Science, Technology and Values (STV)

The Climate Crisis will explore how science and religion intersect in their analyses of climate change. We will emphasize two questions: (1) How has climate change over the past 30 years impacted biological organisms and ecosystems? (2) How ought Catholics respond to climate change, and how does such a response inform your own response? Readings will be drawn from a basic science textbook, writings from recent popes and from other Christian writers. The class sessions will be active, and focused on discussion and activities. This course is open to all, and is inspired by the UND mission that various lines of Catholic thought may intersect with all forms of knowledge.

A course developing the basic ideas of energy and power and their applications. The fossil fuels are considered together with their limitations, particularly as related to global warming, pollution, and their nonrenewable character. The advantages and disadvantages of nuclear power are studied and compared with alternative energy sources such as solar energy, wind, and geothermal and hydroelectric power. Various aspects of energy storage and energy conservation are also considered. This course is designed for the non-specialist. It is open to first-year students only.

The course will provide a survey of relationships between man and microorganisms. General information about microbial physiology, biochemistry, and ecology will support more detailed discussions of interesting topics in food, medical, and applied microbial biology. Included will be subjects of general and historical interest, as well as current newsworthy topics. The student should get a better understanding of the role of microorganisms in disease, the production of common foods, relevant environmental issues, and biotechnology. This course counts as general elective credit only for students in the College of Science.

Evolution is the cornerstone of modern biological sciences. This course will highlight evolution as well as ecology and biodiversity. Emphasis will placed on the evolution of animal behavior including human behavior. Sexual selection and its role in shaping many forms of life, including humans, will be extensively covered. Open classroom discussion is a central and required part of the course.

Have you ever pondered how people live(d) in a world without television, YouTube, smartphones, and automobiles? Why have bellbottoms come and gone twice in the last 50 years? Will we be forced to relive the fashion mistakes of the 1970s and 1980s? What new stuff will people invent and sell next? In asking and answering these questions, we must focus on one underlying query: What does our stuff really say about who we are and who we want to be? This course combines lectures, discussions, and interactive small group activities to explore the nature and breadth of peoples' relationships with their things. We will investigate why and how people make and use different types of objects, and how the use of these material goods resonates with peoples' identities in the deep past, recent history, and today. Since everyone in the class will already be an expert user and consumer of things, we will consider how people today use material objects to assert, remake, reclaim, and create identities, and compare today's practices to those of people who lived long ago. Class members will learn about how anthropologists, including ethnographers (studying people today) and archaeologists (studying past peoples) think about and approach the material nature of our social, economic, and political lives. We will discuss why styles and technologies change through time, and why, in the end, there is very little new under the sun in terms of human behaviors and the way people produce and consume goods. The topical breadth of this workshop encompasses most social science disciplines, including history, economics, psychology, and anthropology, and resonates with classics, art history, and gender studies.

In the aftermath of 9/11, with American troops deployed in Afghanistan and Iraq, and concern about the nuclear ambitions of such nations as North Korea and Iran, "national security" is the phrase that is often discussed and is of crucial importance to informed citizens. This course will examine national security policy: what it is, how it is formulated and executed, and how US national security policies have evolved since the 1890s. Using a variety of readings and films such as Casablanca and Dr. Strangelove, this course will examine US national security policies from the late 1890s through two world wars, the interwar period, the Cold War, the post-Cold War years, and up to the current post-9/11 world. We will identify continuities and departures in historic US national security policies, and consider the roles of policymakers and their critics in a self-governing society.

Science and technology play a powerful role in structuring our world, making possible everything from our physical environment to our culture. It is thus imperative that we understand them not just as objects, but as practices and processes. What constitutes reliable knowledge? How do the technological systems in which we are embedded throughout our lives come to be, and how can they be changed? These questions are more urgent than ever. This course introduces students to the field of Science & Technology Studies in order to provide them with analytical and conceptual tools needed to confront the complex questions that arise where science and society intersect. Its objective is thus not so much to present a particular body of empirical information as it is to equip students with the analytical skills to understand complex multi-dimensional phenomena. The purpose is to give students both the opportunity and the tools to consider science and technology in a broader political, social, historical and economic context, and to reflect on how the practices of scientific and technological development shape their own individual and collective experience.

By reading science fiction and political philosophy born of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818), we will investigate the complex ethics and politics of making artificial forms of life through the interventions of human culture, science, and technology in the wider environment. We will focus on three critical 21st-century manifestations of human-made or artificial life: genetic engineering of children through CRISPR-Cas9 and other biotechnologies; making artificial intelligence as smart as or smarter than humans; and the spread and exacerbation of viral zoonotic pandemics through global systems of economics and politics.

What does writing look like in the age of generative AI? What does it mean to communicate with others, or to seek to persuade others, or to write for the sake of learning about a topic (or about oneself) at a time when generative AI has radically shifted the very sense of our educational, professional, and personal lives? These are the questions that will guide our work in this course, as we will experiment with generative AI to gain a deeper, clearer understanding of its impact on writing and our writerly identities. We will examine the role of AI during various parts of the writing process and in various genres and modes of writing in order to better assess, on the one hand, where generative AI can develop our thinking and writing in useful (and perhaps even astonishing) ways, and, on the other hand, where it requires us to think critically and ethically about its impacts on our own learning and ways of being.

This course will provide a broad overview about one of the most divisive scientific topics in our society. Both the scientific and societal aspects of radioactivity will be considered. This provides an understanding of the physical principles for cause and effects of radioactive decay and radiation. It will also provide a basis to evaluate the cost benefit in the growing use of radioactivity as a tool in industry and technology. To cover the broad range of material, the course will be offered in four topical sections that address the science and scientific effects of radioactivity, as well as the environmental consequences and the societal impact of its growing number of applications: 1. The phenomenon of radioactivity 2. The origin of radioactivity 3. The environmental impact of radioactivity 4. Societal impact of radioactivity

An introductory course, for non-science majors, providing an overview to a broad range of topics and aspects of nuclear weapons and warfare in the 21st century, providing students with both an understanding of the science behind nuclear weapons (including nuclear fission and fusion, effects of shock and thermal radiation, electromagnetic pulses, etc.) as well as an understanding of the strategic aspects of the nuclear revolution. This course is jointly taught and sponsored by the Department of Physics and the Department of Political Science.

This course will introduce students to fundamental ethical and social issues related to the design, development, and use of technology. Students will develop an understanding of philosophical ethical theories as a resource for analyzing how technology impacts both individual and collective civil, political, and human rights and issues related to autonomy, privacy, and identity, as well as how it reinforces power dynamics in society and its impacts on equity, justice, and fairness. Specific topics will include bias and fairness in algorithms, privacy, data governance and civil liberties, surveillance and power, social media, and the ethics of artificial intelligence.

This course will introduce students to fundamental ethical and social issues related to the design, development, and use of technology. Students will develop an understanding of philosophical ethical theories as a resource for analyzing how technology impacts both individual and collective civil, political, and human rights and issues related to autonomy, privacy, and identity, as well as how it reinforces power dynamics in society and its impacts on equity, justice, and fairness. Specific topics will include bias and fairness in algorithms, privacy, data governance and civil liberties, surveillance and power, social media, and the ethics of artificial intelligence.

Environmental degradation and climate change are among the most pressing scientific, economic, political, and social issues of our time. These problems seem to require technological solutions. But they also seem to be the result of the increasing technological sophistication of human societies. This means that the ecological crisis is inextricable from questions about the proper use of technology. This course will equip students to reflect on these interrelated challenges from a theological perspective. Drawing on scripture and other texts from the Jewish and Christian traditions (Genesis Rabbah, Augustine, Basil of Caesarea, Moses Maimonides, Thomas Aquinas, Julian of Norwich, and others), students will consider three distinct models of creation, the relationship between God and creation, and the place of human beings in creation. We will also reflect on the moral and theological significance of ecology and technology through some of the literary classics of the environmental movement (Aldo Leopold, Rachel Carson, Wendell Berry). Finally, we will explore how local communities might develop virtues and practices that would constitute a theologically-informed response to our "eco-technological" crisis. By the end of the course, students will have deepened their capacity for theological reflection and will understand how theology provides a compelling framework for moral formation and collective actioni n response to some of today's most urgent global challenges.

"Hacking" is one of the most pressing topics of technological and societal interest. Yet, it is one of the most misunderstood and mischaracterized practices in the public sphere, given its ethical and technical complexities. In this course we will combine anthropological and computer science methods to explore the digital tools, practices, and sociocultural histories of hacking with a focus on their context of occurrence from the late 1960s to the present. Our goal is to help students think anthropologically about computing as well as technically about the digital mediations that we depend on in our lives.

Monsters manifest in the earliest manuscripts containing English literature and continue to capture our collective imagination. Cultural conceptions of monsters may change over time, but monstrous entities never cease to appear in the writings of any given era. These creatures shapeshift from magical beasts to medical inventions to ravenous murderers across the centuries, and their depictions resonate differently depending on the historical context. This course explores monsters and monstrosity in British literature from the medieval period to the modern age. It not only investigates how monsters are represented but also interrogates the underlying anxieties that define their textual presence. What constitutes monstrosity? By what means are monsters created? In what ways do monsters reflect and reveal our deepest fears? What do we fear and why do we fear it?

Design thinking has emerged as a powerful methodology to catalyze breakthrough innovation for an array of complex business, social and humanitarian challenges. Business and industry have embraced design thinking as one of the most potent drivers of innovation, growth and prosperity for its’ deeply human-centered approach to problem solving. During this fast paced, hybrid, hands-on journey through the design thinking process, students will immerse themselves in a series of overlapping modules that introduce the various phases in the design thinking process and familiarize students with the tools and techniques. This course will unleash your creativity and ingenuity in addressing problems through a human centered framework and mindset, applying this methodology to a vast array of human-centered problems, and complementing disciplines from science and engineering to business and the liberal arts. This course fulfills a Core Curriculum Liberal Arts 4 Way of Knowing (Arts) as well as the gateway to the Collaborative Innovation minor and cross-listed with other minors including: Sustainability, Computing & Digital Technologies, Education, Schooling & Society, Entrepreneurship and Anthropology.

This course introduces students to the field of social-cultural anthropology. Cultural anthropologists are primarily interested in exploring issues of human cultural diversity across cultures and through time. This course will explore key theoretical, topical, and ethical issues of interest to cultural anthropologists. We will examine diverse ways in which people around the globe have constructed social organizations (such as kinship, and political and economic systems) and cultural identities (such as gender, ethnicity, nationality, race, and class) and we will consider the impact of increasing globalization on such processes. Throughout the course we will consider how different anthropologists go about their work as they engage in research and as they represent others through the writing of ethnographies.

An examination of the following questions: What kind of differences separate men and women? Are these differences natural or are they socially produced, and are these differences beneficial to us or are they limiting? What does equality mean for people characterized by such differences?

This course will treat some central issues in the philosophy of mind, such as freedom of the will, personal identity, and the relationship between mind and body.

We'd like to know what there is in the world -- for philosophical reasons, and for practical reasons, and also out of good old-fashioned curiosity. This class will focus on one way to think rigorously about how to think about what there is. We'll discuss key introductory questions in metaphysics: questions about the existence and nature of causation, dispositions, possibility, objective truth, and fundamentality. And we'll think about answers to those questions which are entailed by valid arguments with plausible premises. Thus, we'll think about simple arguments for and against counterfactual theories of the phenomena above; simple arguments for and against skepticism about the existence of all those entities; simple arguments for and against primitivism about all those entities; and so on. Along the way we'll introduce some basic logical vocabulary which will make evaluating the soundness of those arguments easier. The goal for this class is to improve your ability to reason clearly about what there is, or might be.

Psychiatry and mental healthcare have been the target of criticism and controversy for decades. Common critiques are that the field is not grounded in medical science, that it pathologizes normal problems in living, or that it is a method of social control. This course will focus on the social movements that have been critical of mental healthcare from the second half of the twentieth century to today. We will begin by considering questions such as: What is the proper role of mental healthcare? What is a social movement? What is the relationship between mental healthcare and politics? Then we will shift to discussing particular social movements including antipsychiatry, Mad Pride, the emergence of the concepts of disability and neurodiversity as alternatives to pathology, and other examples of service-user led activism. The goal of the course will be to better understand the ways that psychiatry has abused it power and imagine changes that could be made to the system to improve the lives of those who suffer from mental health conditions.

How do the technologies around us shape our lives, our bodies, and our engagements with the world—and what hidden social dynamics shape them? In this course, we will explore the fascinating intersections of science, technology, medicine, and society, focusing on how contemporary innovations—like AI, smart algorithms, and new medical technologies—are deeply intertwined with issues of social power and control. Through case studies, social theory, and discussions, students will discover how technologies are never neutral, but instead reflect and reinforce issues of inequity, ethical dilemmas, and dynamics of uneven political and economic power. This course will challenge you to think critically about the power dynamics embedded within the tools we use to heal, to communicate, and to engage with the world around us. Prepare to question everything you thought you knew about science and technology!

This course explores the ethical challenges posed by the ongoing revolution in the technology of war. After learning about some general, philosophical approaches to ethical decision making, we will examine a wide range of new weapons technologies, from "smart" bombs, drones, and robots to em (electromagnetic) weapons, cyberwar, and bio-enhancement, asking the question whether the existing framework of Just War Theory and the Law of Armed Conflict (LOAC) are adequate for war as it will be fought in the 21st century.

In an age where ‘identity politics’ figures as both an accusation and a creed in public and private spaces, a careful and critical examination of how we construct our individual and collective selves is more important than ever. Science and technology are crucial resources in these identity formation projects, serving as fundamental structuring elements of our world. They are crucial in shaping not only our physical environment but the very conditions of possibility within which we construct our collective and individual identities. This integration course is an exploration of the ways that the practice of science and the production and marketing of technology supply the material that gets taken up in the work of identity formation, focusing on two closely linked technoscientific domains: neuroscience and genetics.

Since the dawn of history, human beings have been telling stories about their origin and destiny. From the Dreamtime of Aboriginals to the gods of the Hellenes, Norse tales to Abrahamic revelations, our ability to weave imagination and reason, tradition and experience, has underpinned our collective identity and shaped our history. Today, we are increasingly turning to science to tell these stories of origin and destiny. Concepts like entropy and evolution are giving us cosmic and biological arrows of history, one inexorably tending to disorder, the other to ever-increasing complexity. Unfolding across a series of identifiable thresholds, the budding field of Big History combines our nature as storytellers with our skill as scientists to provide a coherent narrative of life and the universe from the big bang to the present, offering what has been called a new creation story for our time. What tale does Big History tell, what sources of knowledge does it draw on, in what ways does it challenge traditional beliefs, and what futures does it imagine? Bridging the chasm between C.P. Snow's Two Cultures of the sciences and humanities, this interdisciplinary course engages big questions about religion, nature, science, culture, and meaning through great books in popular science with the help of theoretical contributions from science and technology studies. The class welcomes non-scientists who are interested in acquiring scientific literacy as well as scientists seeking to acquire religious and social science literacy. We will look for the best descriptions of nature available to us today (the "is") to draw inspiration for unique insights on how to be (the "ought"). The readings and discussions of this class will provide global citizens in the twenty-first century of diverse religious, theological, or philosophical persuasions a common framework of the past, a sense of presence in the Anthropocene, and conceptual tools to imagine a shared future.

Da Vinci, Google, the people who brought you the board game Operation - some of the most skillful hands and minds in history have attempted to depict and teach the human body. Could you do better? This project-centered course introduces you to the history of anatomical illustration as an art and data science. We will focus on understanding its many trajectories from early print to digital media so as to imagine new, more inclusive futures as we also try to lower the barrier to entry for anatomical knowledge.

This course examines global environmental change within Earth systems and how these evolve under natural and human influence. Topics covered encompass atmosphere, oceans, water, land and ecosystems and how natural and human-induced processes are reshaping Earth’s environments. Central to this discussion are water and air pollution, water management, freshwater availability and scarcity and impact of these issues on society. Sustainable energy is investigated and renewable energy sources that meet current needs and those of future generations are explored. This discussion includes energy production but also incorporates energy efficiency measures and responsible energy consumption. The course concludes with a discussion on the implications of climate change for Earth systems and human society.

This course will examine the interactions of culture and biology within sports. The anthropology of sports can help us gain valuable insights into broader social and cultural phenomena, the role of ritual in society, and illuminate how sports have been used to bring people together, but also to exclude people. We will begin with studying the evolutionary origins and non-human examples of play. We will then move into the prehistoric and historic foundations for sport. We will also discuss how people change their bodies, in good ways and dangerous ways, for a greater chance at success, and how those bodies are often more harshly judged by society. Finally, we will explore the ways in which contemporary sporting and fan practices are culturally ordered and/or challenge social norms. Drawing on case studies from around the world, we will pay special attention to questions of gender, race, genetics, nationality, health, equality, and human variation. In addition, students will be encouraged to think critically about their own sporting experiences, both as active participants and as fans, and how sports impact their lives.

This course examines the origins, causes, environmental settings and cultural factors within which natural selective forces converged throughout human evolution to create the human infant, one of the most vulnerable, slowest developing, and energetically demanding mammal infants of all. We consider who the caregivers are, and how and why they might "share care" which was needed to keep our highly vulnerable infants and children alive, and to nurture them throughout their exceedingly long childhoods. Specifically, we trace the origins of modern parenting systems from their mammalian base paying especial attention to the transaction between infant care practices themselves and how they relate to, if not depend on, the emergence of other characteristics that define us as human. These include bipedalism, empathy, learning, food sharing, and a "theory of mind". Here we will examine not only the unique roles that mothers and fathers and other important caregivers (allomothers) play but the underlying biology that both inclines that care but also responds to it biologically. We also emphasize the manner in which social values, ideologies, cultural expectations, social roles, and economic pressures assert critical influences on caregiver physiology and behavior.

Discussion of basic chemical processes occurring in the environment, particularly those relating to the impact of humanity's technological enterprise.

This course presents an introduction to the socio-technical study of knowledge infrastructures in the context of a rising quest for environmental sustainability. It examines the critical role of data in supporting scientific research, environmental action, and sustainability efforts. The goal is to critically discuss the central place of data in a changing world where the proliferation of new digital technologies supports new capabilities for sensing, sharing, processing, and visualizing rapidly accelerating environmental change. This course will bring forward the interconnected technical, cultural, historical, political, and social efforts that make environmental data possible. Applying socio-technical lenses to environmental data, we will go through the different stages of an environmental data workflow, all the way from data collection to visualization and reporting. The course will pay special attention to the local and global entities, past and present, that environmental data supports. We will focus on the implications of digital technologies for participatory and citizen sciences, open data, and data governance in the environmental space. Leaning on these critical tools, we will revise ongoing environmental struggles and data-fueled sustainability efforts to assess the implications of data in ongoing and future attempts to restore and reinvent the integrity of our planet and its life-supporting systems. The course will resort to practical examples using environmental datasets and a network of socio-environmental practitioners who will present selected topics throughout the semester.

What are the cultures of medicine? How does belief create possibilities for healing? How do cultural, social, and political forces shape experiences of illness? When can care be a form of violence? How can histories of oppression make you sick? Medical anthropology is an expansive field of research concerned with the study of medicine, affliction, and healing in historical and cultural context. This course provides an introduction to topics in medical anthropology, from classical texts on belief, illness experience, and structural violence to contemporary work on disability, care, and critical global health. Over the course of the semester, students will gain experience in methods, critical thinking, independent research, and public communication as we collectively explore what medical anthropology can contribute to the urgent health challenges that we face in the contemporary world today.

Introduction to Criminology provides students with an overview of the sociological study of law making, law breaking and the resulting social responses. In this class we not only look at a variety of crimes, but we also discuss the varying methods sociologists use to collect, interpret and evaluate data, as well as how we theorize about crime and punishment. We address questions such as "Why are some people or groups labeled as criminal, while others are not?" "Do laws in both their construction and enforcement serve everyone's interests equally?" "How can the communities in which people are embedded be considered as criminogenic?" "How are poverty, race, gender and other social factors related to crime?"

This course is a comprehensive introduction to the sociology of health and of medicine. First we will examine how sociological variables affect people's health. Research is rapidly accumulating which shows that sociological variables have a huge impact on people's susceptibility to various illnesses, on their access to health care, and on their compliance with medical advice. Such variables include people's neighborhoods, occupations, and lifestyles; their social class, education, race, ethnicity, and gender - and the density of "social networks", whose importance for health was predicted by one of sociology's founders over 100 years ago. Second we will examine medicine, both the practice of medicine by individual health care professionals, viewed sociologically, and the operation of the increasingly large and bureaucratic medical institutions in which health care professionals must work. In addition, we will examine sociological issues that overlap "medicine", such as radically long shifts; the rapid increase in the proportion of female doctors; and increasing concern with work/family balance among practitioners. Third, we will examine health and medicine in relation to other dimensions of society, such as the modern economy, the media, law, the internet, government and politics. Health and medicine are intrinsically social and they cannot be isolated from the effects of the rest of society, many of which run counter to strictly "medical" considerations. Finally, we will examine health and medicine globally. We will compare health and medicine in a number of societies to see and explain how they are similar and how they differ - for example, how different societies pay for medical care. And we will examine global trends with implications for health and medicine that require cooperation among societies, such as the way in which global air travel both increases the danger of global pandemics and makes possible "medical tourism."

This course introduces students to important concepts, issues, and debates in applied ethics. It begins with a brief overview of normative ethics, familiarizing students with two major approaches in this area: consequentialism and deontology. The remainder of the course tackles real-world issues, and proceeds in four parts. PART I: We engage with questions concerning our duties to non-human animals, as well as related questions concerning their moral status. Do non-human animals have moral rights? Do they matter less from the moral point of view than human beings? We’ll also be engaging with some important questions about the ethics of eating meat. PART II: We consider the moral challenges raised by certain kinds of markets, including commercial surrogacy, sweatshops, and the black market in human organs. On the one hand, these practices seem objectionably exploitative. On the other hand, we might think that these individuals’ choices—to sell their organs, rent out their wombs, or undertake risky labor—should be respected. PART III: We investigate ongoing controversies in the ethics of medicine. One such controversy concerns the shape that a state’s organ donation system ought to take: should such systems be ‘opt-in’, or ‘opt-out’? Another important issue is how we ought to conceive of disabilities: are disabilities neutral differences—as opposed to good or bad ones? We’ll also look into related controversies surrounding human enhancement and genetic engineering. Finally, we’ll explore the ethics of voluntary Euthanasia. PART IV: The course concludes by examining matters of justice. Among these are matters of global justice raised by widespread poverty; what duties do those of us living in affluent countries have to the global poor, and why? Another such issue is justice in the distribution of educational opportunities. Does justice require that all children receive the same quality education? Or does it simply require that all children receive a good enough education?

Students will develop a detailed understanding of the applied ethics of eating, engaging with questions about animal welfare, duties to the environment, the exploitation of workers, eco-feminism, and the value of cultural traditions. This will involve discussion of actual, current conditions in our food supply chain. But we will be focusing on the application of broader ethical and metaethical questions they may have touched on in an introductory class, thereby deepening their understanding of the theoretical questions too. For example, are there objective moral facts about how we should eat, or only cultural norms? Does a consequentialist, welfarist view really support Singer-style veganism? Would Kant want us to eat fair trade, for the sake of human dignity? Are there distinct environmental virtues, or feminist reasons to (not) be vegan? The intention is to connect applied and theoretical ethics around a subject that will be engaging for students. They will be required to state and argue for the moral permissibility of their own eating intentions.

How should we address the environmental impacts of new and emerging technologies such as Bitcoin, artificial intelligence, or electric cars? To answer this question, and others like it, we must first remember that technology does not exist in a vacuum; just as technologies impact the environment, social systems shape and are shaped by technological development. In this course, students will gain an understanding of these interrelated systems by reading a variety of historical and scientific sources with an emphasis on the impacts of technology upon the environment during history's three Industrial Revolutions (i.e., the rise of the steam engine, the emergence of mass production, and the development of computing technologies). These revolutions were times of rapid technological development with especially dramatic impacts on politics, economics, the environment, and society. Discussions of these readings in conjunction with individual research projects will allow students to incorporate the lessons of the course into a critical analysis of the impacts of rapid technological change, culminating in a discussion of what the future (and present state) of technological change may be. By the end of this course, students will have developed writing, research, and communication skills which will help them craft well-developed research questions and present evidence-driven arguments in their respective fields of study.

Stories with animal characters have long been used to both entertain and to teach, but the nineteenth and twentieth centuries saw the development of novels written from "realistic" animal perspectives, against the backdrop of radical social, technological, and environmental changes. Works such as Black Beauty, Call of the Wild, and Watership Down were not only best-sellers that captivated readers of all ages, they were—and still are—part of vigorous debates about animal and human nature, ethics, and the real-world impact of art. In our conversations, papers, and if students choose, creative work, we will analyze novels from the perspectives of animals, as well as several screen adaptations, exploring the social and intellectual contexts of these works and engaging with the questions they raise, such as: How can a human portray a non-human point of view? To what extent are these works really about animals, as opposed to about ourselves? How have authors (intentionally or unintentionally) mapped some very human ideas about things like gender, class, and race onto their animal worlds? And how do readers respond to the pleasures and challenges of tales about other species?

Communicating about science has always been a necessity in public discourse, but communicating complex or ongoing science, health, and technology issues can be a challenge. This one-semester core Writing Intensive course, taught in Spring and Fall semesters, immerses students in the art of communicating about science in many forms, from writing for magazines and newspapers, to institutional writing for universities or medical centers, to giving speeches to lay audiences and creating descriptive museum displays. The areas of focus will be on writing concisely without jargon, workshopping/re-writing/editing, communicating and writing with accuracy, and developing empathy for both the scientist and the science communicator. Each week will include short reading assignments, as reading about science is critical to writing about science. Communicating about science has always been a necessity in public discourse, but communicating complex or ongoing science, health, and technology issues can be a challenge. This one-semester core Writing Intensive course, taught in Spring and Fall semesters, immerses students in the art of communicating about science in many forms, from writing for magazines and newspapers, to institutional writing for universities or medical centers, to giving speeches to lay audiences and creating descriptive museum displays. The areas of focus will be on writing concisely without jargon, workshopping/re-writing/editing, communicating and writing with accuracy, and developing empathy for both the scientist and the science communicator. Each week will include short reading assignments, as reading about science is critical to writing about science.

Anthropology is a social science with a holistic perspective on the human condition. It attempts to understand any aspect of humanity in the broadest sense anywhere and anytime. Anthropological perspectives can be used to speculate on what it meant to be human in the distant past, or what it may mean in the far distant future. While we cannot travel into the past, future, or an alternative universe to visit other societies or contact alien civilizations, we can imagine what those trips would be like. In our own culture, science fiction has moved from a fringe literature to an essential part of modern art and entertainment because it allows us to imagine alternate realities, and to speculate about the past, present and future as way to learn about ourselves and others. This class will introduce you to the basic principles of anthropology as a social science using science fiction text and video to illustrate various anthropological principles. You will learn how to critically evaluate anthropology's diverse applications and how they are reflected in popular culture (sometimes accurately and sometimes not). You will also sharpen your writing skills by using anthropological principles to critique science fiction.

Statistics is one of the most important tools in the 21st century for conducting scientific research, assessing the benefits of public policy, and understanding business administration and management. Yet despite its ubiquity the prominence of statistical reasoning we see today is of a relatively recent date. This course will introduce students to important topics in the history of statistics, tracing its emergence in the 19th to its use and misuse in the public health crisis of the COVID-19 pandemic. While broadly chronological, the course will also be organized topically and will address both the content of evolving statistical techniques as well as its social and political contexts. A central theme for this subject will be the complex dynamic between claims that statistics represent facts about the world while at the same time being the product of competing social, political, racial, and cultural interests. We will look at multiple aspects of this interplay including how the intended use of statistics has shaped the development of its techniques and methods; the dependence it has had on certain data-gathering institutions and the role governmental and corporate power plays in such data gathering; and the relationship between statistics, misinformation, and objectivity. By the end of this course you will be able to better appreciate the different criticisms of statistics within their historical context as well as articulate its benefits and the important role it plays in understanding the world today.

Health and medicine have long been intertwined with cultural factors. This course will interrogate pressing bioethical questions: such as the treatment of mental illness, patient confidentiality, physician-assisted death, and women's and LGBTQ access to health care through literature and culture over the nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Long before the emergence of bioethics as a field of scholarly inquiry, American writers were investigating these issues. They were also paying attention to the social and political factors that shaped health care, such as minoritized populations' entrance into the medical professions, health disparities, and the effects of contagious outbreaks on society. In this course, we will explore literary texts and films that portray illness and health care alongside non-fictional sources that take up similar questions. Moving from Walt Whitman's writings about his nursing in Civil War hospitals to contemporary narratives of contagion, this course will take up critiques of racism in public health; questions of gender, sexuality, and illness; and the politics of disability. How do early debates within the medical profession speak to twenty-first-century concerns about the future of healthcare? The course will involve short writing assignments and class discussion. Prior training in the humanities is not required.

We all recognize that the biomedical sciences change rapidly, but amid the seemingly intractable and interminable debate about healthcare reform in the US, it can be easy to lose sight of the fact that the same is true of the healthcare system. This interdisciplinary course will examine the American healthcare system in historical and comparative perspective. We look at its institutional structure, its professional composition, and its governance at various levels, with the end learning objective being to understand how these facets of the healthcare system shape not only national health outcomes, but also provider and patient experience. The course draws on the history, sociology and anthropology of medicine, and serves as one the core courses in the new Health, Humanities and Society Minor.

