This course will enable you to consider how public narratives of democracy, human rights, and social justice are formed and circulated by advocates. To that end, the course will explore how public demonstrations, such as Occupy Wallstreet or the Arab Spring, brought together public writing and community organizing strategies to create political change. More than just a study of such events, however, this course will allow you to directly speak with many of the key organizers. The course will allow you to directly learn how these leaders moved from being students to being part of collective efforts which spoke to their values. Finally, you will take part in the very training in non-violent organizing that informed their efforts. To help make this work meaningful to your own goals, there will be several short assignments where you will reflect on a public issue of importance to you, then develop a plan to begin working on that very issue. As part of the course, students will complete this same training and earn a certificate from Popovic’s Center for Applied Non-Violent Actions and Strategies (canvasopedia.org).  Additionally, here is a link to a video Srdja Popovic sharing his hopes for the course.

This course approaches food from various social science perspectives, focusing on historically and culturally variable forms of food production, exchange, preparation and consumption as the means through which both individual and social bodies are constructed and reproduced. We examine food and the environment; food and colonialism; the globalization of food and food production; food and identities; and food and bodies.

Food is much more than a biological need for human beings. People are meaning-makers, inseparable from the cultural frameworks in which they find themselves enmeshed. What we eat, the way we eat, and whether or not we prepare or provide food for others is every bit as much symbolic as it is rooted in biological survival. We create self identity, claim ethnic and national affiliation and affirm our maleness and femaleness with the foods we purchase, prepare, select or order from a menu. This course will help students to investigate the way the foods people eat—or don’t eat—hold meaning for people within multiple cultural contexts.

Studies the basic principles of nutrition, including psychosocial-cultural considerations in dietary intake. Focuses on nutrient sources and actions, digestion, special population needs, weight control, food faddism, international problems, nutrition education, and nutrition-related disorders.

Explores the impact of people on the environment in the past and present with projections for the future. Addresses the phenomena and effects of food and energy production and industrial processes, including such topics as lead pollution, acid rain, the greenhouse effect, and the disposal of radioactive waste. Demonstrates how the environment works in the absence of humans and discusses how human use of resources perturbs the environment.

Requires off-grounds work with local non-profits. A single-semester option for meeting the first writing requirement-- intended to be taken during the first year of study-- approaches writing as a way of generating, representing, and reflecting on critical inquiry.