Course Offerings

POSC 327: Civil Liberties in America

"Civil Liberties in America" centers on the Supreme Court's interpretation of the First Amendment. Our approach will therefore be case-specific, but, by contrast to a law school course, emphasis will be given to the historical and political context in which constitutional law is shaped, as well as to the philosophical dimension of landmark cases. We will follow the text of the Amendment, focusing first on liberty of religion with its establishment and free exercise clauses, and then move on to explore freedoms of speech and the press, of assembly and association.

ECON 431. Economics of Negotiation and Conflict Resolution

Students frequently enroll in a negotiation class with one thought in mind--negotiating a better job offer from an employer. They soon learn, however, that negotiation skills can do far more than improve a paycheck. Negotiations occur everywhere: in marriages, in divorces, in small work teams, in large organizations, in getting a job, in losing a job, in deal making, in decision making, in board rooms, and in court rooms. The remarkable thing about negotiations is that, wherever they occur, they are governed by similar principles. The current wave of corporate restructuring makes the study of negotiations especially important for M.B.A.s. Mergers, acquisitions, downsizing and joint ventures call into question well established business and employment relationships. Navigating these choppy waters by building new relationships requires the negotiation skills that you will learn in this class. Offered as ECON 431 and ORBH 413.

POSC 231: Conflict Resolution: Essential Communication Skills

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.

ORBH 240: Ethics for the Real World: Developing a Code of Ethics to Guide Decisions in Work and Life

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. Counts as a Communication Intensive course. Counts as a Human Diversity & Commonality course. Counts as a Moral & Ethical Reasoning course. Prereq: Passing letter grade in an Academic Inquiry Seminar (AIQS) or SAGES First Seminar.

ORBH 375: Building Leadership Character: Ethics in Action

The course engages students in moral and ethical reasoning, examining effective ethical leadership in different contexts, across cultures, within organizations, and individuals. It draws on theories of virtue ethics, deontological ethics, utilitarian ethics, relational ethics, and indigenous wisdom. Students reexamine their own ethical character, cultural values, and social consequences of choices through dialogue, feedback, reflection, and action as they engage in a self-reflective journey to develop ethical astuteness for personal and organizational benefit. Uses cases involving ethical crises and ethical leadership examples from across the world. Counts as a Moral & Ethical Reasoning course. Counts as a Understanding Global Perspectives course. Prereq: Junior student standing and completion of an Academic Inquiry Seminar (AIQS) (or SAGES First Seminar).

PHIL 392: Empathic Leadership

Leadership can be challenging. A good leader not only keeps their team on task, but also uses empathy and emotional intelligence to inspire, motivate, create a sense of psychological safety, and help team members develop. The course has two goals: 1) Students experience a development leadership role by acting in the role of a trainee facilitator and coach who guides and supports others as they engage in a variety of personal development exercises. 2) Students reflect on their leadership experiences, compare them to the experiences of others, and integrate it with academic scholarship relating to empathy, coaching, and emotionally intelligent leadership. The first goal is performative. Grading is based on engagement in the role and impact on coachees. The second goal combines personal reflection and academic scholarship, culminating in an essay. This course will be of value to those who are interested in developing their skills in helping professions and roles, including those of: coach, therapist, teacher, nurse, doctor, manager, and parent.

USSY 292A: Drama and Social Protest Movements

The complicated relationship between drama and politics dates back to at least ancient Greece. Today, playwrights continue to use political conflict as the basis for dramatic action, as well as use their plays to spark political protest--at times even risking imprisonment or exile. In this course, we will read a collection of protest plays alongside accounts of the protest movements that the plays and playwrights either depicted or participated in. As part of our investigation, we will ask the following questions: What do these plays tell us about the performative and emotional work done by protest? What role does theatricality play in the acts of persuasion, criticism, and direct action normally associated with political protest? Do these plays simply reproduce the goals and criticisms of protest movements, or does drama invite a style of social critique that sets it apart from other forms of political speech? Do these plays present protest as focused on the personal grievances of characters, or do they criticize larger social systems like class, gender, and racial hierarchy? We will also spend some class time discussing a few more modern anti-war, anti-racist and feminist protest movements, exploring the aesthetics and theatricality of protest and the extent to which they further political change. Prereq: Passing letter grade in a SAGES First Seminar, Academic Inquiry (AIQS) Seminar, or FSTS 100.

ENGL 255: Rhetoric & the Art of Public Speaking

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.

ENGL 262: Free Press and Protest

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.

HSTY 275: The History of Now: The U.S. Since 1980

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?

HUMN 212: Interrogating Information: Research and Writing for a Digital Public

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.

LAWS 5758: Protest, Policing, and The First Amendment

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.

ORBH 240: Ethics for the Real World: Developing a Code of Ethics to Guide Decisions in Work and Life

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.

POSC 231: Conflict Resolution: Essential Communication Skills

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.

USSO 293Y: Forbidden Readings: Heterodox Thinking, Controversy and Books That Get Banned

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: Navigating the Information Landscape: Misinformation on Social Media

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.