Writing Disability & Illness

How can we translate the lived experiences of difference, disability, and illness, variously defined, to the page, rendering in language what necessarily exceeds it? What are our ethical imperatives when writing about these topics? In this course, we will think, write, and talk about what it means to inhabit the world in ways that situate one outside of an imagined norm. Together we'll explore the complex connections between the body and mind and the relationship of trauma to difference, disability, and illness.

Calculus II

This course introduces students to fundamental calculus concepts and applications. The course prioritizes mathematical thinking, concepts, and clear communication while de-emphasizing symbolic manipulation and rote exercises. We will apply mathematical ideas such as integration, infinite series, and Taylor polynomials in a variety of contexts from mathematics, physics, economics, and biology. Coding experience is not assumed, but some comfort with using technology to solve mathematical problems will be a plus.

Nature of Science: Projects

Scientists study the physical world at spatial, temporal, and complexity scales that are beyond the reach of ordinary perception. How does a scientist construct their understanding of the physical world at those scales? This course takes a transdisciplinary approach to the study of scientific understanding. What role does visualization play in the formation of scientific knowledge? How do various forms of representation become accepted scientific practice? How can artistic practice help us illuminate what it means to understand something in a scientific context?

Design Fundamentals

Design Fundamentals: This is an introductory level design class focusing on understanding problems, generating ideas and developing practical elegant solutions. We will begin with a series of guided activities and projects, with the course culminating in a final independent project. Students will become familiar with a range of basic design tools and skills, such as drawing, computer aided design, model making, and prototyping in materials such as cardboard, metal and plastic.

Unreliable Narrators

In this course we will examine how narrators and narration drive and impose structure onto short stories. By doing so, we will begin to consider the role of the narrator in our own creative work. We will study the role narrators play into the function of the stories they tell, whether they feature in those stories or not.

Game Narrative Production

As with many disciplines in game development, the role of narrative design and those who specialize in it varies significantly from studio to studio and project to project. This course will teach students how to not only create stories but also how to effectively present them to an interdisciplinary team and incorporate feedback into their work. Students will create polished materials in the form of linear scripts, branching interactive fiction, and storyboards - along with accompanying design briefs that detail the way their materials could impact other collaborators.

Global Health Inequities

In this course we will explore the intersecting and multidimensional systems and institutions (law, medicine, the family, the state, education) that affect global health politics, access to reproductive health care, rights, and justice. Some of the questions we will investigate include: How do the socio-cultural, economic, and political contexts in which people live affect health and well-being? How are reproductive health, reproductive rights, and reproductive justice connected to inequities in systems of global health, development, and power?

Psych of Love & Relationships

This course will examine queer love, relationship structures and attachments, and how these elements of the relational self inform individual identity development. These themes will be explored within grounded foundational paradigms of intersectionality, queer theory, and relationship anarchy and through the lens of various psychological and sociological theoretical models, including the ecological systems model, attachment theories, and the nested model of trauma, amongst others.

Queer University Studies

What is the idea of the university and how did we find ourselves here, in one? What, or who, is the university for? The university, as we now know it, is a place of immense contradiction: supposedly sites of nationalist or cultural cohesion, but also, as Bill Readings has shown, empty signifiers for "excellence." They are places where we might theorize queer horizons, but, at the same time, institutions that have financial investments in anti-queer, racist industries like weapons, prisons, and dispossessive technologies.
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