Honors First Year Experience courses (FYEs) focus your energies and help you see the possibilities in your education and future in small seminar classes with outstanding innovative faculty.
Our 2019 Honors FYE Seminars are designed to introduce you to concepts of civic engagement and social justice from a social science or arts & humanities perspective. The small class size (no more than 20 students) and discussion format will allow you to work closely with fellow honors students and with faculty members who are passionate about their chosen topics.
Fall 2019
Gaining knowledge through digital interface – aka “Google-knowing” – is changing the way people form beliefs and evaluate claims about the world. One upside of this is the decentralization and democratization of communication, which grants a platform to the voices of dissent and of the oppressed. One downside is that passive ways of knowing and information gathering are drowning out critical thinking, reflection, and understanding. The result is that people find it increasingly difficult to distinguish trustworthy claims from untrustworthy ones. We have seen this play out in the media and, in 2016, on the highest political stage. Today we are constantly being bombarded with targeted news feeds, viral marketing, and claims about fake news. Everyone knows that the internet cannot be blindly trusted, and yet it is the first (and often the ONLY) source we turn to when we need to know. As Michael Patrick Lynch states, “Where we used to say that seeing is believing, now we might say ‘googling is believing.’”
This critical thinking course will examine the dangers of trusting google- knowing as readily as our own perceptive and reflective faculties and it will teach the kinds of intellectual skills that aid in filtering out dubious claims from trustworthy ones. Students will read Lynch’s book The Internet of Us (Liveright, 2017) and other sources, write short reflections, watch film, and discuss the course materials in small and large groups.
Instructor: Christopher Kirby, Faculty in Philosophy
Listing: HONS 196
Requirement Satisfied: Humanities
This course introduces students to the history, methods and ethics of art practice as a vehicle for social change and engagement. Art has long been a catalyst for major cultural shifts whether through individual expression, community building or direct social activism. Throughout this course, students will learn about various social movements and their accompanying artistic production. Students will be guided through the process of researching, proposing and executing a socially engaged artwork which will act as the culmination of the course. Emphasis will be placed on understanding and creating artworks which promote community, collaboration and change.
Instructor: Joshua Hobson, Faculty in Art
Listing: HONS 196
Requirement Satisfied: Humanities
In this class, we’ll use the Fair Trade coffee movement as a lens to look at important questions around how our food system works and alternate theories about how it should work. Along the way, we’ll explore issues around sustainability and sustainable development, the world from the point of view of farmers in the global South, and the ways in which ethical consumption decisions both challenge and help to preserve our current food system. We’ll read Daniel Jaffee’s Brewing Justice, supplemented with readings by Michael Pollan (“East food, not too much, mostly plants”), Carlo Petrini (Slow Food), and Temple Grandin (animal rights and autism expert)
Instructor: Julia Smith, Faculty in Anthropology
Listing: HONS 196
Requirement Satisfied: Social Sciences
Students in this class will examine where bodies have been used (in art, in rhetoric, and on the ground) within social justice movements. We will do this by pairing contemporary events and historical depictions. Students will learn to think critically about how bodies in general, and bodies like theirs, are being used, and often used against them.
Instructor: Ryan Parrey, Director and Lecturer, Disability Studies Program
Listing: HONS 196
Requirement Satisfied: Social Sciences
Justice, or Just Us? Now, more than ever, we need to develop knowledge, strategies, and skills as effective scholar-activists.
This course provides an introductory study of theories, concepts, and strategies of social justice and political resistance, including individual action, policy, advocacy, and collective action. We will learn about intersecting systems of oppression, methods of resistance, and transformative visions of possibility
Instructor: Judy Rohrer, Director of Women's and Gender Studies
Listing: HONS 196
Requirement Satisfied: Social Sciences
Winter 2020
Magic appears in every culture and every time, referenced in historical documents and of course in fairy tales, often as a means to power for the downtrodden. Though not always related to magic, the term "witch-hunt" finds frequent use, even today. This course will explore the connections, traditions, and evolution of magic, as well as the beliefs and practice behind witch-hunts of early modern through modern times. This FYE uses The Witch-Hunt in Early Modern Europe by Brian P. Levack and The Annotated Brothers Grimm, edited and translated by Maria Tatar, as texts that spark cultural and historical investigation and comparison of magic and witchcraft all over the world, in addition to other materials such as newspapers, films, photography, witchcraft treatises, and more. Students will also learn to identify themes of scapegoating and magic in modern life, and learn to engage with them in a meaningful way.
Instructor: Monica Stenzel
Listing: HONS 196-002
Requirement Satisfied: Social Sciences
This course focuses on the ethics and politics of memory in the Americas. Considering current theoretical debates on memory and trauma in the US, the border with Mexico, and Latin America, class discussions will draw on readings representing a wide range of cross-cultural examples. Art—literature, film, music, photography, and visual art—speaks of the unspeakable when confronting a community’s traumatic past. We will survey these artistic representations to understand how trauma, memory, and mourning determine the ways in which the past is (or is not) represented. The course examines the way these texts, practices, and spaces function as a mode of witnessing the traumatic past, mediating between subjective and collective memories at a local, national, and trans-national level.
Instructor: Natalia Rubio-Ruiz
Listing: HONS 196-001
Requirement Satisfied: Humanities and Fine Arts
Note: The Honors FYE is required of all students entering honors this fall, including transfer students. If you have not already completed your general education breadth requirements, you can use the seminar to fulfill humanities or social science, as well.
