This course provides freshman students with a playground to explore their most interested topics through two gatherings per week. The course is designed for students to define their individuality in the history of civilizations through doodling, brainstorming & calligraphy, both individually and collaboratively. The entire doodling and beautiful writing process will be executed in three sections to show all participants' individual learning outcome through teamwork. The outcome of each section in a digital file will be shown on the Department of Art and Art History (AAH) TV Screen in the Kittredge Atrium and the final class project will be exhibited in the Kittredge Hallway Gallery. In so doing, students during their first semester will exercise their brain power to make connections in a liberal arts curriculum at Puget Sound and beyond.
Some believe that there are more Chinese restaurants in the U.S. than McDonald's, Burger King, KFC, and Wendy's combined. Many of the Chinese dishes most known to Americans, however, are not Chinese. What is Chinese food? Are Kung Pao dishes more "authentically" Chinese than chop suey? Why did this immigrant cuisine become so popular in the U.S.? This course explores American Chinese foodways as a form of cultural exchange, a chapter in American history, and a marker of Chinese-American identity, in the context of transnational interactions. Drawing on materials such as book chapters, academic essays, newspaper and magazine articles, films, Internet videos, as well as personal photographs of food and restaurants, the course examines the subject of foodways from the perspectives of Asian-American studies, food studies, gender studies, sociology, anthropology, and film and literature. Through the semester, students will have opportunities to taste and make Chinese food in and outside of the classroom, and work together on building a website about local Chinese restaurants in and around Tacoma.
This course examines visual, film, and literary representations of pairs or communities of women who commit murder in response to exploitation, discrimination, social marginalization, threat of military occupation, ethnic erasure, or sexual and gender-based violence. The case studies are drawn from biblical Bethulia, 17th century Italy, 20th century Hungary, and 21st century India, and explore female identity in patriarchal societies, and the interrelation of female violence and the forging of female communities. The course makes use of a range of disciplinary perspectives (art historical, visual cultural, historical, literary, sociological) in combination with feminist and gender studies approaches. It offers an opportunity to examine the formation of complex, intersectional identities, and the processes that lead to the forging of alliances and communities through the lenses of different disciplines and methodological approaches. Through focused interrogation of the theme of female killers, the course invites students to the academic conversation, offers an introduction to 'liberal arts thinking,' and cultivates skills necessary for academic success and lifelong learning.
Fun is a vital, yet underexamined, part of community building. This course introduces students to a variety of approaches to thinking about the relationship between community and fun. Students will encounter different definitions and ways of understanding fun. They will learn about fun in cross-cultural contexts. They will think about different barriers to fun. They will reflect on what fun means to them. Then, students will design a campus-wide activity that aims to bring fun to as many community members as possible.
We are able to learn when we create space to explore and notice. But our "hustle culture" and our built environments tell us that we should spend all our time with our noses to the grindstone, where we can't explore or notice much. Research also tells us that spending time in green spaces can improve cognitive function.
In this class, students will literally and figuratively explore the outdoors on campus and around Tacoma, and learn to notice things they might miss when they are too busy "in the grind." Students will learn about how scientists, social scientists, and artists are thinking differently about the importance of equitable access to outdoor spaces. Relatedly, this class will help students learn how to create the mental spaces that help everyone do their best learning with others -- in college and beyond. Students should expect to learn a lot about themselves, explore the green spaces of Tacoma, and build relationships with other students. Together, the class will share what they have learned by creating a scavenger hunt for the whole campus that will help other students take a break from the hustle and have some fun while they explore and notice the natural world.
Please note: this class is fully accessible to all students. All are welcome!
What is study abroad and how can it help us understand the political, economic and social forces that shape globalization and the world we live in? This course explores the various meanings and modalities of study abroad, how to prepare to take advantage of this opportunity, and how curriculum designs connect with global affairs. In addition, we discuss the meaning and experiences of study abroad for students from other countries, and how they differ from those of Americans. Moreover, students critically examine their positionality and relationship with the host communities of study abroad programs, and with foreign students enrolled in the United States. While delving into the subject, students develop immediately applicable awareness and metacognitive skills that promote success in college. Finally, students will collaborate on a group project that explores in depth a specific study abroad program, examining curriculum, practical and logistical aspects, as well as economic, political and cultural factors that shape the context of the program.
