Fall 2008 Semester: printable copy
Honors Schedule Tabloid Fall 2008
Honors Courses UHP students will have the opportunity to enroll in interdisciplinary seminars, HONR courses, which are taught by top-notch faculty members who have been recognized for teaching excellence. Typically, five to six HONR courses will be offered during Fall and Spring semesters; however, UHP is pleased to offer 16 HONR courses for fall 2008. Please note the HONR 199 courses are for first and second-year students only. HONR 299 and 399 courses are open to all high ability students.
Additionally, several schools/colleges offer honors course divisions. UHP students also may take honors course divisions in order to fulfill honors diploma requirements.
HONR OFFERINGS
FALL 2008
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HONR 199A, “Scientific Methods: Data Analysis and Communication Skills”

Instructor: Dr. Mickey Latour
http://www.ansc.purdue.edu/faculty/latou.htm
# of Credit Hours: 2
Days and Times: T-TH 1:30-2:20
Brief Course Description:
The primary goal of this course is to make students aware of the fundamental processes which are needed to complete a research project. This would include, but is not limited to setting up experiments, analyzing data, making tables/figures, and writing up the findings using known journal formats. Lastly, the students will be expected to create a “mock poster” of the findings to simulate what would need to be done at the university level as part of their requirement.
Objectives:
- To develop mastery of quantitative problem-solving skills as it relates to data analysis (units of practical problems, strategies for solving numerical problems, transforming of data, graph and table construction, descriptive statistics and statistical analysis). Along with data analysis, a section of the course will be devoted to scientific integrity.
- Emphasis will be placed on finding articles related to their data set, so students must master information skills as it relates to technology and library resources. Students will be exposed to scientific- and popular press-writing. The goal is for students to learn how to identify scientific work, understand it and use it in their data set.
- To develop a mini-paper (abstract, introduction, if possible materials and methods, results & discussion). Lastly, students would be required to given an oral presentation of the findings.
CLA students: fulfills “Statistics” in core requirements
MANAGEMENT students: fulfills “Free Elective” in Mgmt, Acct, IM, and Econ
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HONR 199B, “Don’t Read This! Censorship and Censureship”

Instructor: Dr. Angelica Duran
http://www.cla.purdue.edu/english/directory/index.cfm?personid=80
# of Credit Hours: 3
Days and Times: MWF 11:30-12:20
Brief Course Description:
This course is designed to introduce students to various forms of censorship and “censureship” in relation to the arts, sciences, politics, and more, in order to give you the foundation to tailor your major projects to explore how those issues are related to your major, minor, personal interests, and life.
Weeks 1-5
We will get a sense of the development and domains of censorship and “censureship” from ancient to early modern times, primarily in Africa, Asia, and Europe, by reading primary texts related to book-burning, the Spanish Inquisition, and the growth of artistic taste. Archival research will lead to the first major project, high-quality posters for the Purdue, West Lafayette Public, and Tippecanoe County Public Libraries, to contribute to the American Library Association’s annual Banned Books Week.
Weeks 6-10
We will move to modern times and mainly the U.S. by reading the First Amendment (1791) along with the Alien and Sedition Acts (1798); justifications for depriving education from slaves and women; policies to protect national/scientific/military secrets in the development of the atomic bomb and similar technologies; discussions of movies, music, and video games rating systems; and arguments about the web as a mechanism of access and distortion. The major project for this section will be a 6- to 8- page argumentative paper focusing on a banned book (or other text) or a book/text with a focus on censorship and banning; and a 20-minute class presentation based on that paper.
Weeks 11-15
We will shift from written texts to experiences, with activities such as a leadership luncheon including a Japanese-American who has experienced/s racial discrimination and a political science professor who appears in Horowitz’s 100 Most Dangerous Professors in the U.S.; attendance at an opera, play, or movie that was originally banned; and meetings with the Woodman lecturer (Literature), the Krannert School of Management’s keynote speaker, history-book writers, and creative writers on the topic of self-censorship in publication. The major project will be a presentation on Fahrenheit 451 at a local high school.
Throughout the course, we will anchor these wide-reaching topics with literary books that call attention to the dangers, benefits, and negotiations with censorship: Cervantes’s Don Quixote, Milton’s Areopagitica, Douglass’s Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, and Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran.
CLA students: fulfills “Social Ethics” in core requirements
MANAGEMENT students: fulfills “Free Elective” in Mgmt, Acct, IM, and Econ
HONR 199C, “Should the History of Science be X-Rated?”

