Honors Course Archive

Audio and video remixes have emerged as one of today’s most popular modes of expression. From DJ Spooky’s “Rebirth of a Nation” to DJ Earworm’s mash-up of the year’s top pop music videos, remixes have the power to convey a multiplicity of meanings. In this class we will explore the discourse and practice of remix, paying close attention to those that successfully convey cultural critiques. We will trace the roots of remix to core concepts (e.g., imitatio and mimesis) and practices (e.g., film collage, plunderphonics, fan-vidding, dub, and hip hop). In parallel, students will examine and create remixes that critique normative notions of politics, race, gender, consumerism, and more. This work will be grounded in an exploration of audio/video portals and archives as sources for these remixes. Student remix projects will be screened at an open, end-of-the-quarter event, as well as archived in the UW Libraries’ permanent collections.

Goals and Learning Outcomes
– Develop an understanding of remix culture and a familiarity with the field of remix studies.
– Make remixes that employ radical juxtaposition and scholarly practices such as rhetoric, persuasion, and critique.
– Create remixes that question and/or resist dominant paradigms and privileged narratives.
– Analyze remixes, asking what they convey and what cultural critiques they deliver.
– Critique media sources and archives as sites of privilege and control.
– Develop audio/video/film editing skills and grasp of copyright law, especially fair use.
– Present and archive student remixes in the UW Libraries.

Are there feelings that all people share independent of language, culture, & gender? We will examine the meaning and form of “emotion” words, facial expressions, cultural attitudes towards emo-
tion and emotional behavior, as well as gender-specific emotional expressions in different languages.

The key questions that are addressed in the Ways of Feeling class are:
· Are there “emotional universals”, that is, feelings that all people share independent of language, culture, gender, and race? and
· Are there “culture-specific” emotions?
· Are there “gender-specific” emotions?

The class is suitable for all students who are interested in Language, languages, and meaning. Ways of Feeling is a comparative course, with enough Slavic content for it to be relevant for Slavic majors and graduate students, yet accessible to those interested in other languages. Students will be introduced to research methods in semantics, pragmatics and discourse. They will gain an appreciation of the social and cultural underpinnings of their own language and other languages. The requirements consist of 4 short papers, an image collection, and a final term paper.

The Greek and Roman imagination has fed literature, art and thought in the Western world and beyond from antiquity until today: the god and the hero, the warrior and the wanderer, the lover and the schemer, the statesman and the dissident, the city-builder and the seeker of rural fantasy … Poets, artists, thinkers and doers, all stake-holders in the Classical Tradition.

Presupposing no prior study of what we know as classical antiquity (a shorthand term for the ethnically diverse and multicultural worlds unified by the use of the Greek and Latin languages on all sides of the Mediterranean Sea from about 1000 BCE/BC to 500 CE/AD), the course will offer the opportunity to explore conversations across centuries between ancient and modern texts and ideas, especially in poetry but in other textual genres and in other media too. For classicists like myself, antiquity ends in the 5th or 6th century CE, and on some definitions modernity begins as early as the 14th century CE; in between lie the Middle Ages (the medieval period), whose boundaries are themselves negotiable. Although this class will of course pick and choose its particular objects of study, in principle no period of culture influenced by ancient Greece and Rome is irrelevant to our investigation. What will unify our explorations are, first, a consistent grounding in ancient Greek and Roman texts and ideas and, second, our own perspectives as 21st century readers living in increasingly diverse and interconnected societies, trying to make sense of conversations across two and even three millennia of Western culture and to put them in conversation with other world cultures and traditions on which they have had an impact. ‘Classical’ and ‘tradition’ are both highly loaded terms: to study the Classical Tradition is to investigate, and to be ready to problematize, a long history of cultural appropriation and identity formation.

Introduces important trends and movements in Russian literary and cultural history

HONORS SECTION REQUIREMENTS WILL INCLUDE A LONGER MID-TERM EXAM, AND EITHER A LONGER FINAL EXAM OR A 10-
12 PAGE PAPER.

