sheedy Program. Eligible students should sign up for thesis hours in both the fall and spring of their senior year (3 credits each semester). Note that these hours count as general electives; although students will likely work with advisors from their primary departments, they should not plan to count the hours toward their major or minor.