UCOR Section Descriptions

Course Description

Effective academic writing helps us understand and propose new ways of seeing ourselves and our world. In this writing intensive course, we'll learn to use rhetorical arguments and the revision process to explore how identity is made and sustained in art and in society. Writing about art can revise, expand on, and answer what identity can be. Together, we are going to explore, through readings and museum field trips and critical essays, how people talk about art and personal identity. We will uncover some of the important ways that artists, museums, schools, and, even, politicians use art to unmask, create, and interrogate identity.

Course Description

Our topic is work, with reflection, analysis and research on these questions: What meanings do we attach to different kinds of work? How does work affect identity? How does work shape the worker and the larger society? What is the context of the minimum-wage debate in Seattle? What are the conditions of work where the things we "consume" are made, and how do those conditions affect us as consumers?

Course Description

Through academic and civic writing, this course explores the theme of water citizenship—what we as citizens know about where our tap water comes from, where our flushes send it, how much it costs to manage it, who owns it, and how humans threaten its supply and safety. Our “knowledge” is often shaped by pop culture and media, which serve us a mixture of fact and fear about water. Think of news coverage of recent floods, droughts, and contamination; of TV series such as Mighty Rivers and Blue Planet; of films such as Quantum of Solace, Rango, and Dark Waters; and of thriller novels such as The Water Knife. Think also of the rhetorical impact of the phrases “water wars” and “toilet to tap.” Clearly, to be educated, responsible water citizens we need to understand the power of language and image and have the rhetorical knowledge and writing skills to write our way into these civic conversations. This course, through analyzing pop culture artifacts, reading civic and researched arguments, and creating writing and visual projects that ask you to be proactive water citizens, will prepare you for academic writing, with its emphasis on analysis, research, and argument.

Course Description

Effective academic writing helps us understand and propose new ways of seeing ourselves and our world. In this writing intensive course, we'll learn to use rhetorical arguments and the revision process to explore how identity is made and sustained in art and in society. Writing about art can revise, expand on, and answer what identity can be. Together, we are going to explore, through readings and museum field trips and critical essays, how people talk about art and personal identity. We will uncover some of the important ways that artists, museums, schools, and, even, politicians use art to unmask, create, and interrogate identity.

Course Description

How does television shape our perceptions of everyday life? How does it encourage us to take on a passive role as consumers of culture? And what do popular shows--like Modern Family and The Walking Dead--tell us about the cultural zeitgeist and our contemporary moment? Rather than demonize or simply praise television as basic entertainment, this course draws on reflective, analytical, and exploratory writing to address these questions and our cultural obsession with television.

Course Description

Effective academic writing helps us understand and propose new ways of seeing ourselves and our world. In this writing intensive course, we'll learn to use rhetorical arguments and the revision process to explore how identity is made and sustained in art and in society. Writing about art can revise, expand on, and answer what identity can be. Together, we are going to explore, through readings and museum field trips and critical essays, how people talk about art and personal identity. We will uncover some of the important ways that artists, museums, schools, and, even, politicians use art to unmask, create, and interrogate identity.

Course Description

How does television shape our perceptions of everyday life? How does it encourage us to take on a passive role as consumers of culture? And what do popular shows--like Modern Family and The Walking Dead--tell us about the cultural zeitgeist and our contemporary moment? Rather than demonize or simply praise television as basic entertainment, this course draws on reflective, analytical, and exploratory writing to address these questions and our cultural obsession with television.

Course Description

This writing seminar invites us to consider not only the sources of our food, but the environmental, social, and ethical impact of our choices. How are we connected (or not) to the sources of our food? How are social justice and sustainability linked? Students will engage these questions through readings, writing projects, service learning, field trips, and films, developing the ability to present arguments in clear, academic prose, employ writing as a critical thinking tool, and participate in civic discourse.

Course Description

How does television shape our perceptions of everyday life? How does it encourage us to take on a passive role as consumers of culture? And what do popular shows--like Modern Family and The Walking Dead--tell us about the cultural zeitgeist and our contemporary moment? Rather than demonize or simply praise television as basic entertainment, this course draws on reflective, analytical, and exploratory writing to address these questions and our cultural obsession with television.

Course Description

Our topic is work, with reflection, analysis and research on these questions: What meanings do we attach to different kinds of work? How does work affect identity? How does work shape the worker and the larger society? What is the context of the minimum-wage debate in Seattle? What are the conditions of work where the things we "consume" are made, and how do those conditions affect us as consumers?

Course Description

Our topic is work, with reflection, analysis and research on these questions: What meanings do we attach to different kinds of work? How does work affect identity? How does work shape the worker and the larger society? What is the context of the minimum-wage debate in Seattle? What are the conditions of work where the things we "consume" are made, and how do those conditions affect us as consumers?

Course Description

Effective academic writing helps us understand and propose new ways of seeing ourselves and our world. In this writing intensive course, we'll learn to use rhetorical arguments and the revision process to explore how identity is made and sustained in art and in society. Writing about art can revise, expand on, and answer what identity can be. Together, we are going to explore, through readings and museum field trips and critical essays, how people talk about art and personal identity. We will uncover some of the important ways that artists, museums, schools, and, even, politicians use art to unmask, create, and interrogate identity.

Course Description

This writing seminar helps students develop as college-level, academic writers. Students will engage, rhetorically, with the theme of class war in America to develop their abilities to participate in important academic discourses, understand and respond to the arguments of others, and develop and support their own positions. Through deep inquiry and revision, this seminar facilitates the habits of critical and creative questioning, thinking, and argumentation to help students become more proficient and skillful academic writers. Through two major writing projects, requiring the practice of extensive revision, students will be asked to draw their own conclusions and write for academic audiences about what it means to live in an economically equitable and just society. The first paper will focus on analyzing an act of class war, chosen by students. The second paper will focus on (virtually) any social justice issue important to the writer and will illustrate both what that writer has learned about the academic revision process and rhetorical argumentation.

Course Description

Effective academic writing helps us understand and propose new ways of seeing ourselves and our world. In this writing intensive course, we'll learn to use rhetorical arguments and the revision process to explore how identity is made and sustained in art and in society. Writing about art can revise, expand on, and answer what identity can be. Together, we are going to explore, through readings and museum field trips and critical essays, how people talk about art and personal identity. We will uncover some of the important ways that artists, museums, schools, and, even, politicians use art to unmask, create, and interrogate identity.

Course Description

In this course you will develop academic writing skills by practicing a variety of rhetorical situations that engage the complex relationships between the Islamic and Western Worlds. Through assigned readings and class discussions, we will explore the representations of Islam in the news media and popular culture, and discover ways in which we can contribute our own voices and actions to the many issues facing the peoples of the Middle East.

Course Description

Effective academic writing helps us understand and propose new ways of seeing ourselves and our world. In this writing intensive course, we'll learn to use rhetorical arguments and the revision process to explore how identity is made and sustained in art and in society. Writing about art can revise, expand on, and answer what identity can be. Together, we are going to explore, through readings and museum field trips and critical essays, how people talk about art and personal identity. We will uncover some of the important ways that artists, museums, schools, and, even, politicians use art to unmask, create, and interrogate identity.

Course Description

This course has two primary and equally important goals: to hone your skills in rhetorical and analytical awareness and to cultivate understanding in writing and research. We will engage in inquiry, analysis, synthesis, and meaning-making through argument—all writing habits emphasized by our course outcomes (or goals), which appear on this syllabus and which we will discuss throughout the quarter. This particular section will use the concept of "spatial justice" to help us think critically about how (or to what extent) twentieth century representations of urban space in the United States engage rhetorics of justice, equity, accessibility and more.

Course Description

In this course you will develop academic writing skills by practicing a variety of rhetorical situations that engage the complex relationships between the Islamic and Western Worlds. Through assigned readings and class discussions, we will explore the representations of Islam in the news media and popular culture, and discover ways in which we can contribute our own voices and actions to the many issues facing the peoples of the Middle East.

Course Description

In this course you will develop academic writing skills by practicing a variety of rhetorical situations that engage the complex relationships between the Islamic and Western Worlds. Through assigned readings and class discussions, we will explore the representations of Islam in the news media and popular culture, and discover ways in which we can contribute our own voices and actions to the many issues facing the peoples of the Middle East.

Course Description

How does television shape our perceptions of everyday life? How does it encourage us to take on a passive role as consumers of culture? And what do popular shows--like Modern Family and The Walking Dead--tell us about the cultural zeitgeist and our contemporary moment? Rather than demonize or simply praise television as basic entertainment, this course draws on reflective, analytical, and exploratory writing to address these questions and our cultural obsession with television.

Course Description

Why are we so fascinated by dystopias? Is utopia a pipe dream? Dangerous? Necessary? Something else entirely? From Thomas More to the Seattle World's Fair, from universal design to Black Mirror and beyond, we will use the frame of topias to explore the rhetorical landscape of the past and future. Students will read, write, and conduct research related to their own -topian interests throughout the course.

Course Description

How does television shape our perceptions of everyday life? How does it encourage us to take on a passive role as consumers of culture? And what do popular shows--like Modern Family and The Walking Dead--tell us about the cultural zeitgeist and our contemporary moment? Rather than demonize or simply praise television as basic entertainment, this course draws on reflective, analytical, and exploratory writing to address these questions and our cultural obsession with television.

Course Description

Through engagement with reading, discussing, and writing about contemporary memoirs of displaced young women and essays by prominent refugee writers from around the world, students will develop their writing, critical and creative thinking, and analytical skills. Longing for home and a fear of an uncertain future binds all of the displaced asylum seekers whose journeys you will read and respond to. In a time of immigration crises, war, and border conflicts, all of the nearly 80 million currently displaced is a person with dreams for a better, safer world.