The theory of evolution by natural selection is the underlying theme that unites all fields of biology. In this course we will cover the basic principles of evolution, explore ways in which evolutionary theory can be applied to human biology and behavior, and consider how evolutionary thinking might guide the development of social policy. We will consider questions such as these:

-Why are women and men different?
-Which is more egalitarian: monogamy or polygamy?
-Why do step-parents and step-children often have more conflicted relationships than biological parents and biological children?
-When do people cooperate, when are they selfish, and why?
-What can we do to reduce the rate of spousal abuse and homicide?

My goal is to help students learn selection thinking; that is, to help them learn to reason like evolutionary biologists. I hope to help students pose questions, formulate hypotheses, design experiments, and critically evaluate the quality of evidence. After taking this course, students will be able to:

-Apply evolutionary theory to human interactions, especially those involving social conflict, and make predictions about how the divergent interests of the parties involved will affect their behavior.
-Design observational studies and experiments to test these predictions.
-Interpret and critically evaluate graphs and tables showing data on behavioral patterns in humans and animals.
-Provide evolutionary interpretations of various human social institutions, such as laws, wills, and social policies.

The theory of evolution by natural selection is the underlying theme that unites all fields of biology. In this course we will cover the basic principles of evolution, explore ways in which evolutionary theory can be applied to human biology and behavior, and consider how evolutionary thinking might guide the development of social policy. We will consider questions such as these:

-Why are women and men different?
-Which is more egalitarian: monogamy or polygamy?
-Why do step-parents and step-children often have more conflicted relationships than biological parents and biological children?
-When do people cooperate, when are they selfish, and why?
-What can we do to reduce the rate of spousal abuse and homicide?

My goal is to help students learn selection thinking; that is, to help them learn to reason like evolutionary biologists. I hope to help students pose questions, formulate hypotheses, design experiments, and critically evaluate the quality of evidence. After taking this course, students will be able to:

-Apply evolutionary theory to human interactions, especially those involving social conflict, and make predictions about how the divergent interests of the parties involved will affect their behavior.
-Design observational studies and experiments to test these predictions.
-Interpret and critically evaluate graphs and tables showing data on behavioral patterns in humans and animals.
-Provide evolutionary interpretations of various human social institutions, such as laws, wills, and social policies.

The focus of this course is on the basic science of glacier and ice-sheet change due to changes in the climate system. We will address the state of science on the land-ice contribution to sea-level change, both what we know from the past and the projections for the future. This is an active area of ice and climate research, and one that is also evolving quickly – both because the science is advancing and because the ice is changing in new ways each year.

Coupled to these scientific observations is an imperative to society: improved understanding of the ice-sheet change is necessary in order to make the best possible projections – adaptation and mitigation strategies depend on the science. Major global impacts are projected, and are already being seen in some parts of the world. Climate-change policy is explicitly tied to mitigation efforts, but an additional challenge for sea-level rise is that ice sheets do not respond immediately. The responsibility of response is complicated by the political and economical circumstances of the people affected. Sea-level rise is a multi-faceted global challenge that requires breadth of understanding, but also needs reflection as part of a learning process that can lead to informed awareness and action; students should gain both in this course.

Major expectations include engaging in class lectures and discussion, reading assignments, working in groups on problem sets related to the scientific material and on a presentation related to societal implications of sea-level rise for a chosen location from around the world, as well as submitting an independent essay at the end of the course.

To better understand the key factors that control the earth’s present and future climate, this course examines episodes in the earth's past when extreme climate conditions existed. Dramatic changes in the earth's climate have resulted from natural variations in solar insolation, atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases, rates and pathways of ocean circulation, plate tectonics, and the evolution of vascular plants and, in modern times, the burning of fossil fuels.

The impact of these factors on climate through interactions between the atmosphere, oceans and land will be evaluated.

