At MSU, monsters aren’t limited to the imagination—they’re a gateway to interdisciplinary learning.
In ISS 205: Big Ideas in the Social Sciences: Monsters and Society, students are exploring how monsters reflect social anxieties and challenge the boundaries of belief and identity. We spoke with Assistant Professor David Baylis about the origins of the course, its collaborative design across disciplines, and why discomfort can be a powerful tool for learning.
What inspired the creation of this course?
On day one, I tell my students that I was/am a “certifiable spooky kid.” Most of my longest standing interests in life have revolved around the macabre, the unsettling, the unnerving, and the creepy. I think it’s also part of the fact that I was a perpetually phobic kid who used this fascination with the morbid to make sense of the world and to gradually become more confident. When an opportunity came about to create a unified set of “monster” courses with the other two integrative centers—The Center for Integrative Studies in the Arts and Humanities and the Center for Integrative Studies in General Science—I jumped at the chance.
Why do you think monsters help us to explore society and culture?
So, pretty much any monster history will start with a Latin etymology of the word monster. Without getting needlessly bogged down here, the roots of the word are in the capacity of the monster to serve as a warning. This could be in the sense of the German fairy tale or the contemporary urban legend (i.e., lessons to children or teenagers about how to stay in society’s good graces); it can also be seen in the speculative fiction tradition in general via cautionary tales about hubris and existential dread. At their core, monsters are dark mirror reflections of ourselves. They show us the boundaries of the societies we have created, police them with chainsaws, and dare us to cross the threshold. The main question is: to what extent do we learn from the warnings they provide and avoid becoming a horror movie trope (don’t look back!)?
The course description mentions that monsters resist neat categorization. How does that idea shape the way you teach the class?
My colleagues and I have had a lot of conversations about this. There is a master plan to the course but due to the variety of activities (a group project that involves students working as journalists who are investigating the existence of a monster their team created as an urban legend, field data collections at haunted sites, discussions of films like The Mothman Prophecies (2002) and Candyman (1992), analyses of occult themes in comic books at the MSU library, etc.), the course can feel... unwieldy... to students. To a large extent, this is by design. How do you become more comfortable with horror movies? Ya gotta watch more horror movies! Becoming comfortable with discomfort is a super important bit of academic and personal development. Real learning rarely happens in spaces where you feel completely comfortable. And what better way to make you feel a bit mentally squeamish than with monsters?
How are your students exploring monsters as “urban legend?”
Students in my class are working in small teams who co-collaborate with additional teams in ISB and IAH. As a collective, they created a monster in week four that built upon the artistic and literary principles the IAH team was learning about in their course and the biological and environmental factors that the ISB team was learning about in their class. At this point, the ISS team has stepped back from their “creation” and is now approaching the monster they helped designed as an urban legend in a particular spatial and geographical context.
For instance, the Mothman urban legend is a cryptid associated originally with a bridge collapse catastrophe in Point Pleasant, West Virginia in the 1960s. It has antecedents historically and culturally, and over time it has expanded its geographic and imaginative range. The main idea is to think about how their monster as urban legend has become a stand-in or expression of various social anxieties of the year 2025. Notably, they can take a skeptical approach (think Agent Scully from the X-Files) or a “true believer” approach (think Agent Mulder). To aid in this process, students are also practicing a variety of qualitative social science research methods. These include participant observation (documenting how “haunted” sites are produced and experienced), interviews (exploring the paranormal experiences and beliefs of students across campus), media analysis (documenting “culturally recycled” occult themes and imagery in comic books), and qualitative mapping (creating simple data tables and pattern maps based on their interviews). The final deliverable for the course is a group poster presentation in the style of the push-pin conspiracy board. Along the way they are also using a variety of primary and secondary sources to build their case: is their monster real, or can they debunk it?
How does the course connect to current events or contemporary issues?
In class, we collectively approach urban legends, conspiracy theories, paranormal and supernatural beliefs, etc., as “disreputable oral traditions.” Drawing from a truly interdisciplinary literature that bridges political scientists like Michael Barkun with evolutionary biologists like Richard Dawkins, the aim of the course is not to belittle any belief system. Rather, the point is to understand how they function, how they spread, what they symbolize, and how they are experienced. A key dictum of the course is that disreputable oral traditions are often the means through which individuals who feel disempowered, distrustful of authorities, or socially isolated make sense of the world and build a sense of community identity. There are, of course, real and potentially dangerous consequences to this, and no individual or group across the socioeconomic or demographic spectrum is immune. It also remains an open question as to what extent these sorts of belief systems have become more widespread or influential. In addition, as disreputable oral traditions move to the mainstream and are taken up by more powerful actors, it shifts the balance in terms of how we have traditionally understood their role in society.
What do you hope students take away from this course? How does this course fit into the broader goals of the ISS curriculum?
In the ISS curriculum, integration is the core skill we are hoping to provide students with. From my perspective, integration is all about being attuned to and appreciative of hybridity, complexity, and dynamism in the world and in our everyday lives. As we show students, beginning in week one when we introduce them to “seven monster theses,” the biggest, most challenging, yet most provocative and exciting questions in the world are essentially analogous to monsters. Monsters (like life in 2025) both thrill and terrify. That’s the world we want students to be prepared to enter. You can’t pull the sheet over your head and make it all go away.
If you could describe the course in one sentence, what would it be?
I WANT TO BELIEVE (X-files tagline, for the uninitiated).
Anything else you’d like to add?
Who ya gonna call? (Insert Ghostbusters theme here).
This is the second in a series about interesting ISS courses taught through MSU’s Center for Integrative Studies. Next up: The Social Science of Sports with Dr. Bryan Ellis, coming in November.