Course Description

This writing seminar helps students develop as college-level, academic writers. Students will engage, rhetorically, with the theme of class war in America to develop their abilities to participate in important academic discourses, understand and respond to the arguments of others, and develop and support their own positions. Through deep inquiry and revision, this seminar facilitates the habits of critical and creative questioning, thinking, and argumentation to help students become more proficient and skillful academic writers. Through two major writing projects, requiring the practice of extensive revision, students will be asked to draw their own conclusions and write for academic audiences about what it means to live in an economically equitable and just society. The first paper will focus on analyzing an act of class war, chosen by students. The second paper will focus on (virtually) any social justice issue important to the writer and will illustrate both what that writer has learned about the academic revision process and rhetorical argumentation.

Course Description

This writing seminar invites us to consider not only the sources of our food, but the environmental, social, and ethical impact of our choices. How are we connected (or not) to the sources of our food? How are social justice and sustainability linked? Students will engage these questions through readings, writing projects, service learning, field trips, and films, developing the ability to present arguments in clear, academic prose, employ writing as a critical thinking tool, and participate in civic discourse.

Course Description

This course will develop your academic writing skills by teaching you to write for a variety of rhetorical situations about the complex relationships between politics and media, with a focus on reasoned, ethical argumentation. Through assigned readings and class discussions, we will explore how the news media shape our views of politicians and political issues, and discover ways we can contribute our own voices to the political discourse.

Course Description

This course will develop your academic writing skills by teaching you to write for a variety of rhetorical situations about the complex relationships between politics and media, with a focus on reasoned, ethical argumentation. Through assigned readings and class discussions, we will explore how the news media shape our views of politicians and political issues, and discover ways we can contribute our own voices to the political discourse.

Course Description

Through academic and civic writing, this course explores the theme of water citizenship—what we as citizens know about where our tap water comes from, where our flushes send it, how much it costs to manage it, who owns it, and how humans threaten its supply and safety. Our “knowledge” is often shaped by pop culture and media, which serve us a mixture of fact and fear about water. Think of news coverage of recent floods, droughts, and contamination; of TV series such as Mighty Rivers and Blue Planet; of films such as Quantum of Solace, Rango, and Dark Waters; and of thriller novels such as The Water Knife. Think also of the rhetorical impact of the phrases “water wars” and “toilet to tap.” Clearly, to be educated, responsible water citizens we need to understand the power of language and image and have the rhetorical knowledge and writing skills to write our way into these civic conversations. This course, through analyzing pop culture artifacts, reading civic and researched arguments, and creating writing and visual projects that ask you to be proactive water citizens, will prepare you for academic writing, with its emphasis on analysis, research, and argument.

Course Description

How does art shape your opinion about social issues? In this academic writing course you will examine the rhetoric of art for social change evident in various forms of creative expression, including literary arts, music, and visual arts to understand ways in which the arts communicate messages, advance arguments, and motivate civic responsibility. Through close-readings and rhetorical analyses of written and visual texts, you will write about ways in which art is essential to sustaining people and place.

Course Description

Through engagement with reading, discussing, and writing about contemporary memoirs of displaced young women and essays by prominent refugee writers from around the world, students will develop their writing, critical and creative thinking, and analytical skills. Longing for home and a fear of an uncertain future binds all of the displaced asylum seekers whose journeys you will read and respond to. In a time of immigration crises, war, and border conflicts, all of the nearly 80 million currently displaced is a person with dreams for a better, safer world.

Course Description

Through engagement with reading, discussing, and writing about contemporary memoirs of displaced young women and essays by prominent refugee writers from around the world, students will develop their writing, critical and creative thinking, and analytical skills. Longing for home and a fear of an uncertain future binds all of the displaced asylum seekers whose journeys you will read and respond to. In a time of immigration crises, war, and border conflicts, all of the nearly 80 million currently displaced is a person with dreams for a better, safer world.

Course Description

Our language does not only convey our messages; it constructs our belonging. This course explores: (1) how language is used to construct social identities; (2) how society perceives language varieties and stratifies its speakers into categories of race, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, and class; (3) how language attitudes, ideologies, and policies affect the speakers and writers of marginalized groups; and (4) how speakers and writers negotiate their social identities and access to power within language ideologies.

Course Description

Why are we so fascinated by dystopias? Is utopia a pipe dream? Dangerous? Necessary? Something else entirely? From Thomas More to the Seattle World's Fair, from universal design to Black Mirror and beyond, we will use the frame of topias to explore the rhetorical landscape of the past and future. Students will read, write, and conduct research related to their own -topian interests throughout the course.

Course Description

An introduction to mathematical ideas used in the modern world, with an emphasis on quantitative methods applied to life experiences and on developing problem-solving and critical thinking skills. Topics include graphing, exponential growth, financial mathematics, probability, and statistics. Additional topics may include voting theory, graph theory, Fibonacci numbers, geometry, or other mathematical concepts and applications.

Course Description

An introduction to mathematical ideas used in the modern world, with an emphasis on quantitative methods applied to life experiences and on developing problem-solving and critical thinking skills. Topics include graphing, exponential growth, financial mathematics, probability, and statistics. Additional topics may include voting theory, graph theory, Fibonacci numbers, geometry, or other mathematical concepts and applications.

Course Description

An introduction to mathematical ideas used in the modern world, with an emphasis on quantitative methods applied to life experiences and on developing problem-solving and critical thinking skills. Topics include graphing, exponential growth, financial mathematics, probability, and statistics. Additional topics may include voting theory, graph theory, Fibonacci numbers, geometry, or other mathematical concepts and applications.

Course Description

An introduction to mathematical ideas used in the modern world, with an emphasis on quantitative methods applied to life experiences and on developing problem-solving and critical thinking skills. Topics include graphing, exponential growth, financial mathematics, probability, and statistics. Additional topics may include voting theory, graph theory, Fibonacci numbers, geometry, or other mathematical concepts and applications.

Course Description

An introduction to mathematical ideas used in the modern world, with an emphasis on quantitative methods applied to life experiences and on developing problem-solving and critical thinking skills. Topics include graphing, exponential growth, financial mathematics, probability, and statistics. Additional topics may include voting theory, graph theory, Fibonacci numbers, geometry, or other mathematical concepts and applications.

Course Description

An introduction to mathematical ideas used in the modern world, with an emphasis on quantitative methods applied to life experiences and on developing problem-solving and critical thinking skills. Topics include graphing, exponential growth, financial mathematics, probability, and statistics. Additional topics may include voting theory, graph theory, Fibonacci numbers, geometry, or other mathematical concepts and applications.

Course Description

An introduction to mathematical ideas used in the modern world, with an emphasis on quantitative methods applied to life experiences and on developing problem-solving and critical thinking skills. Topics include graphing, exponential growth, financial mathematics, probability, and statistics. Additional topics may include voting theory, graph theory, Fibonacci numbers, geometry, or other mathematical concepts and applications.

Course Description

An introduction to mathematical ideas, emphasizing a multicultural, or global, perspective to studying quantitative methods, logical thinking, and algorithmic processes.

Course Description

An introduction to mathematical ideas used in the modern world, with an emphasis on quantitative methods applied to life experiences and on developing problem-solving and critical thinking skills. Topics include graphing, exponential growth, financial mathematics, probability, and statistics. Additional topics may include voting theory, graph theory, Fibonacci numbers, geometry, or other mathematical concepts and applications.

Course Description

An introduction to mathematical ideas used in the modern world, with an emphasis on quantitative methods applied to life experiences and on developing problem-solving and critical thinking skills. Topics include graphing, exponential growth, financial mathematics, probability, and statistics. Additional topics may include voting theory, graph theory, Fibonacci numbers, geometry, or other mathematical concepts and applications.

Course Description

An introduction to mathematical ideas used in the modern world, with an emphasis on quantitative methods applied to life experiences and on developing problem-solving and critical thinking skills. Topics include graphing, exponential growth, financial mathematics, probability, and statistics. Additional topics may include voting theory, graph theory, Fibonacci numbers, geometry, or other mathematical concepts and applications.

Course Description

This will be an introductory class that assumes no prior film making experience and is designed to encourage students to explore film making using accessible mobile technology. Students will develop their knowledge of basic video production, methods and terminology using their smartphones. Through hands-on, small-group assignments, students will learn and apply professional film concepts while using their smartphones to tell their own creative story. With available apps, students will learn how to turn their smartphone into a powerful film tool. Students will understand exposure, framing, audio, lighting, composition and more.

Course Description

This will be an introductory class that assumes no prior film making experience and is designed to encourage students to explore film making using accessible mobile technology. Students will develop their knowledge of basic video production, methods and terminology using their smartphones. Through hands-on, small-group assignments, students will learn and apply professional film concepts while using their smartphones to tell their own creative story. With available apps, students will learn how to turn their smartphone into a powerful film tool. Students will understand exposure, framing, audio, lighting, composition and more.

Course Description

Digital Imaging is a course that explores working with photography outside the parameters of traditional darkroom photography. The focus is on post-processing images for ends, including compositing multiple images, combining text & images, and working to conceptually to develop a complex visual book of digital images. Artist presentations and readings serve as launching off points for class discussions regarding the nature of digital images in our media saturated culture and the ways we can work with them. With each new project introduced throughout the quarter there will be corresponding technical demonstrations dedicated to specific technical aspects of Photoshop, from basic to intermediate. No previous Photoshop experience is required for the class.

Course Description

As a Core course, Digital Photography will involve equal parts making images, reading, writing, and analyzing/discussing. Assignments progress on a formal level from B&W to color and then to working with images in time, whether stop-motion or sequenced as short experimental films. The ideas students bring to the projects will be emphasized and the readings, films, image presentations, and discussions will provide direction to explore themes such as consumerism, the environment, gender, social diversity, imagination and dreams. The photographic medium has undergone changes in the last decade at a rate unparalleled since photography's invention during the latter part of the 19th Century. What does digital photography hold for the 21st Century? How is it different from working with film -or is it? What are artists doing within the medium today and what are their influences? These and other questions will be addressed over the course of the quarter as the technical, conceptual and formal properties of the medium are introduced.