The processes that produced past climate changes will be discussed primarily as a framework to evaluate modern and future climate change resulting from human activity.

The class will utilize lectures, in-class problem solving, discussion of scientific papers and weekly homeworks to learn the material on both a qualitative and quantitative level. Students are expected to have had sufficient science-based coursework to feel comfortable solving quantitative in-class and homework problems using basic algebra and, in some cases, using the spreadsheet program Excel. Honors students will work as multi-student teams on separate projects to quantify the impact of human CO 2 emissions on local and regional climate change.

This course presents a two-credit add-on to BIOEN 215, a three-credit introductory bioengineering seminar covering creative problem solving techniques, engineering ethics, social constraints, and engineering design process. In addition to attending BIOEN 215 lectures and discussion sections alongside students registered for BIOEN 215A, students registered under the HONORS-prefix will attend an additional two-hour discussion section once a week and complete additional weekly assignments including weekly reading responses and a term paper on a topic of their choice related to the role of diversity/diverse identities in engineering practice.

In the Honors section of this course, we ask students to put their bioengineering knowledge into a social context and reflect on the impact of engineering in society. Through weekly readings and discussions, we will explore the relationships between engineering, ethics, race, gender, disability and sexuality to answer three inter-related questions:
1) How do our cultural ideas about race, gender, disability and sexuality influence engineering knowledge and practice?
2) On the other hand, how does our engineering practice influence our cultural ideas about race, gender, disability and sexuality?
3) How can we use engineering to promote social welfare for all people?

Every day – for that matter, potentially for every minute or second of every day – we interact with a widening variety of information objects, from the trivial to the profound. All of those form part of the human record, the record of who we are as individuals and who we are as a society. That record goes back thousands of years and is our only way of
knowing, understanding and remembering days and people gone by, and in turn is the only way we and our world will be known and remembered.

This course will explore that record in its various forms, how it got that way, what makes it work, what is and might be happening to it, and what that might mean going forward. Questions we will explore include: What is the human record? Why does it
exist? How does it impact our society? What (and who) is missing? How is changing? What are the effects of recording? What do we want it to be? How does power play out? And, ultimately, who shall we be?
Students will know more about the various types of records: public, private and published, the life cycle of information, including specific examples and the questions they raise, the importance of social context and roles, power and work, as well as the institutions that work to create, organize, preserve and provide access. Finally, we'll look
at the future of an increasingly documented world and its implications.

Explores big problems and opportunities facing society ranging from healthcare, education, big data, and poverty. Examines how solutions to these challenges can be researched, validated, and implemented using entrepreneurial skills such as creativity, business models, pivoting, and execution.

In this seminar we will learn the recent history of homelessness in Seattle and explore root causes of impoverishment — both socio-economic processes and representations that frame people and places as ‘poor’. We will think about the role of the non-poor and structural causes in the production of poverty/inequality. In the first part of the course we will ethically engage with non-homed people, homelessness activists and political movements that are addressing the immediate and root causes of homelessness. We will then work on understanding root causes of homelessness, considering the role of gentrification, job markets, intersecting forms of discrimination (race, gender, sexuality, citizenship and more), criminalization and state-sponsored violence. Throughout our class, we will consider what forms of citizenship acts of engagement, research and action can tackle impoverishment

Reading, writing and traveling are all acts of the imagination. This course will allow us to “see” the places we’ve already visited, and imagine the places we plan on visiting. Our workshop will offer the memoirist and the returning traveler a way to synthesize experiences, transforming them into essays, articles, poems or stories. Our time together will help to set a practice for writing and exploring so that writing becomes a multi-modal practice to document life as it goes along.

Our goals include: helping you to keep a fantastic notebook/record of the sights, sounds, smells and impressions of the places you’ve visited and creating methods to transform that notebook into a more formal piece of writing. By reading poems, stories, essays and articles that illuminate the art of travel and of recording memories, we’ll test out a range of styles and stances. These activities will surface our initial assumptions about what it means to travel as a method of inquiry and imagination, and of acceptance, through places we don’t yet know– or places we have already been.