The novel Dune by Frank Herbert is widely recognized as a foundational text for modern science fiction. Less known are its origins in the Pacific Northwest, as Tacoma native Herbert sought to address issues of climate change, resistance and conflict that were unfolding around him. This course engages Dune through a multidisciplinary lens. Students will examine the interplay between such topics as ecology, locality, empire, and identity, tracing the narrative's origins, influence, and eventual transition to film. Through in-depth discussions, activities and projects, students will explore Arrakis' ecological intricacies, scrutinize the political and social structures of empires, and delve into nuanced explorations of identity and power. Bridging literature, politics, environmental studies and cultural analysis, the course provides a comprehensive understanding of Dune's themes from their origins in our region's past, to a narrative set across multiple worlds in our distant future.
This course engages students in conversation about ethics in everyday life, and the values and reasoning behind different ways of approaching them. Throughout the semester, students research and discuss case studies in small groups. The instructor-assigned cases may come from personal contexts (such as friendship and family), social contexts (such as speech and representation), technological contexts (such as social media and generative artificial intelligence), or professional contexts (such as medicine or business). In addition, students will complete a final project on the ethics of a case that relates to their curricular or co-curricular interests. While exploring cases of ethics in practice, students will consider different social perspectives, different academic approaches to knowledge, different career paths, and their own values and interests.
More than a children's toy or a means of exercise, the bicycle has had a profound impact on societies around the globe. In this course students will explore the evolution of the bicycle from early prototypes to modern tech marvels. Along the way, students will learn about bicycles' contributions to women's empowerment, their role in economic development around the world, their use in warfare, and their increasing importance in environmentally sustainable and equitable urban planning. Students will also explore how bicycles are part of the campus, Tacoma, and PNW communities they are joining. No ability to ride a bike is required!
This course explores the definition of health from multiple perspectives including biology, economics, society, exercise, and nutrition. Discussions and activities will span individual experiences to the Puget Sound community and beyond via readings, self-assessment, a community-based project, and excursions around Tacoma. In addition, students will be introduced to campus resources focused on academic success, wellness, and working towards future goals. The semester-long project will have students work collaboratively on a selected topic culminating in the production of resources for the broader campus community.
This Connections seminar provides an introductory and multidisciplinary examination of critical societal and global relations through the prism of soccer, which is often also referred to as 'the beautiful game.' As a sport, soccer has and continues to captivate the lives and imagination of billions globally. Since the invention of modern soccer, it has grown to become universal and ubiquitous across cultures and societies. Reflecting Puget Sound's distinctive approach to the liberal arts, this seminar draws on critical contributions from the disciplines of sociology, history and political economy to examine how the beautiful game enables us to better understand the processes and systems of social organization and change at a societal as well as cross-national context.
This course focuses on building community in a variety of settings. Students study community building in a variety of contexts through academic and popular press articles, podcasts, videos and by building community on campus. In small teams, students help build community with a campus club. Questions examined include: Why do people behave in certain ways? What helps and what detracts from building meaningful community? In what ways can community enhance our lives? Students read, listen, watch, observe, interact, question, write, converse, and experiment.
Building community helps students integrate into campus life and enriches their lifetime community building skills. In the course's progression, students also build the intellectual and personal skills for college success, from time management and goalsetting, to building curiosity and framing questions, to building interpersonal connection and resilience. In addition, the classroom community strives to be a safe and enjoyable setting to put concepts into action and build a community of scholars.
Tea is earth's most popular beverage. Each year, the world's population consumes billions of kilograms of tea at meals, as an afternoon break, to welcome guests, during ceremonies and rituals, in closing business deals, and on many other occasions. Drinking tea can be a pleasure; so can studying it. This course introduces students to how scholars of politics, history, science, and culture ask questions about tea, while also offering an introduction to the university curriculum and campus life.
This course explores a range of issues from the science of well-being. What does it mean to become happier? Does cultivating happiness serve as a meaningful refuge from stressful life situations or is it merely the latest capitalist fad holding individuals responsible for their own well-being, regardless of our varied circumstances and contexts? Besides considering diverse perspectives on well-being, students will learn about major evidence-based happiness habits through readings and discussions, with special attention to the ways in which our social connections and communities shape well-being. Students will also experiment with trying out some of these evidence-based practices. Activities might include nature walks in a local forest, mindfulness meditation, practicing gratitude, cultivating self-compassion, conversing with community members off-campus, and more. Students will work together to brainstorm ways to share their key insights and reflections with the wider campus community, perhaps through a series of posters or a podcast.
In this course students will learn and practice the human-centered engineering and design process with the goal of contributing to a pressing real-world problem. Problems could include homelessness, salmon restoration, water pollution, microplastic pollution, or the need for inexpensive prosthetics in the developing world. Students will work in groups on a semester-long project to either design, prototype and build a device or to collect and analyze data to address the chosen problem. Each student group will determine their own device or research question related to the real-world problem being studied. As part of the engineering and design process, students will consider their real-world problem from a variety of disciplinary perspectives and will also learn established processes to design for equity.