Course Description

This course is an introduction to video production within the context of contemporary art history, theory, and practice. Students will examine video's formal elements and theoretical concerns through production and critique of their own projects as well as screenings and discussions of work by contemporary artists. With an emphasis on building experimental narratives and developing creative concepts, this course will provide students a comprehensive overview of production techniques. The course is conducted through a combination of lectures, demonstrations, screenings, and critiques of student work and videos by contemporary artists, class discussions, readings, and individual and collaborative video productions and presentations.

Course Description

This course focuses on the art of telling stories for Virtual Reality. Students will immerse themselves in understanding the media through the technology available so they can learn about the challenges of telling a story using its specific attributes. In this hands-on class, students will create and produce a short film using 360 video, which will purposefully blur reality and fiction, and narrate a story. This course will include analyses of experiences and texts with an emphasis on immersive narrative and the nature of interactivity. The purpose of this class also includes intensive learning through collaboration and reflection on future challenges and our responsibilities of storytelling through new technologies.

Course Description

This course introduces students to creative inquiry and expression through the study and practice of key genres in creative writing: poetry, fiction, and creative non-fiction. Students' principal work in the class will consist of the production of original works in each of these three genres. In support of this work, students will respond to model poems, stories, and essays, and they will engage in artistic discussions about the areas where genres overlap. Assignments will include both written and oral components.

Course Description

This class addresses light as an art form through analytical observations, practical applications, and thoughtful critique. This class builds a foundation of understanding how light exists in our lives by breaking down properties of light into color, quality, intensity, shadow, contrast, and environment. Writing and basic drawing techniques are incorporated as a means of communication.

Course Description

In this course, students will be introduced to the creative process of “devising." Devising is a term used to loosely describe productions created by a wide range of theatre collaborators, actor-collectives, director-designers, and performance artists. Sometimes, a governing playwright is brought in to facilitate the literary values of the group’s explorations. Often, groups who devise are governed by a visionary director/performer or co-directors. The term “devising” itself is used in England to distinguish productions that are not based on plays. In short, devising is the creation of a new performance piece wherein the collaborative artists who create the work also perform the work. In this course, students will be immersed in the different models of devising through readings, hands-on workshops, and much dialogue. They will collaborate throughout the quarter, ultimately creating an original performance piece.

Course Description

This course introduces students to creative inquiry and expression through the study and practice of key genres in creative writing: poetry, fiction, and creative non-fiction. Students' principal work in the class will consist of the production of original works in each of these three genres. In support of this work, students will respond to model poems, stories, and essays, and they will engage in artistic discussions about the areas where genres overlap. Assignments will include both written and oral components. This course introduces students to creative inquiry and expression through the study and practice of key genres in creative writing: poetry, fiction, and creative non-fiction. Students' principal work in the class will consist of the production of original works in each of these three genres. In support of this work, students will respond to model poems, stories, and essays, and they will engage in artistic discussions about the areas where genres overlap. Assignments will include both written and oral components.

Course Description

Put your headphones on and delve deeply into the power of sound in and as art! Experience installations and performances on the cutting edge of music and aural creativity. Learn the basic skills and techniques of generating and manipulating sound to touch the senses and impart emotion, ideas, and meaning. Then integrate what you've learned and experienced by expressing your own ideas through a unique piece of multi-media, sound-focused art.

Course Description

Digital Imaging is a course that explores working with photography outside the parameters of traditional darkroom photography. The focus is on post-processing images for ends, including compositing multiple images, combining text & images, and working to conceptually to develop a complex visual book of digital images. Artist presentations and readings serve as launching off points for class discussions regarding the nature of digital images in our media saturated culture and the ways we can work with them. With each new project introduced throughout the quarter there will be corresponding technical demonstrations dedicated to specific technical aspects of Photoshop, from basic to intermediate. No previous Photoshop experience is required for the class.

Course Description

As a Core course, Digital Photography will involve equal parts making images, reading, writing, and analyzing/discussing. Assignments progress on a formal level from B&W to color and then to working with images in time, whether stop-motion or sequenced as short experimental films. The ideas students bring to the projects will be emphasized and the readings, films, image presentations, and discussions will provide direction to explore themes such as consumerism, the environment, gender, social diversity, imagination and dreams. The photographic medium has undergone changes in the last decade at a rate unparalleled since photography's invention during the latter part of the 19th Century. What does digital photography hold for the 21st Century? How is it different from working with film -or is it? What are artists doing within the medium today and what are their influences? These and other questions will be addressed over the course of the quarter as the technical, conceptual and formal properties of the medium are introduced.

Course Description

This class addresses light as an art form through analytical observations, practical applications, and thoughtful critique. This class builds a foundation of understanding how light exists in our lives by breaking down properties of light into color, quality, intensity, shadow, contrast, and environment. Writing and basic drawing techniques are incorporated as a means of communication.

Course Description

This hands-on studio course offers an exploration of costume design and construction techniques used in costume design for the stage, film, print and photography. Students will experience the world of the costume designer from the designer’s point-of-view through a quarter-long exploration in which they will conceive of designs for a unique historical garments and build each garment themselves. Steps to this project will include design analysis, historical and conceptual research, an introduction to flat patterning and draping techniques, and instruction in hand and machine sewing techniques. Throughout the course, students will move from gathering visual research through collage, to rendering their designs on paper, to learning to put together a three-dimensional sewing pattern, to finally, building finished sewn garment samples they have designed in their entirety.

Course Description

This is an introductory studio course designed to introduce students to painting. The course will develop skills to begin investigating painting as an artistic medium and method of individual expression.

Course Description

This course immerses students in the creative process of designing visual worlds for the stage. Students create a variety of designs that build visual communication, collaboration, creativity, ingenuity, composition, conceptual development and presentation skills. Class will attend live theatre performances and reflect on these experiences through writing and discussion.

Course Description

Put your headphones on and delve deeply into the power of sound in and as art! Experience installations and performances on the cutting edge of music and aural creativity. Learn the basic skills and techniques of generating and manipulating sound to touch the senses and impart emotion, ideas, and meaning. Then integrate what you've learned and experienced by expressing your own ideas through a unique piece of multi-media, sound-focused art.

Course Description

This is a beginning acting class focusing on the fundamentals of the craft of acting. Students will participate in exercises designed to help develop physical and vocal presence, an awareness of impulse and being 'in the moment', and text analysis and action oriented skills specific to acting a text. They will participate in a number of individual and partner performance exercises. Using the techniques and insights learned in these exercises students will create a performance of a scene from Samuel Beckett's WAITING FOR GODOT.

Course Description

This will be an introductory class that assumes no prior film making experience and is designed to encourage students to explore film making using accessible mobile technology. Students will develop their knowledge of basic video production, methods and terminology using their smartphones. Through hands-on, small-group assignments, students will learn and apply professional film concepts while using their smartphones to tell their own creative story. With available apps, students will learn how to turn their smartphone into a powerful film tool. Students will understand exposure, framing, audio, lighting, composition and more.

Course Description

An introduction to the fundamentals of sculpture. Students will have learned to explore the artistic imagination, develop a vision and/or concept and express it in three-dimensional form. A range of materials such as clay, plaster, plastic and found object and sculpting processes such as constructing, modeling, carving, casting and fabricating will be utilized to introduce students to the creative process and problem solving of three-dimension art.

Course Description

Put your headphones on and delve deeply into the power of sound in and as art! Experience installations and performances on the cutting edge of music and aural creativity. Learn the basic skills and techniques of generating and manipulating sound to touch the senses and impart emotion, ideas, and meaning. Then integrate what you've learned and experienced by expressing your own ideas through a unique piece of multi-media, sound-focused art.

Course Description

This course introduces students to creative inquiry and expression through the study and practice of key genres in creative writing: poetry, fiction, and creative non-fiction. Students' principal work in the class will consist of the production of original works in each of these three genres. In support of this work, students will respond to model poems, stories, and essays, and they will engage in artistic discussions about the areas where genres overlap. Assignments will include both written and oral components.

Course Description

This course focuses on the art of telling stories for Virtual Reality. Students will immerse themselves in understanding the media through the technology available so they can learn about the challenges of telling a story using its specific attributes. In this hands-on class, students will create and produce a short film using 360 video, which will purposefully blur reality and fiction, and narrate a story. This course will include analyses of experiences and texts with an emphasis on immersive narrative and the nature of interactivity. The purpose of this class also includes intensive learning through collaboration and reflection on future challenges and our responsibilities of storytelling through new technologies.

Course Description

This course is a hands-on exploration of the five major methods of fine art printmaking (relief, intaglio, stencil, planographic). Class consists of technical demonstration lectures, hands on learning exercises, and the production of simple exemplary limited edition fine art prints. Students will be responsible for reading assignments, oral and written reviews critiques, studying prints in local museums and/ or galleries and on campus art venues. A small service learning component will be assigned to one of the printmaking assignments.

Course Description

This course focuses on the art of telling stories for Virtual Reality. Students will immerse themselves in understanding the media through the technology available so they can learn about the challenges of telling a story using its specific attributes. In this hands-on class, students will create and produce a short film using 360 video, which will purposefully blur reality and fiction, and narrate a story. This course will include analyses of experiences and texts with an emphasis on immersive narrative and the nature of interactivity. The purpose of this class also includes intensive learning through collaboration and reflection on future challenges and our responsibilities of storytelling through new technologies.

Course Description

As a Core course, Digital Photography will involve equal parts making images, reading, writing, and analyzing/discussing. Assignments progress on a formal level from B&W to color and then to working with images in time, whether stop-motion or sequenced as short experimental films. The ideas students bring to the projects will be emphasized and the readings, films, image presentations, and discussions will provide direction to explore themes such as consumerism, the environment, gender, social diversity, imagination and dreams. The photographic medium has undergone changes in the last decade at a rate unparalleled since photography's invention during the latter part of the 19th Century. What does digital photography hold for the 21st Century? How is it different from working with film -or is it? What are artists doing within the medium today and what are their influences? These and other questions will be addressed over the course of the quarter as the technical, conceptual and formal properties of the medium are introduced.

