In this capstone course, a portfolio studio, students will complete the Interdisciplinary or College Honors Program by creating educational narratives within vibrant, creative, online portfolios. Each student will reflect upon the intersection of formal coursework and experiential learning by exploring, collaborating, articulating, testing out, refining, and showcasing the Honors portfolio to a community of peers and mentors. Using portfolio platforms introduced in Honors 100, students will be asked to creatively reflect on the connections between and across their UW courses and disciplines, as well as to consider in-classroom knowledge and its interface with academia and experiences outside of the classroom.

Students must request an add code via this link: https://forms.gle/fahxhGcTR6r7P4my9

In this capstone course, a portfolio studio, students will complete the Interdisciplinary or College Honors Program by creating educational narratives within vibrant, creative, online portfolios. Each student will reflect upon the intersection of formal coursework and experiential learning by exploring, collaborating, articulating, testing out, refining, and showcasing the Honors portfolio to a community of peers and mentors. Using portfolio platforms introduced in Honors 100, students will be asked to creatively reflect on the connections between and across their UW courses and disciplines, as well as to consider in-classroom knowledge and its interface with academia and experiences outside of the classroom.

 

Students must request an add code via this link: https://forms.gle/fahxhGcTR6r7P4my9

This course offers the chance to learn about histories and stories of unarmed self-defense while learning martial arts. In this course, we will engage texts and documentaries that detail the lives of activists and marginalized folks that became students of the martial arts or spontaneously defended themselves in unsafe situations or environments hostile to their identities. In order to understand how gender, race, and safety have impacted people’s lives across time, we will study works from the 1970s (Angela Davis: Autobiography, 1974) to the present (Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars: A Dangerous Trans Girl’s Confabulous Memoir, 2016). Each work will push students to critically think about concepts such as violence, discrimination, healing, and survival using theories from critical ethnic studies, gender studies, and trans studies. Through group discussion, students will be able to understand how marginalized activists and writers incorporated self-defense into their lives spiritually, mentally, and physically. In and outside class, students will begin their own accessible, safe martial arts journeys by practicing basic moves from Goju Karate. By the end of the course, students will be able to answer for themselves: Does defending oneself increase your safety? Does everyone have equal access to the right to practice self-defense legally or socially? What do people who are disproportionately affected by violence get out of daily self-defense and martial ats practice? What can you get out of a daily martial arts practice? And how can you use it to practice political and social solidarity with others?

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.

How can music be a site of resistance? What does it mean to listen politically? This seminar explores experimental music from the twentieth century to today, examining how composers and performers have challenged cultural, aesthetic, and social hierarchies. Students will engage with works ranging from John Cage and Pauline Oliveros to Julius Eastman and the AACM, exploring how sound can amplify marginalized voices, build community, and inspire social change. Through readings, listening, discussion, reflective writing, and creative projects, students will develop skills in critical and creative listening, interdisciplinary thinking, and analysis. No prior musical training is required-just curiosity, openness, and a willingness to explore how experimental sound can reshape the way we hear the world and each other.

It’s a given among many scientists that understanding how the natural world works (including mathematics) is an invaluable guide to understanding both the origins and evolution of human values. Yet these ideas rarely make it into humanities courses. Quantum mechanics offers insight into how deep truths can appear to be mutually exclusive; special and general relativity demonstrate the power of constants that don’t change no matter what (symmetries) and how notions we accept as fundamental (like space and time) sometimes aren’t. The mathematics of game theory makes strong arguments that cooperative strategies are, in the long run, more successful than ruthlessly competitive ones, and that symmetry can inform fairness. Biology illuminates how symbiotic relations have been central to evolution, and how all life is connected. The “environment” is not something “out there,” separate from us. It IS us. Indeed, everything in the universe is connected, including matter and energy; a sense of community is built into nature.

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 can 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 course 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.

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

How are you going to change the world? Grand Challenges for Entrepreneurs provides tools to better understand the big problems the world faces and to identify, design and implement effective solutions. In class you’ll learn about topics ranging from poverty, climate change, global health, to inequality and polarization. Using the lens of entrepreneurship you will also learn frameworks and tools including design thinking, business models and execution strategies to better understand these problems and potential solutions.

What is the role of the justice system when the lived experiences of many students in the classroom remain unjust? This course explores how landmark Supreme Court decisions on topics such as desegregation and free speech to gender equality and disability rights have dismantled or reinforced injustice and inequity in the education system. Students will engage directly with legal texts and apply critical frameworks to evaluate how the Supreme Court’s interpretation of the law has shaped the everyday experiences of students. Through an experiential learning project with a community-based organization, students will also translate theory into practice by developing an actionable advocacy project (e.g., a podcast, webinar, or toolkit) addressing students’ rights in schools.

The course, “Human Rights and Inclusive Development”, is a new course designed to explore how human rights and sustainable development are integrated in practice. The course will do this in part by interrogating what we mean by development, what makes it sustainable, who it is meant to benefit, and who is left out. It will discuss how human rights law addresses poverty and what consequences flow from that, as well as what a human rights-based approach to development can and should look like.

The course will take an explicitly intersectional perspective by investigating the impact of gender and disability, among other factors, on understandings of what development means and who it is (or should be) for.

A planned study abroad program in Kenya during Early Fall Start 2027 will give students an opportunity to learn more about the challenges we discuss in class through on the ground experience. The study abroad program is being co-designed in partnership with Dandelion Africa (https://dandelionafrica.org/our-model/) a women-led non-governmental organization working at the intersection of women’s rights, community health and sustainable development. Dandelion Africa is based in Nakuru, Kenya and works with communities in Nakuru and in more remote areas where HIV/AIDS, female genital circumcision, and early marriage remain persistent challenges. The course is not required to participate in the study abroad program but is highly recommended. Students registered for the course will be preferred during the application process.

This course examines the challenges historians face when writing the history of the Aztecs (Mexica), a people whose codices, or written pictorial records of their past, were largely destroyed by the Spanish after colonization in 1521. In asking how historians investigate and interpret the histories of populations when traditional forms of primary source evidence are unavailable, we will complicate our thinking about how historical knowledge is produced. In the process, we will also examine the broader history of the Aztec Empire and the Spanish colonial society that formed in its aftermath. Particular attention will be paid to notions of religion, cosmology, and daily life among the Aztecs.

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.

How can music be a site of resistance? What does it mean to listen politically? This seminar explores experimental music from the twentieth century to today, examining how composers and performers have challenged cultural, aesthetic, and social hierarchies. Students will engage with works ranging from John Cage and Pauline Oliveros to Julius Eastman and the AACM, exploring how sound can amplify marginalized voices, build community, and inspire social change. Through readings, listening, discussion, reflective writing, and creative projects, students will develop skills in critical and creative listening, interdisciplinary thinking, and analysis. No prior musical training is required-just curiosity, openness, and a willingness to explore how experimental sound can reshape the way we hear the world and each other.

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 258.

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 K 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.

 

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. Prerequisite: minimum grade of 2.0 in MATH 334. Offered: W.

Addresses same material as PHYS 122 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 115, PHYS 118, PHYS 122, and PHYS 142. Prerequisite: a minimum grade of 2.5 in PHYS 141; and MATH 125 or MATH 134, either of which may be taken concurrently; recommended: high-school-level physics course. Offered: W.