All course descriptions posted below are for Honors College Perspectives/Colloquium/Seminar classes only. For Honors elective course descriptions, please consult the course's catalog entry at ozone.ou.edu
For information about a class's general education standing, please consult the General Education Planner at ou.edu/genplanner
NOTE: Class schedules and descriptions are subject to change
"Perspectives" is a three-credit, interdisciplinary, introductory level seminar that explores a broad issue (or issues) from different perspectives. This course is writing intensive, requiring at least 15 pages of writing per student, and includes a component wherein each student works with an Honors College writing assistant. Specific topics vary based on the professor's area of study.
Instructor: Daniel Mains
Day/Time: T/R 9:00-10:15 AM
Building/Room: Cate Center 1 RM 201
Description: This course explores the relationship between economic and cultural processes associated with globalization and sub-Saharan Africa. In order to better understand the nature of globalization and its implications for inequality and day-to-day life, we will examine case studies dealing with topics like the marketing of soap in colonial southern Africa, conflicts over the extraction of oil n Nigeria, and Somali migrants in the state of Maine. The course begins by briefly examining coffee and Ethiopia as an example of globalization in Africa. We then investigate colonialism in Africa. We will explore similarities and differences between colonialism and contemporary globalization, especially in relation to issues of exploitation and the extraction of resources from Africa. This will be followed by a series of readings related to consumption and conceptions of modernity. We will examine the movement of Indian movies, second hand clothes, and other international commodities into Africa in order to understand how identity is constructed within the context of globalization. The third section examines global movements of people, especially from Africa to Europe and the United States.
Instructor: Amanda G Minks
Day/Time: T/R 1:30-2:45 PM
Building/Room: Cate Center 1 RM 101
Description: Music in many times and places has been used to maintain or transform political structures, and even music firmly in the realm of leisure often has indirect political effects. In Latin America, music has been especially important as part of an aural public sphere for people marginalized from education systems and print media. From the late 19th to the early 20th century, music, and dance became key "instruments" for populist political platforms of modernizing nation-states in Latin America. Under increasingly oppressive dictatorships, music also became an ideological weapon for revolutionary movements, and an everyday strategy of psychological escape. After movements of democratization finally replaced dictatorships in the 1980's and 90's, musicians, and singers continued to engage with political structures, as well as with social and cultural demands from below. The soundscape of social movements is ever more diverse, with urban youth, Indigenous peoples, and transnational migrants (among many others) staking out claims for political participation. This course will explore these social/political phenomena through specific case studies, lectures and discussions, and audio-visual examples.
Instructor: David S. Song
Day/Time: M/W 1:30-2:45 PM
Building/Room: Cate Center 1 Room 201
Description: This course introduces students to Asian American Studies, as the product of an intellectual and political movement that emerged in response to racism in the United States and American imperialism abroad. Learning through a mix of contemporary research, current issues, and primary historical sources will provide an insightful lens into the field of study, which will allow students to access perspectives that are largely underrepresented in the university. This course is designed so that students with no prior knowledge of Asian American studies will be able to take this class, gaining an appreciation for the selected texts and subject matter. This class attends to "Asian American" issues, as well as shows how the presence of Asian peoples in American (and in Asia) is fundamental to how people understand themselves as American, Afro-American, Chicanx and Latinx, Indigenous and Native, Pacific Islander, and White subjects.
Instructor: Ralph Hamerla
Day/Time: T/R 9:00-10:15 AM
Building/Room: Cate Center 5 RM 180
Description: I want to change the way you think about science! Most of us accept science and scientific knowledge, the operation of scientific institutions, and the culture of science in general. To do this we will read a number of books and articles that examine the nature of the scientific enterprise locally, nationally, and globally over time. This literature focuses on science as an evolving and contingent body of knowledge, as a dynamic and powerful way to explore the world, as a professional community, as a culture with its own idiosyncratic conventions, and as a contested source and object of political power.
Instructor: Ralph J Beliveau
Day/Time: MW 3:00-4:15 PM
Building/Room: Cate Center 1 RM 214
Description: This course explores how notions of media literacy are frames in different cultural contexts to come to an understanding of both the strengths and weaknesses of highly mediated cultures. At the center, this course asks how does the interaction of media and culture effect empathy? How does that interaction of media and culture effect empathy? How does that interaction support cultural aspirations? Alternately, how can it create effects that increase or decrease empathy?