Course Description

This course is a hands-on exploration of the five major methods of fine art printmaking (relief, intaglio, stencil, planographic). Class consists of technical demonstration lectures, hands on learning exercises, and the production of simple exemplary limited edition fine art prints. Students will be responsible for reading assignments, oral and written reviews critiques, studying prints in local museums and/ or galleries and on campus art venues. A small service learning component will be assigned to one of the printmaking assignments.

Course Description

What does it mean to be a community member of Seattle? How do we express through narrative craft the personal, historical, social, or political ramifications of what it means to live in this dynamic urban landscape? In this course you will read an array of literature about Seattle and the Pacific Northwest and will craft original works of fiction and narrative non-fiction to describe the people and place that is home to our university.

Course Description

As a Core course, Digital Photography will involve equal parts making images, reading, writing, and analyzing/discussing. Assignments progress on a formal level from B&W to color and then to working with images in time, whether stop-motion or sequenced as short experimental films. The ideas students bring to the projects will be emphasized and the readings, films, image presentations, and discussions will provide direction to explore themes such as consumerism, the environment, gender, social diversity, imagination and dreams. The photographic medium has undergone changes in the last decade at a rate unparalleled since photography's invention during the latter part of the 19th Century. What does digital photography hold for the 21st Century? How is it different from working with film -or is it? What are artists doing within the medium today and what are their influences? These and other questions will be addressed over the course of the quarter as the technical, conceptual and formal properties of the medium are introduced.

Course Description

This course introduces students to creative inquiry and expression through the study and practice of key genres in creative writing: poetry, fiction, and creative non-fiction. Students' principal work in the class will consist of the production of original works in each of these three genres. In support of this work, students will respond to model poems, stories, and essays, and they will engage in artistic discussions about the areas where genres overlap. Assignments will include both written and oral components.

Course Description

Students learn and analyze Visual Language and Design Principle through lectures, hands-on studio exercises and projects to demonstrate their understanding of design principle in imaginative, creative ways. Each project will follow a typical design process and color theory from initial idea to project completion.

Course Description

This course is designed for students with an interest in creating and examining socially-engaged theatre practices and performance techniques. In this course we will investigate and examine ways in which theatre has inspired political action, and reflect upon ideas surrounding both social oppression and social change within a theatrical/performance framework. No performance experience is necessary.

Course Description

This course introduces students to creative expression through the study and practice of writing poetry and short stories, paying special attention to gender in a variety of cultural settings. Students will study the production and appreciation of poetry and short stories through a variety of exercises and responses to published poems and short stories and will work carefully with language, image, concision, and form. Students will draw on their positionally and their lived experiences to produce poems and short stories as an expression of the political, social, and cultural moment. They will compose brief analytic response essays, present your work in class, and attend a public literary event.

Course Description

An introduction to the art and craft of handmade letterforms (italic writing) adapted for modern artistic use. Students will learn the formal italic form and variations such as swash, informal, cursive, and instructions for future personalization. Skill will be attained through a series of practice exercises that will then be applied to the creation of finished works of calligraphic art.

Course Description

An introductory studio course designed to introduce students to Drawing. Developing skills to begin investigating drawing as an artistic medium and method of individual expression.

Course Description

This is a beginning acting class focusing on the fundamentals of the craft of acting. Students will participate in exercises designed to help develop physical and vocal presence, an awareness of impulse and being 'in the moment', and text analysis and action oriented skills specific to acting a text. They will participate in a number of individual and partner performance exercises. Using the techniques and insights learned in these exercises students will create a performance of a scene from Samuel Beckett's WAITING FOR GODOT.

Course Description

This course is a hands-on exploration of the five major methods of fine art printmaking (relief, intaglio, stencil, planographic). Class consists of technical demonstration lectures, hands on learning exercises, and the production of simple exemplary limited edition fine art prints. Students will be responsible for reading assignments, oral and written reviews critiques, studying prints in local museums and/ or galleries and on campus art venues. A small service learning component will be assigned to one of the printmaking assignments.

Course Description

An introductory studio course designed to introduce students to Drawing. Developing skills to begin investigating drawing as an artistic medium and method of individual expression.

Course Description

Students learn and analyze Visual Language and Design Principle through lectures, hands-on studio exercises and projects to demonstrate their understanding of design principle in imaginative, creative ways. Each project will follow a typical design process and color theory from initial idea to project completion.

Course Description

What does it mean to be a community member of Seattle? How do we express through narrative craft the personal, historical, social, or political ramifications of what it means to live in this dynamic urban landscape? In this course you will read an array of literature about Seattle and the Pacific Northwest and will craft original works of fiction and narrative non-fiction to describe the people and place that is home to our university.

Course Description

Class Piano is designed for students who have no previous experience in piano playing. The course introduces basic keyboard and musicianship skills that enable students to be musically creative and expressive, as well as enable them to enjoy the process of creating music. Emphasis is placed on developing listening skills, performing skills, and a few useful elements of music theory. Beyond developing basic playing skills, this class will enable students to develop the confidence to make aesthetic judgments, express themselves creatively through the piano and interpret and analyze music.

Course Description

Introduction to Music Theory is a creative Core course designed to increase a student’s abilities in creative thinking and expression through music composition and performance. This class will teach the fundamentals of music by engaging students through group activities and individual performances such as singing, playing instruments, and dance. Students will learn and explore rhythm, pitch and counterpoint.

Course Description

This course introduces students to creative expression through the study and practice of writing poetry and short stories, paying special attention to gender in a variety of cultural settings. Students will study the production and appreciation of poetry and short stories through a variety of exercises and responses to published poems and short stories and will work carefully with language, image, concision, and form. Students will draw on their positionally and their lived experiences to produce poems and short stories as an expression of the political, social, and cultural moment. They will compose brief analytic response essays, present your work in class, and attend a public literary event.

Course Description

Class Piano is designed for students who have no previous experience in piano playing. The course introduces basic keyboard and musicianship skills that enable students to be musically creative and expressive, as well as enable them to enjoy the process of creating music. Emphasis is placed on developing listening skills, performing skills, and a few useful elements of music theory. Beyond developing basic playing skills, this class will enable students to develop the confidence to make aesthetic judgments, express themselves creatively through the piano and interpret and analyze music.

Course Description

This course will both broaden and deepen your understanding of music through the study of—and hands-on experience with—experimental approaches to contemporary popular music composition and production across a wide range of styles and genres. A strong emphasis will be placed on the development of listening skills, the ability to write critically and meaningfully about connections between music and culture, and creative engagement with the musical tools and techniques we will be covering.

Course Description

In this course we will be addressing the identity of the Asian/Asian-American through literature, film, and Critical Race Theory. Students will be introduced to key concepts that help us better understand the historical condition of the Asian/Asian-American persona including assimilation, model minority myth, shame, vulnerability, and others, that continues to change with generational differences.

Course Description

This course examines how movies can engage issues of social justice. By analyzing how movies construct logical arguments, appeal to audiences' desires, and invoke a variety of emotional responses, this course traces the methods by which audiences are transformed into active social participants. Through analysis of films that engage a variety of social justice issues, students in this course will gain an understanding of how moving images wield the power to affect social change.

Course Description

Do video games matter? How do they make meaning? We'll explore the ways in which various video games communicate messages to audiences, focusing on their words, design, and play. Addressing matters ranging from console design to specific games and the people who play them, this class will investigate how video games communicate and why that process of media representation is meaningful.

Course Description

Do we live in a posthuman (or transhuman) world? Is the category of the human no longer expansive enough to account for all the ways in which we live today? Virtual existences, scientific advancements, and philosophical investigations have pushed us to what some would consider the "limit" of a purely human existence. However, the category of the hybrid, the marvelous, the cybernetic has been a topic of literary investigation for hundreds (if not thousands) of years. This course reads some of those literary texts alongside the concepts of both humanism and posthumanism-interrogating the literary texts for the ways that they frame and respond to the category of the human.

Course Description

This class examines the technologies by which images and visual forms are produced, circulated and received, as well as the theories of seeing that make the visual world intelligible. It will introduce students to the social role of images and visuality (the structures and power relations of society), with a particular focus on frames of race, gender and sexuality.

Course Description

Stories are the vocabulary necessary to "cultural literacy." We need stories to read with. Without stories, the world is uninterpretable. In this course, students will explore a story archetype that they will quickly recognize in their own lives. It is the lived story, provocatively told in great films and literature, of our approaching, pushing, and transgressing boundaries.

Course Description

This course will be an intellectual history of the two movements that stand as the foundation of modern Western thought and culture: the Enlightenment and Romanticism. The goal will be to come to an understanding of the manner in which these two movements articulated competing and alternative visions as to the nature of individual and collective life. In this manner, we should come to better grasp the assumptions and presuppositions that still underpin contemporary thinking about political, social, cultural, ethical, and spiritual matters.

Course Description

This course asks how art objects can provide us access to the meaning of place in ways that reveal spaces, regions, landscapes, cities, and nations to be terrains of competing interests and complicated senses of belonging. We will focus on the role that the American West has played in the American popular imagination through a variety of forms of visual art, including: 19 c. landscape painting and survey photographs, Native American art and notions of place, 20th c. regional painters such as the ''Northwest Mystics," the 1962 Seattle World's Fair, 1970s land and environmental art, and contemporary practices that address the experience of the rural and the urban. We will read material from art history, literature, geography and urban theory in this course. There will be a take-home essay exam and students will be required to write papers that synthesize readings and the analysis of art works, and complete a research and writing project on a facet of the local Seattle environment.

Course Description

Stories are the vocabulary necessary to "cultural literacy." We need stories to read with. Without stories, the world is uninterpretable. In this course, students will explore a story archetype that they will quickly recognize in their own lives. It is the lived story, provocatively told in great films and literature, of our approaching, pushing, and transgressing boundaries.

