Course Offerings

The health of a democratic society depends on an informed electorate. And yet the attack ads, unverified accusations, sound-bites, and carefully scripted and staged media events that fill television and the Internet tend to misinform, confuse, and disengage voters. How might we reverse this trend? How can we meaningfully enter into political conversations? How can we listen to others, form our own beliefs, and then communicate them respectfully and with purpose? To help answer these questions, we will return to modern democracy's ancient roots, using the lens of classical rhetoric to explore contemporary political debate. While the word “rhetoric” is often used today to deride precisely what's wrong with political discourse, as when a policy proposal is dismissed as mere “campaign rhetoric,” it more properly denotes the techniques of effective persuasion. By learning how rhetorical devices are used, we can empower ourselves to analyze policy debates and to make our own contributions. As part of this investigation, we will research issues, debate and develop positions, read and evaluate speeches, write and speak about our own positions, participate in public debates by writing letters to representatives and opinion pieces for newspapers. We will also experiment with various presentation styles and occasions to build our persuasive speaking skills. In our final project, we will research, analyze, and share our perspectives on an issue of interest, and reflect on our internal processes as we take on a belief and act on it. Recommended preparation: Passing grade in an Academic Inquiry Seminar or SAGES First Seminar.

This course explores the intersection of protest movements and media writing in both U.S. and international contexts. Through close and critical analysis, we will think about how journalists, historians, philosophers, novelists, photographers, and filmmakers have met the challenge of documenting moments of social upheaval. We will discuss how different mediums -- news articles, photographs, documentary films, essays, oral histories -- make possible different narratives and counter-narratives of public assembly and civil disobedience. We will ask questions like: Does free speech actually exist? What is the difference between activism and journalism? How do governments justify the often violent suppression of speech? We will trace genealogies of American protest in the public imagination from the Vietnam War to the AIDS crisis to contemporary social movements, including Black Lives Matter, the January 6 insurrection, and the Palestine solidarity movement. We will also examine recent international protest movements, from the Arab Spring to pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong, and analyze how both traditional and online social media affect our understanding of contested global events.

This course provides a survey of U.S. history since 1980, examining both domestic and global contexts. Topics include the rise and fall of neoliberalism, U.S. wars and foreign policy, dramatic transformations in technology and media, political realignments, social and cultural changes, and the histories of our most divisive current debates. Aside from simply covering “what happened,” we will attempt to go further and explore how historians think about contemporary events, place current events into longer historical contexts, develop skills in media literacy to better evaluate the quality of information we receive, and discuss the uses and misuses of historical analogies in public debate. We will also investigate the importance of structural narrative in making sense of historical events and processes: what questions do we ask of the past and why some questions and not others? Why do our questions about the past change over time? How do present circumstances affect our historical work? When do we draw our chronological boundaries; when do our stories start and when do they end?

Current scientific and technological innovations inspire a need to weigh and evaluate information like never before, while navigating the digital world has become a critically important practice. In other words, we must interrogate information instead of passively receiving it as we encounter news, research, and everyday communications. Where scholarly conversations found in books and journal articles form the backbone of academic discourse, these are not the only sources of knowledge worth sharing and not the only forums where valuable conversations take place. These other sources of information and venues for sharing knowledge include digital conversations and knowledge distribution on platforms that include TikTok, Twitter, YouTube, and Wikipedia, among others. The fundamental question this course seeks to answer is: How do we leverage a multitude of information sources to become more thoughtful and more literate when interacting with the knowledge produced within the digital world? Throughout this course, we will examine different online communities that generate information, from TikTok, Twitter, and YouTube to other outlets such as Wikipedia and the search engines that lead us there. These communities will revolve around an intersectional combination of gender, race, class, and sexuality. Our goal is to explore where and how online knowledge is formed, who forms that knowledge through community engagement, and how it is dispersed to better understand the information networks we rely upon and to put them in social and cultural contexts. Broader questions we will consider and discuss include issues of equity and access to information, how does information lead to knowledge, who dominates information distributed within online conversations, and how do other voices carve out spaces for themselves via diverse communities. Assignments will model the research and writing process and will build towards a substantive research paper alongside a multimedia presentation in the style of a TikTok video or a specialized website focused on a given online community in order to best serve as a communications-oriented course. Counts as a Communication Intensive course. Counts as a Human Diversity & Commonality course.

In this course, we engage in a holistic study of seminal Supreme Court cases surrounding freedom of speech, hate speech, incitement, freedom of assembly and association, and the right to petition. You will also learn and apply mass media theories to develop thoughtful critiques of newsgathering, news reporting and news dissemination. Integrating principles of mass media analysis, you will also learn and apply critical theories to rhetorical, visual and aural analyses of media text. We will continually evaluate how our readings inform and shape recent socio-legal-political events and issues such as events in Ferguson, Missouri, Cleveland, Ohio, and Charlottesville, Virginia.

This seminar addresses two major questions: (1) How do the contexts of our lives affect ethical behavior? and (2) How can we develop our character to manage ethically compromising personal and organizational challenges, while being authentic? Using experiential methods, reflective writing, and dialogue to help students discover individual ethical principles guiding behavior. We examine legacies from religion, spiritual teaching, and cultural upbringing (family, schools, friends, community, and nation), and moral philosophy to explore important personal values to build leadership character. These serve as standards of behavior to help decision-making in difficult contexts. With a focus on values and virtues, the course helps students think about the type of person they want to be and the sort of world they want to help create. Included are practical exercises for development of a code of ethics, an iterative process articulating principles of moral construction. These can serve as a foundation for character development, integrity, and moral courage for ethical decision-making to confidently address challenges throughout life.

This course focuses on actively developing practical communication and conflict resolution skills, designed to be inclusive across diverse contexts, from individual to international interactions. Students will acquire a comprehensive toolkit, including empathetic and active listening, non-violent communication, assertion, reframing, facilitation, negotiation, mediation, interactive conflict resolution, and alternative dispute resolution methods like circle processes and facilitation basics. Special emphasis is placed on identifying and surmounting barriers to effective communication, nurturing productive techniques, and fostering comfort with conflicts. This course recognizes the significance of adapting these skills across diverse contexts, emphasizing the need for effective application in various cultural settings.

This course examines books and readings that are not only controversial, but that critics attempt to push out of public dialog through formal and informal bans. We will examine a range of literature and scholarship that opponents attempt to censor, ban, or refuse to assign in classrooms. Some activists have sought to "ban" certain materials from public schools, such as critical race theory and gender theory, so we will read and discuss these in good faith. Likewise, other activists have sought to prevent critiques and empirical challenges to critical race theory, gender theory and related ideas, even attempting to block speakers and sales of these books, so we will discuss these controversial critiques in good faith. Novels can become so controversial that they face censorship and their authors face credible death threats. Most famously is the case of Salman Rushdie, so we will examine The Satanic Verses, the political reactions to it, and the social issues discussed within it. The core principle for this seminar is open discussion of controversial readings, and this requires reading controversial books with an open mind based on the principle that if someone wants to ban a book, it probably has something interesting to say. Ultimately one should be willing to read authors with whom one disagrees with the goal of learning and self-reflection.

USSO 294I (Think About The Social World)
Navigating the Information Landscape: Misinformation on Social Media
3 Credits
Instructor: Olivia Hobbs, Research & Engagement Librarian
MW 3:20 - 4:35 in Kelvin Smith Library

By the end of the semester, students will have strategies to verify information and engage in responsible digital citizenship on various social media platforms. They will have the knowledge and critical thinking skills to be more discerning consumers and creators of information.

**Note: This is a one-time offering for spring 2024 only.