This 5-credit seminar follows the journalistic path of author Rebecca Skloot and her uncovering the plight of Henrietta Lacks, an impoverished African American woman whose immortal cells were remove by researchers at Johns Hopkins Medical Research Center in 1951. A historical context as addressed for understanding how corporate values have absorbed the mission of health and social justice within academic research institutions. The commodification of human tissues emerges as a product of capitalism and the consequence co-optation of integrity within academic research centers.
Course Requirements: A complete critical reading of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (Crown, 2010) and not the movie. Students must fully engage each other with informed discussion and will demonstrate a deeper understanding of societal and institutional forces that framed the exploitation of Henrietta Lacks and her family. A week-by-week discussion guide provides a blueprint for presentations. Group Presentations (30%), Pop Quizzes, Final Essay (70%).

Are we still moderns in our thinking and imaginations? Or are we postmoderns now? What do those terms even mean?

This is a course in the history of ideas that will look at how key themes in philosophy, literature and film, science, and religion have come to shape the way we think about and imagine what is real and unreal, what is legitimate or illegitimate in our practices and thinking.

This course is designed to help students become more aware of the cultural forces that otherwise unconsciously impinge on them to shape the narratives that give their lives meaning. It will do so by looking at the remarkable transformation of the North Atlantic social imaginary in the last five hundred years-from a premodern, enchanted world full of magic, spirits, and invisible forces to the late modern one that Max Weber described as ‘disenchanted’, a world that lacks any robust, commonly imagined sense of the supernatural that our ancestors in all world cultures took for granted.

The course will require coursepack readings that will include excerpts from Plato, Marsilio Ficino, Castiglione, Friedrich Nietzsche, Michel Foucault, Charles Taylor, and others. The course will examine how these readings and other concepts presented in class have been dramatically represented in films that include The Matrix, As You Like It, King Lear, Fargo, Hail Caesar, Harry Potter, and others to be determined.

Lectures on Mondays and Wednesdays along with assigned coursepack readings will provide necessary historical and conceptual background. Students will be required to watch and analyze assigned films. Students can watch films on their own or view them out-of-class Thursday evenings when I will schedule on-campus viewings. Scheduled class time on Fridays will provide the opportunity for discussions led by me or students to hash through the themes and materials presented each week during the quarter.

Grade will be determined by short quizzes, class participation, and final project.

For the first time in the history of the planet humans are causing changes on a global scale – the Anthropocene. Scientists discovered global climate change, identified its human origins, and are forecasting change to every corner of the globe. There is overwhelming consensus about the facts underpinning our knowledge of climate change. Powerful forces are aligned against implementing changes necessary to mitigate climate impacts. By introducing uncertainty, and doubt about scientists’ motives, complexity and uncertainty have been turned into disagreement, undermining the public’s understanding and belief in climate science.

Understanding climate change requires an interdisciplinary approach that considers natural and social sciences, art, and the role of activism. A first step is to understand the often complex and sometimes perplexing science of climate change, in all its disciplines. Beyond the natural sciences, we can learn from history how past civilizations succumbed to climate change, we can further examine how the human brain limits our ability to process complex problems in a moral context. Just as importantly, we can explore how artists and musicians work with scientist to extend the expression of hard facts to intellectual and emotional enrichment.

The course will begin by building a foundation for understanding climate change causes and impacts, including atmospheric science, oceanography, chemistry, and ecology. First comes information on how the atmosphere works and mechanisms of climate alteration. Next, how the ocean works, atmospheric-ocean interactions, and their role in climate alteration. Then we will follow with key ecosystems and species in Arctic.

Interwoven with the science will be discussions of how Arctic states are working together to mitigate climate change impacts. Arctic indigenous peoples are also working with Arctic states to engage in the climate change discussion. The course consider the impacts of climate change to those nations and people, and also how they are contributing through literature, music, art.