Course Description

This course will be an intellectual history of the two movements that stand as the foundation of modern Western thought and culture: the Enlightenment and Romanticism. The goal will be to come to an understanding of the manner in which these two movements articulated competing and alternative visions as to the nature of individual and collective life. In this manner, we should come to better grasp the assumptions and presuppositions that still underpin contemporary thinking about political, social, cultural, ethical, and spiritual matters.

Course Description

This course analyzes modern understandings of human rights in light of Global African Studies intellectual traditions and Jesuit/Catholic intellectual traditions. Introduces students to theories of social movements, African Diaspora history, and historical methodology. We chart the history of social movements before and since the Haitian Revolution, the Pan-African Congress, and the modern civil rights movement. We will analyze and critique the legacies of various methodologies and social and political theories for modern day social movements.

Course Description

This course is about the historical role of the artist in society. We look at two moments in history when the identity of artists changed to learn how historical context helps us understand works of art. We ask why Renaissance artists argued that they were intellectuals rather than artisans and why Modem artists attacked the intellectual traditions of art to demand social change and radically question the purpose of visual art. To address these issues we explore themes such as Renaissance self-portraiture, 19th century paintings of labor, symbols of the liberal arts in the Renaissance, and German Dada artists' responses to the trauma of the First World War.

Course Description

What is the aftermath of empire and imperialism? Beyond describing empires as good or bad, students taking this course will learn about the aftermath of colonialism and expansion as viewed in the increasingly despotic actions of the Athenian Empire, the naked expansion of the Roman world and the increasing Romanization of willing and unwilling subjects/allies, and the aftermath of the end of the British Empire. This course asks: What are consequences of empire?

Course Description

Especially during troubled times, how can poetry become a resource for individuals to foster a greater degree of mindfulness in their lives and thereby find meaning, develop greater resilience, and make sense of their places within the world? Mindfulness is a concerted effort to live more fully in the present. This seminar examines how the Chinese have considered poetry a vital means to achieve mindfulness and develop greater insights into daily living.

Course Description

What is the aftermath of empire and imperialism? Beyond describing empires as good or bad, students taking this course will learn about the aftermath of colonialism and expansion as viewed in the increasingly despotic actions of the Athenian Empire, the naked expansion of the Roman world and the increasing Romanization of willing and unwilling subjects/allies, and the aftermath of the end of the British Empire. This course asks: What are consequences of empire?

Course Description

Drawing on the work of U.S. writers, this course engages a range of historically divisive questions: what, for example, makes the U.S. unique and what--if anything--makes it great? Such questions animate a long history of American politics, but this course will explore the ways in which U.S. literature offers more nuanced lines of inquiry, interrogating definitions of and assumptions about national identity.

Course Description

Especially during troubled times, how can poetry become a resource for individuals to foster a greater degree of mindfulness in their lives and thereby find meaning, develop greater resilience, and make sense of their places within the world? Mindfulness is a concerted effort to live more fully in the present. This seminar examines how the Chinese have considered poetry a vital means to achieve mindfulness and develop greater insights into daily living.

Course Description

The course studies myths and art of ancient Egyptian, Greek, and Roman Cultures from a historical perspective. Students in this course learn about concepts and aspects of myths and their depictions in art. The course involves studying mythical topics and includes a comparison between ancient Egyptian and Graeco-roman cultures. It teaches students how to assess similarities and differences between ancient cultures and evaluate inherited legacies that have affected modern cultures and societies.

Course Description

What does it mean to be human? How do we, as humans, interact with and understand one another and the natural world? This course asks you to consider the ways both literary and scientific texts help us think about these and other shared questions. This course will help you see both literary and scientific writing in new ways and to discover how these two fields overlap to express and shape the way we understand our world and our experiences.

Course Description

What is the aftermath of empire and imperialism? Beyond describing empires as good or bad, students taking this course will learn about the aftermath of colonialism and expansion as viewed in the increasingly despotic actions of the Athenian Empire, the naked expansion of the Roman world and the increasing Romanization of willing and unwilling subjects/allies, and the aftermath of the end of the British Empire. This course asks: What are consequences of empire?

Course Description

This course is about the historical role of the artist in society. We look at two moments in history when the identity of artists changed to learn how historical context helps us understand works of art. We ask why Renaissance artists argued that they were intellectuals rather than artisans and why Modem artists attacked the intellectual traditions of art to demand social change and radically question the purpose of visual art. To address these issues we explore themes such as Renaissance self-portraiture, 19th century paintings of labor, symbols of the liberal arts in the Renaissance, and German Dada artists' responses to the trauma of the First World War.

Course Description

Well-aware of the scrutiny to which women's bodies are subjected in modern culture, this course turns its attention to the medieval attitudes towards women as bodies and bodies as female. We consider what- and when -medieval peoples thought about the female body through a close examination of laws, artwork, medical texts, and other sources, in order to examine the gendering of the body in many different facets of medieval society and culture.

Course Description

How did alternative medicines come to be separate from the mainstream, and why do they draw so much on Asian traditions? This course explores the history of herbal medicine in Europe, Asia, and America in order to understand the roles that race, gender, and colonial thinking have played in defining modern medicine. We focus on the medieval origins of this topic while keeping an eye on its modern realities.

Course Description

Hollywood films play an outsize role in shaping how Americans encounter the past. In this inquiry seminar we will examine genres of films that have a heightened relationship with the past: the Civil War film and the war movie, the western, the civil rights movement on screen, the immigrant’s tale, among others. Our project will be both to assess historical accuracy and to understand how a particular cinematic vision of the past speaks directly to the time period that produced it.

Course Description

This course uses the idea of a coup to discuss and study political legitimacy, the transfer of power, and the relation between state, citizen and political change. The course gives an overview of coups through history before examining the theoretical underpinnings of coups (what makes a coup a coup and when is the concept used incorrectly). Students will research and examine various coups across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Course Description

We will take novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s TED talk “The Dangers of a Single Story” as an entry point into the texts and a way to create continuity across the diverse materials we are reading. First of all, what is a “story”? How does perspective change a story? Why is it dangerous to assume that there is one story? How can thinking about different ways of seeing expand the way we see the world?

Course Description

This course will focus on an intellectual history of three of the primary critics of modern Western culture: Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Sigmund Freud. We will be seeking to understand both the economic-social, philosophical and psychoanalytic critiques they developed of modern European culture and the historical contexts out of which these critiques emerged and to which they were responding.

Course Description

The course studies myths and art of ancient Egyptian, Greek, and Roman Cultures from a historical perspective. Students in this course learn about concepts and aspects of myths and their depictions in art. The course involves studying mythical topics and includes a comparison between ancient Egyptian and Graeco-roman cultures. It teaches students how to assess similarities and differences between ancient cultures and evaluate inherited legacies that have affected modern cultures and societies.

Course Description

Through an examination of the travel accounts of select individuals this course will explore the impact of technology on global encounters in the modern world. It will explore the way that developments in travel technology shaped cross-cultural encounters and understandings in the modern world. It will address the central question: how do changes in travel technology change not only the way people travel around the world but the way people understand the world?

Course Description

A thematic course that addresses a topic or period of Art History outside of modern Europe or the West.This writing intensive course provides the opportunity for students to approach issues of global citizenship and the study of art through a cross-cultural lens. This particular iteration of the course analyzes the treatment of the Baroque style in South America, particularly Brazil. Students will become familiar with South American painting, sculpture and architecture largely from the 17th and 18th centuries. In addition, this course will examine how crosscultural issues such as colonialism, race, and slavery affected art.

Course Description

This course is about the historical role of the artist in society. We look at two moments in history when the identity of artists changed to learn how historical context helps us understand works of art. We ask why Renaissance artists argued that they were intellectuals rather than artisans and why Modem artists attacked the intellectual traditions of art to demand social change and radically question the purpose of visual art. To address these issues we explore themes such as Renaissance self-portraiture, 19th century paintings of labor, symbols of the liberal arts in the Renaissance, and German Dada artists' responses to the trauma of the First World War.

Course Description

What are the arts? What are methods of interpreting the arts - such as theatre, film, music, dance, and visual art - in relation to their cultural, aesthetic, and administrative contexts? Students analyze contemporary arts practices while learning about arts administration history, and community practices, such as staffing, financing, marketing, programming, and engagement. Course assignments include five “art critiques,” an art organization presentation, and a final research-based arts programming project.

Course Description

Citizens and interest groups in the United States have effectuated significant societal change through political participation. Accordingly, this course covers the theoretical nature of citizenship in a democracy, exposes the impediments to democratic citizenship, and fosters an understanding of the various ways in which one can participate in the American political system. It examines examples of citizen engagement that may challenge preconceptions about the forms and forums of democratic participation in order to demonstrate to how political science takes civic engagement seriously.

Course Description

What happens when things fall apart? What leads some societies to pull together to overcome the challenges that face it, and others to fall apart and fail? This class is focused on trying to answer that question. Looking at both empirical case studies and speculative fiction, we will seek to understand what leads societies to fail, and ask ourselves whether America is on such a path.

Course Description

Appropriation of Breastfeeding is a 5-credit course designed to be taken for one-quarter of an academic year. The overall purpose of the course is to create culture of health and wellness among the students pursuing degrees in health and related disciplines. The specific aims of this course are to help the students explore personal values and attitudes toward breastfeeding and to hone new knowledge and skills to promote breastfeeding. The course will provide safe and inclusive learning environment in which breastfeeding is examined as a socio-cultural, political, and health construct through structured and direct engagement in diverse course activities.

Course Description

Disability is the only marginalized identity status which anyone could join at any point in their life. In this course, students apply a public health lens to ask and answer questions such as: Who is disabled? What are the diverse needs and strengths of disabled individuals? What rights do disabled people have? What is the difference between accessibility and universal design? And what would it mean if the future (of work, climate solutions, art and expression, and more) was disabled?

