Current Courses

This course will be an introduction to modern Japan through films, in which we will use a wide variety of twentieth-century works to discuss an array of topics. Not only will we be viewing films in a variety of genres – documentary, drama, comedy, historical pieces, the avant-garde, gangster films, and animation – we will also be discussing topics ranging from the nature of art to the moral questions of nuclear modernity. Although our discussions will be sensitive to the specific nature of film as an expressive medium, we will consider the topics of art, history, society, war, propaganda, tradition, and morality.

Learn about climate and ice-sheet change by traveling to the margin of the Greenland Ice Sheet. We will investigate a glacier basin and distinct glacial landforms at the margin of the ice sheet that are shaped by to ice sheet advances and retreats over time. We will explore these places using a recently developed set of virtual reality environments, as well as explore real-world data in a Geographical Information System (GIS) developed for Greenland. Through numerous hands-on activities students will gain geospatial skills and build connections to polar places and spaces. Introductory material will cover basics of climate science, basics of continent-scale dynamics of the Greenland Ice Sheet, and how the Greenland Ice Sheet has changed over time; lectures would build from ‘climate literacy’ and ‘polar literacy’ principles. As a class we will also work towards creating geospatial layers using available statistics about life in Greenland and available locations of sites that have cultural and historical significance.

This course seeks to provide students with a comprehensive and culturally sensitive understanding of the Salish Sea’s marine ecology. With a focus on integrating indigenous knowledge alongside scientific study, the course aims to explore the intricate relationship between the ecosystem and tribal communities, considering the cultural, historical, and ecological significance of the region. The course covers the coastal oceanography of the Salish Sea, its diverse marine flora and fauna, emphasizing keystone invertebrates, culturally and commercially important fish and marine mammals. It examines conservation challenges, anthropogenic impacts such as pollution, habitat loss, climate change and ocean acidification, and explores conservation initiatives. The course argues for the inclusion of diverse social scientific and indigenous knowledge in conservation decision-making, challenging the assumption that physical sciences alone provide true knowledge. Structured with a variety of teaching methods, including lectures, seminars, discussions with tribal elders, field trips, and visits to marine research facilities, the course integrates hands-on experiences such as ecological surveys, laboratory activities and collaborations with conservation experts. Learning outcomes include understanding the cultural significance of marine life for indigenous tribes, comprehending the complex regulatory framework of the region, and advocating for interdisciplinary collaborative approaches in ocean governance. By nurturing a generation of students equipped with scientific knowledge, practical skills, and empathy, the course aims to contribute meaningfully to the conservation and sustainable management of the Salish Sea marine ecosystem.

Pain is a pervasive human experience.  All of us have had pain from injuries and various medical problems.  For most of us, pain is either episodic or modest enough in intensity that it does not greatly affect our lives.  But some people experience severe chronic pain that has devastating effects on the quality of their lives.  The purpose of the present course is to explore chronic pain from a variety of perspectives – including biological, psychological, and social. Our goals for the course are to help students acquire a comprehensive understanding of the many dimension of chronic pain, and to acquaint them with contemporary approaches to the assessment and treatment of it.

Traditionally, natural history and culture museums have served both as a repository for collection objects, and as a place of exhibition, education, and engagement. Today, visitors are still captivated by these museum collections, drawn in by dinosaurs, whales, masks and canoes. However, most natural history and culture museums are able to share only a small fraction of their vast collections and their in-depth research. A key challenge is to connect visitors to museum collections, to share the relevance of museum research, and to make museums matter. The aim of this seminar is to consider both the public faces (exhibit/education programs) and the behind-the-scenes spaces (collections/research) of a modern natural history and culture museum. Students will be challenged to work across cross-disciplinary art and science methodology, and to explore how these two approaches interact within museum spaces. We will assess how museum collections and their stories can be shared in creative and novel ways, and together, what they can teach us about our communities and ourselves.

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.

The Ecology of Urban Seattle examines social, design, political, and environmental factors that promote healthy urban neighborhoods and the integration of urban communities and ecological realities. We will use these interactions to gain a deeper awareness of how these systems function in relationship to each other, to social and economic diversity, and to growth management and climate change. A Race and Social Justice (RSJ) screen will be employed as a key element in evaluating how communities are shaped.

Cities function as a place where human communities come together to work, live, and interact. They also exist in a specific social, political, and ecological context, including the relationship between development and the environment, the interaction of human habitation and natural systems, and the relationship of human activities to the health of diverse cultures and the long-term viability of the local and global climate.

This class tells the story of the emerging urban paradigm built around resilience and sustainability, along with the social context through which that evolves (past and future). Participants will study three communities, review their history and ecological context, examine the course of neighborhood development, and discuss these elements in class. The instructor will lead the class through an RSJ review of each community, beginning with an introduction to the technique and presentation on the initial neighborhood, and leading to student papers applying the RSJ screen to a neighborhood.

What does it mean to be healthy? What counts as an illness or disease, and why? Rather than a static quality one possesses or lacks, “health” is a practice, socially constructed and enacted via subtle rhetorical actions and social performances, informed by intersections of privilege and power.

This course takes as our starting point how language and argument shape our understanding of health, illness, and disability, and how the meaning of health has become a site of argument and controversy. Students will examine the role of rhetoric in the creation and circulation of biomedical knowledge; our complex lived experiences with illness (physical and mental); the intersections of race, gender, sexuality, and disability in experiences of illness and healing; and the role of activism and advocacy in diagnosis, disease, and treatment.

