Rigorous, interdisciplinary courses that take the long view — on money, power, ecology, and the moral questions underpinning the economy.
Profit, responsibility, and the moral questions business schools prefer to skim over. Twelve weeks on two tracks: the textbook at home, the harder arguments read together in the room.
The energy flows, material cycles, and metabolic patterns that economic textbooks leave out, including a week spent auditing your own throughput.
CMU's first-year interdisciplinary intro, taught in sections across many fields. This section (Wed & Fri, James Magnus-Johnston) spends the term on one question, from seminars to a closing symposium.
Ten live experiments reveal why humans reject free money, fear losses, and inflate bubbles they know will burst.
From Mesopotamian grain ledgers to modern fiat, the physical foundations of money, debt, and power.
How ventures generate social, environmental, and financial returns, and what breaks when they try.
Manufacturing consent, algorithmic polarization, and the information crisis reshaping democracy.
Design thinking, stakeholder engagement, and systems-level problem solving with live community partners.
Three convictions about how difficult material actually gets learned.
The hardest readings are started in class on a timer for seven to ten minutes. It is never quite enough to finish, which is the point.
Quizzes and reading responses are written by hand in the room. This remains the best way to verify and improve understanding.
Positions get taken publicly, defended, and revised. Where a claim can be tested, we test it rather than assert it.
Most of what looks like a crisis is a slow pattern finally becoming visible. The work is learning to see it.
It hosts the schedules, readings, and materials for courses taught by James Magnus-Johnston at Canadian Mennonite University. If you are registered in one of them, everything you need is on that course page.
No. Course pages are open. Anything that has to be submitted goes through the links on the course page itself.
Linked from each course page, week by week. Textbook chapters are read before class. The supplementary readings are the ones that get class time.
James Magnus-Johnston, Assistant Professor and Director of the Redekop School of Business at Canadian Mennonite University. MPhil, Cambridge. Doctoral work at McGill in biophysical and ecological economics.
Today we do it here. Over the 2026–27 year, the courses running at CMU are being rebuilt as independent versions — recorded lectures, full readings, and the experiments and activities.
Occasional word on what is being built and when a course opens. Nothing more than that.