We will discuss how different cultural formations frame the desires and the practices of using media, including educational contexts, child development, and ideas of cultural or community citizenship. This includes gaining an understanding of changes in media in the intersections of technology, economics, regulation, and aesthetics.
To do this we will consider many different examples, including films, streaming, online, written, and other examples. We will discuss ideas from Renee Hobbs, Douglas Rushkooff, Patricia Hill Collins, Bell Hooks, Bonnie Brennen on qualitative media research, Nancy Tuana on 'epistemologies of ignorance', Howard Segal on 'technological utopianism, Henry Giroux and Helen Reiss on 'The Empathy Effect'. We will also consider the history that led us to where we are now, including historical perspectives on notions of media literacy and American culture, from the philosophies behind the establishment of the information models of journalism, radio, and documentary (John Dewey, Walter Lipmann, Jack Ellis, Bill Nichols, Robert McChesney, and Patricia Aufderheide) to the development of U.S. critical pedagogy with Henry Giroux, Ira Shor, and Charlotte Jacobs.
We will visit with national and international media literacy people as guests in the class (in person, on Zoom, etc.) to enhance and broaden the number of perspectives in the class on what counts as media savvy.
Instructor: John Banas
Day/Time: M/W 1:30-2:45 PM
Building/Room: Cate Center 1 RM 101
Description: This course is intended to provide you with an understanding of humor in communication. By reading the original source materials, you will be able to learn and draw your own conclusions about theories and ideas related to humor and its effects on a variety of issues, including: relationships, persuasion, identity, media, teaching, and health. In addition to reading and discussion, creating and performing humor will also be required in order to give you an opportunity to express yourself and learn through doing. All of these practices combined will hopefully allow you to gain insight into humor and communication in a way that illuminates important issues in your own life.
Instructor: Sarah W. Tracy
Day/Time: T/R 1:30-2:45 PM
Building/Room: Cate Center 1 Room 214
Description: What makes a good scientist? What makes an interesting life? What makes a good biography? In "Lives of Science" students will explore both the history of biography and the history of modern science as they consider how the life and biomedical sciences have changed over the previous hundred and fifty years and how the criteria for a "good biography" have likewise evolved. Once derided by social historians for telling the "exceptional stories of exceptional men" biography today seeks to tell larger stories about the political, social, and economic, contexts in which one life - not necessarily a famous one -was led. The life of Charles Darwin, for example, can tell us much not only about the nature of natural history in the nineteenth century but also about the relationship between religion and science, the career options and gender expectations of the British middle class, and the colonialism in nineteenth-century Britain. The life of Henrietta Lacks can tell us much about race relations, gender expectations, and the relations among health, disease, and poverty in the Jim Crow South-not to mention the legacy of health and race discrimination for African Americans today.
Like any historian or storyteller, biographers must make decisions about which aspects of their subjects' lives are important and which are trivial. Writers of biography also wrestle with the ethical issues posed by examining both the professional and personal milestones of their subjects; and biographers often must deal with their subjects' living family members and intellectual descendants. Writing the lives of those still living presents still more opportunities and challenges. Participants in this class will address these issues and others as they explore what makes a good scientific biography, and as they conduct research on a scientist or physician of their choosing. This course will focus primarily on life science and medicine in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries this semester.
Instructor: Robert D. Lifset
Day/Time: T/R 12:00-1:15 PM
Building/Room: Cate Center 1 RM 101
Description: This course uses the prism of energy to examine the history of the United States from the colonial period to the present. We will consider how energy has affected, and is affected by American society, culture, science, and technology, politics, diplomacy, and the environment.
Four broad, thematic questions will recur throughout the semester. First, how has increasing energy use transformed American social life, the economy, and politics? Second, what are the relationships between energy consumption and environmental change?
Third, what are the relationships between scientific discoveries, technological innovation, and social change? And finally, how did the United States grow to be the largest consumer of energy in the history of the world? Addressing these questions will reveal the fundamental ways in which energy has shaped American history.