Science and technology play a powerful role in structuring our world, in everything from our physical environment to our culture. It is thus imperative that we understand how these entities work. What constitutes reliable knowledge? How do the technological systems in which we are embedded throughout our lives come to be, and how can they be changed? In this historic moment of a global pandemic playing out against a backdrop of fake news, alternative facts and increasingly autonomous technologies, these questions are more critical than ever. This course introduces students to the interdisciplinary field of Science & Technology Studies in order to provide them with analytical and conceptual tools needed to confront the complex questions that arise where science and society intersect. Its objective is thus not so much to present a particular body of empirical information as it is to equip students with the analytical skills to understand complex multi-dimensional phenomena. The purpose is to give students both the opportunity and the tools to consider science and technology in a broader political, social, historical and economic context, and to reflect on how the practices of scientific and technological development shape their own individual and collective experience.

This course will introduce students to scientific illustration and visual documentation through basic drawing skills and techniques utilizing traditional and contemporary art approaches, media and tools. Students will learn to create representational renderings through close and careful observation of natural subjects including botanical, animal, insect and/or aquatic life based on field observations, study at the Museum of Biodiversity and other sites as available. Emphasis will be on accuracy, form and structure as well as integrating personal vision through developmental, conceptual and compositional sketches and exercises leading to several completed drawings and include a field journal and sketchbook. Students do not need any prior drawing experience and can be pursuing any major!

Measurement is a fundamental activity in modern science, both the natural and social sciences. While measurement is often considered as the hallmark of science that makes an activity “scientific,” there is little consensus among philosophers about how to define measurement, what kinds of things are measurable, or which conditions make measurement possible. By engaging with texts that build on concrete practices of measurement in historical and contemporary case studies, we will collectively explore questions such as: How do we know that an instrument, such as a thermometer, measures the quantity it is intended to measure? How are measurement units established, and how do they vary across different fields of science and culture? What does it mean to measure human attributes, such as feeling, if possible at all? Our journey begins with in-depth discussions on accuracy and precision, calibration, and standardization—the foundational concepts that make measurement possible. We then navigate the diverse landscape of philosophical viewpoints on measurement, encompassing operationalism, conventionalism, and realism. With these concepts and perspectives in mind, we will explore more case studies across various scientific domains, ranging from the physical and biological sciences to clinical medicine and social sciences, where you will discover issues more closely related to your own field of study. In the course, you will bring and elaborate your own case study related to your specific interests or fields of study. This case study serves as a focal point for actively applying concepts and approaches learned throughout the course, which will eventually crystallize into your final paper. From the course, you will come to see measurement not merely as a technical process but as a complex epistemic activity that demands critical examination, from experimental design to data interpretation. No prior background in specialized sciences is necessary to enroll in this course.

This course will focus on the philosophical, ethical, and political dimensions of topics of environmental concern. Specific topics vary by semester. For more detailed information regarding current and upcoming offerings, see https://philosophy.nd.edu/courses/2nd-courses-in-philosophy/.

The aim of this course is to introduce and explore two rival conceptions of the world --- each of which claims, as its source of legitimacy, unprecedented progress achieved throughout the recent history of modern science. The first conception, coming out of fundamental physics research, is often extolled for its elegant simplicity, and enjoys considerable popular acclaim: our entire universe, including all of space and time around us, has evolved over the past 13.8 billion years --- approximately uniformly expanding ever since initial conditions were set by the ‘Big Bang' (a topic that is, itself, a central focus of ongoing fundamental physics research). Meanwhile, the second conception is an ecological one: the world is a mess of unfettered complexity, but a mess that we try to shape into a patchwork reality in order to better navigate. Although garnering less popular acclaim, it is this ecological conception, and not the fundamental conception, that is closely allied with science-based approaches to public policy --- e.g. in response to anthropogenic climate change, or biosecurity in an era of pandemic --- and is therefore no less relevant to society. At the end of the course, we will ask and answer an outstanding question: how can it be that we embrace each of these conceptions of the world, simultaneously, as consequences of the role we entrust to modern science in society?

This course introduces some epistemological and ethical issues broadly related to artificial intelligence and machine learning. The course begins with an introduction to the historical development and the technical basis of some contemporary AI technology. Topics may include: basics of linear algebra; machine learning; neural network; examples of contemporary AI systems. The second part of the course discusses some epistemological issues related to AI. Topics may include: the problem of induction, AI assisted scientific research; transparency and interpretability. The final part of the course discusses the interaction between AI and the human society. Topics may include: the meaningfulness of various human activities when AI's ability on them supersedes human; algorithmic fairness; predictive policing; digital labor.

Scientific theories have enjoyed much success; they afford us tremendous power to predict and explain phenomena in the world around us. In light of this power, you might wonder why it is these theories are so successful. This question invariably leads to others. For instance: how much do our chosen theories tell us about the world---must the unseen entities referenced by scientific explanations exist? And just what counts as a "scientific explanation" anyhow? This course will equip you with the tools necessary to begin answering these and other questions. We will survey classic and contemporary debates in the philosophy of science, including: the reality of unobservable entities posited by theories; the nature of scientific explanation; how we choose between competing theories; and how we confirm existing theories. We will also consider applications to examples from the physical sciences. However, this course is self-contained: no previous familiarity with any particular physical or mathematical theory is required.

This course traces the history of business in the United States, from the merchant-smugglers of the American Revolution through the rise of big business and the tech boom. We will consider the operation of individual firms as well as situate the history of American business within its wider social, political, and economic context. In particular, we will move between thinking about the specific challenges businesses faced - such as the emergence of new technologies or price-cutting competitors - and a broader conversation about the evolution of American business, such as the "managerial revolution." The course will proceed chronologically, but each week will stress a particular theme, often seen through the story of a particular firm. Topics addressed include the rise of a national market, debates over regulatory capture, outsourcing and globalization, and finally the relationship between management, investment capital, and organized labor.

We live and act in an ecological theater created by God that includes all other living organisms and their ecosystems within the biosphere. Urgent questions abound today about what our relationship is to the rest of the natural world. What is our place in the world? This course investigates the Christian understanding of God as Creator, creation, and our human relationship to God, one another, and the natural world. We will examine the theology of creation beginning with Scripture and the Creed and progressing through the Early Church, Medieval, and modern time periods. We will also discuss theological anthropology in terms of our identity and mission within our ecological home. To this end, we will apply Pope Francis' notion of integral ecology to the specific case of the Great Lakes watershed in which we live, examining topics such as biodiversity, water, agriculture, and energy. As ecological citizens and creatures of God, we will also address the connection between liturgy and ecology. This course will have a special appeal to students interested in the intersection of theology and science, especially ecology and environmental studies.

A discussion of ethical problems in the medical profession in light of natural law and Christian moral principles.

This course surveys some of the main ways that philosophy and biology intersect. Possible topics include the nature of life, arguments from biological complexity to intelligent design, implications of Darwinian evolution for views about the nature of value, personhood, and freedom, and analysis of central biological concepts (e.g., natural selection, adaptation, function, development, and species) via philosophical methods.

Philosophy of Mental Illness is designed to give students the ability to critically and profoundly think about and discuss the phenomenon of mental illness. As a philosophy course, this course will focus less on the scientific discoveries regarding mental illness (though not ignoring those entirely) and instead focus on what concepts and categories are needed to explicate the nature of mental illness and our ethical obligations regarding it. The questions that need to be answered for a philosophical understanding of mental illness include how should we understand the nature of minds in general, how should we differentiate different types of mental problems (irregularities, diseases, disabilities, injuries, illnesses, etc.), should definitions of mental illness include a notion of harmfulness to the individual with the illness, can we make sense of particular interpretations of particular mental illnesses (particularly as it relates to persons and free will), to what extent and for what reasons should a person be held morally responsible for actions partially or fully caused by mental illness (e.g. mass shooters), and in what ways should people respond individually and as a society to the phenomenon of mental illness?

In this course we will examine some central feminist themes and issues by way of a philosophical examination of science fiction texts. Readings will include short science fiction stories, two or more science fiction novels, and a variety of texts in feminist philosophy and philosophy of gender.

The aim of this course is to ask how our ways of thinking about nature, material things, and ourselves supports and/or obstructs our ability to engage in more sustainable environmental practices. Our questions will include, but are not limited to: What is nature and how are humans connected to, distinct from, or part of this nature? What does it mean to be sustainable? If our aim is to exist more sustainably, how should we think about nature to help achieve this end? What is waste, exactly? Whose way of life is being preserved by our present sustainability efforts in the West? How does gender, race, and culture shape how one is affected by (un)sustainable practices? To what extent are the formal structures of oppression conserved across sexism, racism, and environmental destruction? This course will draw heavily on ecofeminist philosophy to help answer these important questions.

Disagreement, especially about matters of empirical fact, is often seen as an impediment to rational discourse and the pursuit of truth. And yet, in the sciences, our primary source of knowledge about the world, disagreement is not only par for the course but, arguably, an essential feature of "the scientific method". In this course, we will engage in a philosophical analysis of the roots and resolution of disagreements between scientists in order to (1) better understand why experts come to disagree, and (2) gain a more nuanced picture of the everyday practice of science. Drawing on insights from the history, philosophy, and sociology of science, we will first consider some potential sources of disagreement, paying special attention to the contextual nature of evidence, scientists' diverse reasoning styles, and psychological bias. Then, we will put these conceptual tools to the test analyzing an assortment of in-depth case studies drawn from across the experimental and historical sciences, including: the Cretaceous-Paleogene mass extinction event (or, what really killed the dinosaurs?), John Snow and the cholera epidemic of 1854, spontaneous generation, ritualistic cannibalism, and the (first) detection of gravitational waves. In addition to greater familiarity with actual science in action, students will come away from the course with the tools to be more critically engaged with the beliefs of others as well as their own, especially regarding, though not limited to, scientific claims. No previous background in philosophy and/or the sciences is required.

Critical examination of topics within epistemology applied to various practical areas of life. This semester focuses in Skepticism, Fake News, and the Ethics of Belief.

This course is an introduction to environmental sociology, the sociology of food, and Catholic social teachings on creation, solidarity, human dignity and rights, and social justice as they relate to the environment and food issues. The course has two directly linked central purposes. One is to learn descriptive and analytical sociological perspectives on environmental and food issues, as well as related matters of agriculture, globalization, consumerism, rural America, health, social movements, and human futures. A second purpose is to learn Catholic social teachings on the environment and food issues, in order to deepen our capacity to reflect normatively from a particular moral perspective about crucial social problems. Achieving these two purposes will require us recurrently to engage the sociological and the Catholic perspectives and contributions in mutually informative and critical conversation. This is fundamentally a sociology course, but one in which Catholic social ethics stand front and center. In other words, this course will engage in multiple, ongoing exercises of "reflexivity," engaging the sociological imagination, issues of environment and food, and Catholic social teachings - to consider what possible fruitful understandings each may provide for and about the others. Students need not be Catholic (or even religious) to benefit from this course, but everyone must be open to learning about and reflecting upon Catholic ethical teachings as they relate to the environment and food. This course will explore a number of interconnected substantive issues, descriptively, analytically, and normatively. These will include technological development, energy consumption, global warming/climate change, neoliberal capitalism, interests of nation states, corporate power, the role of mass media, population dynamics, the maldistribution of wealth, political decision-making, the status of science, ocean environments, extreme weather, sustainable development, environmentalist movements, agribusiness, nutrition, food supply systems, hunger and obesity, organics, fair trade, localism, agrarianism, human dignity, the common good, the option for the poor, the universal destiny of the earth's goods, creation care, and the moral goods of solidarity, subsidiarity, and participation, among other relevant topics.

Artificial intelligence is rapidly transforming society, impacting how we live as individuals and communities. This course will examine the issues raised by AI from the perspective of the Catholic understanding of the human person, Catholic theological anthropology. The course will particularly focus on how to ensure that AI promotes rather than prevents human flourishing. In the process of exploring those broad concerns, the course will address specific issues related to AI, such as whether AI could be a person, relationships with chatbots, surveillance capitalism, the implications of Catholic Social Teaching for AI, AI in warfare, bias, transhumanism, and the impacts of social media.

In this course we examine how knowledge about drugs - legal, regulated, and patented drugs - is produced, distributed among diverse scientific-technical and social communities, and how it is received and/or consumed by them. As we will learn, the question of how drugs are produced and how they should be consumed is a highly contentious one. We will study how pharmaceutical companies work not just to distribute, but also to shape scientific knowledge about their products, and we will trace the mechanisms used to transfer that knowledge to researchers, physicians, and potential consumers. We will discuss a range of important issues that arise as our lives become more medicalized, for example: what is the nature of the diseases that researchers and companies target - are their characteristics and limits easily fixed? What are, and what should be the bounds of the use of pharmaceuticals for cosmetic purposes? How can society engage and deal with conflicts of interest - profits versus regulated safety; how can one ensure the integrity of researchers and research? What rules should be placed on how researchers and companies enroll research subjects, both in the US and abroad? We will start off exploring the history of pharmaceuticals regulation in the US, and then explore the peculiar history that led to the unique research infrastructure in the area of pharmaceutical research and development. Then we will turn to explore the wider range of implications of our system of drug production for society at larger, exploring the questions above in the context of diverse cases. In this course you will develop a far-reaching understanding of how scientific and technical knowledge in the medical-pharmaceutical world is produced and distributed, an understanding that you can apply to many other areas of knowledge production.

World population has doubled in the last 50 years, and sustainable development in the face of global change is the greatest challenge of our time. Through readings, lectures and class discussions by topic (water, energy, resources, waste, environment and related topics), this class provides an overview of the origin, scale and complexity of the challenge, and discusses how we can contribute, as engineers, scientists and professionals to help address it. We will learn the fundamental quantitative tools to measure and evaluate environmental and resources problems, which will be applied in class projects focusing on specific sustainability issues. The course will conclude by studying how environmental and resources policy decisions are made, and discuss the tradeoffs and ethical dilemmas involved.

This course combines hands-on introduction to the basic concepts and technologies of computing with critical discussion of the historical, social, and cultural dimensions of computing, data, and digital technology. The work of the course includes content discussions that foreground the cultural, social, and historical dimensions of computing technologies, along with exploration and foundational skill building with various computing tools and methods. By studying how computing technologies have developed over time, as well as how they work, we’ll consider what kind of technological future we want, and how to build it, via a critical examination of the technologies and platforms that shape our lives together. Along the way, we’ll explore what computer science educators have identified as seven “big ideas” in computing: creativity, abstraction, data and information, algorithms, programming, the internet, and global impacts (AP Computer Science Principles).

Coronavirus in China, wildfires in Australia, locusts in East Africa, melting poles, rising seas, the insect armageddon, the sixth extinction, droughts and floods of Biblical proportion . . . Welcome to the "End of Nature" and the beginning of the Anthropocene! For just when we're being told that "Nature" is at an end, nature seems to be everywhere, invading our headlines and intruding into our lives in sudden and unexpected ways. Not long ago, we could still think of nature as a peaceful retreat from the stress and din of society, a resource for healing, and a refuge from the traumas of history - whether it be an afternoon's gardening, a day hike nearby, a weekend fishing trip, or a summer's outing to a faraway National Park. But that was the nature of the Holocene, the geological epoch that, according to the latest science, ended as recently as the 1950s. Today, in the Anthropocene, nature is roaring back into our lives and shaking the very pillars of our society - as if The End of Nature, in Bill McKibben's 1987 book title, were more truly the end of the world. But perhaps what this panic tells us is that our world has always been intertwined with nature, both actually and conceptually, in ways we have forgotten to remember, ways that the current revolt of nature is forcing us to confront. This course will inquire into the strange ways that modernity has, over the last 200 years, modified and transformed our notions of Nature, even as our technological explosion has leveraged the power of humanity from regional to planetary scales. This course, therefore, travels from the Holocene of our recent literary heritage to the Anthropocene within which we are all living today - although only some of our literature explicitly takes up this fact. Altogether we are now left with one great question, as we look toward our future: Since we can't survive without nature, how can we learn to survive with it? Readings will be drawn from poetry, fiction, and nonfiction, from Emerson and Thoreau, through American 'Naturalism ' and such "nature writers " as Aldo Leopold and Annie Dillard, to the recent writings of Jeff Vandermeer, Linda Hogan, Barry Lopez and Richard Powers. Along the way we will be guided and provoked by such philosophers and theorists as Michel Serres, Peter Sloterdijk, Donna Haraway, and Amitav Ghosh. Students will write two short papers and one longer paper involving research as well as personal observation and reflection.

Nature isn't what it used to be: the Arctic is melting, seas are rising, forests are burning, and the planet is heating up. How do we understand the human relation to nature in a time of ecological catastrophe? This writing-intensive course introduces students to key ideas in the environmental humanities, including nature writing, deep ecology, social ecology, ecofeminism, sustainability, and deep adaptation.

The Earth's climate is changing faster than expected. Industrialization, fossil fuel use, consumption, and exploitation are radically transforming the planet we live on. In "Witnessing Climate Change," we work to make sense of the science behind this planetary crisis and practice writing about it for the public. This is a large, writing-intensive, public-facing course that engages key contemporary issues and core ways of knowing from a values-oriented perspective, through large lectures and small group workshops. Readings include Jeff VanderMeer, Nukariik, Barry Lopez, Aldo Leopold, Wanda Coleman, J.M. Coetzee, and St. Francis, among others.

Many students are working to equip themselves with the practical skills that they will need to use AI in their chosen fields after graduation, but it is equally important to think critically about the bigger challenges that AI presents: changes to how and why we learn; increases in academic and professional misconduct; and questions of justice, social and environmental responsibility, and spiritual well-being. This weekly course will present an overview of these issues and encourage students to think through their implications for the good life in the 21st century.

We are living through a watershed moment in United States history. Structural racism is at the forefront of the national discourse. Yet, the threat that racism holds on our nation's most cherished ideals of democracy and justice is hardly new. Generations of activists, scholars, and everyday people have fought and persevered to bring about social, cultural, and policy change. This course engages deeply with topics relevant to the national discourse on racial and ethnic relations in the U.S. The first part of the course examines key concepts, focusing on the social construction of race and ethnicity, prejudice, and discrimination. The second part reviews the historical experiences of Native Americans, Latinos, Asian Americans, and African Americans. The third and final part of the course centers on four critical issues that are especially relevant in 2020: (1) immigration; (2) political disenfranchisement; (3) racial and ethnic disparities in health; and (4) racism in the criminal justice system.

Food is inarguably a basic component of human life. In spite of its basicness, however, eating food in the 21stcentury is wrapped up in a whole host of theological and moral issues including ecological degradation, globalization, food security, and economic justice. Our eating practices, in other words, raise urgent questions about the human relationship to the rest of the natural world. This course provides a theological framework for addressing our understanding of food. Drawing on Scripture and sources throughout the history of the Christian tradition, we will investigate the Christian conception of God as Creator, nature as creation, and the human relationship to God, other humans, and the rest of nature. We will also examine the moral and theological implications of human participation in nature through engagement with classics in environmental literature and the agrarian tradition. Finally, we will draw on these sources to contextualize and reflect on the theological and moral implications of the way we grow and consume food. This course will give students a deeper capacity for theological reflection on humans' relationship to the rest of nature and will equip them to understand the theological significance of the seemingly quotidian act of eating food.

This course aims to equip students with the tools to examine and contribute to contemporary problems in the relationship between Christian beliefs and the natural sciences. This is achieved by allowing students to see those topics as embedded in a long history of theologians engaging the physics, medicine, and natural philosophy of their times. Roughly half the course will be devoted to that history, drawing out three narrative arcs: the sophisticated ways that Christians dealt with apparent conflicts between their beliefs about nature and those of secular authorities; the ways that the contemporary sciences depended on particular theological presuppositions (divine voluntarism and immutability, the regularity and intelligibility of nature); and the contingency of the contemporary sciences. Against this historical backdrop, the second half of the course will consider four classical Christian doctrines that appear to be in conflict with some aspect of contemporary science: the imago Dei in relation to evolution and scientific transhumanism; miracles in relation to the laws of nature; doctrines of the Fall and original sin in relation to population biology; and the doctrine of the soul in relation to neuroscience.

This course will seek to identify and address the various tensions between theology and the natural sciences, reimagining that relationship as one of complementarity. A large part of that tension has been constituted by the modern Western presupposition that the unique and privileged access to reality comes through the empirical method of the natural sciences. We will begin with a brief introduction to the history of the development of scientific method, before turning to an investigation of the methodological differences between the natural sciences and theology. It will be shown that the complementarity of the two methods stems from their both being particularizations of the more general process involved in learning. The second section of the course will focus on specific topics which have historically been considered a source of division between Christian belief and the theories of the natural sciences. These will include an examination of objections to the belief in the existence of God, the seeming tensions between the scriptural creation narrative and evolutionary biology, and the incompatibility of belief in the resurrection with modern materialist reductionism. Finally, there will be a treatment of the convergence of natural science and theology on the question of ecological ethics.

In 2000, two Earth System scientists popularized the idea that Earth might be entering a new geologic epoch, the "Anthropocene," in which human activity is shaping and will continue to shape the Earth System so profoundly that it will be evident in the geologic record. The idea has become a central topic in both the environmental sciences and the environmental humanities. Our interest in this idea is in the ethical questions it raises. Who is responsible for this new epoch and what should be done about it? What kinds of technological interventions are ethically appropriate to limit or otherwise alter environmental change? If humans can "manage" the global climate, fine tuning Earth's temperature and climate composition, should they? This is a course about ethical reasoning, in which moral principles are applied to contingent circumstances to determine good (i.e., ethically sound) courses of action. We will use a sophisticated understanding of the doctrine of human dominion and the moral principles it entails to construct a range of Christian responses to the ethical questions of the Anthropocene. In developing Christian ethical responses to the challenges of the Anthropocene, we will practice using clear logic, rhetorical argumentation, and a sophisticated grasp and deployment of Christian doctrine.

This course investigates the Christian understanding of creation and how this doctrine relates to contemporary scientific issues. We will examine the development of the doctrine beginning with Scripture and the Creed and progressing through the early Church period into the Medieval and Scholastic era, focusing on the concepts of creation ex nihilo, creation continua, divine Providence, and divine action in the world. With the rise of the modern era, we will analyze the origin of and principles involved with the purported conflict between science and theology. We will bring the doctrine of creation into dialogue with three contemporary issues in the sciences: cosmology, evolution, and ecology. Integral to this course will be the relationship and response of humankind to God and to creation. This course will have a special appeal to students interested in the intersection of science and theology.

This course investigates the relationship between the Catholic Faith and modern science for the sake of an integrated worldview in which they are brought into a "relational unity," i.e. a dynamic interchange in which their distinct perspectives and methods are carefully respected. We will begin with historical, philosophical, biblical and theological resources for engaging science from the perspective of faith. These will be brought into dialogue with modern cosmology, evolutionary biology and the sciences of human origins in an attempt to forge a holistic perspective in which science, philosophy and theology are treated as distinct but mutually enriching paths to truth. Specific topics will include the conflict model of science and religion, the Galileo Affair, the biblical creation accounts, the doctrines of divine creation and divine providence, and the human person as the image of God.

This course is an introduction to the history of the peoples of Africa from the late nineteenth century to the present day. During the term, we will consider the ways in which Africans shaped and were shaped by the transformative events of the period. In the second half of the nineteenth century, European powers conquered and colonized much of the continent. Over the next sixty years, Africans lived and died under the yoke of European rule; some resisted, others collaborated, but all influenced the nature of colonialism and its eventual collapse. By the 1960s, most Africans were free of foreign rule. Since then the peoples of Africa have endeavored to achieve political stability, navigate Cold War politics, harness development aid, and adapt to a globalizing economy. In recent years, they have succumbed to brutal wars and endured devastating famines, but they have also inspired the world with their triumph over apartheid, emerging vibrant democracies, rich cultures, and deep history. In this class, we will identify, problematize, and debate these major themes in Modern African history. We also will make use of a variety of texts, from historical documents to classic academic works to works of African art, film, and fiction.

Algorithms and data increasingly influence our behavior, steer resources, and inform institutional decisions that affect our everyday lives. This course will examine the social forces that shape what information gets recorded in databases and how algorithms are constructed and used. It will also introduce various approaches for assessing how algorithms and big data impact the social world. Along the way, we'll tackle important questions raised by these technological developments: What opportunities and challenges emerge when machine learning is applied to data about people? How should we evaluate whether algorithms are better or worse than the systems they replace? How might algorithms shape our agency, relationships, and access to opportunity?

Food feeds culture. It nourishes societies as well as bodies. No discipline is intelligible without it. It provides economics with products, physiology with sustenance, social sciences with classes and relationships of power. and intellects with food for thought. Food's also essential in ecology. Our most intimate contact with the environment occurs when we eat it. From interdisciplinary perspectives, we'll approach the history of food in all cultures (including, by the way, those of non-human cultural creatures) in all periods that we can say something about, from the origins of carnivorism and cannibalism through famines and fushion to the food-related environmental problems of the future. There may even be time to explore cuisines.

This once weekly lab session is a mandatory requirement for students enrolled in the Design Thinking course. These sessions focus on practical application of the topics and materials presented in class with students working in teams to employ techniques and methodology on assigned projects. This hands-on lab will having students exploring the research, brainstorming, ideation, iterative prototyping and presentation techniques that lead to creative innovation and disruptive breakthroughs applicable to students of any discipline.

Lab for Environement Food and Society: This course is an introduction to environmental sociology, the sociology of food, and Catholic social teachings on creation, solidarity, human dignity and rights, and social justice as they relate to the environment and food issues. The course has two directly linked central purposes. One is to learn descriptive and analytical sociological perspectives on environmental and food issues, as well as related matters of agriculture, globalization, consumerism, rural America, health, social movements, and human futures. A second purpose is to learn Catholic social teachings on the environment and food issues, in order to deepen our capacity to reflect normatively from a particular moral perspective about crucial social problems. Achieving these two purposes will require us recurrently to engage the sociological and the Catholic perspectives and contributions in mutually informative and critical conversation. This is fundamentally a sociology course, but one in which Catholic social ethics stand front and center. In other words, this course will engage in multiple, ongoing exercises of "reflexivity," engaging the sociological imagination, issues of environment and food, and Catholic social teachings - to consider what possible fruitful understandings each may provide for and about the others. Students need not be Catholic (or even religious) to benefit from this course, but everyone must be open to learning about and reflecting upon Catholic ethical teachings as they relate to the environment and food. This course will explore a number of interconnected substantive issues, descriptively, analytically, and normatively. These will include technological development, energy consumption, global warming/climate change, neoliberal capitalism, interests of nation states, corporate power, the role of mass media, population dynamics, the maldistribution of wealth, political decision-making, the status of science, ocean environments, extreme weather, sustainable development, environmentalist movements, agribusiness, nutrition, food supply systems, hunger and obesity, organics, fair trade, localism, agrarianism, human dignity, the common good, the option for the poor, the universal destiny of the earth's goods, creation care, and the moral goods of solidarity, subsidiarity, and participation, among other relevant topics.

A weekly tutorial required for students registered for HIST 30407, World War 2: A Global History or its cross-lists.

The science we produce helps us understand the world. But how does the world around us impact how we produce and understand science? Whatever our social lives outside of the lab, in the laboratory workspace, we consider our work to be largely devoid of bias and influence from the outside world. However, the science we encounter is a product of the scientists who have gathered this knowledge - the answer to the “why” depends on “who” came up with it. The goal of this course is to consider “who”, “what”, “when”, and “where” as important questions that affect the scientist, the science they produce, and the way this science is introduced to society. We will be reading scientific literature alongside texts from the discipline of science and technology studies, focusing on the language used by science. Specifically, we will work together to uncover the history and context surrounding commonly used metaphors and critically analyze them through the lenses of race, gender, disability, and indigeneity. We will think about how these word choices impact our scientific hypotheses and interpretations, and sometimes even determines who gets to ask these questions. Could an alternate, more inclusive vocabulary uncover what scientific knowledge lies beyond the stereotypes? This course is open to all students interested in exploring the interplay of science and society. Practical research experience (in a lab) will help but is not required!

Organized violence between human communities is one of the unfortunate realities of human existence, and its causes and consequences have consequently been of great interest. Is war an inevitable outcome of human nature, or the result of specific social, historical, and environmental circumstances? Archaeology is uniquely positioned to provide concrete insights into the history of human violence through study of its direct material correlates, traumatic injuries on skeletons, fortified settlements, weaponry, and iconography. However, the archaeological record also documents the impacts of violence, reduced nutritional status and health, evidence for enslavement, cannibalism, and population decline, and can provide insights into why war occurred through examination of environment, population, and social conditions. In this course, we will explore what the archaeological record tells us about violence, human nature, and the veracity of claims for either a more violent or more peaceful past. We will examine theoretical models of war, anthropological studies of conflict, and archaeological case studies of both violent and peaceful times to understand the role that organized violence has played in human history and evolution.

What does writing look like in the age of generative AI? What does it mean to communicate with others, or to seek to persuade others, or to write for the sake of learning about a topic (or about oneself) at a time when generative AI has radically shifted the very sense of our educational, professional, and personal lives? These are the questions that will guide our work in this course, as we will experiment with generative AI to gain a deeper, clearer understanding of its impact on writing and our writerly identities. We will examine the role of AI during various parts of the writing process and in various genres and modes of writing in order to better assess, on the one hand, where generative AI can develop our thinking and writing in useful (and perhaps even astonishing) ways, and, on the other hand, where it requires us to think critically and ethically about its impacts on our own learning and ways of being.

What does it mean to explore gender through a sociological lens? Why does gender inequality persist in contemporary society? What can we do to advocate for social change? In this course we will discuss gender in families, politics, and history. The class will analyze gender at an individual, interactional, and institutional level. How gender intersects with race, class, and sexuality will be the bedrock of our learning together. The course will intellectually challenge students to continue becoming sociological scholars, educated activists, and justice-seeking individuals.