Instructor: Dr. George Bodner
Arthur Kelly Distinguished Professor of Chemistry and Education
http://www.chem.purdue.edu/bodner/bodner.html
# of Credit Hours: 3
Days and Times: T-TH 3:00-4:15
Brief Course Description:
The course will begin with an analysis of the arguments Brush raises in his Science paper. It will turn to a discussion of whether there is a difference between art and science in which the instructor examines evidence for more or less simultaneous changes in world view within two fields from the 5th Century B.C. to the middle of the 20th century. It will then examine several selections from the Harvard Case Histories in Experimental Science, to introduce students to the product of historians of science and the process by which they work. The goal of this section of the course is to help students understand the difference between what Brush calls “the context of discovery” and the “context of justification.” We will then address the question: What should be the role of the philosophy of science? Should it describe the process by which scientists could or should work? Or should it describe the way they do work? In other words, should it be capable of surviving the test of being mapped onto the work of practicing scientists? The bulk of the course will involve readings from some of the philosophers of science, including Karl Popper, Imre Lakatos, Thomas Kuhn, and Paul Feyerabend. Throughout the course of the semester, we will digress to discuss issues such as “creation science” or “animal rights” that come up in the news.
CLA students: fulfills “Social Ethics” in core requirements
MANAGEMENT students: fulfills “Free Elective” in Mgmt, Acct, IM, and Econ
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HONR 199D, “Human Genetics: New Hopes & Dilemmas”

Instructor: Professor Emerita Anna Berkovitz
# of Credit Hours: 3
Days and Times: T-TH 12:00-1:15
Brief Course Description:
The study of human genetics has recently undergone a dramatic metamorphosis. This field, which until recently was limited to the statistical study of pedigrees and to the cataloging of diseases, has turned into a science with a powerful technology that already has a great impact on scientific research, medicine, and society.
We are now almost continuously exposed to reports of new genetic discoveries, new therapy possibilities, and new reproduction options. Few of us are able to appreciate the scientific validity of the claims in the popular press, nor can we foresee the potential ethical and moral issues that may arise from the unwise applications of the new technologies.
This is a human genetics course. Course’s purpose is to enable students from all disciplines to critically evaluate what they read about genetics in the popular press, to be able to distinguish scientific validity from hype, and to bring attention to the ethical and moral dilemmas created by the application of these new technologies. There will be appreciable elementary science content in the course.
In addition to numerous class discussions on current topics in the news, each student is required to write a major research paper on such a topic of interest.
CLA students: fulfills “Non-Lab Science” in core requirements
MANAGEMENT students: fulfills “Science” in Mgmt & Acct; “Free Elective” in IM;
“Science Non-Lab” in Econ
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HONR 199F, “The McDonaldization of Society”