Course Description

How did the United States become the world's largest jailer? This course addresses many questions that arise from the phenomenon of mass incarceration (the more than tripling of the incarceration rate in America since the mid-1970s). We compare the U.S. criminal justice system to other countries in the world and explore major topics like police violence, sentencing, white collar crimes, gangs, the War on Drugs, conditions of confinement, and life after prison.

Course Description

This course examines the construction and consequences of borders across the world. Students develop their analytical, presentation and writing skills as they learn how international boundaries work on local, national and transnational levels. Substantive topics include borderland cultures, collective identities, international order, migration processes, and security policies. Assignments involve written essays, oral presentations, in-depth research, and group collaboration.

Course Description

We are increasingly bombarded with crises such as climate disasters, racial injustice, and toxic stress. In this course students will learn about types of crises and their effects on the mental health and social well-being of vulnerable communities. Students will be introduced to social work values and theories and interdisciplinary crisis intervention frameworks, and have the opportunity to analyze global and domestic case studies of crisis responses through a social work lens.

Course Description

How did the United States become the world's largest jailer? This course addresses many questions that arise from the phenomenon of mass incarceration (the more than tripling of the incarceration rate in America since the mid-1970s). We compare the U.S. criminal justice system to other countries in the world and explore major topics like police violence, sentencing, white collar crimes, gangs, the War on Drugs, conditions of confinement, and life after prison.

Course Description

This course examines the construction and consequences of borders across the world. Students develop their analytical, presentation and writing skills as they learn how international boundaries work on local, national and transnational levels. Substantive topics include borderland cultures, collective identities, international order, migration processes, and security policies. Assignments involve written essays, oral presentations, in-depth research, and group collaboration.

Course Description

The United States is experiencing historically unprecedented levels of income and wealth inequality. This course begins by discussing the measurement of economic inequality, providing students both a historical and global perspective on current levels of inequality in the US. The course then introduces microeconomic explanations for economic inequality, focusing on the labor market. The course examines claims that inequality is detrimental to individual and societal well-being and to the political process. Finally, the course asks what, if anything, can or should be done to address economic inequality.

Course Description

Grounded in theoretical perspectives of International Relations, the course materials focus on the United Nations (UN) system and its evolving roles in the pursuit of security, peace, prosperity, and justice in the world.

Course Description

How did the United States become the world's largest jailer? This course addresses many questions that arise from the phenomenon of mass incarceration (the more than tripling of the incarceration rate in America since the mid-1970s). We compare the U.S. criminal justice system to other countries in the world and explore major topics like police violence, sentencing, white collar crimes, gangs, the War on Drugs, conditions of confinement, and life after prison.

Course Description

This course is offered by the sociology program, taught by a sociologist. The course covers several contemporary topics of importance: race relations and oppression, political discourse and its possibility, climate change and denial. The course will introduce you to sociological, historical, and psychological perspectives on these and other critical issues.

Course Description

What happens when things fall apart? What leads some societies to pull together to overcome the challenges that face it, and others to fall apart and fail? This class is focused on trying to answer that question. Looking at both empirical case studies and speculative fiction, we will seek to understand what leads societies to fail, and ask ourselves whether America is on such a path.

Course Description

How did the United States become the world's largest jailer? This course addresses many questions that arise from the phenomenon of mass incarceration (the more than tripling of the incarceration rate in America since the mid-1970s). We compare the U.S. criminal justice system to other countries in the world and explore major topics like police violence, sentencing, white collar crimes, gangs, the War on Drugs, conditions of confinement, and life after prison.

Course Description

What happens when things fall apart? What leads some societies to pull together to overcome the challenges that face it, and others to fall apart and fail? This class is focused on trying to answer that question. Looking at both empirical case studies and speculative fiction, we will seek to understand what leads societies to fail, and ask ourselves whether America is on such a path.

Course Description

The United States is experiencing historically unprecedented levels of income and wealth inequality. This course begins by discussing the measurement of economic inequality, providing students both a historical and global perspective on current levels of inequality in the US. The course then introduces microeconomic explanations for economic inequality, focusing on the labor market. The course examines claims that inequality is detrimental to individual and societal well-being and to the political process. Finally, the course asks what, if anything, can or should be done to address economic inequality.

Course Description

Citizens and interest groups in the United States have effectuated significant societal change through political participation. Accordingly, this course covers the theoretical nature of citizenship in a democracy, exposes the impediments to democratic citizenship, and fosters an understanding of the various ways in which one can participate in the American political system. It examines examples of citizen engagement that may challenge preconceptions about the forms and forums of democratic participation in order to demonstrate to how political science takes civic engagement seriously.

Course Description

Helping others is a multifaceted process. What is the meaning of help and how is it accomplished? Who decides the nature of the problem? What are the impacts of helping on the giver and receiver? What ethical issues and value stances arise? Students will explore the dynamics of helping individuals and communities resolve problems by examining the links between personal and social problems, historical approaches and theoretical frameworks used by the helping professions.

Course Description

This urban sociology course will explore the emergence and the consequences of wastelands, or polluted spaces, in the urban environment. This academic service learning course will allow students to investigate urban wastelands throughout the urban landscape of Seattle-Pacific Northwest.

Course Description

The United States is experiencing historically unprecedented levels of income and wealth inequality. This course begins by discussing the measurement of economic inequality, providing students both a historical and global perspective on current levels of inequality in the US. The course then introduces microeconomic explanations for economic inequality, focusing on the labor market. The course examines claims that inequality is detrimental to individual and societal well-being and to the political process. Finally, the course asks what, if anything, can or should be done to address economic inequality.

Course Description

This course introduces students to the complex ways in which environmental factors and human cultures influence each other across the globe. The course adopts a holistic anthropological approach in understanding humans as biological, social, and intellectual beings engaged with the environment around them.

Course Description

This course is an anthropological introduction to three social issues that have been the focus of much research, policy and popular interest in the United States: environmental sustainability, racial identity, and gender difference and inequality. In our efforts to better understand these issues (and act upon them), anthropological research offers us a wealth of empirical data and analysis drawn from the richness of our cultural and biological variety and the sweep of human history and evolution.

Course Description

This course introduces students to the complex ways in which environmental factors and human cultures influence each other across the globe. The course adopts a holistic anthropological approach in understanding humans as biological, social, and intellectual beings engaged with the environment around them.

Course Description

This course introduces students to the complex ways in which environmental factors and human cultures influence each other across the globe. The course adopts a holistic anthropological approach in understanding humans as biological, social, and intellectual beings engaged with the environment around them.

Course Description

This course is offered by the sociology program, taught by a sociologist. The course covers several contemporary topics of importance: race relations and oppression, political discourse and its possibility, climate change and denial. The course will introduce you to sociological, historical, and psychological perspectives on these and other critical issues.

Course Description

This course brings the social sciences in conversation with puppetry arts to explore how the latter can amplify the insights of the former. Students will engage in low-stakes puppet-making, learn how puppetry has responded to social issues across the globe throughout its history, apply the perspectives, paradigms, and research methods of the social sciences to a specific social issue, and then have fun putting on a puppet show dramatizing what they've learned.

Course Description

This course introduces students to the complex ways in which environmental factors and human cultures influence each other across the globe. The course adopts a holistic anthropological approach in understanding humans as biological, social, and intellectual beings engaged with the environment around them.

Course Description

How can a city be described as a "social laboratory"? How can people that lived a hundred years ago explain today's social and cultural issues? Beginning with the tum of the 20th Century, students will examine the urban landscape of Chicago, one of the earliest sites of sociological inquiry. Through the lens of Upton Sinclair's historical sociological fiction, The Jungle, we will study the "urban laboratory" that began with confluence of diverse immigrant populations and the extremes of crushing poverty and vast wealth. While many early American sociologists worked with the goal of social reform in mind, these social inequities are still at the heart of sociology today. This course will facilitate a discussion of the both the history of Sociology in terms of research, social thought, and reform and also how the discipline continues to address social injustice albeit in different ways. Students will enter the "social laboratory" that is Seattle and carry out their own service-learning projects in order to ameliorate suffering and also to determine how Sociology has progressed as a discipline.

Course Description

This course examines the more than 15,000 year old archaeological record of the Northwest Coast of North America, the culture area extending from southeast Alaska to coastal British Columbia, Washington, Oregon, and northern California. This region has fascinated anthropologists for almost 150 years because its indigenous peoples have developed distinctive cultures based on fishing, hunting, and gathering economies. The course examines the ecological and ethnographic background for the region, and then study how these have shaped archaeologists' ideas about the past. The contents of sites and consider the relationship between data, interpretation, and theory.

Course Description

This course brings the social sciences in conversation with puppetry arts to explore how the latter can amplify the insights of the former. Students will engage in low-stakes puppet-making, learn how puppetry has responded to social issues across the globe throughout its history, apply the perspectives, paradigms, and research methods of the social sciences to a specific social issue, and then have fun putting on a puppet show dramatizing what they've learned.

Course Description

This class provides students with the opportunity to develop a theoretically critical awareness of the relationship between love, sexuality, and marriage from a social scientific lens. The class will explore the relationship between sex, love, romance, desire, and intimate relationships in the modern world through a social scientific lens. Topics to be considered may include: the intersections between race, ethnicity, class, gender, nation, sexuality, and marriage; changing definitions of sexual respectability; prostitution and sex work in different contexts; sexual behavior and sexual ideals; transsexuality and transgender identities; the varieties of love; the meaning of marriage; state regulation of marriage and sexuality; love in popular culture, and historical shifts in constructions of affect and emotion.

Course Description

What is a "social problem""? In this course, we will step back to understand how social problems are socially constructed by asking what gets labeled as a problem, who gets to label something, how groups mobilize around what they consider problematic, and about the role of social policies in this process. We will cover a wide range of topics from affordable housing and homelessness to environmental degradation to race-based violence. The goal throughout the class will be to examining the public claims-making process of how people construct ideas about what is good and bad in social life. As we look at the process through specific examples, the course will pay special attention to how these issues are constructed in the city of Seattle and the Pacific Northwest.