This London Seminar focuses on The Nature of Man and the Order of the World throughout the history of philosophy and the history of medicine from Hippocrates to the discovery of DNA. It is a demanding course that is taught using primary texts and original manuscript sources available in the Museums, Libraries and Archives of London. Classes will include the analysis of texts and artifacts and site visits to The British Library, The British Museum, The Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology, The National Gallery, The Wellcome Collection Library and Archives, The Royal Society of London, The Royal College of Physicians, The Science Museum London, The Old Operating Theatre Museum as well as The Gordon Museum at Guy???s Hospital, London, which is one of the largest pathology museums in the world and the largest medical museum in the United Kingdom. The course will place an emphasis on the close reading of selected primary texts, supplemented by secondary specialist sources which will enable students to critically evaluate and interpret medical texts, terms, concepts, and theories in a philosophical context. It will also enable students to gain practical knowledge of how to use archival sources for philosophical research. It will give students a unique opportunity to study works of canonical philosophers such as Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics, Galen, Bacon, Boyle, Locke, and Descartes in a medical context in relation to the works of historically significant physicians, naturalists, and scientists, such as Hippocrates, Vesalius, Harvey, Burton, Willis, Newton, Darwin, Crick and Watson. This course will enable students to understand the close inter-relationship between the study of natural philosophy and the study of medicine from antiquity to the 21st century, since both are dedicated to gaining knowledge about the function of the human body and soul, the order of nature, the cosmos, and the natural world.

This module takes a critical, interdisciplinary approach to understanding the relationship between gender and health. It examines why health inequalities in gender persist. It considers how theories of health and illness drive health policy-making in the political and health-care systems. Through engagement with course materials and facilitated in-class discussions, students will: 1. Gain a critical awareness of the social and political forces that shape gendered health; 2. Articulate the links between constructions of gender and health, with a particular focus on women and women's bodies; 3. Consider how medical and popular knowledge about health is implicated in the social reproduction of gender difference and gender roles; 4. Develop a deeper understanding of how women's experiences of health and health care vary according to social position. 5. Learn about the gendered dimensions of health inequalities. 6. Expand their understanding of women's "choices" in relation to their health and reproduction.

Robots or "autonomous systems" play an ever-increasing role in many areas, from weapons systems and driverless cars to health care and consumer services. As a result, it is ever more important to ask whether it makes any sense to speak of such systems' behaving ethically and how we can build into their programming what some call "ethics modules." After a brief technical introduction to the field, this course will approach these questions through contemporary philosophical literature on robot ethics and through popular media, including science fiction text and video. This is an online course with required, regular class sessions each week. Class meetings are online via Zoom webinar software (provided by the University).

Broad outline of history of science, from ancient times to present, and incorporates a number of field studies that would be considered "scientific" today.

The current generation of colleges students will face a host of challenges in their lifetimes, including a global population that will potentially reach 9 billion by the early 2040s, depleting resources, and declining ecosystems. Additionally, the world is currently experiencing the worst global pandemic it has faced in over a century, whose effects will linger for years to come while foreshadowing the potential impact of other impending shocks. If current economic growth continues in a "business as usual" framework, future generations will face an increased dearth of decent jobs, growing social divisions, and devastating threats to the environment. This course will explore this confluence of issues and help students to consider a new roadmap for economic development and human flourishing that respects the dignity of every individual and the environment. Readings and lectures will look at the intersection of economic growth, industry, food security, water scarcity, health, religion, innovation science, and climate change. Case studies and real world examples will link theory to policy and practice. A major component of this course will be in-class discussions and case studies that will push students to think critically and debate the important questions within the study of sustainable development. The objective of these discussions will be to a) explore the interconnectedness of many of these issues and their varying degrees of impact on the wealthy, the middle class, and the poor or marginalized; b) understand different models of governance at international, national, and local levels that are trying to work through these issues; and c) bridge theory to policy and practice. This course requires active student participation in class as well as group projects and quizzes to gauge how well students are absorbing the material.

In 2006, Henry Louis Gates popularized the practice of DNA ancestry testing through his PBS series "African American Lives". In it, he uses DNA testing to uncover ancestral connections to ethnic groups in Africa, as well as Europe and elsewhere. And yet, scholarly consensus is that race and ethnicity are social constructed- fictional concepts that have real consequences, but are not biological in nature. What is it about race that makes us believe it is constitutive of some essential, biological self, and yet racial categories and meanings are constantly in flux? In this course, we will scrutinize the classification of groups and the naturalization of those categories. Focusing on the United States, throughout the course we will examine the invention, production and reproduction of race from a social constructionist perspective, concentrating on the ways in which the constitution of race is controversial and constantly being remade. We will also discuss how race structures inequality in everyday life. This course is organized so that it builds from racial classification theory, moves on to an examination of the construction of US racial categories and racial stratification, and closes with an applied focus on racial controversies that are directly tied to resource allocation and federal policy.

This course will discuss how specific populations are more vulnerable to biofilm-related infections. We will explore how geographic and socioeconomic factors influence the prevalence and management of these infections. The course will highlight the importance of social awareness, education, and public health initiatives in preventing and managing infections. The course will also introduce novel perspectives on wastewater treatment systems that promote biofilm growth and offer increased energy efficiency, making them suitable for remote areas with limited electricity and resources. We will have an open discussion about how to promote environmental justice initiatives.

This course is intended as the first of a two-part survey of Western science. We begin with a survey of the heritage of ancient (largely Greek) contributions to natural philosophy, mathematics, and medicine. We will continue with medieval studies of mathematics, motion, the heavens, living things, optics, materials, and alchemy in Arabic and Latin cultures. Given the importance of religion to the formation of these historical cultures, we will pay particular attention to the relations between broader philosophy, theology, and the emerging activities bearing the hallmarks of naturalistic and rational approaches we often distinguish as "science." Changing institutional homes for the study of nature also contextualize our study of key ideas and methods, from early philosophical schools to monasteries, universities, courts, and academies. Ultimately, we will consider whether there was such a thing as "the Scientific Revolution," and, if there was, what was so revolutionary about it.

Where do regional and national identities collide? Has the rise of the internet and globalization made national borders increasingly obsolete? Or, has it ironically caused people to embrace ultra-nationalism and xenophobia? This class analyzes these questions within the context of East Asia. We will study the growing impact of cultural hybridization—and in particular, the soft power of K-Pop boy bands and Korean soap operas—on fan culture, online communities, and migratory patterns. We will then juxtapose these trends with more sobering evidence of the lingering effects of Cold War politics, the Japanese empire, and territorial disputes in Korea, China, and Japan in the past decade. By using materials from history, anthropology, and literature, students will explore the influence of colonialism, nationalism, and globalization on everyday life across the continent. All majors and backgrounds are welcome. No prior knowledge about Asian languages or topics is required.

Politics, markets, and the environment are all spheres of development that are fundamentally shaped by the action and interaction of many individuals over time. For example, the Arab Spring protests, the shortage of medicines in Caracas, and the rising water temperatures of the Baltic Sea are all system-level outcomes arising from the individual actions of thousands or even billions of people. In these spheres, leadership is often weak or non-existent. Scientists call these "complex systems." Complexity is difficult to study in the real world. Instead, scientists often approach these phenomenon using computer simulations (sometimes called agent-based models, social network models, and computational models). The goal is to build computer models of development that link the actions and interactions of individuals to the system-level outcomes. This class will use the perspective, literature, and tools of complexity science to approach core questions in the field of development. No programming experience is required, but students should be prepared to learn a new language called Netlogo. It is a free program which is described as having a "low threshold" (easy to get started) and "high ceiling" (many capabilities).

We face worldwide ecological catastrophe, accelerating global warming, and political upheaval: this is the Anthropocene. What problems does the Anthropocene pose to narrative? What storytelling skills and rhetorical strategies do journalists, scientists, memoirists, bloggers, and philosophers need in order to adequately address and communicate about the epochal crisis we all face? Through journalism, essays, and other media, this course will explore the question - in practice - of what it means to write the Anthropocene.

One way to improve our understanding of ourselves is to compare ourselves with the animals who most resemble us, in informative, challenging and disturbing ways. In this course, we'll look at the relationship that has done most to change human self-perceptions. With a focus on Western texts and experiences, but with reference to many other cultures, we'll concentrate on the problems of how and why human attitudes to other apes have changed since the Middle Ages, and how they have influenced thinking in science, religion, politics, sociology, literature, and ethics.

Statistics is one of the most important tools for conducting and communicating the results of virtually all areas of inquiry today. From scientific research, public policy, and business management, the history of statistics is the history of how one area of mathematics has come to be seen as providing the common language for making arguments, correctly reasoning, and objectively describing the world. Yet, at the same time, statistics has often come under criticism for its misrepresentation of reality and its ability to easily spread false or misleading information. From disputes over climate change, election results, and subatomic particle detection, the more widespread statistics has become in different domains of inquiry today the more controversies it has found itself embroil within. This course will introduce students to some of the many controversies that have emerged over the course of statistics’s development in the nineteenth and twentieth century. Students will be introduced to some of the basic theoretical frameworks for analyzing controversies in the sociology of science. A central theme for this subject will be the complex dynamic between claims that statistics represent facts about the world while at the same time being the product of competing social, political, racial, and cultural interests. Most history courses in statistics are organized chronologically, however, this course will examine the history of statistics through its impact on various fields, including the physical and life sciences, social sciences, government policy, and domains like sports and business. No prior knowledge of statistics is required for this subject; however, students will be encouraged to reflect on the ways that the field of their chosen profession (physics, biology, law, or economics) has been shaped by statistics. By the end of this course students will be able to better appreciate the different criticisms of statistics within their social and political context as well as to articulate how statistics has shaped modern conceptions of objectivity and standards of reasoning in different fields.

This course is an intellectual history of western medicine. It is intended to familiarize students with the multiple explanatory problems that occur in medicine and the most important approaches to them. Its focus will be much more on medical theory and knowledge than on medical practice and institutions. The course will begin with a review the Hippocratic and Galenic heritages and early modern appeals to chemical and physical explanations of disease and of health. A middle section will explore the 17th-18th century syntheses of Sydenham, Boerhaave, and Cullen, consider the difficult problem of nosology, and examine the empiricist critique in the clinics of early nineteenth-century Paris, including the conflict between ontological and physiological concepts of disease. The final section will examine several distinct trends in the nineteenth century: the impact of experimental physiology, the growth of clinical science, the emergence of epidemiology and tropical medicine, the rise of bacteriology, immunology, and virology; and the impact of new statistical methods. Reading assignments will be a mix of scholarly articles by medical historians and extracts from primary sources. Requirements include critical reviews of primary sources, journal, quizzes, and final exam. There are no prerequisites for the course. While some familiarity with the human body and its ailments and vulnerabilities, and some comfort with modes of biological explanation will be helpful, the course is intended for persons with general interests.

Although the mass media is not formally part of the U.S. government, it is arguably the most powerful institution shaping public attitudes, creating and producing information, and communicating political information to individual citizens. Almost all exposure to politics comes not from direct experience but from mediated stories. And, with the rise of the Internet, the growth of 24-hour cable news, and the decline of the "Big Three" television networks has created, a more diffuse media environment has been created. The primary purpose of this course is to analyze the role of the media in American politics and its relationship with the public, government, and candidates for office in a democratic society.

From Shelley to Kubrick and beyond; robots have played a pivotal role in film, television and theatre. This course will exam and reflect upon the ways in which non-human constructs are used on the stage and screen; and how they inform us of what it means to be human. Warning: Interaction with automatons is expected.

"Why do people invest and how do they do it in different national and historical contexts? This course offers students the opportunity to think about the emergence of financial markets as institutions, evolving legal and business practices and the changing role of investors from a historical and global perspective. Starting with trade finance in the 15th century and the emergence of sovereign bond markets under the Habsburg Spain empire, we move on to London's rise as financial center of Europe, stock market bubbles, the nature of new exchanges in Asia and other global settings to Wall Street, war bonds, and the rise of new financial tools and markets in the post-WWII era. Readings will involve primary documents and exciting literature in economic history, social, business and cultural history and allow students to gain a broader understanding of the nature of financial and political risk, institution-building, human behavior, and the role of financial markets in modern history. "

Open any medical journal or textbook, go to the doctor's office and look at the walls, or do an internet search for the little pain that's been bothering you for the last few days. You'll notice that medical pictures, diagrams, and computer-generated images are everywhere. This may seem obvious, and it may seem natural that physicians and scientists need to learn to "read" complex visual information. Science and medicine were not, however, always so visual. How did the medical field become so thoroughly image dependent? What kind of information—whether obvious or hidden—have medical images conveyed in the past up to the present? What roles have images played in the spread of Western medicine? And what can such images tell us about the communities and societies, including our own, in which they were created? In this class we will analyze images related to nature, the body, and medicine, covering the middle ages through the twentieth century. It is both a history of medicine seen through the lens of visual techniques and technologies developed over time, as well as a history of visual representation itself as revealed through the history of medicine.

This course tells the history of Appalachia through humans' relationships with the natural environment. The class starts in geologic time with the formation of the mountains and spools forward through ebb and flow of Native American homelands, the colonial wars and the fur trade, the American invasion, the growth of an agrarian economy centered on corn, pigs, and whiskey, the arrival of the railroads and the extractive industries of coal and timber, and finally the difficulties wrought by de-industrialization, climate change, and the opioid epidemic. The central characters throughout are the men and women who wrested their living from the mountains and the hollows, and their struggles as a series of political, economic, and ecological transformations dispossessed them. Over time, Appalachia was impoverished and made marginal; in the eyes of many, the place and the people were deemed exploitable and expendable. This class seeks to understand how Appalachia became synonymous with grinding poverty and environmental degradation. The class argues that ecosystems and people advanced and declined in tandem and that history shows neither were destined for impoverishment. This course is intended to give current Notre Dame students who have or who might visit and volunteer in Appalachia the historical perspective they may need to fully appreciate the region's problems and potential.

According to several popular narratives, Artificial Intelligence is either about to be the most transformational influence on human culture since the Industrial Revolution, or an over-hyped set of diffuse technologies and systems with only superficial relation to each other. In this course, students will consider AI from several different disciplinary perspectives in order to make sense of both the narratives and the science surrounding it. These perspectives include computer science, the history of technology, philosophy, AI ethics, and science fiction. By taking up these different perspectives, students will develop vocabularies for talking about AI and, importantly, for thinking about its future.

The aim of this course is to explore the ethical and political issues surrounding space exploration and consider how past and present realities constrain our future in space. We will first survey the present state of space exploration. This will include the privatization of space travel, military investment in the space industry, space policy and law, and the state of modern space science. Then, we will look to our future in space and consider questions such as: Does climate change justify/ necessitate colonizing other worlds? What are the ethics of terraforming? What types of extraterrestrial life are worthy of ethical consideration? Will space travel replicate or exacerbate existing structural oppression, and should we pursue ‘anti-colonial' space travel? Ultimately, students should be able to place space exploration in its social context and articulate a vision of space exploration that they believe best serves society.

This course will provide advanced undergraduates and graduate students with a critical introduction to digital humanities for the study of early China, the fountainhead of Chinese Civilization. Collaborating with the Center of Digital Scholarship, this course will focus on relational data with structured information on historical figures, especially high officials, of early Chinese empires. Throughout the semester, we will read academic articles, mine data from primary sources, and employ Gephi and ArcGIS to visualize data. Those constructed data will cover three major themes: how geographical mobility contributed to consolidating a newly unified empire over diversified regions; how social networks served as the hidden social structure channeling the flow of power and talents; and how criminal records and excavated legal statutes shed light on the unique understanding of law and its relationship with the state in Chinese history.

This course will provide advanced undergraduates and graduate students with a critical introduction to digital humanities for the study of early China, the fountainhead of Chinese Civilization. Collaborating with the Center of Digital Scholarship, this course will focus on relational data with structured information on historical figures, especially high officials, of early Chinese empires. Throughout the semester, we will read academic articles, mine data from primary sources, and employ Gephi and ArcGIS to visualize data. Those constructed data will cover three major themes: how geographical mobility contributed to consolidating a newly unified empire over diversified regions; how social networks served as the hidden social structure channeling the flow of power and talents; and how criminal records and excavated legal statutes shed light on the unique understanding of law and its relationship with the state in Chinese history.

This class is about widespread illness, its mitigation, and the consequences of both. We deal with how populations are defined socially, economically, and politically and trace out the interventions that are made to preserve populations. We also contemplate the pandemic's pariahs; those who get blamed, excluded, and persecuted in times of plague. This class analyzes medicine as power; specifically, Michel Foucault's description of biopower (making live and letting die). A major source of reflection and analysis will be the instructor's experience nursing during the first and second COVID-19 surges in New York City. We will analyze film, documentary, podcast, literature, and medical science. In short, we will study theories, practices, and stories of healing.

Enlightenment anatomists journeyed to Peter The Great’s collection of monsters to study the human body. In 1800s London, Humphrey Davy discovered potassium, sodium, and chlorine at the newly built Royal Institute, which he funded from hugely popular, public lectures he gave. Private firms bolstered their R&D by hiring research scientists after WWI. An integration of private management methods and production techniques, federal money, and scientists who were previously cloistered in universities built the atomic bomb. The above anecdotes gesture at an intimate relationship between science and the public. To explore the entanglement of science and the public, this class offers a “survey” of science beginning in the Enlightenment and ending in the late twentieth century. Rather than covering every scientific development over 300 years, this course will focus on the topics that best reveal how science and the public relate in a series of case studies chronologically arranged. Using those case studies, the course investigates the principal question: how did scientists and their theories interact with the public? From this, sub-questions emerge, such as “what is the public?” “what is the basis of scientific authority?” and “how has public support changed science?” Students will grapple with these questions by examining the history of science and technology.

Feminism isn't only about women, nor is feminism only for women. Feminism is about power - about who has it and who doesn't. And in today's world, data is power. Data can be used to create communities, advance research, and expose injustice. But data can also be used to discriminate, marginalize, and surveil. This course will draw intersectional feminist theory and activism to identify models for challenging existing power differentials in data science, with the aim of using data science methods and tools to work towards justice. Class meetings will be split between discussions of theoretical readings and explorations of data science tools and methods (such as Tableau, RStudio, and Python). Those readings may include chapters from texts that include Catherine D'Ignazio and Lauren Klein's Data Feminism (2020), Virginia Eubanks' Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor (2018), Ruha Benjamin's Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code (2019), and Sasha Costanza-Chock's Design Justice: Community-Led Practices to Build the Worlds We Need (2020). This course will also examine the data advocacy and activism work undertaken by groups like Our Data Bodies, Data for Black Lives, the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project, and Chicago-based Citizens Police Data Project. Over the course of the semester, students will develop original research projects that use data to intervene in issues of inequality and injustice. This course is not about gaining mastery of particular data science tools or methods, therefore familiarity with statistical analysis or data science tools (R, RStudio, Python, etc.) is NOT a prerequisite for this course.

This CAD course looks back to 1850, when urban industrial America began, and looks forward to 2050, when Notre Dame promises to be carbon neutral, to critically engage competing visions of individual, communal, and ecological flourishing. It focuses on economic, racial, and environmental justice as students explore how US political culture, the discipline of American Studies, and Catholic social teaching have clashed and converged and Americans proposed varying solutions to poverty, racism, and environmental degradation. After an introduction to American Studies, we turn to visions of the good life in foundational US political documents (the Declaration, the Constitution, and Inaugural Addresses) and in Catholic tradition (scriptural passages, theological essays, and papal encyclicals, from Rerum Novarum to Laudato Si'). Then the course's three main sections consider, in turn, economic equity, racial justice, and environmental restoration. Each section includes a "faith in action" case study and concludes with an "integrative essay" that puts Catholic social teaching into conversation with American Studies scholarship. In the final class session, Learning Groups present their synthesis of the course material, and, during the exam period, each student submits a final integrative essay that focuses on one of the issues—poverty, racism, or environmental degradation—and identifies what American Studies might learn from the Catholic Tradition and what the Catholic Tradition might learn from American Studies.

This course examines the nineteenth and twentieth century histories of print and cultural manufacturing in the U.S., with special attention given to readers, writers, media producers, and distribution. By tracing how literature, broadly defined, has influenced the shape and reshaping of modern life, our primary goal for the semester will be to better understand the role and impact of intellectual transmission on civil society, formal politics, and cultural standards. Related topics we will investigate include the development and growth of American children's literature; the history of racial and ethnic authorship; the rise of industrial publishing; national and transnational censorship; and legacies of "master" communicators to mass audiences (e.g. Franklin Roosevelt with radio, John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan with television, and Donald Trump with Twitter). Course readings and film screenings will range from William Llloyd Garrison's abolitionist newspaper, The Liberator, Matthew Rubery's The Untold Story of the Talking Book, Catherine Fisk's Writing for Hire: Unions, Hollywood, and Madison Avenue, James Baldwin's The Fire Next Time, Capote, and The Social Network.

Sport is one of the most enduringly popular and significant cultural activities in the United States. Data has always been a central part of professional sport in the US, from Henry Chadwick's invention of the baseball box score in the 1850s to the National Football League's use of Wonderlic test scores to evaluate players. This course focuses on the intersecting structures of power and identity that shape how we make sense of the "datification" of professional sport. By focusing on the cultural significance of sport data, this course will put the datafication of sport in historical context and trace the ways the datafication of sport has impacted athletes, fans, media, and other stakeholders in the sport industry. The course will also delve into the technology systems used to collect and analyze sport data, from the TrackMan and PITCHf/x systems used in Major League Baseball to the National Football League's Next Gen Stats partnership to emerging computer vision and artificial intelligence research methods. Readings for this course will draw on texts like Christopher Phillips' Scouting and Scoring: How We Know What We Know About Baseball (2019), Ruha Benjamin's Captivating Technology: Race, Carceral Technoscience, and Liberatory Imagination in Everyday Life (2019), and Michael Lewis' Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game (2004). Class meetings will be split between discussions of conceptual readings and applied work with sport data and technology systems. Coursework may include response papers, hands-on work with data, and a final project. Familiarity with statistical analysis, data science, or computer science tools and methods is NOT a prerequisite for this course.

This course offers a broad thematic overview of the history of capitalism from the early sixteenth century up to the late 1980s. As a discussion-based seminar, we will devote most of our conversations to discovering, analyzing and reflecting on the transformation of the U.S. from a newly-independent British colony, to the most influential economic power in the world. Topics and themes we will consider include: the rise of early modern transnational capitalism, European imperialism and trade, and indigenous dispossession after 1492; science and technological transformations; social and economic thought; slavery and servitude, broadly construed; and characteristics of prosperity, wealth, and economic flux. Our readings and viewings will be a mix of scholarly and primary sources, including an abundance of canonical literary and artistic material, such as novels, visual art, and film excerpts (e.g. Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's House (1879), Aaron Douglas's Building More Stately Mansions (1944), and Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence (1920)). Over the course of the semester, students will draw upon this eclectic combination of sources to synthesize the dominant historical dimensions of capitalism in and beyond the U.S. via four short essays (4 - 5 pages, double-spaced-between 1,100 and 1,400 words), and a final paper (10 - 12 pages, double-spaced) based on cumulative texts.

History is not a single "true story," but many competing narratives, each defined by values, interests, and political commitments. This course on ancient Japanese history provides an overview of three sets of competing narratives: first, the politically charged question of Japan's origins, when we explore archeological evidence and chronicles of the Sun Goddess; second, the question of whether culture (through continental imports of writing, religious forms, and statecraft) or nature (as disease and environmental degradation) defined the Yamato state from the sixth to the ninth century; and, third, whether Heian court power rested on economic, political, military, judicial, or aesthetic grounds and if its foundations were undermined internally or by the invasion of the Mongols. In examining these competing narratives, we aim to develop the disciplined imagination necessary to enter another culture and another time.

Around 1600, Japan closed itself off for 250 years, neither importing food nor exporting people. It was, in short, an almost hermetic ecological system, and yet, instead of outstripping their natural resources, Japanese people managed to attain a level of well-being above that of most other people. Some scholars have acclaimed this era an "eco-utopia" while others point to problems with this view. This course explores the interplay between political, social, economic, and ecological forces asking whether Tokugawa Japan modeled resilience.

Disability has long been constructed as the opposite of higher education. Universities are places that valorize, even demand, physical and intellectual ability. Disability, in turn, is often seen as something that does not fit within a university context, a problem that must be fixed. This antithetical relationship between disability and the university is rooted in history—eugenical curriculums, research programs that study disabled people—but it continues today. Despite a growing focus on diversity in university admissions and populations, disabled students enter higher education at a lower rate than non-disabled students and are less likely to graduate. In addition, universities perpetuate cultures of ableism in both faculty and students by prioritizing ability, perfection, and achievement.

With help from athletes such as Billie Jean King, Colin Kaepernick, LeBron James, Serena Williams, and Megan Rapinoe, Americans are growing accustomed to thinking about sports as embedded in the politics of gender, class, race, sexuality, and the nation. Consider the variety of places where sports happen, however, and the ways we develop and consume those places, and it becomes apparent that sports are also environmental in significant and complex ways. This course will examine the environmental politics of sports from conservation to climate change through the lenses of history and cultural studies. Course content will range from 19th century hunting, Indigenous surfing, and BASE jumping, to pick-up basketball, pro stadiums, and Notre Dame Athletics. Topical sections include outdoor sports and conservation, mountain sports and public land use, parks and recreation, stadiums and environmental justice, sports and climate change, and sustainability in the NCAA. Course requirements include regular reading and discussion, midterm and final essays, and a research project on a topic of the student's choice.

THIS CLASS HAS NO ASSIGNED READINGS! That's right, there is no reading for this class. Instead, you'll learn how millions of Americans are coming to know their history, their science, their neighbors, their sexuality, their art and so much more and you'll do it all through listening to some of the most engaging (and some of the least engaging too) podcasts available. We'll take a look at primary sources that collaborate and dispel some of what we're hearing and we'll think about the integral ways that podcasts are shaping our nation and our national interests. We'll even delve into how podcasts in other lands celebrate and eviscerate America, Americans, and Americanism. Double up on your homework and your workout as you listen your way into exciting and engaging topics that we'll explore in class using the methodologies of the best scholarship in American Studies, History, and Education, Schooling, and Society. This class is for all of those who love American Studies, great stories, researching and discovering, and can't wait to get their headphones on and delve into the best stories we as a society know how to tell.

American ruins are increasingly visible today, from images of urban decay and piles of debris in Detroit and Gary to movies and novels (The Book of Eli, The Road) depicting post-apocalyptic "ruinscapes" of abandoned towns, derelict factories, crumbling monuments, and deserted shopping malls, variously populated by zombies, vampires, and survivalists. Ruins typical signify "disaster," "failure," "defeat," and "the past." Why, then, in a nation that has repeatedly defined itself in terms of promise, progress, and success-the American Dream-are visions of ruin, real and imagined, so prevalent today? This class explores the history and meaning of American ruins, relating contemporary fascination with ruins ("ruin porn") to currently held attitudes about modernity, technology, citizenship, consumerism, the rule of law, and the environment. Course materials include novels, films, and photographs; coursework includes fieldtrips (to Detroit and Gary), essays, and discussion.

Inflammation is a fundamental biological phenomenon - whether it preserves or destroys is often a matter of context. In this course, we focus specifically on neuroinflammation - i.e., inflammation as it relates to the central (and peripheral) nervous system. We begin with the founding principles of molecular and cellular immunology in the context of the human nervous system. Next, we will explore the biological, environmental, and human components of (neuro)inflammatory disease through clinical case studies and representations in literature and media. Finally, we ask: how do medical, healthcare, and pharmaceutical constructs define the sociocultural experience of disease? Thus in this class, we integrate the scientific and the social: How do humans, how does humanity at large, deal with (neuro)inflammation? Can we firefight our collective future? This course is open to all majors. Strongly recommended prerequisites: Biology I: Big Questions (BIOS10171) OR Neuroscience and Behavior (BIOS20450) OR Cell Biology (BIOS30341) OR Cellular Biology: Stem Cells to Disease (BIOS30410)

Germany is globally recognized as a leader in the fields of renewable energy, sustainable development, and environmental protection. But how did this come about? In this course, we will examine the roles that culture and history play in shaping human attitudes towards the environment. Our case studies will range over two centuries, from damming projects in the Rhine valley at the start of the nineteenth century to the Chernobyl nuclear disaster at the end of the twentieth. We will study novels, films, and philosophical essays alongside works by leading environmental historians. Over the course of the semester, students will develop a richer understanding of German environmentalism that also includes an awareness of its dark sides, such as the role that nature conservancy played within Nazi ideology.

This introduction to modern Japanese history focuses on political, social, economic, and military affairs in Japan from around 1600 to the early post-WWII period. It considers such paradoxes as samurai bureaucrats, entrepreneurial peasants, upper-class revolutionaries, and Asian fascists. The course has two purposes: (1) to provide a chronological and structural framework for understanding the debates over modern Japanese history; and (2) to develop the skill of reading texts analytically to discover the argument being made. The assumption operating both in the selection of readings and in the lectures is that Japanese history, as with all histories, is the site of controversy. Our efforts at this introductory level will be dedicated to understanding the contours of some of the most important of these controversies and judging, as far as possible, the evidence brought to bear in them.

In a very broad sense, a myth can be a story that distills an ideology, simplifies a complexity, or presents an idealized conception of a person or a thing. Our collected histories and current realities are all told through stories that contain elements of myth. These stories, and especially those that dictate what it means to be human, have real planetary and material consequences. With all its exaggerations or simplifications, the dominant myth of “mankind” provokes a particular relationship with the planet, its inhabitants, and its resources. By focusing on the story of the climate crisis that manifests itself within the age of the Anthropocene (a new era in which humankind acts as an additional planetary force), we will unravel the other stories within the Western tradition that promote, exemplify, and identify an exploitative relationship with the planet. This course will explore stories from the traditions of science, literature, philosophy, film, and history that either justify or resist humanity’s tendency to expand, dominate, and consume the world. We will approach the large story in three parts: 1) The science and thought about the new era of humanity’s planetary influence, labeled the Anthropocene. 2) Examples of fiction, film, philosophy, and history from the Western world that either perpetuate or expose the mentalities that led to the this crisis. 3) Counter-narratives, alternative perspectives, and possibilities for hope. We will dedicate each class to an open discussion with a variety of viewpoints, with the goal to analyze texts for their themes, implications, and consequences. If a myth is a simple answer, the complicated predicament of the climate crisis dispels all myths because we can no longer tolerate such simple approaches. This course does not require an expertise in history, literature, or science. Instead, this course blends a variety of topics in an accessible way that prioritizes understanding and discussion. Apart from in-class discussions, this course is a writing intensive course, with a goal to teach students how to write concise, persuasive, and academic essays.

