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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Description not available at this time

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.

This two-semester, 8-credit interdisciplinary Thesis Seminar examines the complex problem of making weapons out of biological organisms. This includes understanding the history of research and development into creating biological weapons, as well as describing the extent and categories of actual use, including consideration of accidental and/or unintentional use, as in the historical exposure of indigenous cultures to European diseases.

The Internet and social media have reshaped our understanding of basic information literacy and access to information, but how have these changes influenced our human behavior and the value we place on information in a country dedicated to supporting First Amendment principles? This course will examine the Internet from conception to Web 2.0, and the digital platforms that have developed to facilitate immediate interaction over the "spine" of the Internet.