Courses of Interest
Winter 2009
Overview
These "Courses of Interest" are classes that sound interesting to us, and will most likely be an excellent addition to your schedule if you're trying to figure out what to take. None of these are Honors courses themselves, but they may be applicable towards the College Honors Core requirements through the Ad Hoc method. However, you must first get approval from an Honors adviser and the course instructor if you would like to take any of these courses as ad hoc (see an Honors adviser if you have questions about this). And don't forget about the Honors Program Electives Handbook.
Courses
CHID 480 B: Queering Home: Race, Class, Sexuality, and the Politics of Belonging in a Transnational Frame
SLN 11874
Against the grain of these minoritizing discourses, we will explore how queer of color cultural productions subvert exclusive delineations of "home" and belonging. In other words, we shall look at how queer people of color in particular re-shape the notion of "home" as a strategy for resisting exclusionary rhetorics that surface after World War II and extend the logics of cultural imperialism and epistemological colonialism. These cultural producers, in this case of African and Asian diasporas, offer ways to re-imagine "home" and spaces for belonging that are anti-capitalist, anti-racist, and non-heteronormative. We will examine these alternative verisons of "home" transnationally (between and amongst nations rather than confined to a single one) as a strategy for tracking the emergence of critical resistance at multiple sites with shared political enthusiasms. We will view the historical tracking of these sites as a strategy for building solidarity between African and Asian diasporas in re-thinking "home."
CHID 498 C: Viennese Modernism: Vienna 1900 in English
SLN 11889
This course focuses on the modernist movement that erupted in Vienna in the last days of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, from 1890 to 1914. This is a distinctly interdisciplinary course that examines the struggle to find new approaches in literature, music, architecture, painting and design. Particular emphasis is placed on the works of Robert Musil, Arthur Schnitzler, Adolf Loos, Gustav Klimt, Arnold Schoenberg and Sigmund Freud.. The course is conducted as a combination of lecture and small-group discussion supported by videos, films, slides and music. Class is conducted in English.
CHID 498 B: States on Violence: Gender, Nationalism and Identity in Contemporary Sri Lanka
SLN 19658
The course will explore the implications of and intersections between women and war, how militancy can become an acceptable mechanism for social change, national and ethnic identity in competition, the contemporary impacts of colonialism and the impact of religion, development and the international community on violence in Sri Lanka. In an effort to collaborate with other invested individuals, this course will utilize local and international scholars, activists, practitioners and others to contribute to our critical dialogues.
SOC 495 A: Special Topics on Race, Class, and Gender: A Social Justice Perspective
SLN 18051
T Th 1:30-3:20pm
5 credits
Instructor: M. Henderson, Ph.D.
This course explores both historical and contemporary dimensions of social justice and inequality centered in race, social class, gender, and sexuality. While the course will focus on intersecting nature of social categories, it will also examine the way that systems of social inequality are inextricably intertwined with dominant social institutions and societal structures. I have designed this course to give you a basic understanding of social and systematic inequalities, such as class, race, gender, and sexuality with emphasis placed on the socially constructed definitions of various groups in our society and how these definitions affect individual and group experiences.
We will study groups experiences as they relate to power and domination and self-agency at institutional, group, and individual levels. We will also examine the concepts of privilege and oppression and how they work simultaneously to affect the lives of people of color in a U.S. context. Specific attention will be given to the nature of institutional and ideological racism, sexism, classism, abelism, nationalism, heterosexism, etc. as well as the varying ways that oppression is experienced and can be resisted at institutional, group and individual levels.
ESS 203: Glaciers and Global Change
M W F 9:30-10:20am
5 credits
Instructor: Ed Waddington
Glaciers and Global Change is a Natural World course with no prerequisites, for Science and non-Science majors alike. The course explores questions such as: Why are glaciers, sea ice and permafrost melting? How do glaciers influence the Earth's environment? What are Ice Age cycles, and what causes them? How do scientists read the record of past climate locked in glaciers?
English 285: Writers on Writing
T Th 12:30-1:50pm
Wednesday quiz section
For the first time in a large-format class, the collective UW Creative Writing faculty, along with other visiting artists, will remember in public why they do what they do. On ten sequential Tuesdays they will speak in depth about what interests them most, including the ways and means of poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and the joys and vagaries of inspiration, education, artistic practice, and the writing life. Thursdays will constellate a literary reading series. Discussion sections will be scheduled in between.
Serious curiosity is the only requirement for admission. Students will be expected to attend all talks, do the assigned reading, respond to problems and exercises posed by the lecturers, and participate vigorously in the ongoing conversation. By the end, they will have had a disciplined brush with literate passion, practiced imaginative methods at the point of the pencil, learned something about books from people who write them, and gained a practical sense of the artist's way of knowing the world.
Conceived as a perpetual work-in-progress, according professors full freedom in designing their respective contributions, the course will find its coherence in the conversation we leap to make of it. Sample topics: What Is It? or, Ars Poetica; Forms of Poetry, Forms of Thought; Mythos-Minded Thinking: From Proverbs to Parables, Stories as Metaphors in Motion; Odd Autobiography; Reading the New; Literary Collage & Blurring Boundaries; The Writing Life; The Revision Process; Closing Words.
No required text. Readings will be posted online or handed out in class. Grading will be based equally on reading (by quiz and conversation), writing (solutions to assigned prompts), and participation (attendance and discussion).
Repeat: this course is intended to bring infectious literate passion within earshot of as many people as possible at the University of Washington. No formal prerequisites. Everyone is invited.
ASIAN 203: Literature of Ancient and Classical India in English Translation
SLN 10516
T Th 12:30-2:20pm
5 credits
Instructor: Heidi Pauwels
This course explores some of the most influential works of Indian tradition and world civilization in their cultural context: the Rigveda, the Ramayana, the Mahabharata and Bhagavadgita, Kalidasa's Sakuntala, the Pancatantra, and Cilappatikaram. The works covered in the course were originally composed in Sanskrit or Tamil, but we will read them in English translation.
GEOG/SIS 111: Global Youth
SLN 19021
M W F 11:30-12:20
Thursday quiz sections
Instructor: Craig Jeffrey, Geography and International Studies
Youth politics is everywhere. Global transformations in economic prospects and cultural possibilities have catapulted young people to the center of political life. How might we connect the hardships and politics of youth in Seattle to the lives of youth in India, Africa and Latin America?
Global Youth 111 allows students to discuss the links between their own lives and those of students in other global contexts, with particular reference to health, education, environment and politics. The course will interest students at different stages of their university careers and it makes use of a variety of teaching techniques, including debates, photography, and performance.