If you were to perform a Google image search of “human evolution,” you would see endless pictures of men linearly evolving from apes to modern humans. These overwhelmingly one-sided depictions are because much of our human evolutionary story has been written by and about men to the exclusion of women. Consequently, many of the key theories explaining the unique suite of human features seem to assume that evolutionary forces act only upon men, and women are merely passive beneficiaries. Not only is this exclusion of roughly half the population sexist, it is also bad science – bad science that to this day has been repeated and perpetuated to justify the status quo. In this class, we will explore human evolution from a feminist perspective intellectually drawing upon human biology, archaeology, cultural anthropology, primatology, exercise physiology, and reproductive health to demonstrate that women were and still are a driving force in human evolution. Using non-traditional learning methods and assignments, we will cover: 1) foundational feminist human evolutionary theory, 2) the pervasiveness of estrogen, 3) physical/athletic performance and sexual division of labor; 4) the significance and frequency of alloparenting; 5) multiple orgasms and the control of women’s sexuality; 6) cooperation and competition among women; 7) concealment (or not) of human ovulation; 8) evolutionary reasons for the difficulty of human birth; 9) the physical and mental resilience of women; and 10) the crucial role grandmothers and menopause. It is my hope that this class not only provides an alternative perspective to current thinking in human evolution, but also encourages students to bring their experiences and perspectives to bear. Because who asks the questions matters, and a greater diversity of views can only improve and enrich our holistic understanding of human evolution.

The United States has a long history of using its most cutting-edge science and technology to discriminate, marginalize, oppress, and surveil. The poorhouse and scientific charity of an earlier era have been replaced by digital tracking and automated decision-making systems like facial recognition and risk prediction algorithms. This course focuses on how automated systems are tasked with making life-and-death choices: which neighborhoods get policed, which families get food, who has housing, and who remains homeless. This course will examine black box tools used in K-12 education, social services, and the criminal justice system to better understand how these technologies reinforce and worsen existing structural inequalities and systems of oppression. Class meetings will be split between discussions of conceptual readings and applied work with technology systems. Readings for this course will draw on texts that include Safiya Noble's Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism (2018), Virginia Eubanks' Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor (2018), Catherine D'Ignazio and Lauren Klein's Data Feminism (2020), and Meredith Broussard's Artificial Unintelligence: How Computers Misunderstand the World (2019). This course will also examine the advocacy and activism work undertaken by groups like Our Data Bodies, Data 4 Black Lives, Algorithmic Justice League, Auditing Algorithms, Big Brother Watch, and Chicago-based Citizens Police Data Project. Coursework may include response papers, hands-on work, and a final project. Familiarity with statistical analysis, data science, or computer science tools and methods is NOT a prerequisite for this course

It has been 20+ years since the first draft sequence of the entire human genome was published, spurring development of genetic technologies that were previously impossible, such as CRISPR genome editing. These technologies carry potential to identify, treat, or even prevent genetic conditions; at the same time, they often rely on assumptions that genes determine one’s fate and are shaping contemporary ideals of health, wellness, and disability. This course will examine how genetics and genetic technologies raise a host of complicated ethical questions, such as concerns about “new” forms of eugenics and genetic determinism, the ownership and commodification of genetic material, the ethics of genetics research in marginalized communities, legislative efforts to prevent genetic discrimination, and more. We will use a case study approach, pairing examinations of the biological and technical bases of specific genetic technologies with bioethical analysis to consider costs and benefits from a variety of stakeholder perspectives. This will entail engagement with perspectives from the history of science, genetics, bioethics, genetic counseling, etc. to explore complicated questions about the relationships between genetics, research, medicine, and society.

This course is an introduction to the new field of environmental history. While many people think "The Environment" suddenly became important with the first "Earth Day" in 1970 (or a few years earlier), environmental issues have in fact long been of central importance. In recent decades historians have begun actively to explore the past sensibilities of various groups toward their surroundings and fellow creatures. They have also increasingly paid attention to the ways environmental factors have affected history. This course will range widely, from world history to the story of a single river, from arguments about climate change to the significance of pink flamingos, and will survey a number of types of history including cultural, demographic, religious, and animal.

This course offers a critical examination of what it means to be an immigrant or child of immigrants through scholarly works, memoirs, blogs, and popular journalism. Since the liberalization of immigration policy in 1965, immigrants from Latin America and Asia are becoming an increasing and emergent demographic of American society. In major American cities such as Los Angeles and New York, they comprise over 50% of the population. This course focuses on how immigrants and the children of immigrants experience the United States. How are immigrants changing the US racial and ethnic structure? How do their experiences differ given varying legal statuses? How is the second generation becoming American? We will explore these questions through readings that focus on family, religion, education, dating and sexuality. This course will include a community based learning component where students will work with immigrant serving organizations. Students will have the option to teach citizenship classes or to work with immigrant children. Service will be 2-3 hours per week outside of class.

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

As we move deeper into the 21st century the global community faces mass language extinction. While languages have always changed, died, and been born, the scale of the contemporary threat is unprecedented. The Endangered Languages Project estimates that more than 40% of the world's 7,000 languages are in danger of disappearing. As it becomes increasingly clear that language rights are closely connected to other human rights, and that indigenous languages in particular hold traditional environmental knowledge crucial for the creation of a sustainable future, the fate of these languages has become a matter of global concern. In 2019 the UN declared a year of Indigenous Languages and in 2022 kicked off IDIL, the International Decade for Indigenous Languages. Partly because of these new collaborations, the story of endangered languages is not all doom and gloom. In this class we will explore the past, present, and future of endangered languages, with cases drawn in particular from Ireland, New Zealand/Maori, Bangladesh, Africa, and the Indigenous communities of the South Bend region. We will ask what languages do and what is lost when they disappear; why some languages become endangered and others do not; and what contemporary realities speakers and learners of such languages face as they seek schooling, entertainment, self-expression, and community in their language. Most importantly, we will also consider the reasons for language optimism by learning about the ways many endangered languages--even those once thought "dead"--are being revived by dedicated communities of language activists, often working in collaboration with each other. Over the course of the semester, students will choose an endangered language and create a policy paper for the government(s) and communities responsible for that language laying out the language’s history, present conditions, and future needs; the class will include multiple rounds of revision and workshopping of this policy paper. The course culminates with an event in which students put a poster version of their paper on display.

This course aims to change the way you think not only about the way that we play games, but also about the way that video games teach their players to behave within their digital worlds. This course will encourage students to reflect on and utilize their lived experiences as players, and utilize these experiences to locate themselves within their analysis and writing as well as their design practices. This course will undertake an intensive, interdisciplinary focus on the history of video game development, representation in video games, and the languages that digital games work in as well as decolonial theory and diverse theories of design. This class will engage with a variety of scholarly texts, video games, media posts, videos, and design exercises, in order to illustrate the ways in which video games have shaped the ways we play, think, and behave within their spaces. Students will be required to write and design around these lessons and address and push back against the problematic behaviors and colonial narratives around violence, race, gender, sexuality, and relationship to the land that these gamic languages and lessons have created.

This course explores the history, meanings, myths, and realities associated with narcotics in the United States. We will consider, for example, the fascinating history of cocaine as it went from miracle drug and panacea (as well as the active ingredient in Coca-Cola) in the early twentieth century to elite party drug in the 1970s to public health threat in the 1980s and 1990s. Through this example and many others, including marijuana’s dramatic shift from illegal to legal substance, we will pay special attention to drugs and social difference, exploring the ways that American ideas about narcotics relate to such matters as race, class, gender, sexuality, ability, citizenship, and nation.

The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimate that 26% of Americans (about 61 million people) have a disability—a physical, intellectual, sensory, or self-care impediment that affects major life activities. This course considers this population, their stories and experiences, as well as how disability—as a social, cultural, legal, and political construct—has shaped the nation and its history. A particular focus of the course will be on disability and social justice. Throughout American history, and still today, disabled people have been excluded from basic civil rights, such as voting, marrying, holding property, and living independently. This course will examine how these restrictions developed and changed over time as well as how disabled people have fought for greater access and equality. Coursework may include response papers, primary source analysis, and a final project.

From early silent films to contemporary video games, media have not only been informed by but have actively shaped our culture, including how we think about sexual and gender minorities, who have always been present in screen cultures. This course examines GLBT/Queer representational practices across a wide variety of media forms. It will cover foundational understandings of both queer studies and media studies in order to provide students with the necessary tools to engage with a diverse array of media texts, including texts such as Life is Strange, The Last of Us series, The L Word, and RuPaul’s Drag Race. Students will discuss and write about both primary sources and theoretical works that ask them to consider the politics of representation as well as the promises and perils of self-representation. This class will feature blog posts, lectures, class discussion, class activities, presentations, and frequent writing assignments to develop critical thinking and compositional skills.

Many approaches to policy, development, and governance emphasize universal goals and patterns. In practice, however, all policies and processes of social development unfold in specific places, at specific historical moments. In this course, we will explore a vibrant body of scholarship from multiple disciplines, called “critical policy studies,” that combines social and cultural analysis with policy studies. Students will learn how to analyze global policy interventions and outcomes as the products of specific communities, cultural contexts, and historical settings. We will examine the history of core categories in policy, like “poverty,” “growth,” “progress,” and even “development” itself. We will then use case studies to explore specific examples of how cultural and historical context shape policy interventions and outcomes. In so doing, students will learn the core methods of critical and interpretive policy studies, in order to develop valuable skills for analyzing how policies are shaped by, and act on, social life in unexpected ways.

This course analyzes the history of television, spanning from its roots in radio broadcasting to the latest developments in digital television. In assessing the many changes across this span, the course will cover such topics as why the American television industry developed as a commercial medium in contrast to most other national television industries; how television programming has both reflected and influenced cultural ideologies through the decades; and how historical patterns of television consumption have shifted due to new technologies and social changes. Through studying the historical development of television programs and assessing the industrial, technological, and cultural systems out of which they emerged, the course will piece together the catalysts responsible for shaping this highly influential medium.

This spring, many of our lives have been transformed by COVID-19, the coronavirus disease now causing a pandemic. As we respond to this crisis and work to keep ourselves and our loved ones safe, it may feel like we are treading in uncharted territory. But epidemics, even pandemics, have a long history in America and have integrally informed the American experience. In this course, we will examine health and disease in America from the pre-colonial period to the present, paying particular attention to how epidemics - smallpox, yellow fever, cholera, Spanish influenza, AIDS, and more - have shaped American history and culture. Epidemics are cultural as well as biological events, influencing everything from governmental policy to market relations to ideas about race, gender, class, disability, family, community, and citizenship. By engaging with a wide variety of historical and contemporary texts - newspapers, literature, medical treatises, cultural artifacts, government documents, among others - we will see how epidemics have been forces of incredible cultural and historical change, shaping the nation today. Coursework may include response papers, primary source analysis, and a final project.

Video Games of the American West will utilize digital games as the primary case studies to examine the modern cultural image, understanding of, and interaction with the "space" of the American West. This class will provide historical understandings of the vast, varied, and often mythologized history of the American West, as well as its place as a cite of continued colonial narratives and hegemonic imagery in contemporary popular media such as film, television, and video games. Through the close-playing of a variety of Western games including installations from the Call of Juarez series, Red Dead Redemption, series, Horizon, series, and many others, students will be asked to apply their knowledge of the historical and contemporary understandings and employments of the West as a physical space and a cultural space to the visual and mechanical recreations of it within the digital realm of video games.

How is a national park different from a national wilderness area, a city park, the lakes at Notre Dame, or your back yard? Why are some considered more wild than others, and why is wilderness such an attractive idea? Writers, historians, painters, photographers, and politicians have described American landscapes as wild to great effect, in concert with identities of gender, class, race, and nation. This class will explore how the idea of wilderness - and the places associated with that idea - have developed during the 19th and 20th centuries. We will examine how wilderness has supported the growth of a national identity but largely failed to recognize the diversity of the American people. Course themes include: 1) developing the wilderness idea; 2) national parks and the problem of wilderness; 3) wilderness experience and politics; and 4) wilderness narratives. Readings will range from Henry David Thoreau and John Muir to Edward Abbey and Jon Krakauer, and there will be a strong visual culture component. For their final project students will choose a wild place of their own to interpret.

Loss of health is a part of life. Medicine is one means by which this part of life is addressed, negotiated with, or battled against. In this course, we will explore the questions surrounding the nature and use of medicine in a variety of historical and social contexts. These questions will include, but are not limited to, the following: What is medicine, exactly? Is it a science or an art? How has the answer to this question evolved over the course of certain histories? Are diseases and medical causes, as typically conceived, mind-independent entities or human constructions? How do our worldviews and philosophical commitments affect what we observe and what we count as evidence? What kinds of medical epistemology are possible? Which ways of knowing should be granted authority? If medicine is defined as the practice of alleviating suffering, whose suffering should be alleviated and whose suffering is justified by the acquisition of further medical knowledge? What does it mean, existentially, to lose one's health? Finally, what should the aims of medical practice be? We will explore these questions in a philosophical manner using a variety of intellectual resources from philosophy, history, sociology, and contemporary medical science.

How has the HIV/AIDS crisis shaped U.S. political culture, public health, and artistic production since coming to public attention in the early 1980s? In this course, we explore the history of the AIDS crisis, including medical, religious, and moral constructions of the epidemic that arose amid heated culture wars debates over gender and sexuality. We look at competing strategies to define and combat the epidemic, from Christian Right leaders who have described AIDS as a divine punishment to public health workers and religious leaders who championed comprehensive AIDS education. We will be especially attuned to grassroots activism that emerged from the communities most affected by the AIDS crisis, including LGBT communities. We explore how AIDS activists drew upon the lessons of feminist, queer, and Black civil rights movements to fight for political and medical resources for people with AIDS. And we will see how art became central to these efforts by exploring how feminist and queer activists and other people with AIDS produced a vast (and still growing) archive of cultural production, including visual and performance art, film, and literary work, through which they processed the grief and trauma of this crisis while forging new political and artistic visions.

This course offers an opportunity for an exploration of arguably the most significant natural and man-made disaster in recent history, an event with critical implications for social and environmental justice. The 2011 Tohoku, Japan, earthquake, tsunami, and subsequent Fukushima nuclear tragedy presents a compelling case study of the challenges to recovery and resilience in the wake of major disruption. Around the world, communities are grappling with unprecedented health, economic, and social challenges during the COVID-19 pandemic - the topic of recovery and resilience is more salient than ever. Building on faculty research and site experiences in Japan, students will examine public reports, scholarly analyses, and community stakeholder testimonials to formulate informed perspectives on the elements of and challenges to community recovery and resilience in the wake of this disaster. Central activities will be determining and assessing specific indicators of resilience, to include socioeconomic indicators, which are often left out of existing analyses that typically focus on infrastructure, and considering the issues of economic and social justice inherent in community preparation for, vulnerability to, and response management of natural and man-made disasters.

This course examines gender and medicine in America from the colonial era to the present. We will explore how gender has shaped medical ideas and practices and how women have participated in health care as providers, consumers, patients, and reformers. We will pay particular attention to how gender has intersected with race, class, ethnicity, and ability to affect health outcomes and highlight the experiences of black, Native, immigrant, working-class, and disabled women.

African peoples and empires have always been at the heart of transformative world events. Their wealth, ingenuity, and power reshaped the medieval global economy. Their enslavement and back-breaking forced labor fueled industrial and agricultural revolutions. Their struggle against western racism and imperialism awakened pan-African consciousness. And today, their creativity and entrepreneurialism drive popular culture and economic opportunity. In this course, we will explore the many ways Africans shaped the history of the world. We will do so by examining primary documents, reading African fiction, watching African films, and immersing ourselves in current trends in Africa.

Sports play a big role in American culture. From pick up soccer and the Baraka Bouts to fantasy football and the Olympics, sports articulate American identities, priorities, aspirations, and concerns. They reflect our dominant values but also highlight our divisions and serve as a means to question those values. Athletes, organizers, spectators, fans, and the media all have a stake. This course will examine sport's role in American society and culture thematically, covering the late 19th century to present and paying special attention to sport as a physical performance (including issues of danger, drugs, disability, spectatorship, and fandom), sport as an expression of identity (the construction of race, gender, class, community, and nation), sport as a form of labor (with issues of power and control, safety, and amateurism), and sport as a cultural narrative (how do writers, historians, and the media attach meaning to it?). We will examine history, journalism, documentary film, and television coverage; topics will range from Victorian bicyclists and early college football to Muhammad Ali. Requirements include reading and regular discussion, a variety of short analytical papers, and a culminating project in which students will choose one course theme to analyze through a topic of their own choice.

In the 20th century, the “Mall” was an indelible component of the American Dream. It was a social, economic, and cultural space that signified American prosperity alongside automobile and home ownership. However, in the 21st century, the mall is no longer the center of conspicuous consumption in the US.  Instead, it has become a site of fiscal crisis, it has been dislodged from the cultural imagination, and it has firmly been replaced by Amazon and Instacart as the premier intermediaries of consumption. While its physical “ruins “have become a dystopic reminder of decline, stagnation, and obsolesce illustrating what happens when capital is injected and then forcibly extracted from the landscape. This course will examine the complex relationship between the “Mall” and American culture through popular culture, print media, digital media, planning and zoning ordinances, retail practices, and technological innovation. From the Mall of America in Minneapolis to The Grove in Los Angeles to The Galleria in Houston, the “Mall” will serve as an entry point to think about America at its current moment. Central to this course will be understanding the roles that technology, consumer culture, and capital accumulation and dispossession play in contemporary US culture.

What is psychic life? The word psyche has encompassed a range of definitions as it has travelled through time, from notions of mind, soul, spirit, and the conscious and unconscious mind, to a mirror, an asteroid discovered in 1852, a moth or butterfly, and anima mundi, "the animating principle of the universe" itself. Today an additional constellation of concepts may also be drawn into psyche's orbit, including brain, emotion, feeling, affect, self, subjectivity, person, ego, and experience. As opposed to terms like "mental health," the concept of psychic life provides a language with which to speak about a range of phenomena across multiple traditions, epistemologies, and histories, without prioritizing any one conceptualization over another or locating the psyche within the boundaries of an individual mind, as distinct from the body and the world (Eileen Barany, cc:d here, has the full course description if you are interested).

Conserving the earth's rich biological heritage while enhancing the well-being of some of the world's poorest people stands as a critical global challenge. This course examines this complex issue using the lens of political science and related fields such as political ecology, gender studies, and sustainability science. It will demonstrate how insights and approaches from these areas of scholarship can help understand and address the twin problems of biodiversity loss and poverty in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Examples will focus on forest and wildlife conservation and management. This course will be of interest to students from a wide range of natural and social science disciplines.

This course serves as a gateway for subsequent coursework in international security. It is a required course in the Notre Dame International Security Center's undergraduate certificate program requirements, but it is also appropriate for, and open to, any Notre Dame students interested in U.S. national security policymaking. It will begin with an account of the history and development of U.S. national security policy from the Founding through the present. Next, it examines the current state of the primary institutions involved in U.S. national security policymaking. Finally, it explores the tools and instruments of military statecraft as applied by the United States. The course culminates with a simulation exercise in which students will role-play key participants in the U.S. national security policymaking process. At a minimum, that students will gain from it the analytical tools, historical knowledge, and current-events background to become more informed citizens, particularly with respect to important national debates about when and how our country should use military force. At a maximum, the course may lead some students to become interested enough in the topic to pursue a career in either the practice or the study of U.S. national security policy. The current draft version of the syllabus is posted at https://www3.nd.edu/~dlindley/handouts/ND_NDISC_cert_gateway_syl.pdf.

The history of Christian Apocalypse is about trying to place humanity in linear time. It is about bodily death, the end of the world, and immortality of the soul. But it is also about rebirth. These concepts have shaped European cultures, societies, and discourse for centuries. Apocalypse has been used to help us make sense of the events unfolding around us, from the turn of the Millennium, to the Black Death, to Y2K and COVID-19. This course will ask where our images of Apocalypse come from, why it exploded in popularity during the Middle Ages, and how those medieval developments in apocalypticism remain deeply ingrained in our world today.

This course examines how oil and natural gas have shaped international relations from the early twentieth century to the present, with a particular focus on conflict. It begins by introducing students to the fundamentals of global energy production, consumption and trade, and then briefly surveys the political history of oil as it relates to the great powers. The course then moves on to contemporary issues, including the political significance of "fracking" technology, the role of the United States in protecting Persian Gulf oil, and the extent to which Russia's dominant natural gas position might translate into political influence in Europe. These and other topics are examined through numerous theoretical lenses, including theories of resource conflict, economic interdependence, political coercion, and petro-aggression.

What does "disaster" mean? In this class, we seek to question, challenge, and comprehend the socio-historical, economic, cultural, spatial, and geopolitical components of "natural" disasters. How are some events deemed a disaster? How do communities recover and reconstruct after events of disaster? As disasters become more frequent and devastating due to global climate change, growing economic precarity and political instability, it is imperative to understand the multifaceted socio-ecological nature of disasters. First, we seek to examine how certain communities are more disaster-prone than others, and how these vulnerabilities to risk, hazard, and exposure have historical, political, and social underpinnings. These same underpinnings impact how people live through disaster, as well as the aftermath that follows the "event"; so much so that oftentimes, it is more accurate to speak of disaster "processes" rather than finite events. This one-credit module will unpack many of these questions alongside critical case studies, drawing from an interdisciplinary array of approaches, ranging from history, anthropology, sociology, psychology, geography, and urban planning. These approaches cover a broad range of methodologies and theoretical approaches that will inform and enrich our critical thought toolbox and, I hope, will prove to be useful even outside the classroom.

The focus of the course will be an examination of the advances in medicine over the last 30 years that have challenged traditional values and ethical norms, and the institutional processes and procedures in place that facilitate decision-making in the health care setting. It will include a sketch of the most recent advances in the various fields of medicine, followed by an examination of the clinical and ethical questions they raise and how they have affected the physician-patient relationship.

What is the relationship between development projects, which often pursue universal goals and scalable approaches, and cultural difference? How does culture shape the impact of development projects? How are development practitioners themselves shaped by culture? In this course, we use materials from anthropology, sociology, and history to explore how development processes shape, and are shaped by, culture. Approaching culture in terms of the meanings, values, practices, and norms that shape social life in both overt and subtle ways, we will focus on how different actors in the development world create and communicate knowledge about social issues and their potential solutions. Along the way, we will draw on different theories about culture, power, and inequality to analyze mainstream development approaches to data, expertise, and social transformation.

Migration is a prevailing global phenomenon that affects millions of peoples around the world. According to the UNHCR report, at the end of 2019, there had been 79.5 million forcibly displaced people around the world. At the same time, refugees and migrants experience migration- and displacement-related physical and psychosocial stress and trauma, which may increase their vulnerability and affects their health and well-being. This course will explore, engage, and analyze contemporary migration flows - movements of people across national and international borders - and the ways human mobility shape refugees' and migrants' lived experiences, cultural meanings, social values, and health. How and why particular modes of mobility are permitted, encouraged, and enabled while others are conversely, banned, regulated, policed, and prevented? How do contemporary forms of displacement may challenge conventional understandings of who gets to be defined and accepted as a refugee? Why do we have so many different categories of people who simply seek refuge? Do these different categories indicate different treatments? How is migration associated with higher levels of mental health disorders among refugee/migrant populations? The course will engage with such questions by focusing on events that occurred in the second half of the twenty-first century in Europe, including both the EU and non-EU states. We will rely on the selected readings and documentaries as they reflect an integrative anthropological approach to migration, displacement, and refugeeness. Taking into account lived experiences, identity, social values, cultural meanings, health, and well-being, we will explore migration, borders, and displacement as a subjective experience and sites of ethical, socioeconomic, political, and cultural examinations and critiques. Topics will include transnational migration, terminology, citizenship, borders, asylum policy, health, and well-being. This course will also enrich your understanding of the fluidity of different categories, processes underlying refugees and migrants' cultural and social tuning, as well as their biosocial responses, resilience, and adaptability under conditions of migration and displacement. The course will be run in a seminar-style, and students will be expected to analyze and debate core readings in class.

Foundations of Conventional War introduces students to the underlying mechanisms and gradual evolution of combat from The First World War to today. The course will frame these mechanisms and evolutions around theoretical bedrock concepts, such as Steven Biddle's "Modern System" and Clausewitz's concept of Friction. Students will learn how these foundational concepts have varied over time due to technological, tactical, and social change. The course will then shift to contemporary conflicts to illustrate how foundational concepts might change due to emergent conditions on modern battlefields such as the current Russian invasion of Ukraine or hypothetical Taiwanese invasion scenarios. Students will produce simple models of combat to demonstrate foundational concepts as a final project.

Destined for War? Great Power Politics after the Cold War: Our world has changed a lot in the last 30 years. From triumphant declarations of the "end of history" after the collapse of the Soviet Union to the mire of the War on Terror, and now with China's rise becoming more evident every day, global affairs has seen its share of ups and downs. This class will focus exclusively on international politics since the end of the Cold War, with specific attention paid to the actions and interactions of the great powers in the system - the US, Russia, China, and the European Union. We will examine how the various theoretical paradigms within the field of international relations seek to explain these events, and evaluate their proposed accounts. By the end of the class, students will possess broad knowledge of world political events that have taken place in the last 30 years and have an understanding of how political science has sought to understand these events.

The goal of the course is to compare the processes by which social scientists and filmmakers/photographers engage in social documentation. Students explore how global social problems such as rural and urban poverty, race and gender inequalities, immigration, and violence are analyzed across the social sciences and depicted in a variety of documentary film and photography genres. The course also explores the role that documentary photography and film play in promoting rights and advocating for social change, particularly in the realm of human rights and global inequality. It examines the history of documentary film and photography in relationship to politics and the development of concerns across the social sciences with inequality and social justice. It also looks at how individual documentarians, non-profit organizations, and social movements use film and photography to further their goals and causes as well as issues of representation their choices raise. The course is unique because it requires students to engage in the process of visual documentation themselves by incorporating an activity-based learning component. For their final project, students choose a human rights or social problem that concerns or interests them (and which they can document locally - no travel is required), prepare a documentary exhibit on the chosen topic (10-12 photographs), and write an essay analyzing how social scientists construct and frame the given problem. Students also have the option to produce a short documentary film

In this course we will examine how different kinds of organizations and institutions (corporations and firms, NGOs and non-profits, economic development organizations, social movement organizations) respond and adapt to cultural differences in a globalizing world. We will begin by analyzing the processes by which the children's educational television program Sesame Street is transformed and spread around the world, and how the organization that creates it builds relationships with its international partners and counterparts. We will then compare Sesame Street to other organizations that translate, locally adapt, and diffuse various kinds of innovations around the world, from products (toys and soap operas) and policies (health care and anti-discrimination laws), to norms and ideas (human rights, peace building, and democracy).

How has the Internet changed the ways people voice their opinions, gather information, and organize social movements? Have marginalized groups become more empowered by mobilizing online? Why does increased social media activity often exacerbate political polarization and populism? How has social media affected national elections? This course will analyze these questions and more within the context of East Asia. In analyzing the impact of the Internet on state-society relations, students will analyze state attempts to control media consumption and surveil Internet-use in Communist regimes like North Korea and China. We will compare these trends with similar efforts made by state actors in advanced industrialized countries such as Japan and South Korea. While the Internet-usage is in many ways, still tightly regulated by the state, the Web has in many ways, also empowered people formerly detached from politics to become politically engaged. This has led to both political polarization (and the influx of political extremist groups), as well as large-scale grassroots movements for democratization. Along these lines, we will examine the growth of far-right "netizen" groups in Japan, South Korea, and China and the subsequent proliferation of hate crimes, populism, and ultra-nationalism. We will also read studies of how teenagers used their presence on social media and the blogosphere to eventually lead large-scaled national protests like the 2016 Candlelight Movement in Seoul and the Umbrella Movement in Hong Kong. Finally, in studying the global diffusion of social protests in the digital age, we will analyze how the #MeToo movement reignited new waves of feminism in South Korea, Japan, and China. What implications does the Internet have for the future democracy?

This course offers an in-depth analysis of the roles of structural and cultural violence in peace studies. Unit 1 (conceptual/theoretical) explores field-formative debates over the nature, basis, and viability of "structural violence" and "cultural violence" as analytical concepts, asking how they have shaped (or failed to, but perhaps ought to shape) the field of peace studies. We will examine their critical appropriations of early critical theory, and assess comparable theoretical approaches such as reflexive sociology (Pierre Bourdieu and Loic Wacquant), post-structural analysis (Michel Foucault), and later critical theory (Nancy Fraser and Axel Honneth) while asking what advantages, if any, lenses of structural and cultural violence have vis-à-vis these resources for peace analysis and peacebuilding, and where they need to be supplemented. Unit 2 (cases/agents) studies cases in which some version of these analytical lenses have been deployed for purposes of peace analysis and peacebuilding. We examine recent uses of these lenses to examine poverty, global development, and global health in building peace (e.g. Nancy Scheper-Hughes, Paul Farmer, Peter Uvin), religious/cultural identity (Veena Das), and race, class, and gender (Joshua Price on incarceration and prison abolition in the U.S; Alex Mikulich and Laurie Cassidy on white complicity in hyper incarceration).

Despite important progress in alleviating poverty in low- and middle-income countries, technological change, automation, and rising levels of training required for employment pose a great challenge for reducing economic insecurity and precarity as well as the future of work in these countries. A major challenge in attaining these goals is the tension between the global diffusion of innovation paradigms and national cultural traditions. This course will draw on concrete examples from countries such as India, Peru, The Philippines, Mexico, Indonesia, and Kenya and on conceptual tools from across disciplines (economics, anthropology, sociology, and history) to provide students with the needed intuitions for examining the interplay between global economic transformations and the institutional and cultural characteristics of emerging societies. Throughout the course, we explore some of the ramifications for racial, ethnic and gender inequality resulting from these global economic changes and from the policy strategies adopted to address them.

