UCOR Section Descriptions

Course Description

How can a city be described as a "social laboratory"? How can people that lived a hundred years ago explain today's social and cultural issues? Beginning with the tum of the 20th Century, students will examine the urban landscape of Chicago, one of the earliest sites of sociological inquiry. Through the lens of Upton Sinclair's historical sociological fiction, The Jungle, we will study the "urban laboratory" that began with confluence of diverse immigrant populations and the extremes of crushing poverty and vast wealth. While many early American sociologists worked with the goal of social reform in mind, these social inequities are still at the heart of sociology today. This course will facilitate a discussion of the both the history of Sociology in terms of research, social thought, and reform and also how the discipline continues to address social injustice albeit in different ways. Students will enter the "social laboratory" that is Seattle and carry out their own service-learning projects in order to ameliorate suffering and also to determine how Sociology has progressed as a discipline.

Course Description

This course examines the more than 15,000 year old archaeological record of the Northwest Coast of North America, the culture area extending from southeast Alaska to coastal British Columbia, Washington, Oregon, and northern California. This region has fascinated anthropologists for almost 150 years because its indigenous peoples have developed distinctive cultures based on fishing, hunting, and gathering economies. The course examines the ecological and ethnographic background for the region, and then study how these have shaped archaeologists' ideas about the past. The contents of sites and consider the relationship between data, interpretation, and theory.

Course Description

This course brings the social sciences in conversation with puppetry arts to explore how the latter can amplify the insights of the former. Students will engage in low-stakes puppet-making, learn how puppetry has responded to social issues across the globe throughout its history, apply the perspectives, paradigms, and research methods of the social sciences to a specific social issue, and then have fun putting on a puppet show dramatizing what they've learned.

Course Description

This class provides students with the opportunity to develop a theoretically critical awareness of the relationship between love, sexuality, and marriage from a social scientific lens. The class will explore the relationship between sex, love, romance, desire, and intimate relationships in the modern world through a social scientific lens. Topics to be considered may include: the intersections between race, ethnicity, class, gender, nation, sexuality, and marriage; changing definitions of sexual respectability; prostitution and sex work in different contexts; sexual behavior and sexual ideals; transsexuality and transgender identities; the varieties of love; the meaning of marriage; state regulation of marriage and sexuality; love in popular culture, and historical shifts in constructions of affect and emotion.

Course Description

What is a "social problem""? In this course, we will step back to understand how social problems are socially constructed by asking what gets labeled as a problem, who gets to label something, how groups mobilize around what they consider problematic, and about the role of social policies in this process. We will cover a wide range of topics from affordable housing and homelessness to environmental degradation to race-based violence. The goal throughout the class will be to examining the public claims-making process of how people construct ideas about what is good and bad in social life. As we look at the process through specific examples, the course will pay special attention to how these issues are constructed in the city of Seattle and the Pacific Northwest.

Course Description

What threatens the health of the Puget Sound ecosystem? This course will focus on the ecosystem of the Puget Sound, the pollutants that can be found there, where they are coming from and how we can prevent them. Students will do their own investigations on effects specific chemical are having on animal health and how rain gardens and river repair programs can prevent pollution from reaching the Sound.

Course Description

The nature, formation, and evolution of our Solar System and other planetary systems, and how we learn those, through scientific inquiry. Background physics will be introduced and explored in laboratory exercises and independent observational and computational work. Discussions of the methods, costs, and gains from robotic space exploration, leading up to the search for planets and life elsewhere in the Solar System and the Galaxy.

Course Description

We rely on energy for a variety of daily functions, including heat for our indoor spaces, light, power for electronic devices, and fuel for transportation. How is that energy produced, what natural resources does is consume, and what are the potential consequences? This course will use fundamental principles of chemistry to understand how energy is harnessed from natural resources, and will consider the environmental, societal, and economic impacts of our consumer choices around energy.

Course Description

Environmental sustainability gives us an extraordinarily relevant avenue to investigate the question: how do we know what we know about the natural world? We will explore the fundamental biology behind sustainability to better make informed choices about how to live in our only ecosystem, the earth. In lab, we will learn 'hands on' by exploring a question of personal interest using the methods of science as well as visiting environmental sustainability related locales.

Course Description

We rely on energy for a variety of daily functions, including heat for our indoor spaces, light, power for electronic devices, and fuel for transportation. How is that energy produced, what natural resources does is consume, and what are the potential consequences? This course will use fundamental principles of chemistry to understand how energy is harnessed from natural resources, and will consider the environmental, societal, and economic impacts of our consumer choices around energy.