Instructor: Benjamin L. Alpers
Day/Time: T/R 12:00-1:15 PM
Building/Room: Cate Center 5 RM 180
Description: This is a different kind of Perspectives course. Like other Perspectives courses, you'll be learning about ideas and the American past while developing your writing skills. But unlike other Perspectives classes, you'll be doing these things through role-playing. Reacting to the Past is an innovative pedagogy that uses role-playing to put students in the shoes of historical actors at key moments in history.
Over the course of the semester, we will play three Reacting games. We will start with America's founding: The Constitutional Convention of 1787, a game in which students will have the opportunity to debate and frame the U.S. Constitution. Next, we will be playing Chicago 1968, which reenacts the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Though set in different places and times and focused on decisions of radically different scopes, each of these games explores the meaning of democracy and the challenge of rethinking institutional and political orders in situations in which the participants profoundly disagree on matters of importance.
Each of these games will begin with about a set-up of phase, a week of more-or-less traditional classes during which you'll study the historical background and major issues of the game. You will then be assigned a role and, for the next several weeks, you will play out the events of the game. Unlike in a traditional history course, the outcomes of these events are not decided in advance. How the events play out will be up to the students. And persuasion largely determines the outcome of Reacting games. Through writing and speaking -always in character and reflecting on the knowledge you will gain of the person you are portraying -you will try to persuade your fellow students to support your positions in the conflicts that lie at the center of each of these games after each game concludes, there is a brief post-mortem phase, during which the winners of the game are announced, students leave their roles, and the class returns to a more traditional format to discuss the game and to consider what really happened in the event that we've been studying.
In addition to learning about the past and improving your writing. Reacting will help you hone public speaking, leadership, and team-building skills.
If you want to find out more about Reacting see this pedagogical introduction (PDF), which explains how Reacting games work in a little more detail.
Readings will include Student Game Books (including primary readings) for America's Founding, Yalta, and Changing the Game.
The "Colloquium" is a three-credit, interdisciplinary, discussion-based advanced seminar on a specialized topic, and is best suited for juniors and seniors. The colloquium is writing intensive, requiring approximately 30 pages of writing per student, and the assignments will also involve library research. Topics vary based on the professor's area of study.
Instructor: Robert D Lifset
Day/Time: T/R 12:00-1:15 PM
Building/Room: Cate Center 1 RM 101
Description: This course is designed to introduce students to a range of issues concerning the kinds of communities- political, social, moral, and religious- that human beings construct for themselves and the values that inform and define such communities: this course is intended to prepare students to become active and informed citizens. We will read closely texts in various traditions of argument, with a focus, though not an exclusive one, on European and American traditions developed from biblical and classical sources. These texts include the writings of Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Machiavelli, More, Erasmus, Luther, Descartes, Hobbes, and Locke among others.
Instructor: David Song
Day/Time: M/W 3:00-4:15 PM
Building/Room: Cate Center 1 3:00-4:15 PM
Description: Are Asians in America becoming assimilated into "Americans?" Do they belong in the racial category of "Honorary White" or "Person of Color?" What is the relationship between Asian Americans and institutions such as family, schooling, migration, and capitalism? How do immigrants and ethnic minorities from communities with each other, in unexpected or unseen ways? This course engages students with contemporary and classical issues of Asian America, through a sociological lens. Themes include: (1) racialization and panethnicity (2) migration, assimilation, and transnationalism. (3) schooling and family socialization; (4) ethnic enclaves and communities; (5) youth cultures and styles; and (6) multilingualism and language education. A background in sociology is not needed, as part of the course will also introduce students to the basics of sociology.
Instructor: Ralph Beliveau
Day/Time: M/W 1:30-2:45 PM
Building/Room: Cate Center 1 RM 214
Description: Sitting at the intersection among folk stories, horror, and science fiction, The Weird is a significant conceptualization of storytelling in a variety of different media forms. Many authors, podcasters, filmmakers, and social media participants spend energy and attention on different kinds of stories that fall within the Weird.
In The Weird, the reality of the world is often portrayed as being unstable, shifting, or mutable, and the supernatural and fantastical elements are often integrated into the fabric of the world in a seamless and believable way. Media in this genre often feature strange, otherworldly, landscapes and creatures, as well as characters who must navigate these environments and confront the bizarre and terrifying events that unfold there.
