Topic Title: Conquest by Law: The Use of Law to Subjugate and Marginalize in the U.S. (499-seminar)

This two semester Interdisciplinary Honors Thesis Seminar will explore current thinking on health and wellbeing in the built environment, with a focus on campus environments. Consideration of the impact of the built environment on health and well-being is an increasingly important priority in the design fields as well as in conversations concerning equity, public policy, public health, and education. These concerns are interrelated with issues of sustainability, resilience, and planetary wellbeing.

The goal of the course is to better understand randomness and uncertainty, and develop tools to make more informed decisions under uncertain situations. In the beginning of the first semester, the instructor covers some fundamental and relevant concepts from probability, decision theory, and psychology. The presentation will be made in a way accessible to students from all majors and no advanced knowledge will be required. The goal is to lay the foundations for deeper investigation by students in their theses.

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.

In the second part of this two-semester Honors Thesis seminar, students will learn about the psychological and historical forces that have shaped house and home in the United States. Dominant norms evolved that other nations and cultures must variously mimic, alter or resist.

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 course is a critical, interdisciplinary study of environmental worldviews and ethics - how people think about the earth and how what they think makes them act. We will focus on recent responses to climate change and environmental crisis that seek to recognize or recover the sacredness of the earth as a strategy for survival in the Anthropocene. We will consider what ethical choices present themselves in a world where animals, plants, rivers, and mountains are full of life, intelligence, and agency compared with a world where only (some kinds of) humans really matter.

European colonialism and the establishment of empires have shaped all aspects of contemporary life?from our ecology to our economy, our culture and religion, ideas about sexuality and gender, and our architecture and material lives. In this class we will critically analyze narratives of colonialism and empire, and the ways that colonial histories/ stories are told. We will also read the work of postcolonial writers and consider how the voices of colonized people change the ways we understand colonial histories.