Instructor: Dr. Mick La Lopa
http://www.cfs.purdue.edu/HTM/about/lalopa_mick.shtml
# of Credit Hours: 2
Days and Times: WF 11:30-12:20
Brief Course Description:
This course is based on a concept known as McDonaldization, which is defined as the “process by which the principles of the fast-food restaurant- McDonald’s- are coming to dominate more and more sectors of American Society as well as the rest of the world.” Students will explore and discuss the dimensions of McDonaldization which are efficiency, calculability, predictability, and control to see how they apply to their lives and the lives of those around them in both positive and negative ways.
CLA students: fulfills “Free Elective” in core requirements
MANAGEMENT students: fulfills “Free elective” in Mgmt, Acct, IM & Econ
HONR 199I, “The City”
Instructor: Dr. Emily Allen
http://www.cla.purdue.edu/english/directory/index.cfm?personid=72
# of Credit Hours: 3
Days and Times: T-TH 10:30-11:45
Brief Course Description:
This course addresses the development of modern human identity and experience as it is constructed by and played out within urban space. We will focus on the two great European capitals of the nineteenth century - Haussmann’s Paris and Victoria’s London - and an All-American city: twentieth-century Chicago. Reading theories of architecture and urbanism alongside sociology, cultural geography, and cultural history, we will consider various historical, cartographical, literary, and visual representations of the city space. If people make cities, it is equally true that cities make people, and our main interest will be in how the development of an urban sphere produces certain types of human subjectivity and community.
The course begins with the linked histories of industrialization and urbanization that during the eighteenth century first produced the modern city as we know it. The first part of the course focuses on the two European cities that during the nineteenth century came to embody all the hopes and fears of a new, urban world: Paris, the “city of light” and center of civilization (and revolution), which had a sweeping urban redesign during Napoleon III’s Second Empire; and London, the center of a global empire that promised all the pleasures of modernity but came to be known as the “city of dreadful night”. The second part of the course moves across the water to address the American city that most fully embodies twentieth-century modernism: Chicago, the site of architectural experiment and of a particularly Midwest brand of urban culture. The third part of the course takes the ideas we’ve developed about European and American cities and brings them home, as we focus on the development of Greater Lafayette: Lafayette, “The Star City,” and its twin across the mighty Wabash, West Lafayette. One of the questions we take up in this third section is whether or not a university can be considered “a city,” per se. What kind of space is Purdue University? Where, in other words, are we?
Throughout the course, we learn to consider space both as the literal embodiment of theories about the public, the communal, and the urban, and as the projection of fantasy onto physical space. Our job will be to determine what sort of realities - and further fantasies - such cities can produce.
By taking an interdisciplinary approach to the study of the city, this course introduces students not only to a variety of disciplines, but also to the basic practices of cultural critique. Perhaps most importantly, it asks them to think analytically about the physical world that they inhabit, about the complex ways that “culture” is produced, and about the mutually constitutive relationship between reality and representation. The idea of the city is ultimately as potent as the thing itself, and we will track this idea as it develops over time and (urban) space.
Finally, this course is about people: what does it mean to take part in the urban sphere? And what does it mean, in this age of global conflict, to imagine a cosmopolitan subject, an urban citizen of the world?
CLA students: fulfills “Global Perspective” in core requirements
MANAGEMENT students: fulfills “Literature Elective” in Mgmt, Acct & IM;
“Global Perspective” in Econ
HONR 199K, “America in Vietnam”

Instructor: Dr. Patrick Hearden
http://www.cla.purdue.edu/academic/history/facstaff/Hearden/H-Hearden.htm
# of Credit Hours: 3
Days and Times: T-TH 1:30-2:45
Brief Course Description:
This course will be an undergraduate seminar centered on classroom discussion and designed to promote critical thinking. It will analyze the early history of Vietnam, the establishment of the French empire in Indochina, the rise of Vietnamese resistance to foreign rule, the escalating American military involvement in Vietnam, and the changes in American-Vietnamese relations from 1975-present. Students will be expected to participate in vigorous discussions of the assigned readings, to write several papers based on primary documents as well as secondary sources, and to present their independent research findings for classroom discussion. There will not be any examinations. Grades will be based upon participation in classroom discussion and papers written on selected topics.
CLA students: fulfills “US Tradition” in core requirements
MANAGEMENT students: fulfills “World History or International Elective” in Mgmt, Acct & IM; “US Tradition” in Econ
HONR 199M, “The Impact of Culture on Health”