The Weird is often seen as a subgenre of both horror and science fiction, but it also draws elements from other genres such as mystery, fairy tale, and gothic fiction. The goal is often to evoke a sense of unease, disorientation, and terror in the reader, and it is known for its use of unconventional narrative structures and surreal imagery.
Overall, The Weird is a genre that challenges the boundaries of what is considered "normal" in fiction and pushes the limits of the reader's imagination. Often tension in these stories builds off the limits of our ability to understand things in the world that resist both explanation and understanding.
This concept also complications the relationship between fictional and non-fictional storytelling. Folk knowledge has had several different conceptualizations in philosophy and criticism. It now finds routes of expression in online concepts like "creepypastas", in short, user-generated visual content (photographs, films, audio productions, etc.) and the widespread interest in "True Crime" storytelling, including podcast series and streaming video productions.
This course explores both the theoretical considerations of the history of this form, and the expressions of it in fiction and non-fiction texts, films, audio productions, and art. It would also explore the ethical dimensions of the varied forms of the Weird as a response to both Enlightenment rationalism and Pragmatism, as well as the experience of modernity in both urban and rural contexts.
Instructor: Benjamin L Alpers
Day/Time: T/R 1:30-2:45 PM & T/R 3:00-4:15 PM
Building/Room: Cate Center 5, RM 180
Description: This colloquium will deal with the ways in which the societies that took part in the Second World War -and especially America -have understood and dealt with that conflict's legacies since the war's end. From 1939 to 1945, the world was engulfed in the most destructive war in history, a conflict which took 60 million lives and created enormous social, political, and technological change. Since the war's end in 1945, many different groups and individuals have tried to interpret World War II, including historians, novelists, filmmakers, journalists, politicians, lawyers, judges, and veterans. Their interpretations have taken the form of histories and works of fiction, war memorials, and policy decisions. In this colloquium, we will explore many of the debates and controversies over the meaning of World War II through both primary documents -including novels, films, journalism, and works of history -and secondary works. By studying these controversies we will gain a better understanding not only of the particular legacy of this war but also more generally of the way in which the memory of major events in the past continues to shape the present. Please note that this course has a mandatory Monday evening film screening. Although we won't have a film every week, students will be expected to attend screenings at this time during a number of weeks in the semester.
Instructor: Amanda G Minks & Sarah Tracy
Day/Time: T/R 10:30-11:45 AM
Building/Time: Cate Center 5 Room 180
Description: This course uses anthropological, ethnomusicological, and historical approaches to analyze how concepts of health, illness, healing, mind, and body are related to practices of music and dance, and how these relations vary across cultures. Students will read and discuss a range of case studies from different parts of the world, with special attention to concepts of "Western" and "non-Western" medicine and the interactions between them. The course aims to de-naturalize the logic of modern Western medicine and help students see beyond their culture-based assumptions of what constitutes health and healing. By examining the range of ways music, disease, and healing have intersected with one another in different cultures and at different times, the course will enrich students' understanding of both music and healing practices and should enable students, including future medical professionals, to think critically and become more sensitive to the effects of cultural difference.
Instructor: John Banas
Day/Time: M/W 4:30-5:45 PM
Building/Room: Cate Center 1 RM 101
Description: This is an upper-division course designed to take an in-depth look at the applied social influence problem of the proliferation of conspiracy theories and misinformation in society. We will examine a variety of theoretical perspectives that help explain why conspiracy theories and misinformation are prevalent, and why they can be harmful, and we will explore a variety of communication-based interventions for preventing them.
Instructor: Daniel Mains
Day/Time: T/R 1:30-2:45 PM
Building/Room: Cate Center 1 RM 201
Description: This course examines the political, cultural, and economic dynamics of the contemporary African diaspora. We explore how and why Africans leave the continent and the strategies they employ as they seek to make new lives elsewhere. The course begins with a brief overview of theoretical perspectives concerning the African diaspora. We then examine the movements of people between Africa and Europe, giving particular attention to the implications of colonialism for identity formation and power relations, the maintenance of intimate relationships across continents, and the recent refugee crisis. The second half of the course examines case studies of Africans living in the United States, including Somali refugees in Maine, Ethiopian migrants in Washington DC, and Togelese migrants who return to Africa. Throughout the course, we seek to understand migration from the perspective of migrants and we read both fiction and nonfiction. We ask what motivates African migrants and what migration means for them.
