In this course, students will explore disability through theory and research. First, students will be introduced to the definition and meaning of disability. Disability is a complex identity that can be viewed from a variety of social, cultural, historical, legal and political perspectives. Students will be introduced to conceptualizations of disability, models of disability, and historical perspectives as well as the intersection of disability with other social identities such as gender, sexuality, and race/ethnicity.

This course aims at reducing graduation anxiety by preparing students for their next phase. Small action steps written in weekly journal assignments bring self-designed short and long-term career goals into reality. This specialized approach allows students to plan for any next step, be it graduate school, travel, work etc. Participants will solidify practical skills and knowledge about conducting a successful job search, writing professional resumes and cover letters, interviewing, and salary negotiation.

The purpose of the course is to provide a common experience for Commonwealth Honors College students in their junior year. While recognizing that by the junior year students will be working in a wide variety of disciplinary areas, an interdisciplinary course like this will help honors students at the preliminary stage of thinking about a culminating senior thesis, project or capstone to experience a variety of topics and approaches that can lead to the development of their own senior culminating experience. Why a theme of innovative ideas across disciplines?

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This course examines portrayals of ethnic identities in contemporary popular culture. The definition of ethnicity has moved well beyond the description of a group of individuals with a shared history or cultural background. While most agree that Italian American, Jewish, Asian Indian, Chinese American, American Indian, and Japanese American are ethnicities, others believe whiteness is an ethnicity, and some define sexual orientation as similar to an ethnicity.

This two-semester, 8-credit honors thesis/project course focuses on two of the most intractable structural issues confronting contemporary American society: immigration and mass incarceration. This course will place these two issues in historical context through a variety of academic, journalistic and autobiographical texts and documentaries, which will allow students to see how the contemporary phenomena of immigration and mass incarceration have common ideological underpinnings and common historical roots.

Globalization will serve as the cornerstone of our study in this two-semester seminar as students undertake their honors thesis. By globalization I mean the increasingly integrated nature of our world's economy, culture and consciousness. Some of the main issues of globalization the course will explore are: strengthening borders against outsiders (refugees, immigrants); increasing borderlessness of technology, which reaches into all corners of the globe and the relationship between globalization and the distribution of income across countries.