This course will examine the representation of medicine in film, still art and texts. The point of view will be to examine the interdisciplinary arts, primarily film plus secondary readings of literary texts, with the goal of broadening the understanding of the lives of patients, families and providers for future health care professionals, particularly physicians. The goal is to heighten the awareness of the world surrounding medical encounters and encourage an open minded approach to people in medical need. Based on Cinemeducation training in medical schools and residency programs, topics examined include delivering bad news, end of life issues, medical malpractice, family dynamics, professionalism, cultural diversity, gender issues, grief, balance of professional and personal life and medical errors. Film clips will be introduced and reviewed with specific discussion points. Strong emphasis will be placed on group discussion, with four short papers, one discussion lead and a final paper.

Modern Japanese history has seen a series of revolutions – in politics and government, but also in science and technology, media, gender roles, and lifestyle. The Japanese people tested, debated, encouraged, and denied the near-constant revolutions they were living through via literature that metamorphosed to resemble everything from millennium-old Japanese romantic poetry to contemporary French travelogues. In this course, students will traverse constantly-evolving territory of modern Japanese literature to see how revolutions affect literature, and how literature affects revolutions.

Plants have provided food, medicine, fuel, and raw materials for humans throughout our history. Concurrently, humans have modified the distribution, diversity and utility of plants for our benefit in ways that are often unsustainable. Many of the grand environmental and societal challenges of today and tomorrow involve our interactions with plants and the pivotal roles they play in our natural and modified environments. The goal of this course is to provide foundational knowledge about the biology and diversity of plants. This includes learning the basics of plant anatomy and physiology and the ecology and evolutionary history of plants. This knowledge is then utilized to discuss plants as sources of food, commercial products, medicines and toxins in the past, present and future of human society."

The study of religious beliefs and practices in tribal and peasant societies emphasizing myths, ritual, symbolism, and magic as ways of explaining man's place in the universe. Concepts of purity and pollution, the sacred and the profane, and types of ritual specialists and their relation to social structure will also be examined.

Science education occupies a unique position among the school-based disciplines. Across many sectors, the perceived role of science education is to prepare students to enter into and succeed in scientific fields. It is argued that if an advanced economy, like the United States, wishes to maintain its economic relevance, than each generation must be prepared to engage in scientific and technological innovation and that school science is responsible in fulfilling this obligation. But only approximately 5% of all occupations are STEM related - what happens to the 95% of students who wish not to pursue STEM careers? What are the needs of an educated citizen in today's society? Although most goals for science education focus on the development of students' understanding of the material world, this focus on canonical science often presents the discipline as a ‘rhetoric of conclusions' rather than a messy, complex, highly creative, and tentative enterprise. The consequence has been that many students are alienated from science, thus undermining one of the fundamental aims of science education. This course explores the complex and contested terrain of policy and practice in science education by focusing on four major themes: 1) The nature of science and the nature of school science; 2) Policies surrounding science curriculum; 3) The practice of science education; and 4) New approaches to science education.

This course offers an in-depth examination of one of the 's most popular media: Japanese animation. Students will study the development of the anime industry and the artistic styles used in anime with an eye toward understanding how this supposedly unique form of art in fact responds to and affects global events and art forms. Students will learn to not only passively watch, but actively see how an anime fits into global currents.

This lecture course examines some of the most important events, ideas, and personalities that shaped late Imperial, Soviet, and post-Soviet periods of Russian history during the last one hundred years: from the outbreak of the First World War and the Revolutions of 1905 and 1917 through the Great Terror of the 1930s, the experience of the Second World War and the emergence of the Soviet Empire, late Stalinism and post-Stalinist developed or mature socialism, the collapse of the communist rule and the disintegration of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, as well as Russia's uneasy transition "out of Totalitarianism" and into Putin's authoritarianism during the first fourteen years of the twentieth-first century. The course is designed for history majors as well as for students in other disciplines with or without background in modern Russian and East European history.

Models of human communication developed in linguistic anthropology have long relied on empirical analysis and cross-cultural comparison of how people talk to other people, and to a variety of non-human “persons” as well. This course examines how anthropologists study communication between humans and non-humans, and how communication helps make persons out of non-humans. The class concerns research on seances and related scenes of spirit possession where the dead speak, talking with animals whether pets or prey, learning spiritual lessons from teacher plants, and contemporary conversations people have with artificial intelligence language models. We compare how anthropologists have asked questions about personhood when considering speech across species boundaries or across divides such as life and death. We ask how communication constructs interlocutors and makes relationships possible, and we consider the commonality and variety among communicative approaches and tactics. We ask if communication with non-humans connects people to other worlds of experience, or if it is more instructive as a projection of our own social life onto others.

This course is designed to provide the theoretical and practical foundation to providing compassionate care in the medical professions. It will provide an introduction to the field of Caring Science and provide the behavioral and attitudinal components to providing effective patient care as well as teaching how practitioners can be balanced in providing patient care. Topics include Caring Science theory, clinician burnout, compassion fatigue, maintaining caring in the encounter with suffering, and physician self-care. While designed specifically for the future medical professional, the course is open as enrollment allows to students in allied helping professions. Class material will include research from medical, psychological, caring science, business, and spiritual sources.

"The Second World War is the largest single event in human history, fought across six of the world's seven continents and all its oceans. It killed fifty million human beings, left hundreds of millions of others wounded in mind or body and materially devastated much of the heartland of civilization." The above quote from historian John Keegan summarizes the significance of studying the Second World War. In this class, students will receive an introduction to the largest conflict in human history, from the origins of the war in Asia and Europe to the postwar settlements that continue to shape the modern world. Class content will focus on the military, diplomatic, and political narratives of the war, while exploring the lived experience of the war through primary source readings. This course satisfies the university history requirement and is open to all students; no previous knowledge of the topic is required.

Fracking, Water Wars, Deforestation of the Amazon, Droughts, Global Warming, Climate Change, Unsustainable Agriculture, Hurricanes, Pollution, Species Extinction, Invasive Species, Poaching, Overfishing, Depletion of Fossil Fuels, Overpopulation, Wastes, Ocean Acidification, Wildfires, Oil Spills, Overpopulation, Overconsumption, Land degradation - the list goes on! These complex environmental problems are occurring constantly and rapidly; their consequences are global in scope and transcend national boundaries; and they embody the complex relationship between humans and the natural environment. This course is about developing an interdisciplinary understanding of the relationship between humans (society) and the environment. We will examine the historical and contemporary environmental challenges of global concern, the underlying role of humans, and attempts by society to address, mitigate, and adapt to such complex problems through policies, institutions, and governance. We will pay attention to the roles of different state and non-state actors in environmental policy making. Overall, students will draw from both the social and natural sciences to develop a deeper understanding of how society - through consumption, culture, politics, power, ethics, values, economic growth, location, etc... contribute to, or solve, environmental problems.

The application of artificial intelligence is expanding rapidly and has the potential to reshape many fields, including transportation, finance, health care, marketing, social media, criminal justice, and public policy, just to name a few. AI's ability to predict human preference and behavior or even substitute human judgement in these fields creates opportunities as well as concerns for safety, bias and discrimination, transparency, inequality, and job loss. Designed to serve students from no background in AI to those who have existing technical background, this course surveys current and emerging applications of AI in different fields and the related ethical issues and governance problems. The course targets students from different disciplines. Students from the humanities and social sciences will gain a deeper understanding of the technical aspects underpinning today's ethical and policy debates related to AI. Students with more technical background will better appreciate the ethical issues that arise in programming and engineering and understand how technology interacts with the broader societal contexts. The course's goal is to encourage students to become proactive in thinking of the societal implications of technological change and to incorporate such understanding in their education and careers.

The French Revolution, along with the American Revolution, is often considered the founding moment of modern democracy. And yet, democracy was not achieved once and for all in 1789. Over the course of the next two hundred years, France went through five republics, two empires, two monarchies, and one (arguably) fascist regime. In addition, it took hundreds of years for the egalitarian promises of the revolution to be extended to all members of French society. This course tells the story of this ongoing experiment in democratic governance—one that continues to this day. It introduces students to the major themes in the political and cultural history of modern France from 1789 to the present, examining how the universalist promise of the Republic has been contested and reshaped through its encounter with colonialism, industrialization, the rise of radical ideologies, religion, war, feminism, and multiculturalism. Course materials are drawn from a variety of sources, including novels, manifestos, political cartoons, films, works of art and philosophy, as well as secondary works by historians.

Between the early rumblings of the Reformations and the last cannon shot of World War I, Europeans profoundly changed how they conceptualized bodies as experience and metaphors. During these four centuries, Europeans grounded the ways in which they interacted with each other and the world in bodily imaginings. On an individual level, the living, human body provided a means of accessing and understanding the material or spiritual world. On a collective scale, the physical body, its adornments, and its gestures provided markers that Europeans used to fracture society along axes of gender, sexuality, class, race, mental aptitude, and even sacrality. Drawing in part from their myriad imaginings of the human body, Europeans constructed metaphorical political bodies. The body politic assumed diverse forms spanning from divine right monarchs to revolutionary republics to modern nation states. Our course will lay bare the human body as culturally constructed, while fleshing out how Europeans' evolving visions affected political imaginings.

Television has been widely available in the United States for only half a century, yet aleady it has become a key means through which we understand our culture. Our course examines this vital medium from three perspectives. First, we will look at the industrial, economic and technological forces that have shaped U.S. television since its inception. These factors help explain how U.S. television adopted the format of advertiser-supported broadcast networks and why this format is changing today. Second, we will explore television's role in American social and political life: how TV has represented cultural changes in the areas of gender, class, race and ethnicity. Third, we will discuss specific narrative and visual strategies that characterize program formats. Throughout the semester we will demonstrate how television and U.S. culture mutually influence one another, as television both constructs our view of the world and is affected by social and cultural forces within the U.S.

Building on recent ecocritical approaches to the discipline of art history, this course will explore human-environmental relations and changing ideas about the natural world from the industrial revolution to the present. Structured around four elemental modules and drawing on a diverse range of visual media including scientific ‘specimen’ prints, Romantic landscape paintings, contemporary photography, and installation art (with works by J.M.W. Turner, Thomas Cole, and Edward Burtynsky), we will discuss natural history, landscape gardening, and land art (earth), global maritime trade, colonial expansion, and its visual culture (water), climate and disease (air), and the impacts of industrialisation and the burning of fossil fuels (fire). Major themes will include interactions between science and art, the global movement of people, ideas, flora, and fauna through colonial networks, developments in environmental theory, indigenous perspectives, materiality (especially as it relates to natural resources), and art as a form of critical intervention. This course will include visits to the Raclin Murphy Museum of Art, the Museum of Biodiversity, and Rare Books and Special Collections. Finally, the course will introduce students to the discipline of art history and its knowledge-making techniques.

Building on recent ecocritical approaches to the discipline of art history, this course will explore human-environmental relations and changing ideas about the natural world from the industrial revolution to the present. Structured around four elemental modules and drawing on a diverse range of visual media including scientific ‘specimen’ prints, Romantic landscape paintings, contemporary photography, and installation art (with works by J.M.W. Turner, Thomas Cole, and Edward Burtynsky), we will discuss natural history, landscape gardening, and land art (earth), global maritime trade, colonial expansion, and its visual culture (water), climate and disease (air), and the impacts of industrialisation and the burning of fossil fuels (fire). Major themes will include interactions between science and art, the global movement of people, ideas, flora, and fauna through colonial networks, developments in environmental theory, indigenous perspectives, materiality (especially as it relates to natural resources), and art as a form of critical intervention. This course will include visits to the Raclin Murphy Museum of Art, the Museum of Biodiversity, and Rare Books and Special Collections. Finally, the course will introduce students to the discipline of art history and its knowledge-making techniques.

This course explores the myriad of national security policy challenges facing the United States and the policy options to address these challenges. The course will explore security issues with Russia, China, Iran and North Korea as well as climate change, global health/pandemics, cyber threats/security and terrorism/extremism. The course will include lectures by policy experts and student engagement with these experts to explore policy options and their potential for success. Students will conduct research of primary source policy documents to develop a policy memorandum for the US National Security Council that will outline a policy challenge for the United States and recommend policy options for consideration.

Since the eighteenth century, Europeans have grappled with a number of transformative events and developments, from the French Revolution and the birth of an industrial economy, to catastrophic wars and the rise and fall of European empires. In the process of making sense of these events, they produced works of philosophy, political theory, art, and literature that continue to shape the way we understand our place in the world today. This course introduces students to the history of European thought from the Enlightenment to the present, a period that birthed the many great "isms" that have defined the modern world: liberalism, socialism, nationalism, feminism, existentialism, totalitarianism, and colonialism. Course readings will be drawn from a range of primary sources, including novels, works of philosophy, political treatises, films, and works of art, as well as secondary sources by historians. By reading these two kinds of sources together, we will explore not only how ideas and works of art were shaped by the historical context in which they were produced, but also how they themselves shaped the course of European history.

An introduction to the economics of the environment and natural resources. Topics include externalities, market failure, cost-benefit and contingent valuation analyses, climate change, and public policies related to environmental and natural resources

An introduction to the economics of housing, with particular attention to issues of homelessness and the low-income housing market. Topics includes economic models of homelessness, housing subsidies and regulations, housing market filtering, concentrated poverty and neighborhoods effects, and public policy responses to housing problems.

This course examines the late 20th and early 21st century 'economic miracles' of several East Asian countries and the political, social, and spatial factors underpinning them. We will explore similarities, differences, and interdependencies in the development trajectories of Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and mainland China, and will debate how accurate and useful concepts like "the developmental state" and "state capitalism" are in describing the political economy of the region. To what extent has China's economic rise followed the existing playbooks of its East Asian neighbors? What human costs and developmental distortions have accompanied booming industrial and urban growth? And what lessons does East Asia's experience offer for the contemporary developing world?

Over the last two decades, there has been a groundswell of interest in global health across multiple disciplines and professional fields. The field of global health recognizes the multidimensionality of health as well as the interconnectedness of everyone living in the world today; its primary goal is to eliminate health disparities to achieve health equity for all. This course will provide foundational knowledge necessary to understand what global health is today; its history and evolution; how social theory contributes to understanding specific global health problems; the importance of understanding health and designing interventions by using a biosocial model that includes a myriad of cultural, social, political, economic factors; and an understanding of the role of various actors on the global health stage including international, bilateral, and civil society organizations.

Social Entrepreneurship has sparked dialogue and debate for two decades. Its very definition is much debated, as well as its capacity to create sustainable, scalable, systems-changing impact. This course explores the theoretical concepts, practices and strategies associated with the dynamic discipline of social enterprise and innovation. For our purposes, social entrepreneurship is the landscape, of which paradigm-shifting solutions like microfinance, MSME (Micro-Small-Medium Enterprise) development, bottom of the pyramid, fair trade, impact investing, and the like, are components. This course will study many of these concepts, focusing on their opportunity for social impact, and as a vehicle for wealth creation in vulnerable and disenfranchised communities across the globe. Further, the course covers examples of various social enterprise models (for-profit, non-profit, hybrid), requiring students to analyze and devise strategies to improve the efficacy of these ventures. Finally, the course engages students in research seeking to advance the field of social entrepreneurship at the Keough School of Global Affairs and Notre Dame.

This course examines how economic analysis can be applied to various components of the health care system. Microeconomic theory is used to understand the operation of health care markets and the behavior of participants (consumers, insurers, physicians, and hospitals) in the health care industry. International comparisons and the role of the public sector are discussed.

This course introduces the foundational theories of human-centered design (HCD), its critiques, and the subsequent development of design principles, followed by a practical, hands-on exploration of HCD methods. It approaches design as a broadly applicable practice across multiple domains, including – but not limited to – social innovation and computing for social good. The course is organized into four modules. The first module examines the foundations of HCD, its critiques, and its evolution toward community-driven, value-aligned, and justice-oriented approaches. The next two modules provide hands-on experience in design research, prototyping, and reflection, where students learn to integrate technical, ethical, and social insights into actionable design strategies. In the final module, students will address real-world design challenges drawn from domains such as global development, sustainability, and public policy. The course welcomes students from the social entrepreneurship and innovation minor, global affairs, computer science and engineering, poverty studies, business, public policy, science-technology-values, and peace studies who are interested in designing for social impact.

Can humans live and work successfully on the Moon? This course will endeavor to address this question by informing the students of what we have learned about our nearest celestial neighbor during and since Apollo. This will include details about resources that could be used to build, maintain and grow any human field station that is set up, and would discuss the criteria for the location of such a station. The first series of classes will be the traditional lecture format to get the baseline data imparted to the students. The next segment of the course will be team discussions to address a series of questions where the class will divide into teams and work on a solution to a particular question as part of their homework. They will present their results in subsequent classes and will be graded on this. The final lecture will be a Capstone to tie together the results of the semesters work.

This course is designed to introduce students to a wide range of health issues affecting women globally, with particular emphasis on Africa, Asia, and the United States. The topics will focus on a woman's life, from infancy and childhood, through adolescence and reproductive years, to old age. We will examine the physiological, social, psychological, economic, cultural, political, behavioral, and environmental factors that influence women's health, and the role of poverty, discrimination, and unequal health access. Topics such as determinants of women's health, reproductive health, sexual health, cardiovascular health, maternal health, cancers of the reproductive tract, mental and emotional health, substance use and abuse, and various forms of violence against women will be discussed. At the end of the course, students should have a solid grasp of key issues affecting the health of women in different cultural contexts globally, and how women can be empowered to take actions that positively influence their health.

This course introduces the role of economics in environmental issues and in the formation of environmental policy. Topics covered include choice, externalities, market failure, cost-benefit and environmental valuation analyses, and climate change. The course aims to encourage students to think about pressing environmental issues in economic terms and equip students with the diverse set of economics tools to contribute to the evaluation and implementation of wise policy choices. There is no prior knowledge of economics required, and students will have the opportunity to learn basic economic principles and frameworks that guide decision-making regarding environmental issues.

In many societies around the world, culture plays a major role in health and wellbeing. This course will provide a global overview of how society and culture influence the health and wellbeing of people, with discussions on strategies for health promotion and awareness that are sensitive to cultural settings. Focusing mostly on developing countries, we will examine the ways in which different aspects of culture, such as gender and social norms, values and belief systems, and religion influence health, with particular emphasis on physical health, mental & emotional health, and sexual & reproductive health.

This course examines how economic analysis can be applied to various components of the health care system. Microeconomic theory is used to understand the operation of health care markets and the behavior of participants (consumers, insurers, physicians, and hospitals) in the health care industry. International comparisons and the role of the public sector are discussed.

Explore the responsibility inherent in using, creating, and developing new technology. Students will begin with the following questions: What is justice? How does Technology promote or reduce justice? Does it do both? We will engage these questions through ancient frameworks such as the thinking of Plato and through modern frameworks outlined in Catholic Social Teaching. We then turn to the question of what scientists and engineers owe their creations, which we address through engaging with the classic literary work, Frankenstein. Finally we will look into the relationship between technology and economy through the lens of community. We will ask how we actually create meaningful change and what systems are at play. We will read the work of technology ethicists and economists as well as moral theologians. Technologies and economies work together and against each other to create community; we will explore how to create and promote a just future.

This course seeks to explore connections between environment and culture change by introducing students to the diversity of cultures living in the Southwest. We begin by learning about indigenous people living in the Southwest today including the Pueblo peoples (e.g., Hopi, Zuni, Santa Clara, Cochiti, Acoma), Navajo, Ute, and Tohono O’odham using ethnography and contemporary native histories. We will then travel back in time to learn about the complex histories of these people, particularly the ancestral Pueblo, to places like Chaco Canyon, Mesa Verde, the Rio Grande, the Mimbres Valley, and the Phoenix Basin. Our explorations will cover from the earliest Paleoindians (11,500 years ago) to the 13th century Migrations to European contact, the establishment of Spanish Missions, and the Pueblo Revolt of 1680-1692. We will then bring this discussion full circle to today. Along the way, we will explore the impact of large-scale, long-term processes such as the adoption of agriculture, village formation, religious change, migration, and warfare on the rich historical landscape of the Southwest.

Urban civilization as we know it was born in 19th century Europe. Rarely have the bright and dark sides of progress been so starkly juxtaposed as in the cities immortalized by Charles Dickens, Victor Hugo, and Fyodor Dostoevsky, with their railroads, department stores, and other modern wonders, but also their slums, cholera, and ubiquitous coal smoke. Those cities were the first to confront the challenges that cities have faced ever since: How can a government unify the people, police the streets, and preserve a livable environment? How can society organize itself to build infrastructure, develop the economy, integrate immigrants, educate the young, and uplift the poor? How can everyday men and women share in the city's wealth and freedom without succumbing to its cruelty and alienation? Through modern scholarship and through fiction, journalism, images, and other sources from the period, we will explore the grimness and the glory of the 19th century European city. This course is a research seminar. Each student's main activity will be to write an extended research paper on a topic of his or her choice. We will spend weeks 1-6 acquiring an overview of the subject, and developing topics for research papers. Weeks 7-10 will be devoted to analysis of different types of sources and scholarship. During weeks 11-15, students will work on their papers and make presentations to the class about their research.

This course focuses on selected legal and policy issues related to K-12 education in the United States. A central theme is the intersection of K-12 schooling and the state, with a particular focus on Constitutional issues of religious freedom and establishment, student speech and privacy, parental choice, educational opportunity, and education reform trends such as charter schools and accountability measures. Questions examined over the course of the semester include: What are the most basic obligations of the state with regard to its regulation of K-12 education? What are the most basic rights of parents in this regard? In what ways does the 1st Amendment protect - and limit - the speech and privacy rights of K-12 schoolchildren? In what ways may the state accommodate K-12 schools with an explicitly religious character? What are the Constitutional requirements with regard to religious speech or expression within K-12 public schools? To what degree is the principle of equality manifest in the form of educational opportunity? How has this changed over time? In what ways have education reform trends such as charter schooling and increased accountability changed the policy landscape of K-12 education?

This course provides a multifaceted look at one of the most dynamic and pivotal eras in US history, the legacies of which we are still living with today. During the 1970s American society weathered tumultuous changes in politics, economy, and culture generated by unprecedented upheaval at home and abroad. Moving chronologically through the decade, we will assess large-scale forces that recalibrated American life, developments related to deindustrialization and globalization, for instance, as well as geopolitical contestations over oil, nationalism, and the Cold War. We will also pause to detail and analyze key turns in different sectors of American society. Topics addressed will include the energy crisis and environmentalism, stagflation and the ascent of Wall Street, working-class malaise and the decline of organized labor, Watergate and the fragmenting of American politics, the emergence of the culture wars and religious right, Title IX and feminist and civil rights activism, disco, punk rock, and the Hollywood Renaissance.

This course explores the history of American sport in global context. American football was one of a number of sports (including soccer, rugby and various "football" games) that emerged from common roots. Ice hockey began as a Canadian sport but grew popular in parts of the United States by fusing Canadian talent and management with American capital. Basketball was invented in Massachusetts by a foreign-born educator who viewed physical education as a religious calling, and his creation grew internationally, with the international game developing important differences from the American game. Since the time of sporting goods baron Albert Spalding, businessmen and politicians have used sport to try to market specific products, the American way of life, or a diplomatic agenda. Alone among the industrial nations, the United States developed a talent-development system centered on schools and colleges, with distinctive results - both for the athletes, and for higher education. This course will consider these and other issues.

Few American regions have generated as many cultural narratives, myths, and icons as the American West. Exploring conflicts and conquests alongside Western culture and the creation of the mythic West, we will examine the West through the multiple perspectives of the many peoples who have lived there. Using novels, histories, first-hand accounts, art, and film, we will trace the history and culture of the West. While discussing the evolution of the West's regional identity, we'll explore topics like episodes of violence and conquest, the creation of the US-Mexico border, the rise of national parks and tourism, and the West Coast's counterculture. In this course, we will investigate how violent frontier battles and brutal discrimination became tamed and commodified to sell the West to Americans through fashion, film, and tourism. This course is open to all students; no previous knowledge of the topic is required.

This class considers the environment's role in shaping history. We will discover how our stories of the past change when we include microbes, pigs, and the climate, alongside of more typical subjects like presidents, wars, and ideas. We will ask what nature has meant in the past to a range of people, from the Comanche on the Great Plains, to settler-farmers in New England, to coal miners in Colorado. Throughout the course we will also ask the question: What is nature? And how have ideas about nature changed over time? A premise of this course is that nature is not something "out there," but in fact is everywhere. Thus, we will explore a robust set of thematic topics that will illumine the the varied meanings of "nature": the ways it is constructed, how ideas about it have changed over time, how it surrounds us, nourishes us, has been used to justify violence and racism, how it impedes on our lives.

This course gives students the opportunity to learn more about how Americans have thought about criminal responsibility and how their ideas have changed over time. Historians contend that the 19th century witnessed a transformation in the understanding of the origins of criminal behavior in the United States. The earlier religious emphasis on the sinfulness of all mankind, which made the murderer into merely another sinner, gave way to a belief in the inherent goodness of humankind. But if humans were naturally good, how are we to explain their evil actions? And crime rates varied widely by sex and race; European women were said to have been domesticated out of crime doing. What do those variations tell us about a common human nature? The criminal might be a flawed specimen of humankind born lacking a healthy and sane mind. Relying in part upon studies done in Europe, American doctors, preachers, and lawyers debated whether insanity explained criminality over the century and how it expressed itself in different races and sexes. Alternative theories were offered. Environment, heredity, and free will were all said to have determined the actions of the criminal. By the early 20th century, lawyers and doctors had largely succeeded in medicalizing criminality. Psychiatrists now treated criminals as patients; judges invoked hereditary eugenics in sentencing criminals. Science, not sin, had apparently become the preferred mode of explanation for the origins of crime. But was this a better explanation than what had come before? Can it explain the turbulent debates in the late 20th and early 21st Centuries over variations in crime rates by race? Can it explain why men, not women, are still more likely to commit murder?

Alcohol Use Disorder is a chronic relapsing brain disease. But when presented on screen, it's entertainment. Why do we laugh, why do we cry, why do we emulate fictional characters whose drinking habits result in a life of debilitating addiction? From James Bond to Jonah Hill, the psychology and seduction of alcohol on film, television, and online will be analyzed. Furthermore, what is the relationship between the manner in which alcohol use/abuse is presented on screen and the manner in which alcohol is used and abused on, for example, college campuses? Surveying recent film history, we will examine how alcohol is used in story structure, as a character flaw or strength, and as a narrative device in the story arc of films across multiple film genres, (teen rom-coms, sports films, etc). Why do characters drink, where do they drink, and how does the result of their "getting drunk" advance the narrative? We'll also look at non-fiction media that tackle issues of addiction, as a way of comparing character development in fictional films to the results of this same behavior in everyday life. Film materials will include weekly screenings outside of class, and academic articles relating to the portrayal and analysis of alcohol use in film and television, including the business of marketing alcohol from social media to televised sports. From the psychological perspective we will discuss the topic and process of social influence and how the presence of others influences our behavior. Questions of interest will include the following: what are the mechanisms by which group influence unfolds? How and why might we be persuaded? Does the manner, and if so how, in which alcohol use is portrayed in movies and the media reflect the processes and principles of social influence? Readings will include chapters on social influence, persuasion and academic articles evaluating the manner in which alcohol is portrayed and advertised and the effect this has on alcohol consumption. In addition, issues of addiction will be discussed - from understanding the basis of addiction to examining the efficacy of addiction treatment.

The journeys of human beings into space have captivated the imagination but have also raised significant ethical issues. As the human presence in space for research, recreation, commerce, and possible future habitation becomes more frequent and the goals of space exploration more clear, the urgency of addressing the ethical issues surrounding the human presence in space has also increased. This course begins with an examination of theological understandings of the origin and meaning of the cosmos across a number of different religious traditions, with a particular focus on Christian theological account of creation. The second part of the course reviews the various ways that human beings have approached and are considering the human presence in space, including lunar exploration, commercial exploitation, and possible habitation. The third part of the course considers the ethical issues associated with space commerce, and the course concludes with a comparison between past sublunary colonizations and as-yet-unrealized space colonizations.

Disability is a key aspect of human experience, and this course will examine its importance and complexity from a feminist perspective. Students will investigate cultural meanings and representations of disability, social justice and human rights issues, and current bioethical debates about autonomy, care, and physical and mental difference. These will enable students to think critically about conventional conceptualizations of the body, mind, and self. Some of the topics covered will be disability and the family, the disability rights movement in America, the human-technology interface, and more.

This course will offer students a rigorous and lively encounter with multiple energy sources and their manifold effects on American society, from the mid-nineteenth century to the present.Recent political developments in the US offer plenty of reasons for a course of this sort, one that can contextualize contemporary debates over energy-related matters such as global warming,national security, federal regulation, and sustainability in broad sweeps of change over time. Yet The primary goal of this course will be to provide a history of energy on its own terms. One Cannot grasp the complexities and entanglements of modern life in its entirety without first coming to terms with the ways humans demand, consume, and interact with energy - and in turn,the ways it shapes and reshapes our social structures, realigns our lived and material infrastructures, and even dictates cultural values and trends.We will interrogate these values and structural outcomes with the help of path-breaking scholarship - books and articles about coal, petroleum, electricity, and nuclear energy that not only chart their development over time, but also reveal the ways in which, at key junctures in the nation's past, they forged new patterns of labor and race relations, corporate and community growth, state governance and land-use policy, gender and religion, regional growth andAmerica's global reach. Moving from the Civil War to the present, from the oil patches ofwestern Pennsylvania and West Texas to American petroleum sites in the Middle East - from the electrification of east-coast cities in the late nineteenth century to the damming of western rivers for hydropower in the early-twentieth, this course will give students the opportunity to ponder past and present energy systems within prisms of vast societal impact.

