CONN

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.

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.

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.

How do societies shape their collective identities based on their pasts? Who gets to decide how the past is remembered and what are the roles of governments, museums, memorials and monuments in narrating it? How do societies choose to debate and reinterpret formative historical events? This course explores these questions by focusing on collective memory in contemporary Europe. The main themes of this course are memories of the Holocaust, European empires and communism that continue to shape identity, culture and politics in countries across Europe.

While Americans have assorted perspectives on capitalism, many students arrive on campus with critical assessments of this socio-economic system. In this course, students will develop a significant scholarly foundation in the history of capitalism, its expansion to global dominance, and in theorists' assessment of its impact. We'll commence this gargantuan task with an anthropological lens attentive to how others in this world have experienced capitalism.

Students in this cross-disciplinary course develop an understanding of both the historical and contemporary experiences of African-American business leaders in the United States. Black business leaders herein are defined as either entrepreneurs or as managers and executives working within for-profit enterprises. Students draw connections and contrasts between critical issues and decisions facing black business leaders past and present by analyzing the influence of racism and prejudice on the evolution of American black capitalism.

This course contrasts how people should and how they do create portfolios. To explain how they should, the course covers applied modern portfolio theory, including mean-variance optimization and Monte Carlo simulation using Excel and Crystal Ball software. To address how they do, it covers cognitive and emotional behavioral biases, as well as behavioral portfolio theory, adaptive portfolio theory, bounded rationality, and prospect theory. Students may choose to focus either on institutional portfolios (like endowments and pension funds) or on individual portfolios (like 401(k)s).

This course in intellectual history draws upon history, religion, anthropology, and sociology in order to understand how the cagtegories of `religion' and `magic' have been shaped by the Western, and largely Christian-influenced, tradition. `Magic' and `religion' arose out of the history of the West's engagement with internal groups decried as `deviant,' such as medieval `heretics,' or Catholics in the Protestant imagination, and then, during colonialism, in response to other societies and cultures.

The goal of this course is to provide an in-depth, accurate understanding of mindfulness, from both an academic and experiential perspective. The history of mindfulness is examined, including its roots in Buddhism, along with the more recent integration of mindfulness practice in Western psychology. The course explores what mindfulness is, common misconceptions about mindfulness and mindfulness meditation, how mindfulness works, and also the qualities and virtues cultivated in mindfulness practice.

In 1872, Prussian-born and longtime Brooklyn resident John Gast painted "American Progress," an artistic rendering of Americans' dominant-cultural belief that they were destined to expand throughout the continent. In the painting, Columbia, an angelic female figure betokening Anglo-American "civilization," drives benighted forces of "savagery" into oblivion and ushers in their replacements, those 19th-century emblems of progress, the telegraph wire, the locomotive, the farmer, the schoolbook.