Student learning goals

Students planning to enroll in this course should have substantial college-level preparation. That preparation should include completing at least one Natural World course and one English composition and writing course. Students will be reading, interpreting, and analyzing materials from a broad range of disciplines with guidance from the instructor. With good comprehension and writing skills, students from all schools and departments can be successful in this class. At the end of this course, the student will be able to:

Explain climate change in the context of atmospheric and oceanic systems, with an emphasis on effects to humans and ecosystems.

Describe how Arctic indigenous people understand and articulate climate change.

Explain the role of Arctic Council members, permanent participants, and non-member observer nations in investigating, communicating, and mitigating climate change impacts.

Describe and compare the advantages and disadvantages of climate policy strategies and their differing impacts on the environment and humans.

Recognize the role of art, music, and activism in communicating science and affecting policy.

Display a leadership role in the classroom community through discussion, group learning, and class presentations.

Class assignments and grading
In-class participation – 10%
Discussion briefs and short writing assignments – 30%
Quizzes – 20%
Group Project – 20%
Final Paper – 20%

Music can be heard all over our planet. It finds its place in the chants of a shaman healing their patient, accompanies television commercials to help sell a product, helps create an atmosphere at social events, and accompanies societal rites of passage. Its inspiration can also be found in nature, for example, as a bird singing in our back yard or in the Amazon rainforest. Academically, music weaves its magic into many fields, making it an interdisciplinary powerhouse. It is present from the hard sciences through the most esoteric arts. Examples include recording technology in engineering; the use of music for healing in medicine and psychology; the study of sound production and building of musical instruments in physics; copyright and performance rights in law; and its use as a teaching aid in education.

In this experiential course we will examine some of the universal themes emerging from the use of music and its influence on humanity and our world. Our ten week journey will utilize various lenses through which we will explore the topic, including scientific and academic research, observation of collective human experience, and your own personal experience both in and outside of class. Our time together will be partially modeled on the goals and objectives of collaborative teaching/learning communities. Activities will include class visits from guest experts and group and individual research opportunities along with weekly musical explorations facilitated by the instructor. During this process we will also examine how it affects and empowers our own lives.

This upper division course surveys episodes in the history of world architecture during the period from about 700 to 1750. The course explores key architectural works and urban environments from across the globe, examining the formal qualities of these works together with the technical and cultural factors that inform them. Particular attention is paid to the relevant political, economic, religious and philosophical underpinnings of the past. Recurring themes will include the impact of technological innovations on architectural developments, the effects of cultural exchange on architectural form, and architecture’s role as an expression of cultural ambitions.

The requirements are regular attendance at lectures, a mid-term and final exam, and a research project. The Honors discussion section meets once a week with the class instructor for deeper exploration of course content through readings and discussion. The focus of the discussions will be on the networks and flows of people, materials, and ideas surrounding architecture and the built environment. Students will develop individual research projects and a digitally-based presentation centered on images and maps.

Student learning objectives:
• Identify and explain the significance of representative buildings, sites and features.
• Define key terms that relate to the design, construction and materials of the buildings and sites presented in the course.
• Recognize and interpret basic drawing conventions of architecture.
• Distinguish and compare representative built works according to the historical, cultural and regional context in which they were created.
• Interpret architectural works of the past as an expression of the social, political, technological,
theoretical and aesthetic context of the cultures that built them.
• Recognize the complex manner in which architectural traditions evolved and related over
time as well as within and across diverse cultural and regional contexts.
• Critically analyze and effectively communicate ideas about architecture using text and images.

BIOC 451 is the honors version of BIOC 441; it covers the same topics in metabolism and gene expression using the same textbook, but is taught as a group discussion of selected publications from the primary literature, with an emphasis on research strategy, experimental design, creative thinking, and scientific communication.

Continuation of CHEM 145. Includes laboratory. Together CHEM 145 and 155 cover material in CHEM 142, 152, and 162. No more than the number of credits indicated can be counted toward graduation from the following course groups: CHEM 152, 155 (5 credits); 145, 155, 162 (10 credits).