According to many, environmentalism and feminism go hand-in-hand. What is the basis of this theoretical and political claim, especially given the complexity and evolution of feminism and environmentalism as both political movements and theoretical categories? How did this alliance emerge historically and what has it looked like across different communities and nations? Do feminism and environmental justice ever find themselves in tension? How has non-human nature been conceived of as gendered (e.g. "mother nature", masculinization of wilderness) and what implications flow from that for how human beings experience gender? How might feminist conceptions of freedom, gender, and ethics inform environmental politics and policy? In this interdisciplinary course, we will examine these and other questions in order to understand and evaluate contemporary discourse around climate change, ecology, intersectional feminism, and environmental ethics.

This seminar explores the dynamic and complex history of medicine in the United States, from colonial times to the present, with a focus on how race, gender, class, and geography have shaped medical practices, healthcare institutions, and public health policies. Medicine in America has never operated in a vacuum? It has both shaped and been shaped by broader social structures. The course critically examines how medical authority was established and legitimized, often at the expense of marginalized communities, and how those communities have responded and resisted.

Women's health is a multidimensional paradigm. The purpose of this course is to provide a global perspective on selected topics in women's health. Women's health conditions, programs, and services in developed and developing countries will be explored. Global women's health issues will be discussed within context of race, ethnicity, culture, class, and societal roles. The combination of lecture, media viewing, guest-speakers, readings, class discussions, other learning activities, and assignments are anticipated to prompt critical thinking and discovering of topics that will not be covered in this course for the students' future development as scholars, researchers, and global health leaders and advocates.

Digital technologies present many opportunities for people to work, play, and find community online, but there is a persistent desire to unplug and avoid the ire of social media, information overload, and mass surveillance. Abstaining from technology involves actively assessing how a given tool may enhance, detract from, or reconfigure one’s values, whether that be for reasons of privacy, health and wellbeing, leisure, community, or others. This will look different depending on the context: the traditional lifestyle of Amish communities, the neo-luddism movement, Catholic contemplative practices, and “digital detox” trends each have something unique to say about the potential to abstain from technology (even if only temporarily or unsuccessfully in some cases). How do we identify when a tool is working for or against our needs? What are some strategies to reclaim mindfulness and agency over the barrage of social media and generative AI? What are the potential affordances of making more attention in non-digital spaces? At the same time, is it possible to develop an ethical stance on refusal when we are living in a digital society that appears nearly impossible to disconnect from? This course will explore perspectives from human-computer interaction, media studies, philosophy, theology, and psychology on what it could mean to rethink digital engagement not as a default but a deliberate choice. Students will be asked to complete oral and written communication assignments and engage in debates and discussions about the topics at hand.

Life - its ordering, management and optimization - has been a central concern of the modern state. Thus biological knowledge is inherently political - not in the sense of "political" that dominates current American discourse (crudely interest-driven and ideological), but in the sense of being implicated in the processes of governance. This course explores the intersection of biology and politics, dedicating equal time to analyzing the governance of life at the level of the individual and the population and the politics of biological knowledge production. We ground the theoretical discussion of biopolitics in a close examination of an empirical case study focusing on an important issue in global health, which students play a role in selecting.

This course will use Food and Beverage and Agriculture industries to unpack a wide range of topics to provide a broader view and understanding of the sustainability challenges faced by the companies today, the innovative approaches to address sustainability as they work toward future sustainability goals, and how companies make short/mid/long term business decisions as they strive to make sustainability a part of the company's values and long-term strategy. A deep dive into the consumer evolving mindset toward sustainability will expose consumer motivations, needs, and "demands" the consumers place on the business and how business can effectively communicate their commitments, track the progress, and communicate back to the consumer to gain their trust.

According to many, environmentalism and feminism go hand-in-hand. What is the basis of this theoretical and political claim, especially given the complexity and evolution of feminism and environmentalism as both political movements and theoretical categories? How did this alliance emerge historically and what has it looked like across different communities and nations? Do feminism and environmental justice ever find themselves in tension? How has non-human nature been conceived of as gendered (e.g. "mother nature", masculinization of wilderness) and what implications flow from that for how human beings experience gender? How might feminist conceptions of freedom, gender, and ethics inform environmental politics and policy? In this interdisciplinary course, we will examine these and other questions in order to understand and evaluate contemporary discourse around climate change, ecology, intersectional feminism, and environmental ethics.

Generative AI is a form of computing in which computer systems generate media such as text, images, sound, video, or combinations based on prompts or other information provided to the computer. These systems, including, but are not limited to, ChatGPT, Midjourney & DALLE, have been evolving rapidly and have led to extreme excitement, confusion, and fear. This course provides a survey of how to understand and use a number of these tools including explorations in prompt engineering as well as addressing issues from across the liberal arts including artistic, economic, social/psychological, educational and legal concerns and opportunities.

As an Integration course, students successfully completing the class will have fulfilled a University core curriculum requirement. Reflecting an integration of key considerations from the disciplines of Economics and Business Ethics, the course will allow students the opportunity to examine the complexities of climate change, public policy, environmental and social sustainability, and impacts on global economies and communities. Economics will provide the foundation of knowledge of labor market structure, market failures such as externalities, taxation, migration decisions, discrimination, and income inequality measures. The management approach will address business in practice, and organizational and societal dimensions of effective and ethical business. Topics will include climate change; resilience and its measures; climate change-driven migration around the world and its impacts on labor markets and the business environment; ethical frameworks for guiding business; stakeholder analysis; environmental justice and the disproportionate effects on communities by socio-economic status, race and gender; and regulation and international agreements. Students will participate in experiential activities in real-world contexts, examine indicators of societal resilience, present relevant data in a compelling way through individual and team projects, reflect understanding through assessments including quizzes and exams, and present a policy proposal, all reflective of an integrative approach.

In the last decade, the field of artificial intelligence (AI) ethics has been receiving significant attention in academic, professional, and public discourses. AI ethics research not only faces and attempts to counter a variety of sociotechnical issues relating to algorithmic decision making, mis/disinformation, and fairness, accountability and transparency, but also must reckon with broader social, political, and economic forces. To engage with these conversations, this course will introduce modern AI and technical aspects of predictive systems, discuss the underlying social and political assumptions of AI development, analyze current and future impacts of AI on humanity and the environment, and consider the significance of these conversations in everyday terms. Through the lens of AI ethics discourse, students will learn to analyze persuasive arguments, describe genres, norms, and values of communication, and understand concepts including perception, expertise, meaning making, and responsibility. Students are asked to complete oral and written communication assignments, engage in debates and discussions, and participate in experimental research-creation workshops to think critically about the AI ethics issues at hand.

This course is intended to introduce students to both the practice and social implications of data science, with a focus on social science research methods. The semester is broken into two halves. First, we will learn to use R, a statistical programming language, to transform, analyze, and learn from data. During the second half of the semester, the course becomes more discussion-focused as we investigate the role of modern data collection and analysis in society at large. Readings explore topics such as algorithmic criminal sentencing, chatbots, and the use of data analysis for mystical purposes. Students will leave the course with the skills to independently perform the fundamentals of data science.

The course adopts an entrepreneurial perspective in exploring the role of business in helping to address the poverty challenge in developing and developed economies. The multi-faceted nature of poverty and its implications when it comes to business and entrepreneurship are explored. Attention is devoted to venture creation as a pathway out of poverty, and to how the larger business community can be leveraged in poverty alleviation efforts. Students will examine case studies and meet low income entrepreneurs.

In her book, The Art of Death: Writing the Final Story, Edwidge Danticat states that "we are all living dyingly." The concept of death and/or dying is part of our collective and shared experience. It presents us with the larger possibilities on how to live, how to experience, how to persevere, and how to change. In this course we will examine the politics of trauma, disaster, and memory. We will read across genres in fiction, essays, and poetry in order to write work that contemplates memory as a locus for resilience. We will look at how writers are grappling with some of the more pressing issues of our time i.e., climate change, natural disaster, femicide, colonialism, war, among others. Students will write prose that looks to redress what it means to "live dyingly."

In this course, we will study the novel challenges of the digital economy. The course will begin with economic concepts and issues related to the network industry structure, in particular market power analysis and the appropriate regulatory and antitrust responses. Policy issues related to net neutrality, network access and the "digital divide" will form the next segment of the course. The exchange of personal information for access to "free" networks will then be examined from both an economic and policy perspective. We will conclude by comparing and constrasting various international approaches to the digital economy.

In this course, we will study the novel challenges of the digital economy. The course will begin with economic concepts and issues related to the network industry structure, in particular market power analysis and the appropriate regulatory and antitrust responses. Policy issues related to net neutrality, network access and the "digital divide" will form the next segment of the course. The exchange of personal information for access to "free" networks will then be examined from both an economic and policy perspective. We will conclude by comparing and constrasting various international approaches to the digital economy.

This course will survey historical scholarship on the development of American cities and suburbs from World War II to the present. Making use of primary and secondary sources, and print and visual media, we will seek to understand what defines American cities and suburbs, how the idea and ideals of cities and suburbs have changed over time, and what forces have shaped the places in which we live today. We will explore how a metropolitan approach to modern American history sheds light on major events, movements, and transformations of the twentieth century along thematic lines of race, class, and education; politics and protest; modernity and religion; gender and sexuality; ethnicity, immigration, globalization, and citizenship; urban crisis, renewal, and gentrification; and urban sprawl and environmentalism. Course objectives include learning to analyze and interpret primary sources, including written texts, film, photographs, and the built environment; to read secondary sources critically and effectively; to identify significant people, places, and events in twentieth-century American urban, social, and political history; to recognize major changes and continuities in postwar urban history; and to place contemporary issues and debates in historical and cultural context.

How do the contemporary film and television industries work? How can an analysis of the "business of entertainment" enable a greater understanding of contemporary media aesthetics and culture? This course will explore these questions by focusing on the structure, practices and products of America's film and television industries, and students will engage with academic readings, screenings, trade publications, current events, guest lectures, and written and oral assignments in order to understand the activities of the film and television industries. By the end of the course, students should be able to understand prominent practices employed by media conglomerates and independent companies today, recognize the ways in which industrial structures and practices can shape media products, and examine how television shows and movies are influenced by business strategies. The course should be especially beneficial for students intending to pursue scholarly or professional careers related to film and television through its comprehensive overview of how these industries work, why they work as they do, and the broader practical and theoretical implications of media industry operations

Sociological theory is the foundation of sociology. Students in this course will learn two things: first, what theorists do and why and, second, how to use fundamental theoretic concepts - such as exploitation and alienation, social structure and solidarity, bureaucracy and charisma - to analyze and explain contemporary society.

Sociology 30902 is designed to provide an overview of research methods in the social sciences. Topics covered include (1) hypothesis formulation and theory construction; (2) the measurement of sociological variables; and (3) data collection techniques - experimental, survey, and observational. At the end of the course, students should appreciate both the strengths and the limitations of sociological research methods.

This course examines the financial and economic tools that support sustainable solutions to social challenges, with a focus beyond traditional government aid and philanthropy. Students will explore the rapidly expanding fields of impact investing and microfinance, evaluating their roles in advancing social entrepreneurship, broad-based wealth creation, and equality of opportunity. Topics include emerging approaches to microcredit, the benefits and limitations of financial innovations, and the role of public policy in fostering effective initiatives. Through a combination of case studies, critical analyses, and applied projects, students will engage directly with real-world challenges such as poverty alleviation and inclusive economic development. No prior background in business or finance is required; the course is designed for students from all disciplines who bring curiosity, creativity, and a commitment to social problem-solving.

The aim of this class is to try to understand what conquest, as we have traditionally called it, meant to the people who experienced it in some parts of the Americas that joined the Spanish monarchy in the sixteenth century. We'll concentrate on indigenous sources - documentary, pictorial, and material - and try to adopt the indigenous point of view, without neglecting sources mediated by Europeans. Although the class will concentrate on selected cases from Mesoamerica, the lecturer will try to set the materials in the context of other encounters, both within the Americas and further afield; and students will be free, if they wish, to explore case-studies from anywhere they choose in the Americas (in consultation with the lecturer and subject to his approval) in their individual projects.

The difference between rich and poor nations is not, as Ernest Hemingway once said, that the rich have more money than the poor, but is in part because the rich produce more goods and services. Industrialization, in other words, has often brought wealth (as well as social dislocation and protest) to those who have succeeded. This course examines the process of industrialization from a comparative perspective and integrates the history of industrialization and its social consequences for Western Europe (Britain and Germany), the United States, Latin America (Mexico), and East Asia (Japan and South Korea). We will concentrate on these countries' transition from agriculture-based societies to industrial societies. We will analyze the process of industrialization on two levels from above the role of political authority and from below a view of factory life, industrial relations, and protest from the perspective of workers and the working classes. No specific prerequisites in history or economics are necessary.

We'll try to see the world whole - looking at genuinely global historical experiences of the last five hundred years. Our aim will be to take the broadest and most comprehensive perspective we can imagine; we'll look not only at every kind of human culture in every part of the planet, but also, for the sake of comparison, at the start and end of the course, at the societies of other, non-human cultural creatures. We'll focus on two stories: first, the mutual impact of human beings and the rest of nature; and, second, the effects human societies have had on each other in an era of accelerating world-wide contacts between cultures. The purpose of the course will be to identify and probe the main themes of the history of the world in the last half-millennium, equip students with a historically informed awareness of global connexions and inter-actions in a globalizing world, and to ask whether (and, if so, how) global history relates to current problems in social policy, international relations, and ethical debate.

This course surveys the recognition and response to mental illnesses as a component of the history of western medicine. Topics include the integration of physical and mental illnesses in classical medicine, the great ages of nervousness in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the emergence and cultural role of psychodynamic psychiatry, the asylum and subsequent deinstitutionalization, and the modern era of psychoactive medication. We consider multiple perspectives - those of states and communities, professions, institutions and charities, families and sufferers. Our focus will not only be with "madness" per se, but with broader questions of mental incapacity - with conditions known as melancholia and neurasthenia, as well as feeble-mindedness and dementia, and finally the set of issues we now face.

Food feeds culture. It nourishes societies as well as bodies. No discipline is intelligible without it. It provides economics with products, physiology with sustenance, social sciences with classes and relationships of power. and intellects with food for thought. Food´s also essential in ecology. Our most intimate contact with the environment occurs when we eat it. From interdisciplinary perspectives, we´ll approach the history of food in all cultures (including, by the way, those of non-human cultural creatures) in all periods that we can say something about, from the origins of carnivorism and cannibalism through famines and fushion to the food-related environmental problems of the future. There may even be time to explore cuisines.

This class examines the history of engineering in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and its relationship with capitalism and development on a global scale, with the use of digital tools. Engineers came to design, implement, and manage nearly all elements of the modern world from their positions within corporations and state bureaucracies; they quickly became the primary agents in development in the 20th century. We will examine the history of engineering, introduce students to basic tools in data science, digital humanities, and data visualization, and students will develop data-intensive research projects using the skills they have learned. The class is designed for students from both Arts & Letters and STEM disciplines as a window onto historical methods and an introduction to using qualitative data for analysis and data visualization. There are no prerequisites. This course emerges from a three-year NSF-funded research grant to the instructors, which includes a commitment to develop new undergraduate courses on the subject and the development of open access course materials. Student projects from this course are eligible for inclusion in our global dataset and for hosting on the project website.

This course will explore the evolution of war in modern history from the fall of Constantinople in 1453 through the present. Content will center upon the relationship between war, technology and society. Central themes will include the military revolution debate, the rise of western Europe, the military origins of modern state, and the challenge of technological change to stable international orders. Students will learn how the evolving conduct of war has shaped the structure of modern societies, and vice-versa. Individual class sessions will explore important moments of conflict and technological innovation. Some class sessions will center on paradigm-defining conflicts, such as the Thirty Years' War or the Second World War. The course will conclude with explorations of new themes in modern warfare, from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq to the rise of drone and cyber warfare. This course satisfies the university history requirement and is open to all students; no previous knowledge of the topic is required.

"No one under 30 has ever lived through a month of global temperatures below the 20th-century average." Why bother with history if the future, because of climate change, will be nothing like the past? That's the central question of this course. Scientists now tell us that the relatively benign epoch of human flourishing designed the "Holocene" is over. The change is so great and so rapid that some scientists have even proposed a new epoch called the "Anthropocene" to designate this irreversible rupture with the previous 11,700 year when human beings first discovered agriculture, created cities, and developed writing systems' when most of what historians have called "history" occurred. To confront this dilemma, this course asks three questions: (1) What is the "Anthropocene" and what are scientists telling us about this epoch which began by most accounts in the mid-twentieth century with the Great Acceleration in economic activities and population growth? (2) What does history show us about how we arrived at this crisis? Historians have long been interested in political and economic questions about power, state structures, democracy, and development, but have they sufficiently considered the relationship between their own stories of modernity and the dilemmas we now face? (3) Were there political and economic formations in the past more conducive to environmentally sustainable communities and can historians now help by uncovering them? The readings combine scientific debates over the "Anthropocene" with historians' work on sustainable communities from Victorian England and early modern Japan. We end by reading the famous novelist and anthropologist Amitav Ghosh's The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable. Ghosh will be speaking on campus April 4.

In ancient and medieval texts the soul is the principle of life, of sense-perception, emotions, passions, rational thought and ethical behavior. Throughout history, the investigation of the soul has been special in two ways. First of all, we are not addressing an external topic; we are treating ourselves. Secondly, this study of ourselves is not merely meant to describe and analyze, but to change and to form. Ancient philosophers thought of their work as "care of the soul". The soul is not a mechanism or machine, but something living which can err and go wrong. Pre-modern authorities often described this in the terms of sickness: The body may be sick and need the help of the doctor, and the soul may need therapy if it is sick. In the course, we will address a selection of texts and topics from ancient and medieval sources (Plato, Aristotle, Galen, the Stoics, Neoplatonic authors and Christian authors from Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages), and compare them with select contemporary texts. What constitutes a healthy soul? What are the sicknesses of the soul? What therapies are recommended? How can one build resilience and how much resilience is right? What role does gender play? The course will also integrate lectures/discussions with practicing therapists and a field trip to "mindworks" (Chicago Museum of Cognitive Psychology).

Social Inequality, Digital Divides, and Algorithmic Literacy: How differences in technology access and skill impact individuals and society In the years following its inception, utopian narratives of the Internet promised unfettered access to information, markets, and relationships that would allow users to create wealth and contest power structures by building platform-based enterprises and values-based virtual communities. While some of these benefits have accrued to individuals and society, a significant body of research demonstrates that the reality of the Internet's impact on the world is much more complex. Grounded in key sociological texts, this course focuses on empirical research concerning how "Digital Divides" - differences in individuals' access to, participation in, and benefits from using the Internet - exist on geographic, demographic, and socioeconomic dimensions. It also examines the important role skill and literacy play in mitigating these differences, and takes up the nascent understanding of algorithmic literacy, the increasingly critical knowledge set people need as they navigate the many facets of everyday life now powered by artificial intelligence. As part of the course, students will learn how to critically evaluate empirical social scientific publications and also compose their own literature review concerning a topic related to the course theme.

By helping us step back to see humans as primates, mammals, vertebrates, and beyond, evolutionary theory provides a framework for understanding many aspects of our day-to-day lives that shape the health and well-being, including weight gain-diet, psychosocial stress, immune function, sleep patterns, risky behavior, and child development. But, increasing evidence from the exciting field of "developmental origins of health and disease" suggests that our biological and behavioral patterns are far from being determined solely by our genes. Our early life contexts, from before birth, and possibly even the experiences of our parents and grandparents in prior generations influence how our brains and biological systems function, including how genes are expressed, and thus impact our health and behavior. This course will bring these dynamic perspectives together to answer questions regarding why we get sick, how our bodies flexibly respond to the world around us, and the inheritances we receive from our ancestors.

In 1987, the Soviet Union was the largest political entity on the planet. Four years later, it had vanished from the map entirely. In this interdisciplinary course, you will learn about the ‘new Russia’ that has emerged in the three decades since this stunning collapse. Drawing on an array of resources in English translation, you will explore the politics, media, and culture of the post-Soviet period: from the lawless years of the “wild 90s” under Boris Yeltsin to the return of totalitarianism under Vladimir Putin and his brutal invasion of Ukraine. In so doing, your study of contemporary Russia will lead us to discuss some of the most pressing questions in global politics today. What is the nature of truth and power in Putin’s dystopian propaganda state? Should the current leadership in Russia be described as a fascist regime or neo-Soviet? And, perhaps most importantly, how did Russia’s democratic experiment ultimately end with the launch of the largest war in Europe since 1945—and what lessons might this failure hold for America and the rest of the world?

Visual anthropology involves the cross-cultural study of images in communication and the use of images as a method for doing anthropology. This course proceeds through a non-linear integration of visual themes including water, earth, light, fire, flesh and blood with analytical themes including aesthetics, poetics, violence, history, materiality and subjectivity. We explore still photography, film, and popular media in domains from ethnography, social documentary, war photojournalism, to high art. Students watch, read and write about, and generate visual products of their own in multiple media.

How do animals relate to non-human animals across cultures? Does culture make a difference in how humans relate to animals and the natural world? What are the roles that animals play in different societies - as food, as religious figures, as companions, as kin, as laborers? From its origins as a discipline, anthropology has examined human-animal relations in a variety of social and geographic settings. This course will review some of the classic examples of cross-cultural relations with animals, and bring these examples into conversation with current debates about race and classification, animal ethics, biotechnology, and food politics. Students will engage with texts, films,and other media from anthropology as well as philosophy, history, and feminist science studies. We will approach these materials from an anthropological perspective that focuses on how our diverse and dynamic expressions of identity and culture shape, and are shaped by, how we engage with other species - whether as beings to think with, live with, love, kill, and/or consume.

This course explores the interaction of thinking and action for justice, of cognitive science and social change. In this contested moment, how might we examine the ideas with which we think as we envision social transformation and work toward solidarity and the common good? We will draw from psychology and neuroscience to understand how to overcome attribution errors, implicit bias, and motivated reasoning in work to promote justice. We will examine how assumptions about knowledge and our theories of mind impact our communication and work, and explore epistemic justice (who is invited to the table of knowledge). We will explore, in seminar format, means to promote intellectual humility, ethical imagination, practical wisdom, and commitment to action. Students will be encouraged to learn through experience and community engagement, and apply the lessons of the course in their own journeys.

This course will draw from multiple perspectives to foster a deep appreciation of human development and flourishing. Human development is complex and fragile, yet many splendored. Assumptions about human nature and capacities have critical and moral implications for how we create institutions (family life, education) and systems (policy, government). e challenge is to develop an integrated and ecological understanding of development in the context of human flourishing. We will begin with research in positive psychology on human development, considering the growth of reasoning, identity, moral imagination, and behavior. We will broaden the frame to include understanding of human capabilities from the perspectives of faith (including the principles of Catholic social teaching), culture, and work. Students interested in social change will benefit from a deeper understanding of human development and related research, discussed in a seminar format. Students will draw from their own developmental journeys and current engagements while exploring means to foster human flourishing in future contexts.

This course provides an introduction to the emergent field of social studies of data-intensive analytics for the examination of how "things are done with data." The goal is to cover a wide range of examples and practical applications to introduce questions of design and implementation, privacy and surveillance, as well as governance and stewardship of digital tools and infrastructures. Following the performative aspect of data, we will explore social, technical, political, and economic dynamics that involve data extraction, sharing, literacy, and analysis. From little to big data practices, we will examine at the interface level the professional and institutional applications, development histories, and current political economy of data to situate ourselves as engaged technologists and researchers, not detached critics or passive users. There are no prerequisites for this course: no previous experience in statistics or programming is needed, but independent study of the supplementary materials we provide is highly encouraged.

Vengeful spirits, foxes that turn into alluring women, green and red ogres, Godzilla, and Pokémon: these are some of the monsters that have spooked and beguiled Japanese people across time. This course explores how medieval legends and local histories of monsters and gods play an important role in identifying and resolving social anxieties throughout Japan's cultural history, from the 8th to the 21st century. The materials we will examine include literature, manga, film, and anime, in addition to scholarly essays and historical texts.

As an emergent field of ethnographic theory and methods, design anthropology involves talking to people, figuring out what they want, and creating ways to improve our shared lives. These practices are focused on developing ideas and forms based on people’s needs while anticipating conscious practice and considerate use. Design anthropologists create potentials for future selves, anticipating projected needs and transcending potential limitations. This seminar introduces the emerging phenomenon and ongoing merger of the anthropology of design. It integrates sources in design anthropology, ethnographic design, cultural marketing, and other applied methodologies. We will engage with theoretical discussions, analytical approaches, practicing exercises, and portfolio development to explore the holistic depths of this nascent field.

An array of diseases plague our human population and the number is ever-expanding. It is critical that we understand how societal structures influence when and how we all get sick. When we understand problems more fully, then we can make real change. In this course, we will examine the framework for disease causation. We will then examine various ways to respond to or control disease and consider how these responses could be improved from a basic research, medical, structural, and governance perspective. This is a space to think about what is causing poor health and to ponder current national and global structures that are in place to address it. There is no one right answer for how to control the diseases we will talk about, but there are more complete ways to understand them. This course will be mostly discussion and group-project-based because multidisciplinary approaches require multidisciplinary teams.

Students in today’s information age are consuming greater amounts of quantitative information on a daily basis than ever before. This information comes in many forms and typically involves large data sets that tell “number stories” such as social media activity, politics, global health concerns, and educational achievement. How those number stories are displayed, numerically, text narrative, or graphically holds both power and peril. In this course, we will consider the evolution of visual displays of quantitative information, analyze the characteristics of visualizations, and explore the ways in which the interaction between data and design influence the communication of a number story. These ideas will be investigated through the lens of societal issues and student learning.

Is sushi a high or low class food? What makes a cuisine a national dish? How does food tell us a story about the changes in a society? These questions and more will be answered in our course, where we will examine the history and cultural representation of food in Japan. The sources of our inquiry will range from classical cookbooks to short stories, comedic films to scholarly articles. As part of the coursework, students will learn how to cook a Japanese dish and how to order from a menu in a Japanese restaurant.

Japan is renowned for its modern comic book genre "manga," but humorous and action-packed visual-verbal stories populate its literary history. This course examines a specific period where the urban culture of Edo (modern Tokyo) is colorfully expressed in playful literature and woodblock-prints. We will examine questions of status and class, sexuality, materialism, and the role of technology in shaping the book. As a hands-on project, we will learn Edo period woodblock carving techniques and, as a class, publish our own comic book!

This one-credit, interdisciplinary course is an exploration of the question: What is the relationship between healthy, sustainable communities and the principle of the Common Good? Beginning with an introduction to basic principles of environmental justice, students will explore how the equitable and culturally appropriate distribution of environmental benefits and burdens serves the aim of community health and the common good. Reflective conversations and community visits will shape how students engage questions about the links between health disparities and disproportionate exposure to environmental pollution. Students will leave this course with a foundation of knowledge to address issues at the intersection of health, poverty, sustainability, and justice. Please note: This course satisfies the pre-requisite requirements for any of the Washington Policy Seminars.

Traditional strategies to fight against poverty, inequality and climate change have proved ineffective in the last decades. New and creative solutions are required where cutting-edge technological innovation and multidisciplinary work serve the common good. In this course, you will explore the state of the art in AI business development and its ethical implications in relation to current global societal and environmental challenges. You will reflect on your individual role in society and develop critical thinking about the current socio-technical value system. Our readings will include original works of philosophers, economists and computer scientists as well as examples of state-of-the-art AI supported business and institutional projects. As a result of the readings and class discussions, you will acquire well-informed understanding about the implications of the AI Trustworthy principle of justice and fairness, including non-discrimination and avoidance of unfair bias. You will become aware of the potential for AI to contribute, if well managed, towards fairer and more sustainable societies as well as the dangers it entails to widen inequalities and aggravate the discrimination suffered by vulnerable communities. This is a hands-on course where you will be ideating and planning projects for the social good. I will accompany you in the development of business plans where ethics is the driver and AI is the key instrument. I will help you define your project idea in line with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (UN SDGs). Therefore, your projects will be designed to work towards mitigating poverty, reducing gender and race inequality, combating climate change, improving the sustainability of cities and communities, ensuring affordable and clean energy, achieving responsible consumption and production, improving the quality of education, providing better health and well-being services, ensuring decent work and economic growth or promoting peaceful and inclusive societies. The goal of the course is to encourage and support you, as new entrepreneurs and future leaders, to work in multidisciplinary teams and develop interdisciplinary skills, being able to take advantage of new technology to create and manage projects for ethics in action.

This course explores ethical issues posed by the internet and online communication systems. The primary aim of the course is to identify ethical issues related to the internet and reason through different engineering, design, and policy solutions. Students will be introduced to standard normative ethical theories to provide them with a solid theoretical grounding that they can use to better understand and make sense of the applied ethical topics that will be the focus of the course. Topics covered include (but are not limited to) internet censorship, surveillance capitalism, echo chambers, fake news, online shaming, online anonymity, the digital divide, the right to be forgotten, the ethics of hacking, the metaverse, and intellectual property rights in the digital age. By the end of the course, students should be able to analyze and evaluate philosophical arguments well as write formal philosophical essays.

What happens when computing moves into new spaces of engineering, science, and medicine? In this course, students will engage with ethical questions at the intersection of computing and biotechnology as a launching pad to consider additional ethical dilemmas in other areas of engineering and propose solutions to them. This course will be grounded in an overview of the philosophy of technology and tech ethics. The focus will then shift to contemporary ethical challenges within biotech work, including big data, computational biology, and artificial intelligence. Finally, we will look toward the future and examine how technology may support a future worth wanting. The course will ask big questions such as: how does technology shape the way we see ourselves and others? Students will be equipped to reflect seriously on these topics by reading contemporary think pieces, academic journal articles, short fiction, and political theory. This course will prepare students to engage with the practical and intellectual challenges of an ethically engaged tech career. This signature course is part of the Ethics at Work Project.