Instructor: Dr. Karen Yehle
http://www.purdue.edu/aging/people/faculty/yehle.htm
# of Credit Hours: 2
Days and Times: M 3:30-5:20
Brief Course Description:
This course will examine the socio-cultural influences on the health of selected populations. Students will explore the following topics: health, culture, social justice, resilience, vulnerability, and double vulnerability. Selected populations will be studied (African American, Asian, Hispanic/Latino, Native American, Middle Eastern). Students will visit campus Cultural Centers and interview international students about health and culture.
Assigned readings are minimal. Instead, students will be expected to search databases for peer-reviewed journal articles on selected topics, develop a written critique, AND orally present the article each week during class. Additionally, students will write and present their cultural health philosophy at the beginning and end of the semester. Students will choose a book from the selected list, present their interpretation of it, and write a paper. Students are expected to come to class prepared to discuss the assigned weekly topic, as the class will be conducted in the seminar format. There will be no exams or final. There will be a writing assignment each week.
CLA students: fulfills “Social Ethics” in core requirements
MANAGEMENT students: fulfills “Free Elective” in Mgmt, Acct, IM & Econ
HONR 199N, “The Theory of Pop Culture”

Instructor: Dr. Dino Felluga
http://www.cla.purdue.edu/english/directory/index.cfm?personid=81
# of Credit Hours: 3
Days and Times: M 7:00-9:50PM (Media Lab)
WF 3:30-4:20 (Lecture)
Brief Course Description:
This interdisciplinary seminar on contemporary popular culture introduces students to the basics of critical theory and critical analysis. The course takes as its topic the most “popular” of today’s media - television and film - and pairs it with readings from “high” theory in order to do three main things:
- Give students the critical tools to read and interpret the quotidian world around them.
- Demystify the world of theory by introducing it via its apparent, mainstream opposite.
- Dissolve the boundaries between high/low culture and between popular/intellectual discourses.
The thesis of this course is that pop culture, especially pop culture that is ‘speculative’ in some way (e.g. fantasy and science fiction), gives us a special access to the ways we make sense of the world in our every day lives. By pushing to the limits such issues as subjectivity, temporality, and representation, the speculative fiction that has largely defined blockbuster film in the contemporary market can uncover the ways ideology, narrative, and epistemology function on a day-to-day basis. In other words, the course takes both speculative fiction and pop culture seriously, and it will consequently be dealing with a number of “serious” issues that concern us in our contemporary culture: postmodernism, the disciplinary mechanisms of modern culture, politics and power, and late capitalism.
While the course takes its primary materials from the realm of visual culture, it serves as an introduction to the major theories currently influencing disciplines across the academy. These theories - of gender and sex, ideology, psychoanalysis, postmodernism, and media studies - are the main nodes of interdisciplinary debate and discussion among academics and intellectuals. Students will find material and ideas in this course that will feed back into their work in the humanities, social sciences, or hard sciences (Particularly computer science, chaos theory, robotics, and AI studies).
CLA students: fulfills “Aesthetic Awareness” in core requirements
MANAGEMENT students: fulfills “Literature Elective” in Mgmt, Acct & IM;
“Aesthetic Awareness” in Econ
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HONR 199R, “Aviation Safety: Chaos and Complexity as an Exploratory Model”