For chemistry majors and otherwise qualified students planning three or more quarters of organic chemistry. Structure, nomenclature, reactions, and synthesis of organic compounds. Theory and mechanism of organic reactions. Studies of biomolecules. No more than 4 credits can be counted toward graduation from the following course groups: CHEM 238, CHEM 336.

Basic programming-in-the-small abilities and concepts including procedural programming (methods, parameters, return values) , basic control structures (sequence, if/else, for loop, while loop), file processing, arrays and an introduction to defining objects.

Continuation of CSE 142. Concepts of data abstraction and encapsulation including stacks, queues, linked lists, binary trees, recursion, instruction to complexity and use of predefined collection classes. Prerequisite: CSE 142.

The course investigates modernism, modernist theory, and the modern landscape architecture as process, product, and theory.

What makes a good urban landscape? A great public park? An inspiring work of landscape art? This course will explore the history of designing and creating gardens and landscapes in diverse cultures and
places as the profession and practice of landscape architecture has become a leading field in the design and creation of newly imagined city spaces and places. We will begin in the 19th century with Central Park, in New York City, one of the first public parks designed for the public and work our way up to the postindustrial parks and landscapes of the late 20th century. We will study small gardens that inspire the poet and large nature preserves, as well as city plazas, corporate roof gardens,
and the neighborhood park.

We will explore how modern art and architecture influence landscape design and in turn how environmental thinking influenced the push for sustainable cities. What does it mean to be modern? How does creativity shape the design of natural landscapes? This course provides an historic and critical overview of the evolution of modernism and modernist designs in terms of aesthetic, technological, social, and spiritual concerns in the built landscape. Moving between practice and theory, between design, as a creative art and as a way of thinking, we will consider diverse modernisms across the Americas and Europe.

Covers the material of MATH 124, 125, 126; 307, 308, 318. First year of a two-year accelerated sequence. May receive advanced placement (AP) credit for 125 after taking 135. For students with above average preparation, interest, and ability in mathematics.

Introduction to proofs and rigor; uniform convergence, Fourier series and partial differential equations, vector calculus, complex variables. Students who complete this sequence are not required to take MATH 300, MATH 309, MATH 324, MATH 327, MATH 328, and MATH 427. Second year of an accelerated two-year sequence; prepares students for senior-level mathematics courses.

Covers the basic principles of electromagnetism and experiments in these topics for physical science and engineering majors. Lecture tutorial and lab components must all be taken to receive credit. Credit is not given for both PHYS 115 and PHYS 122.

Join us at the Seattle Symphony for the class “Experiencing Music”! No musical training is necessary – just bring your curiosity and your willingness to engage in the communal experience of live music at the highest level. All students are welcome to sign up for Honors 398A – you don’t need to be in the Honors program to enroll. We will be going to (probably) five concerts at Benaroya Hall throughout the quarter (specific dates to be listed soon; they will be on Thursday evenings). We’ll prepare for these concerts by discussions and readings in classes held on campus, we’ll have talks given by Symphony staff, and we’ll go on a backstage tour. Students will purchase the Symphony’s Campus Card ($30); all ticket arrangements will be made by the instructors. Questions? Contact Claudia Jensen (cjensen@uw.edu).

Open up to all students, all instruments. An ensemble approach to the teaching of jazz improvisation, and playing in a small jazz ensemble. This class is designed to develop students skills and knowledge of playing in a small jazz combo. Repertoire will be arrangements from the jazz canon with opportunity for students to create their own music. Students will be expected to prepare (practice!) their parts for weekly class meetings.

Audition is required for this class and will consist of playing a pre-selected jazz standard and/or a blues. Lead sheets and charts will be pro­vided for all play­ers at the audi­tion. Please contact Greg Sinibaldi (sinibald@uw.edu) for more information and to schedule an audition.