What happens when computing moves into new spaces of engineering and science? In this course, students will engage with ethical questions at the intersection of computing and biotechnology as a launching pad to consider additional ethical dilemmas in other areas of engineering and propose solutions to them. This course will be grounded in an overview of the philosophy of technology and tech ethics. The focus will then shift to contemporary ethical challenges within biotech work, including big data, computational biology, and artificial intelligence. Finally, we will look toward the future and examine how technology may support a future worth wanting. The course will ask big questions such as: how does technology shape the way we see ourselves and others? Students will be equipped to reflect seriously on these topics by reading contemporary think pieces, academic journal articles, short fiction, and political theory. This course will prepare students to engage with the practical and intellectual challenges of an ethically engaged tech career. This signature course is part of the Ethics at Work Project,

According to several popular narratives, Artificial Intelligence is either about to be the most transformational influence on human culture since the Industrial Revolution, or an over-hyped set of diffuse technologies and systems with only superficial relation to each other. In this course, students will consider AI from several different disciplinary perspectives in order to make sense of both the narratives and the science surrounding it. These perspectives include computer science, the history of technology, philosophy, AI ethics, and science fiction. By taking up these different perspectives, students will develop vocabularies for talking about AI and, importantly, for thinking about its future.

Global Health is an interdisciplinary field that requires the integration of lived experiences and narratives into health discourses. The premise of SHAER is to establish a theoretical platform for the development of story-telling interventions in Global Health. SHAER is embedded into the meanings of health and suffering related to distress and disease from various contexts that are the landscape of global health research and practice such as health system development, humanitarian health efforts, conflict and disaster settings, and the universal human right to health and justice. The concept of SHAER has been developed as part of a research collaboration with an international network to develop a traditional story-telling trauma therapeutic intervention for gender-based violence and conflict-related trauma. Collective collaborations from trauma studies, psychiatry, literature, political and social science, philosophy and ethics produced a manual for a storytelling intervention in Afghanistan, Kashmir Valley, and Turkey, which embodied storytelling traditions and cultural histories of what a story means and who are the storytellers. This course will foster the principles and premises through which SHAER are founded on, namely the need to create spaces for marginalised narratives through humanities-based methodologies to improve global health practice and research, including other relevant health fields such as medicine. The course offers the pedagogical aspect of the theoretical frameworks of storytelling and narratives from literary perspectives. Another important aspect of the course is the learning of skills related to health interventions. Through a collaboration with an arts foundation, the students will learn how to propose and form a storytelling intervention. Students shall have the opportunity to choose a particular cultural context of their interest and form a student engagement activity through the facilitation of the arts foundation, Invisible Flock, and to apply the theoretical knowledge to an applied aspect of global health.

In an age where ‘identity politics’ figures as both an accusation and a creed in public and private spaces, a careful and critical examination of how we construct our individual and collective selves is more important than ever. Science and technology are crucial resources in these identity formation projects, serving as fundamental structuring elements of our world. They are crucial in shaping not only our physical environment but the very conditions of possibility within which we construct our collective and individual identities. This integration course is an exploration of the ways that the practice of science and the production and marketing of technology supply the material that gets taken up in the work of identity formation, focusing on two closely linked technoscientific domains: neuroscience and genetics.

This course will introduce students to important topics in the history of modern medicine in the Western world, tracing the changing experience of health, disease, and the healing professions in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. While broadly chronological, the course will also be organized topically, particularly for the twentieth century, and will address both the content of evolving medical knowledge as well as its social and political contexts. Possible topics include: hospitals; asylums and mental health; the development of bacteriology; transformations in surgery, such as the introduction of anesthesia and antisepsis; the rise of public health; the intersections of gender, race, and medicine; the growth of the modern drug industry; and case studies of individual diseases, such as syphilis and HIV/AIDS.

Animals are everywhere in North American history. From the living room to the back alley, animals created history on their own and with humans help. Steeds bore generals into battle while rats bore fleas with diseases that flattened armies. This course will introduce students to animal studies and offer them a sampling of the manifold ways non-human creatures drove economies, shouldered burdens, entered families, and entertained audiences. The topics covered in the class will include co-evolution, the fur trade, people eating animals and animals eating people, pet keeping, animal symbolism, and endangered species. The course invites students to see North American history anew through the eyes of a race horse, a sled dog, a passenger pigeon, a grizzly bear, or a field mouse.

This course is an upper-level history seminar aimed at exploring the history of space flight from political, military, diplomatic, technological, and cultural perspectives. It begins with works of imagination - like Jules Vernes? From the Earth to the Moon - that inspired the early generation of rocket scientists, like Konstantin Tsiolkovsky and Robert Goddard. It then traces how the military utility of modern rockets, first mass produced for use as a weapons system in the First World War, turned the new science into a key strategic competition between Germany, the Soviet Union and the United States in the 1930s. From Germany?s V-2 rocket program to the missile race of the 1950s, the course then explores the strategic impetus behind the highly militarized space competition of the early Cold War. Following the success of Apollo, the strategic aims and goals shifted, and resources drained away from the American and Soviet space programs; readings will then explore the role of spaceflight in intelligence gathering and science diplomacy. Following the Cold War, competition in space seemed to be at an end, but the privatization revolution and growing strategic competition with China and Russia have given birth to a new space race, with targets including the Moon and Mars. In sum, students will address the key question: why space? How has the human imagination, technological change, and strategic necessity driven humanity into orbit, to the moon, and beyond?

The new wave of technologies, such as robotics and AI, will have long-lasting impacts on the labor market. Jobs will be displaced, new tasks created, different skills demanded, teams reshaped, and new management practices will emerge. Organizations and the broader economy will also change. These technologies may benefit and disadvantage workers unevenly, potentially increasing inequality. Education and training systems, along with the institutions that support them, must adapt. At the same time, demographic challenges driven by aging populations and declining fertility will significantly affect labor. How will these forces shape the future of work, and how should we prepare for them? How might the meaning of work evolve, and what policies will be needed to ensure the dignity of workers? We are entering a new era of increasing uncertainty regarding labor and work. Addressing these challenges requires a holistic understanding. This course will be interdisciplinary—grounded in economics but also drawing on insights from history, philosophy, public policy, computer science, and related disciplines. The goal of this course is to provide students with a framework for understanding and analyzing how new technologies like robotics and AI are affecting and will affect the labor market. Students will (1) read and discuss both economics and less quantitative materials, (2) conduct original research by collecting and analyzing data on the labor market, and (3) experiment with AI agents to gain firsthand experience of the future of work. Ultimately, students will develop perspectives on how cognitive and physical AI may impact jobs, occupations, income distribution, and social institutions. They will also consider how education, training, and redistribution policies can help mitigate the disruptions created by technological change.

“Climate and Environmental Justice” is a lecture- and discussion-based class primarily targeted at undergraduates. It is designed to introduce you to the core and crucial concepts of climate justice and environmental justice, with a particular emphasis on existing legacy injustices and the injustices we are currently creating as environmental pollution, climate change, and human systems interact. We will discuss existing patterns of burden, inequality, poverty, and threats to human dignity, and discuss opportunities and mechanisms to repair and avoid injustice. In particular we will discuss environmental injustice as a widely experienced but largely localized experience of disproportionate burden (e.g., on the basis of race and class) associated with extraction, industrialization, and non-greenhouse gas environmental pollution, alongside climate injustice as a global and emergent phenomenon of severe and disproportionate impacts from climate change. We will address concepts of reparations and remediation, as well as governance and other strategies for enacting justice. We will also address links between climate and environmental justice with related movements focused on adaptation, energy, housing, transportation, health, and land. Our focus will be both domestic and international, with attention directed to power dynamics, vulnerabilities, and opportunities for corrective action. Climate change and the energy transition will be major themes given their deep relationship with both climate and environmental justice, particularly as processes of industrialization and deindustrialization associated with decarbonization proceed. Overall, the course will focus on patterns, drivers, and opportunities for corrective action associated with severe injustices associated with climate change and environmental burden.

Among mammals, invested fathers are incredibly rare, and in most species mothers get no assistance when raising offspring. Thus, to the extent that many human fathers help raise their children, humans are an exceptional species. Yet we know that there is great variation within our own culture and across cultural boundaries in the way that humans cooperate to raise offspring to adulthood. This provides the opportunity to explore many important questions regarding fatherhood and the way humans raise their children from an anthropological perspective: What role did fathers play in helping to propel our species to evolutionary success (there are 6+ billion of us and our hominin relatives are extinct, with Great Apes moving towards extinction)? Or were grandmothers the key to our success, with men being more cads than dads? We know that mothers respond physiologically to pregnancy, birth, and breastfeeding, but have evolutionary processes also shaped men's biology to respond to parenthood? How does fatherhood affect men's health? Regardless of whether fathers mattered during human evolution, do they matter now, to the well-being of their children and their partners? Nearly half of all men in this country become fathers before age 45, is fatherhood considered a component of masculinity and manliness? Should it be? These questions and more will be explored through a evolutionary anthropological gaze on the world of fathers, past and present.

MATERIALS FEE. The course develops an understanding of what data means to humans and how does its visualization helps communicate ideas in the fields of medicine, technology and social sciences. The course touches upon measurement, collection and reporting, analysis but ultimately focuses on visualization. Visualization is when the data comes alive and is ready to be used to communicate a complex concept be it numeric, spatial, process or temporal. Types of data covered in this course include but are not limited to: geographical, cultural, scientific, financial, statistical, meteorological, natural, and transportation data. The goal of the exercises within this course is to understand how data can be used to tell a story as opposed to merely packaging and plotting a set of numbers on a page. The design process is therefore exploring the static, dynamic, interactive or 3-dimensional and performance formats of representation and understand why a certain format is more or less suitable for the nature of data, its analysis and therefore its representation. Students develop an understanding of how the graphics being used must correlate completely with the data and numbers that are being represented. The course traverses through these considerations to understand the various approaches that can be used to bring data to life and allow the viewer to understand a story that is being packaged within the representation. Is there revelation or a deeper understanding of a pattern once your data has been visualized and presented that had not been discovered earlier?

Why do weight lifters wear lifting belts? How does athletic training and diet differ between endurance athletes and strength athletes? What are the sex-based differences in athletic performance? What impact do supplements and performance enhancing drugs have on athletic performance? Through the use of peer reviewed research, popular media articles, podcasts, and film we will answer these and many other questions within the field of exercise physiology. The course will be split into two broad units: 1) Powerlifters and 2) Marathoners. Topics covered will include cellular metabolism, muscle physiology, training programs, response to training, basic nutrition, body composition, some methodological exercise testing, supplements and performance enhancing drugs, recovery, fatigue, and activity in extreme environments. Through this use of mixed media, we will also discuss how the media misrepresents and misreports exercise physiology studies, making us all more discerning consumers of information.

“How did assaults on science become the norm–and what can we do?” asks a recent Nature article. This class brings together the tools of science communication and social studies of science to tackle this question. The question will structure the course, beginning with an exploration of what’s driving the public loss of trust in science and its institutions centered on the case of vaccines. We’ll then focus on practical solutions, drawing on the field of science communication to develop strategies and skills tailored to student’s particular disciplinary needs.

This course has two basic objectives. First, it examines from a lifespan and psychobiological perspective the factors that place individuals at different stages of life at risk for illness and assist them in maintaining their health. In addition, it addresses a variety of challenging psychological and social issues that physicians and other healthcare professionals must face in the practice of medicine. The course covers a range of topics dealing with health issues related to different stages of human development (childhood, adolescence, and adulthood), disabled populations, culture and gender, stress, physician-patient interactions, death and dying, professional ethics, and social policies relating to health care. The course is primarily intended for students intending to enter medical school. Most classes will involve brief formal presentations by the instructors and invited guests, followed by discussion of assigned readings pertinent to the day's topic. In addition, students will be exposed, through a limited practicum, to a variety of medical settings.

This course will explore the efforts to reduce biological phenomena to physical explanations the in the modern and recent period in the efforts to gain a physical understanding of life. The course will be divided into 5 sections: (1) Early Modern discussions (Harvey, Descartes, Newton); (2) The development of “organic” physics around 1800 (Lavoisier, German biophysics); (3) The debates over mechanism, vitalism and holism in the early 20th century and the impact of the “new” physics (Loeb, Driesch, Niels Bohr, Schrödinger); (4) the foundations of “molecular” biology (Jacob, Monod, Delbrück, Watson and Crick; systems theory); (5) Toward a “Phenomenology” of Life (Husserl, Hans Jonas, Robert Sokolowski). STV Students will be asked to complete two take-home midterm examinations and a written final. HPS graduate students will be asked to make a class presentation, complete a take-home midterm, and write a paper.

This course offers a multidisciplinary introduction to the vast variety of theoretical approaches used to understand media and technologies. From film, TV, and videogames to computers, internet, and social media, we will study different methods and concepts that help us understand our mediated condition(s) better. Moving historically and geographically, we will also encounter the many ways in which the term 'media' itself gets deployed and critiqued in scholarship across humanistic and social scientific disciplines. We will plug some of these (critical) theoretical understandings of media and culture into the longer histories of politics, philosophy, language, and literature, considering, for example, books as media technologies. And finally, we will ask what studies of media and mediation can do for our comprehension of the politico-economic, sociocultural, racial, and environmental crises surrounding us today.

Global health is an area of study, research and practice that focuses on achieving equity in health for all people worldwide. The health status of individuals and populations arise from a myriad of complex biological, social, economic, political, and environmental factors that operate synergistically. Through a social justice lens, we will examine how these factors shape health outcomes and how interventions must be developed that include addressing the root causes of inequity. We will use a case-based approach, focusing on specific health problems in several countries, including the United States. Cases will include a variety of themes including health disparities arising from stress-associated racial discrimination, the epidemiological transition from infectious to non-communicable diseases, and how the health effects of climate change disproportionately affect the most vulnerable.

New technologies reshape our lives and our world at an ever-accelerating pace, often for the better, but sometimes for the worse. Anxiety grows ever more acute that we have passed a tipping point beyond which intentional, human control of technology development is impossible. But we must assert such control as we can. An emerging body of philosophical literature proposes different mechanisms for doing that. Starting from deep philosophical reflection on the nature of technology, itself, and the manner of its social and cultural embedding, this literature moves on to assay the many urgent ethical questions posed by such technologies as synthetic biology, artificial intelligence, robots, autonomous systems, and nano-scale engineering. Contributors to this literature often conclude with proposed, general policy-making frameworks and specific policy advice. This course will survey the most important such literature. The course is designed for advanced undergraduates and selected graduate students. It assumes no specific background, beyond a good undergraduate preparation in philosophy, with, perhaps, some focus on ethics and some ability to digest a modest amount of technical information.

Almost all crimes, or even human interactions, contain a digital component. The fact that "old" laws don't always fit "new" problems is no more apparent than in the area of cybercrimes. This course will include discussion of topics including: the methodology of typical cyber investigations, the application of the Fourth Amendment to digital evidence, and different types of cyber-specific laws enforced today. The course will also focus on the responses of both courts and legislators to the ever-evolving issues presented by computer crimes.

“Life Cycle Assessment” is a lecture- and practicum-based class primarily targeted at graduate students. The class is designed as a once-per-week session where we will spend about half the time on lectures and the other half on hands-on activities to practice LCA. The class is designed to introduce you to Life Cycle Assessment as a method for evaluating environmental, and social impacts of products, policies, systems, and services, with a focus on International Standards Organization (ISO)-compliant LCA. We will primarily be using OpenLCA, with some exposure to alternative tools. This course will particularly focus on LCA practice in the context of policy development, with emphasis on LCA’s role as a decision support tool. We will address the implications of LCA and related methods being increasingly required in policy contexts (e.g., for prioritizing grant recipients and allocating tax subsidies). We will also address the challenges associated with disparities in the maturity of various life cycle methods, most notably social LCA in comparison to environmental LCA and life cycle costing. We will evaluate published LCAs in forms like Environmental Assessments and Environmental Impact Statements, and also investigate the use of life cycle thinking and LCA for Environmental Product Declarations. The course will also emphasize the role of LCA in the energy transition, particularly given LCA’s strong role in greenhouse gas accounting, and explore how both technological and climate dynamics pose challenges for LCA practice. This course is primarily a methods course, and we will work through case studies and examples together both in and out of class, with a topical emphasis on energy, buildings, and climate due to LCA’s particular relevance in those areas.

Over the past decade, network television producers have reimagined the situation comedy with great success by utilizing mockumentary film techniques. This course will examine the ever-changing boundaries between fiction and non-fiction film and television by analyzing a series of works which question these discrete categorizations. We will consider canonical examples of documentary and the challenges posed to these known forms by pseudodocumentary and other media which reveal the devices used to establish cinematic realism. We will also explore a selection of film and television work which ascribes to realist modes of representation while subverting this approach. Issues such as testimony, performance, reflexivity, and ethics will be addressed in an effort to deepen the complex discourse of realism in visual media.

Since the dawn of history, human beings have been telling stories about their origin and destiny. From the Dreamtime of Aboriginals to the gods of the Hellenes, Norse tales to Abrahamic revelations, our ability to weave imagination and reason, tradition and experience, has underpinned our collective identity and shaped our history. Today, we are increasingly turning to science to tell these stories of origin and destiny. Concepts like entropy and evolution are giving us cosmic and biological arrows of history, one inexorably tending to disorder, the other to ever-increasing complexity. Unfolding across a series of identifiable thresholds, the budding field of Big History combines our nature as storytellers with our skill as scientists to provide a coherent narrative of life and the universe from the big bang to the present, offering what has been called a new creation story for our time. What tale does Big History tell, what sources of knowledge does it draw on, in what ways does it challenge traditional beliefs, and what futures does it imagine? Bridging the chasm between C.P. Snow's Two Cultures of the sciences and humanities, this interdisciplinary course engages big questions about religion, nature, science, culture, and meaning through great books in popular science with the help of theoretical contributions from science and technology studies. The class welcomes non-scientists who are interested in acquiring scientific literacy as well as scientists seeking to acquire religious and social science literacy. We will look for the best descriptions of nature available to us today (the "is") to draw inspiration for unique insights on how to be (the "ought"). The readings and discussions of this class will provide global citizens in the twenty-first century of diverse religious, theological, or philosophical persuasions a common framework of the past, a sense of presence in the Anthropocene, and conceptual tools to imagine a shared future.

This class examines the intellectual, practical, and social dimensions of medicine in the ancient and early Christian world. We will focus first on the nature and development of ancient medical thought, especially in the writings of Hippocrates and Galen. What were its dietetic, pharmacological, and surgical practices? What diseases did patients have? How did doctors understand disease and practice their craft? What instruments did they use? Then, we will turn to the early Christian world to see how this knowledge influenced miracle narratives, dietary regimes, and the reputation for holiness. Finally, we will examine the birth of the hospital as a monastic institution.

The concept of the "commons" has returned to the focus of socio-environmental research, politics, and theorizing with recent debates on climate crisis and justice. From the late 1960s debates on environmental degradation and overpopulation to the present concerns with social change, economic degrowth, and global warming, the "commons" has returned as a key symbol for social analysis, political organizing, and collective resource management. Since then, various currents have claimed and reclaimed the concept under the guide of "communality," "conviviality," "common-pool resources," and the "common" as concrete alternatives to public and private modes of governance. In the past two decades, the concept has been central as well for the discussion of the "digital commons" with decentralized, community-based governance of online resources. In this seminar, we will map out key definitions of the "commons" to examine socio-technical and socio-environmental alternatives to existing enclosures across a wide range of examples (including, but not limited to land, tools, forests, lakes, heirloom seeds, potable water, fish stocks, software, hardware, and much more). The seminar will be organized around presentations by students and guest speakers, followed by debate of concepts, case studies, and methodological approaches in socio-environmental and digital commons research. We welcome advanced undergraduates and graduate students working on environmental research technologies, climate change, conservation, and sustainability to join the seminar.

This course explores how social media and other new technologies are profoundly reshaping the world, impacting democratic institutions, social cohesion, conflict, and the peacebuilding field. We will engage in deep-rooted analysis of technology's positive and negative impacts on society, drawing on neuroscience, psychology, political analysis, and economic research of the profit models, affordances, and designs of current technology platforms. Students will analyze the impact of digital technology on fifteen global conflicts and explore twenty spheres of digital peacebuilding. The course includes a policy analysis of proposed government regulations on technology companies. Participants will learn through case studies and policy dialogues to identify best practices for using social media to support peacebuilding.

As the Flint, Michigan water situation began to attract attention and condemnation, Michigan State Representative, Sheldon Neeley, describing the troops on the ground and the Red Cross distributing water bottles, said that the Governor had "turned an American city into a Third World country." At a Congressional hearing, the Chairman of the House Oversight & Government Reform Committee said, "This is the United States of America - this isn't supposed to happen here. We are not some Third World country. What is a "third world problem?" This introductory environmental anthropology course examines how such imaginaries materialize in development programmes and literature, and bespeak charged geopolitical, racial histories; and invites reflection on what futures for working in common they enable and constrain. We will examine how crises are imagined and constructed, and the governance regimes they give rise to. How does water - as natural resource, public good, kin, human right, need, commodity - determine the contours of such regimes? We will also study chronic, quieter environmental problems and the responses they (do not) generate. Working through a variety of writing genres - ethnography, policy literature, and corporate publicity material - will enable students to appreciate what anthropology can contribute to the conversation on environmental justice. Class readings will draw on examples from a wide range of settings across the world, and group projects, in partnership with local environmental organizations and efforts (or done independently), will (i) narrate histories and map geographies of water access and toxicity, and (iii) imagine futures of more equitable water access in South Bend. The course is offered as an introduction to environmental anthropology and takes students through key themes - infrastructure, race, class, privatization, justice, violence - by focusing on water. It requires no background in anthropology. Students will cultivate the ability to read and write with care and to critique responsibly; develop a sense of overarching trends in anthropological approaches to categories such as nature, environment, ecology, violence and justice; relate contemporary issues of water in/accessibility, toxicity and privatization across disparate geographies.

This course will introduce advanced undergraduates and graduate students to data mining and computational methods in the humanities. What do we mean when we say "data" or "big data"? Why would data, or data visualization count as an argument in the humanities? Through the concept of the "Book of Nature," students explore unstructured and structured data in the work of scientists Thomas Harriot, Isaac Newton, Galileo Galilei, Andreas Vesalius, and Primo Levi, and practitioners in pharmacy and alchemy Camilla Erculiani and Caterina Sforza.* Students familiarize themselves with data mining and visualization, text analysis, and geospatial techniques through resources at the Center of Digital Scholarship and the Institute for Data and Society, while also gaining experience with digital cultural heritage. Primary sources include texts and images from manuscripts, printed books, artworks, and natural history that we will see in person at the Hesburgh Rare Books and Special Collections, the Snite Museum of Art, and the Notre Dame Museum of Biodiversity.

This course provides grounding in some of the methods of qualitative analysis present in the field of anthropology. The focus of the course is on developing skills that students can use to do systematic analysis of anthropological data. The perspective guiding the course is that anthropology is an empirical, scientific approach for describing social and cultural aspects of human life, and that qualitative data can be analyzed in systematic and rigorous ways. The course will explore a range of approaches and will cover analytic skills that cut across traditions, including theme identification, code definition, and pattern recognition. Advanced topics covered will include content analysis, text analysis, and schema analysis. Students will learn techniques and protocols in data arrangement and visualization that are appropriate for different analytical methods. It is a hands-on class where students will be able to work on data provided to them as well as on their own. Collaboration will be integral to the course success.

This course bridges the theories of the environmental humanities and ecocriticism with the study of Irish literature from 1600 to 1900. We will analyze critical theory of the environment in relation to Irish novels, tales, plays, and poems written during the height of British colonialism in Ireland - by authors like Jonathan Swift, Maria Edgeworth, William Carleton, J.M. Synge, Emily Lawless, and W.B. Yeats. Our readings will cover environmental events and colonial systems, such as the deforestation of Ireland, shipwrecks and rebellions, tenant farming, the Irish Famine, and island ecosystems. In class, we will discuss how these environmental contexts impacted the expression of Irish identity and colonial struggle. We will read Irish literature not just for plot, character, and style, but also for the environmental narratives it contains, exploring how each one illuminates the other.

This course investigates the cultural meanings attached to extraordinary bodies and minds. Cultural and literary scholarship has extensively explored issues connected with identities derived from race, gender and sexuality. Only recently have concepts of bodily identity, impairment, stigma, monstrosity, marginalization, deformity, deviance, and difference begun to cohere around disability as a concept. Discussions of these issues are now part of a discipline called Disability Studies. We will cover topics such as communication, inclusion, passing, medical attitudes, social stigma, normalcy, life narratives, bodily representation, mental impairment, the politics of charity, community and collective culture, the built environment, and empowerment.

This course offers a theory-driven exploration of the literature on disability in the Romantic and Victorian eras. In this class, we will read Romantic and Victorian texts alongside modern disability theory (chapters and articles) to develop a disability studies lens as a critical approach. We will study Romantic and Victorian texts in dialogue and in topic groups. Key topics will include physical disability; deformity; communication disabilities; and dwarfism. Although intended as a companion course to Romantic and Victorian Disability, this class can be taken as a standalone. There is no overlap between the classes, and they can be taken in any order.

This seminar explores the relationship between religion and human development with the critical intervention of how technology-from ancient to modern times-shapes both religious vocabularies and notions of human flourishing. In the light of the raging environmental and political crises advocates of techno-science and policy-makers are challenged by both the limitations and capacity of technology to deal with the emerging "postnormal" times. The course offers a focused consideration of complexity, chaos and contradiction. What is the nature of the transitional epoch of the unthought and human ignorance in thinking and practice and possible remedies, if any?

How does the global south figure in writing on climate change? Can there be a role for the global south in the climate justice conversation that recognizes its vulnerability to climate change but goes beyond portraying it as always and only vulnerable and devasted or menacing? In this class we will begin with the premise that the answer is yes: not only is such a role possible, but it must actively be created if the climate justice conversation is to be an equal and inclusive one. Anchored in representations of climate refugees, extreme weather events, particular geographies and conflicts, and informed by scholarship on racialized constructions of ‘good' and ‘bad' migrants, this class will collectively work through the intersections between the political and ecological that contour the realities, as well as representations of human movement today. Our collective endeavor will be to (i) understand and critique existing writing on climate change, (ii) recognize and question the role of the global south in such writing and (iii) craft a new lexicon that is cognizant of colonial pasts and their continuity, and relates geographies, histories and politics.

A major source of conflict - increasingly so - is environmental issues; both climate change-related conflicts about (more and more scarce) resources as well as secondary conflicts (conflicts that arise because of the resource conflict, i.e. climate migrants) pose a major challenge to the planet. Pope Francis' encyclical Laudato Si has offered ways to think about an "integral ecology" that takes the environment, life on the planet, the human condition and culture seriously. The cry of the earth and the cry of the poor cannot be separated. Laudato Si has to be read against the background of the concept of "Integral Human Development." This concept, inspired by the works of Joseph Lebret, OP, was introduced by Pope Paul VI in his encyclical Populorum Progressio (1967). It refers to "the development of the whole person and the development of all persons." The course explores the connection (intersectionality) between peace, (integral) ecology, and (integral human) development. It will do so with in-class room teaching sessions and working with select case studies on integral ecology.

This course offers an introduction to some of the recent thinking and cultural phenomena on the Anthropocene. Although we will pay particular attention to the Iberian Peninsula and contemporary Spain in particular, we will ultimately attempt to come to terms with our current geological and civilizational epoch as mainly humanly driven. For that purpose, under examination and question will be primitive accumulation and Capitalism, humanism and posthumanism, rural depopulation, consumerism, energy use, industrial relocation, technology (social networks, smartphones, big data, Google, etc.); droughts, wildfires, human and planetary finitude, etc. This discourse will combine literary and cinematographic studies with conceptual perspectives that will ultimately seek to bear witness through thinking and the arts to the Anthropocene, if such thing is still possible. Taught in Spanish.

his course explores the media culture of 1980s America. We will explore such topics as the rise of "high concept" blockbuster Hollywood, prime-time television at the peak of the broadcast network era, the emergence of Fox, the widespread adoption of cable television service, the development of the 24 hour news cycle, and media industry consolidation. In addition to studying these dominant industry practices and media forms, we will also explore such secondary and alternative media cultures as independent cinema, music subcultures, and video games. Our emphasis throughout will be on the interplay between shifting technologies, industrial modes of production and distribution, and cultural practices.

This course studies how contemporary Iberian literature and culture is trying to come to terms with the coming of “Surveillance Capitalism;” namely, a new economic order that claims human experience as free raw material for hidden commercial practices of extraction, prediction and sales. Thanks to Google, Apple, Facebook, Netflix, etc., this “Surveillance capitalism” could be also understood as an economic and societal logic in which the production of goods and services is subordinated to an unprecedented global architecture of behavioral modification (Heidegger, Stiegler, Zuboff, Balibar, etc.). Ultimately, we will ask what kind of civilization the third modernity of technics and surveillance foretell, and we will explore how literature and culture bear witness to the subsequent shifting of the fundamental inherited notions of modernity such as: human self-representation and artistic expression, progress, social bond, sovereignty, freedom, planetary finitude, inequality, as well as to the new discontents of civilization. We will combine literary and film studies with conceptual perspectives. Taught in Spanish.

In this class we analyze the many modes of human interaction, from our original invention/discovery of spoken language, to the invention of writing, to telegraphy, telephony, radio, movies, television, and the Internet, smart phones, and social media. We examine the affordances of each medium and modality, and develop tools to understand the ones that aren't even here yet. We draw on linguistic anthropology, biological anthropology, linguistics, cognitive science, psychology, sociology, conversation analysis, media studies, and communications.

Data-informed decision making has created new opportunities, but also expands the set of possible risks to organizations. One of these risks comes from grappling with the "should we?" question with regard to data and analytics, and associated concerns with identity, privacy, ownership, and reputation. In this course, we will explore several frameworks to address the issues related to the proper roles of public law, government regulation, professional codes, organizational approaches, and individual ethics in performing and managing analytics activities. The course will cover applicable theory and guidelines, and also make use of case studies. Upon completion, the student should be comfortable adapting one of these ethical frameworks for use in alignment with their organizational mission.