Instructor: Professor Denver Lopp
http://www2.tech.purdue.edu/At/Facstaff/dwlopp/index.html
# of Credit Hours: 3
Days and Times: T-TH 10:30-11:45
Brief Course Description:
While typical safety programs in the aviation industry rely on a structure of regulated rules and policies for compliance, the fundamental interaction of technology and human actions is often misunderstood by investigators that look into the causes of aircraft accidents. In this course we will consider the theories of chaos and complexity as providing a new outlook in understanding mistakes that develop in typical everyday aviation operations, resulting in actions that could cause major error events. Emergence, swarm behaviors, fuzzy logic, and the bizarre events of quantum mechanics will be studied and used as background fundamentals in developing new models for providing understanding and practical answers of aviation safety programs. Methods of instruction will include the study of hand out material, review of case studies, and a heavy emphasis on class discussions. The Aviation Technology Department’s large transport 737 aircraft and simulators will be utilized as live laboratory tools in demonstrating and running models of complexity and emergence safety issues occurring during flight operations. Several paper briefs will be required by each student, which will provide background material in developing a final class presentation as a team project. The final summary report will be of quality for presentation to safety leaders in the aviation industry.
CLA students: fulfills “Free Elective” in core requirements
MANAGEMENT students: fulfills “Free Elective” in Mgmt, Acct, IM & Econ
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HONR 199S, “AIDS: Biomedical, Social, and Ethical Issues”
Instructor: Dr. Ralph Meyer
# of Credit Hours: 3
Days and Times: T-TH 12:00-1:15
Brief Course Description:
This course will provide a multidisciplinary approach to the AIDS pandemic. The topics that will be covered include the following:
- The history of plagues, including AIDS
- The origin of new diseases
- AIDS in Africa and Asia
- The biology of HIV
- Medical aspects of HIV/AIDS
- Psycho-social issues of HIV/AIDS
- Sexuality in the time of AIDS
- AIDS and the Arts
The AIDS quilt
- AIDS and literature
- AIDS and the law
- The politics of AIDS
- AIDS and the church
- AIDS and the rationing of health care
- Death and dying
- Euthanasia
- Is there life after death?
While there will be a few lectures to present background material, the course will be primarily a discussion course, using videos, DVDs, films, and readings as the basis of the discussion. We will have three or four “Pizza and a Movie” nights where we will show films where HIV/AIDS is a major theme. There will be some outside speakers, including people living with AIDS. Each student will participate in one of several formal debates. Students will have one long paper and several short writing assignments. There are no exams in this course.
CLA students: fulfills “Social Ethics” in core requirements
MANAGEMENT students: fulfills “Free Elective” in Mgmt, Acct, IM & Econ
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HONR 199V, “Visual-Spatial Thinking”

Instructor: Dr. James Mohler
http://www2.tech.purdue.edu/cgt/facstaff/jlmohler/index.html
# of Credit Hours: 3
Days and Times: T-TH 1:30-2:45
Brief Course Description:
Visual-spatial thinking is a critical skill to success in fields ranging from art and education to science and engineering. Visual-spatial thinking allows engineers to mentally construct or deconstruct mechanisms, structures, and systems. It allows scientists to envision organic or inorganic chemical and biological structures. Programmers use it to cognitively construct software flow, inputs, and outputs. Artists, educators, in fact, most fields use visual-spatial thinking in myriad ways, although it is seldom taught directly as a topic or skill for development.
This course focuses on understanding and developing visual-spatial thinking with no assumption of prior experience in the study of visual-spatial thinking. Students will examine various aspects of visual-spatial thinking and related issues through lectures, discussion, reading, experiences, writing and presentation.
CLA students: fulfills “Free Elective” in core requirements
MANAGEMENT students: fulfills “Free Elective” in Mgmt, Acct, IM & Econ
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HONR 199Z, “Archaeological Dating”
Instructor: Dr. Paul Muzikar
http://www.physics.purdue.edu/people/faculty/paul.shtml
# of Credit Hours: 3
Days and Times: MWF 9:30-10:20AM
Brief Course Description:
Archaeology has made great strides in understanding the past, on time scales ranging back to millions of years. An important part in these advances has been played by the use of scientific techniques to determine the ages of objects and events. One may ask: When was Stonehenge built? What are the ages of hominid fossils found in China? When did Akrotiri erupt, and was it related to the downfall of Mycenaean civilization in Crete?
This course will cover the important methods used in archaeological dating, such as tree rings, radiocarbon, luminescence, and fission tracks. The basis of each technique will be explained, as well as the associated problems and uncertainties. This course will cover, in a self-contained manner, the physics, chemistry, and geology needed to understand the dating methods. Students should develop an appreciation for the different time scales involved in earth history. The students will be expected to do a reasonable amount of reading, in both the textbook and in other sources. There will be homework exercises, in-class exams, as well as a written paper.
CLA students: fulfills “Non-Lab Science” in core requirements
MANAGEMENT students: fulfills “Natural Science” in Mgmt & Acct; “Free Elective” in IM; “Non-Lab Science” in Econ
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HONR 299G, “The Rise and Fall of the American Empire”

