You’re reading The Alcove, an interview series with artists and scholars affiliated with Duke University, including students, faculty and alumni in the arts and humanities. Inspired by the style and format of The Paris Review.
The Chronicle (TC): Switching courses a little bit. What are the best arts or humanities courses you’ve taken in your time at Duke?
Courtney Lucius (LC): This is a good question. Hip Hop with Ife Presswood. She’s Street Med’s faculty advisor, and I think it was a really great class on the history of the styles, because we covered hip hop, voguing, heels. It was really comprehensive, especially being a sophomore, it was my first introduction to heels. It felt very comfortable and also really informed.
I’m currently in Theories of Visual Media Studies. Every week, I get to connect all the theory that we’ve been learning to a piece of art or something current. Last week, I presented Doechii’s Grammy performance and connected that back to our reading. It was great because we got to watch Doechii’s Grammy performance in class.
News Writing and Reporting with Professor Stephen Buckley, definitely one of the best ones I’ve taken in terms of helping me find my writing voice and stuff. Love any Child Policy course. Of the ones I took, I liked Child Policy Research with Dr Whitney McCoy, a phenomenal course. I was a freshman in that class. They were really sweet because I’d never written a research paper at that point, but they let me take the class.
Video Journalism with Dr Lynn Owens was also a great class because it was cross-listed with VMS, which was fire. I took it as my first journalism class ever as a VMS class. It was great because it was applicable to VMS, where we were editing and learning how to shoot for TV. That class helped me get a summer internship. In the internship I was mainly doing marketing editing, but I knew how to edit. Off the top of my head, those are all the really good ones I’ve taken, but honestly, like I always recommend humanities courses to anybody, because I think people underestimate how great they are here at Duke. We have very good humanities courses.
TC: We do. You spoke briefly about media literacy earlier – can you tell me more about how we’re abandoning the arts or humanities and what that means for us?
CL: Around the time that we were growing up, turning into middle school, there was this really heavy STEM push. I liked math and science, but nowhere near as much as history and English. Those have always been my favorite classes. We placed so much emphasis on the math and science that we began abandoning the humanities and literature. All these math and science courses are great, but if you don’t supplement that with arts and humanities, you aren’t able to necessarily decode what’s in front of you, like on a small scale, how advertising targets you. We’re always worrying about AI and surveillance on our phones, but that’s something you’d be able to decode if you understand media. I’m trying to think of the best way to explain it. For example, with the abandonment of Google, we see people turn to Twitter, TikTok to ask questions.
People don’t know how to research. You learn how to research when you’re in history class writing a history paper. You learn how to research when you’re in an English class and you have to decode text and analyze media. When you turn away from these English classes, you lose the value of analysis because you’re not continually practicing that, understanding it, going deeper with that. So a lot of these things are being taken at face value, and people don’t necessarily know how to decode that. I think our push towards STEM really hurts us, and now we’re in this media literacy crisis. We talk about distrust in the media, but harmful secondary media sources arise because people don’t know how to analyze or decode media in their daily lives. People are like, what’s the answer? Go to English class. Take an arts class. It helps you understand how you’re being targeted.
TC: Sometimes it’s more about living the questions rather than just answering them. The professor I interviewed last week said that it’s not even a matter of people delegitimize these majors. The market does, and as a result, we all do as well. It’s something interesting to think about in terms of how market valuation impacts our understanding of the arts and humanities and their value.
CL: Exactly.
TC: So, I know you’ve found a lot of people with shared interests as well at Duke, with both Street Med and DefMo. What does community mean to you, then?
CL: Goodness. I think the best way I can describe it is like a warm hug. It’s people who embrace you. Being at school, realistically, these are all very new people and very new experiences. By the time you’re a senior, you’ll only have been here for four years. That’s such a small portion of your life. I think having this sense of community is just people you can lean on. Both dance groups are my family, and I know I can lean on them. I have been the freshman sending an SOS text in the group chat. They would always ensure everyone always has a ride back. If you were going to East as a freshman, you always had a ride back. DefMo’s President, Sidney Chen, and I organize ramen dinners on Ninth every few weeks. We really like going there. We like bringing people. There’s that sense of everyone coming from different walks of life, different majors, everything under the sun, but in this moment, we are here together for a common goal, and we care about each other outside of that goal too.
TC: And you’re all connected by the arts.
CL: Yeah, and it’s cool. A lot of people in DefMo aren’t even arts majors. We have a lot of computer science majors. Our president freshman year was a mechanical engineer. I think it is really cool how people still cultivate their passion for the arts outside of it. You can major in a STEM subject and still want to go out and dance.
TC: That’s beautiful. Thank you.
Courtney Lucius is a member of the Chronicle's 120th Volume.
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Tanya Wan is a Trinity first-year and a staff reporter for the news department.