This course will explore issues concerning human impact on water and the environment in urban and suburban Tacoma. This course is a learning-by-doing class. The class will investigate systems set up in Tacoma to reduce chemicals from being released to the environment and the health of urban streams and lakes. Experiential components of the course will include visiting a local creek to observe salmon returning to spawn, investigation of Tacoma's Green Stormwater Infrastructure, and a class project to devise and implement a plan to monitor pollutants in local creeks.
Using the text The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study by Fred Moten and Stefano Harney as a foundation, this class employs the concept of a "study group" to explore ways to navigate the terrains of a liberal arts education, practice community and self-care, and make operative and empowering use of knowledge through a highly interdisciplinary approach.
Economics is everywhere! Although, often we may find it hard to see. In this class, we will explore how economic concepts, present around us, manifest themselves in interesting ways in popular culture that we love. From box-office smashing movies to chart-topping songs to award winning television shows and artwork, all can serve as important avenues to help us learn and apply economic concepts that are central to our lives. You will not only explore how these works of popular culture incorporate economic concepts within them, but you will also learn about how the discipline is central to the functioning of these industries.
The Wizard of Oz is a classic 1939 film musical starring Judy Garland as Dorothy, a girl from Kansas who makes some unusual friends as she follows the Yellow Brick Road, defeats the Wicked Witch of the West, and learns valuable lessons about truth, home, and flying monkeys. Not only telling a great story through song, dance, and dazzling visuals, The Wizard of Oz has also provided a rich text for scholars from a rainbow of different disciplines to examine and interpret. This course uses the iconic movie as a starting place for connecting with classmates, a fertile ground for exploring the liberal arts, and an intriguing metaphor for the beginning of the college experience.
Medical Narratives explores how the experience of health, illness, and medicine is shaped by language into multiple acts of storytelling, including the complex narrative interactions between patients and health care workers, health and illness, body and mind. The course will examine accounts of how cultural and individual lived experiences provide different conceptions of health and healing and illness and disease, and what those narratives reveal about medical knowledge and authority, empathy and belief, metaphor and fact. Readings and other materials for Medical Narratives will include variety of genres, including fiction, poetry, memoir, and drama, essays and other non-fiction articles and popular medical accounts, and class materials may include a range of other media, such as podcasts, film, video, and social media.
This course explores how art can begin and is used by social movements and everyday forms of resistance. From movies to fashion, dance to street theater, art can transform how we understand systems of power and ourselves. Such transformations in identity and worldviews can seed protest. Art can be used not just to mobilize people but also as a form of enacting opposition. From dancing in the streets of Iran to punk feminism in Russia to DIY fashion in the United states, we will look across space and time to understand how art, it's many forms, is essential to imagining and enacting change in the world.
How do we visualize the everyday? How does creativity contribute to our well being and sense of community and support academic and extracurricular commitments? We will look at the ways that print artists make their everyday lives and culture visible. Through student art projects, reading, reflective writing, and discussion, we will give attention to our own environments, roles, and activities. Reflecting upon our commonplace habits, and experimenting with some new ones, we will consider how pausing, attention, and creativity allow us to engage as students and humans.
This course focuses on ghost stories from different cultures and time periods with special attention to nineteenth and early twentieth-century studies of the paranormal. Our investigations will draw on diverse fields of study, such as history, literature, philosophy, physics, and religion. Along the way, we will work collaboratively to produce a podcast on ghosts and ghost hunters in history.
This first year Connections class connects students to each other in an exploration of arts and activism and how to balance life as students and scholars interested in justice and social change. It connects students to campus programs about arts and justice, and it connects students to the community by introducing them to the work of the Freedom Education Project Puget Sound (FEPPS) and its work with incarcerated women.
At the start, the particular focus of class examples is theatre and prisons, including but not limited to: plays that depict performances by incarcerated people, plays made from the narratives of incarcerated or formerly incarcerated people, prison performance programs focused on Shakespeare, and programs that support incarcerated people to explore playwriting. As the course goes, students will have the option to explore arts activism in other mediums as they develop culminating projects and reflections.
To what extent is the United States achieving the ideal of "one person, one vote," and what role should mathematics play in democracy? In 2023, the Supreme Court ruled in Allen v. Milligan that Alabama's congressional map violated the Voting Rights Act by discriminating against Black voters. The majority opinion contains numerous references to the work of a geometer. This course explores the mathematics used to quantify gerrymandering, as well as other mathematical problems that arise in democracy, such as determining proportional representation and selecting a fair and practical voting system. The course is grounded in mathematics but also draws from the perspective of political science.