Course Description

What threatens the health of the Puget Sound ecosystem? This course will focus on the ecosystem of the Puget Sound, the pollutants that can be found there, where they are coming from and how we can prevent them. Students will do their own investigations on effects specific chemical are having on animal health and how rain gardens and river repair programs can prevent pollution from reaching the Sound.

Course Description

The nature, formation, and evolution of our Solar System and other planetary systems, and how we learn those, through scientific inquiry. Background physics will be introduced and explored in laboratory exercises and independent observational and computational work. Discussions of the methods, costs, and gains from robotic space exploration, leading up to the search for planets and life elsewhere in the Solar System and the Galaxy.

Course Description

We rely on energy for a variety of daily functions, including heat for our indoor spaces, light, power for electronic devices, and fuel for transportation. How is that energy produced, what natural resources does is consume, and what are the potential consequences? This course will use fundamental principles of chemistry to understand how energy is harnessed from natural resources, and will consider the environmental, societal, and economic impacts of our consumer choices around energy.

Course Description

Environmental sustainability gives us an extraordinarily relevant avenue to investigate the question: how do we know what we know about the natural world? We will explore the fundamental biology behind sustainability to better make informed choices about how to live in our only ecosystem, the earth. In lab, we will learn 'hands on' by exploring a question of personal interest using the methods of science as well as visiting environmental sustainability related locales.

Course Description

We rely on energy for a variety of daily functions, including heat for our indoor spaces, light, power for electronic devices, and fuel for transportation. How is that energy produced, what natural resources does is consume, and what are the potential consequences? This course will use fundamental principles of chemistry to understand how energy is harnessed from natural resources, and will consider the environmental, societal, and economic impacts of our consumer choices around energy.

Course Description

Environmental sustainability gives us an extraordinarily relevant avenue to investigate the question: how do we know what we know about the natural world? We will explore the fundamental biology behind sustainability to better make informed choices about how to live in our only ecosystem, the earth. In lab, we will learn 'hands on' by exploring a question of personal interest using the methods of science as well as visiting environmental sustainability related locales.

Course Description

In this course, students will investigate simple cooking concepts backed by scientific experiment to learn about how basic principles of biology, chemistry, and physics apply to cooking. Students will take that knowledge to criticize and suggest improvement to existing recipes.

Course Description

What threatens the health of the Puget Sound ecosystem? This course will focus on the ecosystem of the Puget Sound, the pollutants that can be found there, where they are coming from and how we can prevent them. Students will do their own investigations on effects specific chemical are having on animal health and how rain gardens and river repair programs can prevent pollution from reaching the Sound.

Course Description

What threatens the health of the Puget Sound ecosystem? This course will focus on the ecosystem of the Puget Sound, the pollutants that can be found there, where they are coming from and how we can prevent them. Students will do their own investigations on effects specific chemical are having on animal health and how rain gardens and river repair programs can prevent pollution from reaching the Sound.

Course Description

In this course, students will investigate simple cooking concepts backed by scientific experiment to learn about how basic principles of biology, chemistry, and physics apply to cooking. Students will take that knowledge to criticize and suggest improvement to existing recipes.

Course Description

What threatens the health of the Puget Sound ecosystem? This course will focus on the ecosystem of the Puget Sound, the pollutants that can be found there, where they are coming from and how we can prevent them. Students will do their own investigations on effects specific chemical are having on animal health and how rain gardens and river repair programs can prevent pollution from reaching the Sound.

Course Description

What threatens the health of the Puget Sound ecosystem? This course will focus on the ecosystem of the Puget Sound, the pollutants that can be found there, where they are coming from and how we can prevent them. Students will do their own investigations on effects specific chemical are having on animal health and how rain gardens and river repair programs can prevent pollution from reaching the Sound.

Course Description

Should I change the way I eat and exercise or is everything pre-determined by the genes I was dealt so why bother? Daily we are bombarded by a myriad of “facts” attempting to convince us which product to purchase or which diet to follow. The scientific process will give you powerful a tool to assess evidence and critically evaluate it to inform your opinion on a topic.

Course Description

What threatens the health of the Puget Sound ecosystem? This course will focus on the ecosystem of the Puget Sound, the pollutants that can be found there, where they are coming from and how we can prevent them. Students will do their own investigations on effects specific chemical are having on animal health and how rain gardens and river repair programs can prevent pollution from reaching the Sound.

Course Description

This course focuses on one group of animals, the birds. Descended from dinosaurs, bird species have evolved to survive and reproduce in their natural environment and each displays numerous biological adaptations in anatomy, physiology, and behavior. Lectures will cover many aspects of bird biology and behavior and labs will give students hands-on experience with birds and their unique features and will include time on campus becoming familiar with local species.

Course Description

What threatens the health of the Puget Sound ecosystem? This course will focus on the ecosystem of the Puget Sound, the pollutants that can be found there, where they are coming from and how we can prevent them. Students will do their own investigations on effects specific chemical are having on animal health and how rain gardens and river repair programs can prevent pollution from reaching the Sound.

Course Description

Environmental sustainability gives us an extraordinarily relevant avenue to investigate the question: how do we know what we know about the natural world? We will explore the fundamental biology behind sustainability to better make informed choices about how to live in our only ecosystem, the earth. In lab, we will learn 'hands on' by exploring a question of personal interest using the methods of science as well as visiting environmental sustainability related locales.

Course Description

This course focuses on one group of animals, the birds. Descended from dinosaurs, bird species have evolved to survive and reproduce in their natural environment and each displays numerous biological adaptations in anatomy, physiology, and behavior. Lectures will cover many aspects of bird biology and behavior and labs will give students hands-on experience with birds and their unique features and will include time on campus becoming familiar with local species.

Course Description

Environmental sustainability gives us an extraordinarily relevant avenue to investigate the question: how do we know what we know about the natural world? We will explore the fundamental biology behind sustainability to better make informed choices about how to live in our only ecosystem, the earth. In lab, we will learn 'hands on' by exploring a question of personal interest using the methods of science as well as visiting environmental sustainability related locales.

Course Description

The nature, formation, and evolution of our Solar System and other planetary systems, and how we learn those, through scientific inquiry. Background physics will be introduced and explored in laboratory exercises and independent observational and computational work. Discussions of the methods, costs, and gains from robotic space exploration, leading up to the search for planets and life elsewhere in the Solar System and the Galaxy.

Course Description

The overarching questions this seminar will address are "How does the geology along 1-90 in Washington state change and what accounts for the geologic differences east and west of the Cascade Mountains?" You will design your own research questions, conduct your own geologic fieldwork, collect your own data and learn how to apply the scientific method in a geologic setting. You will participate in fieldtrips to geologically significant locations both east and west of the Cascade Mountains.

Course Description

The overarching questions this seminar will address are "How does the geology along 1-90 in Washington state change and what accounts for the geologic differences east and west of the Cascade Mountains?" You will design your own research questions, conduct your own geologic fieldwork, collect your own data and learn how to apply the scientific method in a geologic setting. You will participate in fieldtrips to geologically significant locations both east and west of the Cascade Mountains.

Course Description

In this course, you will explore career opportunities within your chosen major. We will begin by considering how your knowledge and skills can be transferred to a career. You will identify types of jobs available within your major and learn to decode a job description. During interactive in-person workshops and online modules, you will practice how to present yourself in writing and in speech when applying for a job. By the end of the course, you will have an updated resume, started a LinkedIn profile and set a plan for the next steps in your professional formation.

Course Description

As life changes, knowing who you are and what you believe can help ground you. In this class we will explore identity, community building and access to resources in an American context, leaving you with transferable skills to help you navigate adulthood.

Course Description

Money for Everyone is a very practical, late-start course dedicated to teaching rookies some basics of financial literacy. It assumes no prior knowledge of finance or accounting, and no advanced math skills aside from addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. The broad goal of this course is for students to learn some simple details of personal finance that, along with a little effort, will help them become financially responsible, and maybe even a little proud of themselves. The instructor, Dr. Alaimo, has no formal training in finance – he is a professor of chemistry – but he is knowledgeable and passionate about teaching and helping people to make good decisions about money, and he has a knack for explaining complex topics in simple ways.

Course Description

Multicultural competence is an increasingly important asset in our increasingly diverse world. With systems of power and privilege permeating every aspect of our daily lives, developing foundational knowledge and skill sets to understand the structures of society is imperative. These systems can be particularly difficult to navigate in professional work environments. This course will explore multicultural awareness, knowledge, skills, and action with a focus on empowering your ability to make positive social change in professional workplace environments.

Course Description

The focus of this course will be on how Catholic theological and spiritual traditions have shaped the way Catholics have engaged with aspects of life in U.S. society, such as education, wealth and poverty, war and peace, work and leisure and the arts and literature.

Course Description

Latin American Liberation Theology is a dynamic and controversial approach to the issues of faith, human freedom and liberation. We will explore and deepen our understanding of who Jesus is within the lived faith experience of the Latin American reality.

Course Description

Paul was the first Christian storyteller on record. But even from the perspective of the earliest Christians, the Apostle Paul and his writings were mysterious and obscure. As Paul traveled throughout the Mediterranean world, he told mysterious stories about Jesus that were composed ad hoc, composed out of the diverse metaphors from the cultures he visited. In many ways, each story was a collage of images collected from the well-traveled highways to the darkest corners of the Mediterranean world. In this course, we will travel with Paul, examine his writings, try to make sense of his mysterious stories and letters, and appropriate them to our modern context by comparing them to movies such as The Matrix and The Truman Show.