Human induced climate change is one of the major problems facing society. Economics provides a powerful intellectual basis for understanding, analyzing and correcting these problems. This course will cover basic science of climate change, the associated market failure and tragedy of the commons, cost-benefit analysis of climate mitigation, computation of the social cost of carbon, empirical research on economic effects of climate change, adaptation, and carbon taxation.

The interdisciplinary field of transnational transgender studies reveals how concepts, systems, and experiences of gender cross political and geographic boundaries, and how people move within, across, and against the gender categories available to them. Centering transgender knowledges and practices, this course explores how gender moves across space and time. How and why have some persons transitioned across gender boundaries, and what happens when they do? How do ideas about gender travel across national borders, and how are those ideas (and those borders) transformed along the way? What does transgender studies have to do with nation-states, economics, and global political dynamics? How have political and economic structures of movement - such as empire, migration, globalization, settler colonialism, and tourism - shaped gender in local and global contexts? And what social movements, cultures, visions, forms of resistance, and possible futures emerge out of these encounters? This seminar is discussion-based and centered on collaborative learning. Students will pursue independent research on a topic related to transnational transgender studies, share their research in class, and help to lead and facilitate class

Is it possible to think of the 21st century as a post-racial, post-feminist world? In her provocative 2012 study, Body as Evidence: Mediating Race, Globalizing Gender, Janell Hobson suggests that rather than having been eradicated, millennial hopes that the historical difficulties represented by race and gender have lost their significance in the present day are as far, if not even further away from the mark as they have ever been. For Hobson, policing the body, whether that be in terms of its race, its gender, or its sexuality, has remained paramount. "[W]hile the early-twenty-first century discourse of 'postracial' and 'postfeminist' often declares the loss of meaning attached to race and gender," she argues, "..the global scope of our media-reliant information culture insists on perpetuating raced and gendered meanings that support ideologies of dominance, privilege, and power." In Hobson's view, the body and how it is imagined rests at the center of such ideologies, pointing also to a number of crucial questions that become particularly important when considering the significance of race and gender through the lens of modernity. How might a reconsideration of race point also to a rethinking of gender and vice-versa? What does race actually mean? How does/can it alter the way we understand gender? Is it possible to think race beyond the idea of race? What might a new conception of race actually look like, and how might this influence our thinking on gender? How are the problems of race and gender intertwined, and how is/has the body been imagined in and through them? What can such questions tell us about today's racial and gendered realities, both inside and outside the university, both in the past and the present? This course takes a step backward to investigate these and other like questions in the context of the utopic impulse and its emphasis on the imagination in several 19th-century American authors whose work may be viewed as participating in a broad yet under-acknowledged vision of race, gender and Atlantic modernity that seeks to interrogate hierarchies of race and gender as these have been constructed and maintained within dominant ideologies. Grounding our analysis in a number of 16th-, 17th- and 18th-century political philosophical texts on law and utopia and drawing on insights from critical race theory, gender studies, feminist theory, theories of law and literature, and utopian studies, our goal will be to gain a more nuanced understanding of our racialized past and its troubled link to questions of gender both then and now, so that we may better hope to imagine - and reimagine - the shape of our collective democratic future in the 21st century's global community.

In this course students will explore the economic determinants of the city and the system of cities across space. The key objective of the course is to provide students with a toolbox to think about how space/geography matters for economic activity. For example, why are rents higher in the city center than in the suburbs? Why are average incomes in South Bend lower than in New York? To answer these questions the course combines basic theoretical frameworks with empirical evidence from research in urban economics and economic geography.

Soon after modern printing technology was introduced by western missionaries in the 19th century, China developed an exciting new culture characterized by tremendous creativity and productivity, enthusiastic experimentation with media technologies, high-speed interaction between creators and users, and countless unique ways of mixing textual and visual material. Ranging from the pictorial magazines of the early twentieth century to the Internet sites of the early twenty-first century, China’s modern culture has expressed and engaged with massive historical, social, and political changes, captured in writing and in images. This course takes students on a whirlwind tour of modern Chinese cultural expression in newspapers, magazines, posters, films, TV shows, websites, and social media, using original visual materials in addition to readings in English translation. The aim is to provide students with a comprehensive overview of the main developments in modern Chinese culture, while training their ability to analyze different types of cultural products. At the end of the course, students will have produced their own blog site, using visual and textual material to express their own critical opinions on the materials we studied.

The study of morality has been judged “one of the hottest topics in the life sciences.” Scholars working in fields like evolutionary biology, paleoanthropology, primatology, evolutionary psychology, child psychology, social psychology, social neuroscience, and biomathematical modeling now routinely release accounts of the biological “origin” or “basis” of morality. Many authors of such studies claim that their findings either invalidate or make obsolete religious views of morality. This course will provide you an occasion to investigate the work of several scientists who advocate “biologizing” the study of morality as a way of de-theologizing the subject. I will equip you to place this endeavor in historical context, to evaluate its empirical and philosophical warrants, and to incorporate its valid aspects in moral theology. This course therefore promotes Notre Dame’s mission of exploring how Christian thought “may intersect with all the forms of knowledge,” including the sciences.

This seminar examines a number of important topics in medicine and society today, including shared health responsibility, race and class-based inequities, vaccinations, opioid crisis, beginning and end-of-life care, organ donation and body modification, health of imprisoned populations, mental health of healthcare providers, and health in the age of social media. Students in this class will gain an understanding of the ethical, social, and practical dimensions of a variety of healthcare and health policy issues and how providers navigate these dimensions in their care. A key part of the class is the opportunity for students to engage directly with healthcare workers who will serve as guest speakers. The seminar will emphasize writing and journaling, and will directly integrate matters of health care with broader humanistic and social science approaches to health, wellbeing, the body, etc. to deepen students' understandings of what medicine is. This is a core course in the Health, Humanities, and Society minor.

This course provides an intensive introduction to statistical methods of use for anthropological research. It will examine why and when to use quantitative methods, and how such methods can be incorporated into a holistic anthropological research design. Topics covered include probability theory, and parametric, non-parametric, and Bayesian principles of hypothesis testing, data ordination, and methods of analyzing non-independent data including network analysis. All course work will be undertaken using free statistical packages available through the R programing language. No prior mathematical or programming experience is needed.

Behind the rhetoric of disruption and progress lies a deeper spiritual story. This course examines the religious and apocalyptic dimensions of technology through thinkers ancient and modern—from Augustine and Dostoevsky to McLuhan, René Girard, and Peter Thiel. We will explore how digital technology functions as both idol and oracle, promising salvation through data and control. Students will analyze the cultural myths of transhumanism, the occult fascination of tech elites, and the challenge of recovering a theology of creation, incarnation, and human freedom in a technocratic age.

US literature and popular music between the mid-19th century and the end of World War II. This interdisciplinary course will incorporate methods from performance studies, sound studies, and musicology in addition to literary criticism. We will read key works of American prose (as well as some poetry) from the period's principal literary movements, including realism, naturalism, modernism, and multimedia documentary. We will also listen to musical works--Broadway tunes and blues songs, spirituals and symphonies. We'll pay particular attention to how segregation and other racial politics, changing roles for women, and the mass production of commodities influenced the art of this period. Texts will include writing by Stephen Crane, W.E.B. Du Bois, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Ernest Hemingway, Langston Hughes, Harriet Jacobs, and Edith Wharton, as well as music by George M. Cohan, George Gershwin, Scott Joplin, Paul Robeson, and Bessie Smith. Course requirements will include two argumentative essays, several shorter writing assignments, regular online reading responses, and active class participation.

All human populations, from the simplest to the most complex, interact with their natural environment. Humans alter the environment, and are in turn altered by it through biological or cultural adaptations. Global environmental changes helped to create and shape our species and modern industrial societies are capable of altering the environment on scales that have never been seen before, creating many questions about the future of human-environmental coexistence. This course explores the ways that humans are altering the global environment and the ways that global environmental changes alter humans in return. Four major topics are examined: global climate change, alterations of global nutrient cycles, biodiversity and habitat loss, and ecosystem reconstruction. Students will complete the course with an understanding of the metrics and physical science associated with each type of change, their ecological implications, and the ways in which environmental changes continually reshape human biology and culture. This course is for graduate students and upper-division undergraduates. This course meets a core requirement for GLOBES students.

This course examines the intersection of gender, health policy, and health care organization around the world. Gender is frequently a central contributing (though sometimes ignored) factor to people's health. Men and women have different biologies, and it thus stands to reason that their lives; social, economic, political, and biological would have an effect on their health. What causes men to have different illnesses than women? What places one gender at greater risk for illness than the other? How do men and women across the world experience health policies? Are they affected and constrained by similar factors? How do their work lives affect their experiences with health? How is the body medically produced? How do poverty and development play a role in people's well-being? Through an inquiry-based approach, these and other topics will be addressed in this class.

This class explores the use of marketing principles and concepts to support initiatives, causes and ventures that are social in nature. Attention is devoted to the marketing and communication challenges involved when attempting to do good, and how these issues can be overcome without spending large amounts of money. Sample topics include identifying and understanding target markets for social initiatives, constructing a value proposition, developing positioning approaches, designing communication programs, use of guerrilla techniques, the roles of price and place, and how to set goals and measure performance.

We will use simple microeconomics principles to understand how and why innovation happens, how innovation is related to basic scientific research, what factors influence the production and diffusion of new ideas, and how government policy can help or hinder innovation. We will also study the relationship between innovation and economic welfare using recent macroeconomic models. Intermediate microeconomics and at least one semester of econometrics are recommended, though not required. There will be two midterms and a final exam, as well as written homework assignments

This course is an introduction to political, economic, and social issues through the medium of visual displays. This kind of course has become feasible because data are now abundant and easy to access and software for displaying and analyzing data are available and easy to use. The ability to examine and display data is an increasingly valuable skill in many fields. However, this skill must be complemented by the ability to interpret visual displays orally, and by a commitment to use data responsibly: to reveal, rather than slant or distort, the truth. We will discuss examples concerning drugs, marriage, climate change, development, economic performance, social policy, democracy, voting, public opinion, and conflict, but the main emphasis is on helping you explore many facets of an issue of particular interest to you. You will learn to manage data and produce your own graphics to describe and explain political, social, economic (or other!) relationships. The graphics will include line and bar graphs, 2D and 3D scatterplots, motion charts, maps, and others.

This graduate level seminar will explore the philosophical, theoretical, and ethical underpinnings for inclusive and collaborative practices in anthropology, particularly research that combines approaches from more than one anthropological subfield. Taking a global approach, students will examine a wide range of case studies in community-based and collaborative anthropology, aiming to identify best practices and develop skills which students can then apply to their own projects. Attention will be paid to the importance of context, including geography, colonial histories and decolonization, war and conflict, economy, and environment, that shape engaged approaches to working for and serving communities instead of working on or studying communities with an extractive approach.

Our species is unique because it is the only species that deliberately buries its dead. Mortuary analysis (the study of burial patterns) is a powerful approach that archaeologists use for the study of prehistoric social organization and ideology. This course explores the significance of prehistoric human mortuary behavior, from the first evidence of deliberate burial by Neanderthals as an indicator of the evolution of symbolic thought, to the analysis of the sometimes spectacular burial patterns found in complex societies such as ancient Egypt and Megalithic Europe. We will also examine the theoretical and practical aspects of the archaeology of death, including the applications of various techniques ranging from statistics to ethnography, and the legal and ethical issues associated with the excavation and scientific study of human remains.

What is nature? How has it been imagined and constructed? Who has been excluded and erased from dominant narratives of nature and the environment? This upper-division seminar explores the ideologies and practices that historically shaped popular conceptions of nature. A primary goal for the course is to better understand the historical separations of society and nature based on gender, race, class, religion, and commodification. We will examine the logics and practices of imperialism and settler colonialism, cartography, environmental science and conservation, and capitalism among others. At the same time, we will consider other ways of knowing, imagining, and experiencing nature outside of colonial logics. While this is primarily a modern history course, ample space will be given to place contemporary environmental justice and decolonization movements within their social and historical context. Students will develop an understanding of the theories and methods that scholars have used to critically think about our relationships with nature, while also gaining practical skills in writing and science communication through the course assignments. Please note that this will be an online course.

Students, in a structured format, are involved in assessing, prioritizing and creatively solving problems encountered by low-income and other disadvantaged South Bend entrepreneurs. A process consulting approach is employed and a number of useful tools and frameworks are introduced. Students work with both for-profit and non-profit enterprises, producing tangible deliverables that help clients launch, grow and sustain their ventures. In addition to class time, students will meet with clients on a weekly basis at a Notre Dame facility located downtown. Assistance with transportation will be available for students needing it. Class will meet on Tuesdays. On Thursdays, students will consult with local entrepreneurs in one hour blocks during the hours of 5p to 9p at the Center for Civic Innovation. This consulting time is flexible with students' schedules and based on appointments made by local entrepreneurs.

Students in the Interdisciplinary Seminar read widely across feminist and queer scholarship in multiple fields, including the interdisciplinary field of Gender Studies, and consider how disciplinary norms and boundaries shape scholarly inquiry. Student research and writing for the course will synthesize disciplinary ways of knowing and produce original, interdisciplinary Gender Studies scholarship or creative work. The Interdisciplinary Seminar fulfills both the IS requirement for Gender Studies graduate minors and the capstone requirement for Gender Studies primary and supplemental majors. Although each iteration of the course focuses on a unique topic, all Interdisciplinary Seminars put multiple disciplines in conversation in order to deepen students' mastery of key Gender Studies concepts. Course descriptions for current and upcoming semesters can be found at https://genderstudies.nd.edu.

From the cultural content we consume, through apartment hunting, to dating, more and more aspects of people's lives nowadays unfold on digital platforms. The vast quantities of data generated, together with the availability of data analysis tools and the computational resources that power them, provide social scientists with exciting opportunities to make sense of social phenomena that, previously, were often impossible to capture. This course introduces advanced undergraduates to modern methods sociologists and other social scientists use to collect and analyze data at scale, with an emphasis on the analysis of text and of spatial data. Together, we will discuss and think through recent research that applies these methods to gain insight into how social processes operate. We will gain hands-on experience with the open-source R programming language, powering much of this research. Through in-class activities, assignments, and an independent research project, we will develop skills in data collection, wrangling, and analysis using R, aiming to uncover hidden trends and answer social puzzles. Prior experience with R, specifically, is not necessary, although some statistics or programming background is required.

A Modern Historical Survey from Scaliger to Peter Singer: One way to improve our understanding of ourselves is to compare ourselves with the animals who most resemble us, in informative, challenging and disturbing ways. In this course, we'll focus on the relationship that has done most to change human self-perceptions. With a focus on Western texts and experiences, but with reference to many other cultures, we'll focus on the problems of how and why human attitudes to other apes have changed since the Middle Ages, and how they have influenced thinking in science, religion, politics, sociology, literature, and ethics.

The Senior Seminar is designed as a culminating experience for American Studies majors, an opportunity to hone the skills, methods, and interests acquired in previous American Studies classes and direct them toward a specific and significant research project. Readings and assignments explore themes in the field of American Studies. Requirements include seminar-style discussions of course readings, a final research paper of 20-25 pages (or the equivalent), and a presentation of that project in class. This Senior Seminar focuses on changing cultural understandings of death, dying, and mourning in modern and contemporary America. Examining different visual, material, and media cultures, it explores topics such as: permanent and temporary memorials (like crosses erected at the sites of roadside fatalities, "ghost bikes" left at the scenes of pedestrian fatalities, and "dead-man" t-shirts worn at funerals), funeral practices and cemeteries (including traditional cemeteries, virtual cemeteries, "green" cemeteries, and Living Monuments), death related humor (too soon?), dark tourism (visiting sites of tragic and traumatic death), death-related rituals (Day of the Dead), dead bodies and sensational exhibitions like Body Worlds, Deadheads, death metal, and forensic-based TV shows like CSI and Bones. Our objectives are to consider what death means in America today on cultural terms. Course includes field trips.

What is the relation between life and politics? In the late 18th century, a new technology of governance emerged. This technology, armed with a new science of statistics, focused on the management of life and death within the population-its rates of fertility, mortality, and illness. How could life expectancy be increased? How could rates of mortality be lowered? How could biological threats be eliminated? These questions of life and death were not only biological; life itself had emerged as a political problem. Michel Foucault called this new technology of power biopolitics. Since Foucault's formulation, the concept of biopolitics has demarcated an object of inquiry that has been taken up by scholars in a wide range of academic fields, including anthropology, sociology, literature, philosophy, and history. Through the lens of biopolitics, we will study a number of contemporary issues in which the politics of life and death are at stake, including humanitarianism, new medical technologies, public health interventions, disaster, incarceration, and global pandemics. In class, we will think through these topics together using examples drawn from visual and print media including film, journalism, literature, and photography.

We usually think of field work and excavation as being the essence of archaeology, but much of what we know about the past is learned in the laboratory, where we study the artifacts brought in from the field. A rough rule of thumb states that two hours of lab time are needed for every hour spent in the field, so in reality, lab work may be even more important than field work in archaeology. This course is a laboratory class that will use many different activities to teach you about how archaeologists organize, preserve, and study archaeological artifacts to learn about the past. This class provides an in-depth introduction to basic laboratory methods for the organization, curation, and analysis of pottery, stone tools, metals, soil samples, and floral and faunal remains. By the end of the semester, you will engage in a hands-on application of course principles by conducting a research project on materials from Notre Dame's archaeological collections.

The course will investigate some of the main debates in contemporary philosophical approaches to the aesthetics of film. Of particular concern will be questions that orbit the experience of fictional film. What is the relation between subjective and objective camera shots and point of view? What are points of view in film? What is the difference between fictional narrative film and photography? Theatrical drama? Painting? Other questions posed and discussed: What is the importance of genre to film? What is a genre? Can films be moral or immoral? If so, does that affect our aesthetic experience of film? What is non-narrative film? What is documentary? The class involves both philosophical and film theoretical readings and out-of-class screenings of films to sharpen discussion of the issues.

In this seminar, students will engage with texts published within the last five years in the field of transgender studies. Along with academic writing, we will work with literature, memoir, film, and popular culture. Together, these texts expand our shared understanding of what trans* means; pose challenging questions about Western transgender studies and its canon; and link the field of transgender studies with global movements for justice. Students will have opportunities for collaboration and community engagement, and to create their own theory and creative work.

The goal of this class is to help students think philosophically about ways in which social structures and norms involving gender, race and class affect our personal decisions about what and how much to eat, contribute to disordered eating, impact the environment and workers in the industries that produce our food, and impinge on a variety of other concerns that have been the focus of feminist theorizing.

The relationship between health and poverty is complex and challenging. The inability of the poor to maintain adequate nutrition, shelter and have access to preventative medical care can contribute to their poor health status. But even if one isn't poor, one illness or hospitalization can test their ability to meet both their ability to meet the financial burden of their medical care as well as their other needs. In either case, individuals have to face difficult choices between their health and other material needs. This course examines the consequences of the health risks the poor face and the difficulties that they have in obtaining medical care whether they are uninsured, seek "charitable" care, or utilize public programs such as Medicaid. The course will also examine the impact of the Affordable Care Act that will require all individuals to have at least a minimal level of health care coverage.

In this course we plunge into the intersection of the subjective, social, and biological as we inquire into anthropological approaches to the nature of our very being. Drawing on insights from psychological, cultural, linguistic, and biological anthropology, as well as other relevant fields (and sometimes literary and other sources), we aim to ask researchable questions and generate theoretical contributions. Students should bring a healthy disposition toward intellectual adventure to class.

All humans eat, but the variations in what, how, and why we eat are dazzling. This course examines the many roles that food played in a variety of cultures. We consider food choices and taboos, religious and symbolic meanings of food, dining and social interactions, obesity and thinness, and the political and industrial issues of fast food and the slow food movement. There will be practical and field studies associated with the course.

Why do some countries have higher levels of social, economic and political development than others? While focusing on the record of specific cases, this course focuses on a critical examination of the sociological theories that try to answer the various ramifications of this question.

One would think that secrets are hard to keep, and lies hard to maintain, because it doesn't take much for the truth to escape and once it's out, it can't be put back into the bottle. Yet secrets and lies reside at the heart of much social and political order, sometimes for years and even decades at a time. The objective of this course is to advance our scientific understanding of how this is possible, drawing on sociological, psychological, and historical research on such things as performance, secrecy, lying, forgetting, doubt, denial, and inattention. Case studies will include instances of corporate malfeasance (such as Ponzi schemes and insider trading), Big Tobacco's cover-up of the health consequences of smoking, the lies told by the totalitarian regime of North Korea, the secret British program to break the German cipher during WWII, elaborate attempts to cover up government atrocities, and the cat-and-mouse game between international inspectors and regimes thought to be developing banned weapons. Throughout, we will be concerned with the distinct methodological challenges of studying things many people want to keep secret. Requirements will include midterm and final examinations, reading quizzes/reaction papers, participation, and a final research paper.

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

Knowledge about the relationship between built environment development and global and local challenges, such as climate change, resource depletion, environmental impact, justice and health, is of key importance to move towards a sustainable and resilient future. This course takes a trans-disciplinary approach to understanding how to decarbonize the built environment. Linkages between and perspectives from engineering, architectural design, and social sciences are emphasized throughout the course. This course provides students with real-world problems to work with such as urbanization-related pollution in China and urban revitalization needs for the aging building stock in Germany. This course is composed of two modules: (1) Carbon neutral development at the urban scale is examined through three real case studies to explore the different development principles, design strategies and patterns. (2) Net zero building design and related environmental impact are examined through research literature and real case projects.

Science and social values? The established wisdom has it that science offers us the truth about the empirical world - what is rather than what ought to be - and that social values have little to do with it. How else explain the fact that science can be used for both good and ill and that the results of science are (or at least should be) accepted as authoritative by people of widely different ethical and political persuasions? According to this view, in short, science is, or at least ought to be, "value-free" or "value-neutral." In this course we shall explore how recent research in history and sociology as well as philosophy of science has raised serious questions regarding this established wisdom and how such notions as scientific objectivity and autonomy and the role of science in a democratic society has had to be revised accordingly. Since this is a seminar course, students will lead class discussions, present the results of their individual research projects to the group, and have the opportunity to further develop these projects using the feedback from the group. The aim, of course, will be for students to develop fully informed and defensible responses to the controversial terrain we shall be exploring.

Science has traditionally been billed as our foremost producer of knowledge. For more than a decade, however, science has also been billed as an important source of ignorance, and this aspect of science is now being studied in a new interdisciplinary area of enquiry sometimes called agnotology. In this course we shall explore this new area of ignorance studies and its relation to the knowledge studies of philosophy—epistemology and philosophy of science. Accordingly, readings will be drawn from the work of a broad array of scholars—scientists, historians, journalists, and social critics as well as philosophers.

Through much of its history, academia has been gendered in a particular way-male dominated, focused on men's interests, and privileging those interests-and much of it still is. In response, the area of enquiry known as women's studies or gender studies emerged in the 1970s as part of the feminist movement. In this course we will explore gender, the concept that lies at the heart of this area of enquiry. We shall find that this concept is as complex and multi-faceted as the diverse disciplines from which it now draws and as political as its feminist origins suggest. We shall also find that it is fraught with controversy. Though the disciplines that contribute to the idea of gender comprise nearly all of academia, we will concentrate on the sciences, from which the concept of gender first emerged. No particular scientific background will be presupposed, however, and visits from science faculty will be organized to help us understand the terrain. We will start with the gendered origins of the concept-the gender of science-and then proceed to the science that developed as a result-the science of gender; and we will conclude with some questions concerning the connection between the two-the gender of science and the science of gender. This course will be run as a seminar. Students will lead class discussions, present the results of individual research projects to the group, and have the opportunity to further develop those projects using feedback from the group. Throughout, our aim will be for each student to develop a fully informed and defensible response to the controversial terrain we shall be exploring.

This course will explore the philosophical bases of modern physics and cosmology

Is science a neutral and objective pursuit of truth, or do political values shape our scientific knowledge? Should the public “trust the science” or “do their own research”? Does industry funding distort scientific results? Do politics infuse even basic research and physical science? Is the politicization of science inevitable, or even desirable? In this course, we will explore these questions as we uncover the relationship between science and politics. We will begin by taking a philosophical and historical approach to these issues, then apply this general understanding to a range of case studies. Possible case studies include: particle accelerator funding, space exploration, environmental regulation, global warming, tobacco research, the HIV/AIDS crisis, the COVID-19 pandemic, and reproductive medicine.

This is an advanced undergraduate economics course that will provide a broad introduction to development economics, with an emphasis on the application of modern econometric techniques to questions in development. This course will survey recent literature that examines the factors that explain poverty in the developing world. In particular, we will consider the relative roles of government failures, market failures, history, geography, culture and technology among others. This course will briefly survey 'classic' theories in development and then focus on understanding recent journal articles in detail. We will explore these questions primarily from a microeconomic perspective, paying careful attention to understanding, evaluating and applying econometric techniques. The goal of this course is to introduce students to modern research in development economics and produce an original empirical research paper

When people think about sexuality, they often adopt a biological view - seeing sexuality as "driven" by hormones and nature. This course adopts a different approach by viewing sexuality through the lens of sociology - as shaped by social processes, including social interaction, institutions, and ideologies. The course will focus on examining three sociological aspects of sexuality: 1) The social, historical, and cultural factors that shape sexual behaviors, desires, identities, and communities; 2) The ways in which sex and sexuality are constantly regulated and contested at multiple levels of society, including within families, schools, workplaces, and religious and political institutions; and 3) The sources, causes, and effects of sexual inequality. While our focus will be on sexuality, we will also study how other identities (including gender, race, class, religion, etc.) influence and affect it. Students will be encouraged to question their taken-for-granted assumptions about sex and sexualities and to formulate critical perspectives on issues pertaining to sexuality in today's public discourses. This course is sex-positive in that it assumes that knowledge about sexuality is empowering, not dangerous. The readings and discussions will be frank, and students will be assisted in developing a language for and comfort level with discussing a wide range of sexual topics in a respectful and sociological way. In the process, students will be challenged to improve their critical thinking, researching, writing, and public speaking skills.

Dualist and reductionist emphases in recent analyses of mind. Topics covered will include identity of mind and body, intentionality, actions and their explanation and problems about other minds.

This course examines a range of metaphysical, ethical, and social questions about artificial intelligence. Questions to be addressed include: Could a computer be conscious? Is there anything the human mind can do that a machine couldn't be programmed to do? What are the similarities and differences between human and artificial intelligence? What are the likely cultural and economic effects of AI? What moral principles should guide our use of AI? Is it likely that we'll create AGI (artificial general intelligence), and would this pose an existential threat to humanity?

A survey of central issues in the philosophy of mathematics.

This course will discuss how to analyze and evaluate strategic decision making.

Social networks are an increasingly important form of social organization. Social networks help to link persons with friends, families, co-workers and formal organizations. Via social networks information flows, support is given and received, trust is built, resources are exchanged, and interpersonal influence is exerted. Rather than being static, social networks are dynamic entities. They change as people form and dissolve social ties to others during the life course. Social networks have always been an important part of social life: in our kinship relations, our friendships, at work, in business, in our communities and voluntary associations, in politics, in schools, and in markets. Our awareness of and ability to study social networks has increased dramatically with the advent of social media and new communication tools through which people interact with others. Through email, texting, Facebook, Twitter and other platforms, people connect and communicate with others and leave behind traces of those interactions. This provides a rich source of data that we can use to better understand our connections to each other; how these connections vary across persons and change over time; and the impact that they have on our behaviors, attitudes, and tastes. This course will introduce students to (1) important substantive issues about, and empirical research on, social networks; (2) theories about network evolution and network effects on behavior; and (3) tools and methods that students can use to look at and analyze social networks. The course will be a combination of lectures, discussions and labs. Course readings will include substantive research studies, theoretical writings, and methodological texts. Through this course students will learn about social networks by collecting data on social networks and analyzing that data.

In "Neuropharmacology in Great Britain," you will learn about the basic tenants of pharmacology and classes of drugs that affect the brain, with particular emphasis on drugs that have been important in Great Britain's culture and history.

Race is a social construct. So why have scientists spent centuries trying to quantify, measure, and categorize people by race? From early anthropometry to the Human Genome Project, this course examines the production and embedding of race into scientific knowledge since the 18th century. Designed for students interested in the history of science and the production of scientific knowledge or those curious about the origins of scientific racism and racial inequality, this course is also well-suited for students pursuing careers in the health professions. By focusing on historical discourses on the production and dissemination of scientific knowledge of race, students will be able to: 1. Understand how race, racism, and racial inequality are embedded in scientific knowledge 2. Outline the various methodologies different fields of science have used to group people into races 3. Carefully evaluate scientific technologies for racial biases This is an upper level undergraduate and graduate seminar.

Race is a social construct. So why have scientists spent centuries trying to quantify, measure, and categorize people by race? From early anthropometry to the Human Genome Project, this course examines the production and embedding of race into scientific knowledge since the 18th century. Designed for students interested in the history of science and the production of scientific knowledge or those curious about the origins of scientific racism and racial inequality, this course is also well-suited for students pursuing careers in the health professions. By focusing on historical discourses on the production and dissemination of scientific knowledge of race, students will be able to: 1. Understand how race, racism, and racial inequality are embedded in scientific knowledge 2. Outline the various methodologies different fields of science have used to group people into races 3. Carefully evaluate scientific technologies for racial biases This is an upper level undergraduate and graduate seminar.

Independent research or readings taken under the supervision of an STV faculty member. An approved proposal for the research/readings will be filed with the STV office. (In order to receive STV credit, the student's proposal will need to be approved by the faculty member supervising the student's research/readings and by the director of the STV program.)

Undergraduates will conduct research or elaborated readings on a topic of interest.