From Harry Potter to Magic the Gathering to astrology -- magic, witchcraft, and the supernatural are involved in our social, economic, and political histories, and influence how we think about gender, race, religion and spirituality. In this course we will investigate supernatural beliefs in history, popular culture, sociology and psychology in the US and internationally. We will analyze what beliefs and practices about magic and the supernatural reflect about the cultures that produce them, and why they persist in the modern world.
"Dao" means way, or path, in Chinese. Our course will explore the "dao" as it relates to Chinese architecture. We will investigate the ways that nature, space, and power are conveyed, highlighted, and embodied in Chinese gardens, landscape architecture, temples, monuments, and imperial structures. We will construct some pre-designed model versions of a few sites, and then identify, model, create, and annotate a small-scale version of one other architectural site for display on campus.
Work is an activity that consumes much of our existence. Whether we love it, hate it, avoid it, struggle through it, tell others how to do it, or worry when we don't have it, most of us will center some form of work in our lives. Work is a site for observing social power: Class, race, gender, ethnicity, disability, age, and other social dynamics intersect and condition people's life chances beyond the workplace. It is also the focus of a great deal of music, comedy, theater, film, and art. We sing about it to cope, we write about it to make people laugh, cry, or rage, and we depict it in ways that range from fantasy to realism across artistic styles. This course will explore themes in the sociology of work by focusing on music, comedy, and other sources of popular culture concerning work and social relations. We will also draw on multiple disciplines in the liberal arts to help us understand the significance of work to human beings. Throughout, we will work collaboratively to identify music, comedy, and sources of popular culture that exemplify sociological concerns, and produce student-directed projects ranging from podcasts, and performances, to academic reviews.
This course explores the art of collective negotiation, organizing, and civil rights advocacy through a semester-long study of the 1955 -1956 Montgomery Bus Boycott. The course is organized around a published documentary history of the bus strike titled Daybreak of Freedom by Stewart Burns, and the 2001 dramatic film "Boycott" directed by Clark Johnson and starring Jeffrey Wright and Terrence Howard. The course has three areas of focus. First, students learn the legal challenges and court opinions involved in the Montgomery Bus Boycott. Second, they examine cultural and artistic practices of the protesters including church hymns, soul food, sermons, and public speeches. Third, the class studies the politics that animate the boycott like racial integration, white separatism, Black nationalism, non-violence, and self-defense. The final assignment is a group project that explores a social problem using legal, political, and artistic analysis and expression.
Data & Reality is a multidisciplinary course that delves into the myriad ways data shapes, defines, and mediates our daily experiences. Drawing from fields such as art, computer science, sociology, and philosophy, students will critically examine how data collection, interpretation, and dissemination influence our perceptions, decision-making processes, and interpersonal interactions. By analyzing real-world examples ranging from social media algorithms to health wearables, students will not only recognize the omnipresence of data but also engage thoughtfully with its profound impact on human experience. To synthesize and creatively communicate their understanding, students will also be guided in crafting their own data visualizations, allowing for an exploration of the aesthetic and narrative potential of data representation.
This course introduces students to the values of a liberal arts education as it has been classically formulated. It contrasts the ideal of a mutually enriching relationship among its principal academic areas (humanities, creative arts, sciences, social sciences) with the current situation in higher education where these areas have become isolated and hierarchically ordered according to their perceived prestige and value to society. With this contrast in mind, we examine recent research relating to the origin and nature of human consciousness in the fields of physics, philosophy, psychology, cognitive neuroscience, and indigenous studies, which taken together suggest ways of restoring the original aim of the liberal arts: to educate the whole person so that they may lead a life that is well-lived and richly meaningful.
This freshman seminar is designed for students who are interested in cities and fascinated by urban life. Our semester is devoted to the field-based exploration of three emblematic features of northwest urbanism: dead malls, waterfront promenades, and ethnic enclaves. As we explore these urban themes, students will have ample opportunities to find their footing in the scholarship, and will explore ideas via active, field-based research pertinent to the urban planning and to life in the city. Students will master a multifaceted set of research tools and will deploy those tools in multiple field-based exercises. Students will learn how scholarly and academic work can be applied in the resolution of real world problems and to various policy-making conundrums. Students will also hear from a variety of experts and practitioners at work here in the Pacific Northwest, thereby building the initial components of a professional network. Along the way, students will improve their writing skills, burnish their capabilities with photography, polish their presentation styles, and reinforce their capacities to confidently conduct independent, field-based research by carrying significant research projects to the finish line.