Course Description

This introductory course will provide you with an overview of fundamental questions and issues within the broad realm of conflict and peace studies. What are the overarching concepts of justice and peace? What are the core practices of peacebuilding? What are the challenges? And how can we contribute to building a more just and peaceful society? Topics discussed will include conflict analysis, violence prevention, forgiveness and reconciliation, social justice and sustainable peace, political resistance and social transformation, as well as the traditional ethics of war and peace, namely, just war, pacifism, and just peace. In particular, the course will attend to the Christian intellectual discourse of conflict and peace, including its worldview, ethics, history, text, and inter–cultural and –religious historically and at present.

Course Description

The goal of this course is to provide an introduction to fundamental questions in environmental ethics as they relate to Christian theological resources and practices. This course will simultaneously allow students to examine contemporary issues including but not limited to global climate change; biodiversity loss; the relationship between race, gender, poverty, and the environment; and intersections with other issues such as interfaith dialogues, sustainable peacebuilding, and business and economics.

Course Description

This introductory course will provide you with an overview of fundamental questions and issues within the broad realm of conflict and peace studies. What are the overarching concepts of justice and peace? What are the core practices of peacebuilding? What are the challenges? And how can we contribute to building a more just and peaceful society? Topics discussed will include conflict analysis, violence prevention, forgiveness and reconciliation, social justice and sustainable peace, political resistance and social transformation, as well as the traditional ethics of war and peace, namely, just war, pacifism, and just peace. In particular, the course will attend to the Christian intellectual discourse of conflict and peace, including its worldview, ethics, history, text, and inter–cultural and –religious historically and at present.

Course Description

The Gospel of John records the mission of Jesus Christ as one of coming so "that they may have life and have it abundantly" (Jn 10:10). Yet, we witness the opposite when we see powerful social forces (racism, classism, sexism, heterosexism, etc) disrupt and dehumanize meaningful relationships between peoples. In this course, we will explore eight social issues to get at the heart of this contradiction. The first half of the quarter will focus on global relationships under the headings of global poverty, war, and environment. The second half of the quarter will attend to national relationships under the headings of national poverty, healthcare, incarceration, affirmative action, and feminism.

Course Description

This is the study of major world religious traditions, such as Judaism, Islam, Hinduism and Buddhism, with special emphasis on their inter-religious relationship with Roman Catholicism. The objectives of the course are to introduce students to the academic discipline of theological and religious studies, and to understand the tenets and history of Catholic traditions through the dialogical relationship with other religions.

Course Description

The goal of this course is to provide an introduction to fundamental questions in environmental ethics as they relate to Christian theological resources and practices. This course will simultaneously allow students to examine contemporary issues including but not limited to global climate change; biodiversity loss; the relationship between race, gender, poverty, and the environment; and intersections with other issues such as interfaith dialogues, sustainable peacebuilding, and business and economics.

Course Description

Paul was the first Christian storyteller on record. But even from the perspective of the earliest Christians, the Apostle Paul and his writings were mysterious and obscure. As Paul traveled throughout the Mediterranean world, he told mysterious stories about Jesus that were composed ad hoc, composed out of the diverse metaphors from the cultures he visited. In many ways, each story was a collage of images collected from the well-traveled highways to the darkest corners of the Mediterranean world. In this course, we will travel with Paul, examine his writings, try to make sense of his mysterious stories and letters, and appropriate them to our modern context by comparing them to movies such as The Matrix and The Truman Show.

Course Description

The Gospel of John records the mission of Jesus Christ as one of coming so "that they may have life and have it abundantly" (Jn 10:10). Yet, we witness the opposite when we see powerful social forces (racism, classism, sexism, heterosexism, etc) disrupt and dehumanize meaningful relationships between peoples. In this course, we will explore eight social issues to get at the heart of this contradiction. The first half of the quarter will focus on global relationships under the headings of global poverty, war, and environment. The second half of the quarter will attend to national relationships under the headings of national poverty, healthcare, incarceration, affirmative action, and feminism.

Course Description

This is the study of major world religious traditions, such as Judaism, Islam, Hinduism and Buddhism, with special emphasis on their inter-religious relationship with Roman Catholicism. The objectives of the course are to introduce students to the academic discipline of theological and religious studies, and to understand the tenets and history of Catholic traditions through the dialogical relationship with other religions.

Course Description

Perspectives on Jesus explores Jesus' identity and his meaning for the people of his day as well as in the present. We will try to understand what drew people to Jesus and why he has continued to inspire so many even today. To do this, we will begin with the Christology of the New Testament but will move into how Jesus' identity and significance are interpreted in more recent theological reflection and in artistic representations. We will give attention to the influences of culture and gender on how people interpret Jesus' identity and meaning and consider the social justice implications of these views.

Course Description

Paul was the first Christian storyteller on record. But even from the perspective of the earliest Christians, the Apostle Paul and his writings were mysterious and obscure. As Paul traveled throughout the Mediterranean world, he told mysterious stories about Jesus that were composed ad hoc, composed out of the diverse metaphors from the cultures he visited. In many ways, each story was a collage of images collected from the well-traveled highways to the darkest corners of the Mediterranean world. In this course, we will travel with Paul, examine his writings, try to make sense of his mysterious stories and letters, and appropriate them to our modern context by comparing them to movies such as The Matrix and The Truman Show.

Course Description

Paul was the first Christian storyteller on record. But even from the perspective of the earliest Christians, the Apostle Paul and his writings were mysterious and obscure. As Paul traveled throughout the Mediterranean world, he told mysterious stories about Jesus that were composed ad hoc, composed out of the diverse metaphors from the cultures he visited. In many ways, each story was a collage of images collected from the well-traveled highways to the darkest corners of the Mediterranean world. In this course, we will travel with Paul, examine his writings, try to make sense of his mysterious stories and letters, and appropriate them to our modern context by comparing them to movies such as The Matrix and The Truman Show.

Course Description

Perspectives on Jesus explores Jesus' identity and his meaning for the people of his day as well as in the present. We will try to understand what drew people to Jesus and why he has continued to inspire so many even today. To do this, we will begin with the Christology of the New Testament but will move into how Jesus' identity and significance are interpreted in more recent theological reflection and in artistic representations. We will give attention to the influences of culture and gender on how people interpret Jesus' identity and meaning and consider the social justice implications of these views.

Course Description

This is the study of major world religious traditions, such as Judaism, Islam, Hinduism and Buddhism, with special emphasis on their inter-religious relationship with Roman Catholicism. The objectives of the course are to introduce students to the academic discipline of theological and religious studies, and to understand the tenets and history of Catholic traditions through the dialogical relationship with other religions.

Course Description

This is the study of major world religious traditions, such as Judaism, Islam, Hinduism and Buddhism, with special emphasis on their inter-religious relationship with Roman Catholicism. The objectives of the course are to introduce students to the academic discipline of theological and religious studies, and to understand the tenets and history of Catholic traditions through the dialogical relationship with other religions.

Course Description

The purpose of this course is to provide a panorama view of the vast and complex world of Asian religions in dialogue with Christianity through centuries of missionary works. The case studies of Matteo Ricci and subsequent Catholic missionaries in Asia will enable students to understand the basic theological teachings of Christian faith on God, human nature and the world. The pluralistic world of Asian religions becomes a tapestry of cultural milieu for the contextualization of Roman Catholicism and Protestantism, and continues to develop and flourish until now.

Course Description

How do my theological beliefs and disbeliefs relate to my life in society? What does it mean to live a "moral life" in a world of exquisite beauty that also is brutalized by racism, a soul-shattering gap between rich and poor, gender inequity, and "ecocide"? What is my vision for a more just, compassionate, and sustainable world? In what God or ultimate reality do I disbelieve? In what God or ultimate reality do I believe? Where do I find hope and moral power? Students will explore these and other questions through the lens of Christian theological social ethics.

Course Description

This is the study of major world religious traditions, such as Judaism, Islam, Hinduism and Buddhism, with special emphasis on their inter-religious relationship with Roman Catholicism. The objectives of the course are to introduce students to the academic discipline of theological and religious studies, and to understand the tenets and history of Catholic traditions through the dialogical relationship with other religions.

Course Description

Through the lens of Ferguson Uprising, this course argues that BLM is a rejection of the popular myth of King and the Civil Rights movement and an extension of the tradition of Black Liberation Theology. A careful re-reading of Martin Luther King offers both a corrective to a mythological narrative and sets the stage for critical assessment of a contemporary social movements and theological reflection. Both BLM and MLK will be viewed through the work of womanist and Black Liberation Theology.

Course Description

Perspectives on Jesus explores Jesus' identity and his meaning for the people of his day as well as in the present. We will try to understand what drew people to Jesus and why he has continued to inspire so many even today. To do this, we will begin with the Christology of the New Testament but will move into how Jesus' identity and significance are interpreted in more recent theological reflection and in artistic representations. We will give attention to the influences of culture and gender on how people interpret Jesus' identity and meaning and consider the social justice implications of these views.

Course Description

This course will focus on understanding human sexuality as a socially constructed reality that also implies respect for universal human values. Human experiences of sexuality will also serve as a point of departure for exploring Catholic theological questions about God and spirituality. Students will consider the meanings of love and justice as they are relevant to sexuality in the context of diverse cultures and institutions. Special attention will be given to feminist, queer, and cross-cultural perspectives.

Course Description

This course explores the development of select doctrines in the history of Catholic theology (including the status of women and the problem of war) in order to show how Catholic theology is frequently shaped by political alliances, philosophical systems, and social biases. We emphasize questions surrounding the humanity and divinity of Christ, the problem of war, the problem of Christian anti-Judaism, the doctrine of the church, the doctrine of salvation, and the doctrine of the Eucharist.

Course Description

Are there theological resources that enable human beings to speak about, understand, and actively promote social justice and sustainable peace in a world of grave suffering and systemic injustice? This course offers students an opportunity to investigate the distinctive contributions of Christianity to this broader ethical question by offering an introduction to the language, concepts, methods, issues, debates, and major thinkers in the field of contemporary Christian ethics (N.B. service-learning is required).