Through the study of the political, ethical, and humanities-based aspects of medicine, students will become more savvy patients and, for any students who hope to wield the stethoscope one day, more insightful and compassionate health care providers.

Student Learning Goals:
– Describe how politics, social justice, economics, and rhetoric affect access to and practices of health and well-being
– Identify, describe, and apply key rhetorical concepts and develop understanding of rhetorical theory
– Articulate ways language and argument shape our broader understanding of wellness, illness, and disease
– Assess the efficacy of health activism and campaigns
– Assess the ethics of health messages that circulate in the public sphere

Within an indigenous pedagogical format, this interactive class is a space to do lovework.  We ponder and attempt to perceive how love is incorporated into our daily lives as students, scholars, workers, families, and active members of both human people communities and more-than-human communities.  We critically engage with notions of love, where our understandings of love came from, and how we can proceed with a love consciousness and a love ethic.

We vision possible logic trajectories and frames of understandings in which love, or lack thereof, are included – both individually and societally. We consider musical, biological, philosophical, psychological, religious, political, cultural, artistic, linguistic, and social perspectives on love.  We search for love knowledges and we seek stories about love in our own lives. We look at how love has been portrayed in history and how love can be put into action for creating our futures that include values of equity and positivity.

This course is intended to be an intervention into contemporary practices to help us understand our connections and relationships.  It is an encouragement to act in ways that better respect ourselves, others, and our world.

This is your Interdisciplinary Honors Capstone Portfolio Seminar. Welcome!

Honors 496 is designed to give you the space and opportunity to reflect on your time here at UW in order to help you better interrogate and internalize your experiences. You will draw connections across your courses and disciplines, as well as consider the productions of knowledge you engage with, both in and out of the classroom.

This one-credit seminar will meet weekly and be run in a “studio” / seminar style. We will spend our time on individual and group reflections, group workshops, and practice sessions. The class will culminate in your portfolio presentations at the end of the quarter.

Students must request an add code via this link: https://forms.gle/h8pS74CNKxxT1xfp8

This is your Interdisciplinary Honors Capstone Portfolio Seminar. Welcome!

Honors 496 is designed to give you the space and opportunity to reflect on your time here at UW in order to help you better interrogate and internalize your experiences. You will draw connections across your courses and disciplines, as well as consider the productions of knowledge you engage with, both in and out of the classroom.

This one-credit seminar will meet weekly and be run in a “studio” / seminar style. We will spend our time on individual and group reflections, group workshops, and practice sessions. The class will culminate in your portfolio presentations at the end of the quarter.

Students must request an add code via this link: https://forms.gle/h8pS74CNKxxT1xfp8

Introduction to systematic inorganic chemistry: representative elements, metals, and nonmetals. Includes coordination complexes, geochemistry, and metallurgy. Additional material on environmental applications of basic chemistry presented. Includes laboratory. No more than the number of credits indicated can be counted toward graduation from the following course groups: CHEM 162, CHEM 165 (5 credits); CHEM 165, CHEM 312 (5 credits).

Chemistry majors and other students planning three or more quarters of organic chemistry. Structure, nomenclature, reactions, and synthesis of organic compounds. Theory and mechanism of organic reactions. Biomolecules. Introduction to membranes, enzyme mechanisms, prosthetic groups, macromolecular conformations, and supramolecular architecture. No more than 4 credits can be counted toward graduation from the following courses: CHEM 239, CHEM 259.

Computer programming for students with some previous programming experience. Emphasizes program design, style, and decomposition. Uses data structures (e.g., lists, dictionaries, sets) to solve computational problems motivated by modern societal and scientific needs. Introduces data abstraction and interface versus implementation. Recommended: CSE 121 or completion of Paul G. Allen School’s Guided Self-Placement.

Computer programming for students with significant previous programming experience. Emphasizes implementation and run-time analysis of data structures and algorithms using techniques including linked references, recursion, and object-oriented inheritance to solve computational problems motivated by modern societal and scientific needs. Recommended: CSE 122 or completion of Paul G. Allen School’s Guided Self-Placement.

English 182 focuses on teaching strategies and skills for effective writing and argument that are required of traditional academic genres, such as the research essay, while also expanding the skills for composing in multimodal genres that our increasingly digital and media saturated world demands.

Section G is an Honors discussion driven class with minimal lecturing and grounded in a disability studies analytic.  Students will reflect on their own growth as scholars and their learning process as an evolving product. Honors students will write longer reflective papers with emphasis on metacognitive critical takeaways.

Strategies for composing effective multimodal texts for print, digital physical delivery, with focus on affordances of various modes–words, images, sound, design, and gesture–and genres to address specific rhetorical situations both within and beyond the academy. Although the course has no prerequisites, instructors assume knowledge of academic writing.

Sequence covers the material of 124, 125, 126; 307, 308, 318. Third quarter of the first year of a two-year accelerated sequence. May not receive credit for both 126 and 136. 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 309, 324, 326, 327, 328, and 427. Third quarter of the second year of an accelerated two-year sequence; prepares students for senior-level mathematics courses.

Addresses same material as PHYS 123 in more depth and with additional topics such as current research and cross-disciplinary applications. For students with strong calculus preparation. Maximum 5 credits allowed for any combination of PHYS 116, PHYS 119, PHYS 123, and PHYS 143.