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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?