Instructor: Dr. Steve Hallett
http://btny.purdue.edu/faculty/hallett/index.html
# of Credit Hours: 3
Days and Times: MWF 9:30-10:20
Brief Course Description:
The major hot-button topics related to this course are taught in various departments and colleges throughout the university. Rarely, however, do we consider them together. As a result, engineers may develop a deep understanding of the oil industry without grasping the importance of global warming, and environmental scientists might study global warming without understanding the oil or coal industries. Likewise, agriculture students might discuss bio-fuels without understanding the economics of their implementation. Economists might recognize the impact of Chinese manufacturing on the global economy without recognizing its impact on the environment. This course, rather ambitiously, attempts to join the dots.
Another important goal of the course is to look at how the various global challenges will play out in different parts of the world. Overpopulation, for example, is a global problem, and yet the populations of most of the developed world are rather stable; the populations of Japan and Germany are shrinking. The political will to implement fuel efficiency standards and sources of renewable energy is strong in Europe, growing in the USA, and yet virtually non existent in China and India. Global warming is likely to be disastrous in flood-prone Bangladesh, but may improve farming conditions in Canada.
We will take a trip through history, analyzing the relationships between human societies and their environment. We will discuss the emergence of farming and the early evolution of societies, and study the role of environmental exploitation in the demise of various civilizations. We will discuss the history of fossil fuels, the ways in which they have transformed the world, and the geopolitics of fossil fuel acquisition. Looking at the modern world, we will investigate the full range of growing global problems related to population, fossil fuel depletion, global warming, and food production. We will also analyze potential remedies, such as renewable energy (and nuclear energy). Importantly, we will discuss all these topics in the context of political and economic constraints. Perhaps the really important questions are not whether we can “save the world”, but rather whether we will…
CLA students: fulfills “Global Perspective” in core requirements
MANAGEMENT students: fulfills “World History or International Elective” in Mgmt, Acct & IM; “Global Perspective” in Econ
HONR 299U, “The 2008 Presidential Election”

Instructor: Dr. Rosalee Clawson
http://www.polsci.purdue.edu/Directory/Faculty/clawson.html
# of Credit Hours: 3
Days and Times: T-TH 10:30-11:45
Brief Course Description:
The 2008 presidential election will be the most exciting election in more than five decades. Why? Because there won’t be a sitting president or vice-president on the ballot. The last time that happened was when Dwight Eisenhower ran again Adlai Stevenson in 1952. The timing of this course will allow us to focus on this exciting election in real time. Just as the semester starts, the Democratic and Republican parties will hold their national nominating conventions. On November 4th, voters will go to the polls to determine the popular vote winner. And as the semester ends, the electors will meet in their respective state capitals across the nation to determine the electoral college winner.
Students will be required to read a core set of books and articles on presidential campaigns, voting behavior, political parties, political participation, and public opinion during the semester. In addition, I will assign readings over the course of the semester in response to campaign events. For example, if race becomes an issue in the campaign (as it often does in American politics), I will add relevant readings to the syllabus. Students will do extensive reading, writing, and research for this course
CLA students: fulfills “US Tradition” in core requirements
MANAGEMENT students: fulfills “Free Elective” in Mgmt, Acct & IM; “US Tradition” in Econ
HONR 399M, “Migration with a Spanish Accent: A Shifting Human Landscape Viewed through
Novel, Fiction, and Practicum”

Instructor: Dr. Patricia Hart
http://www.cla.purdue.edu/film-studies/directory/index.cfm?personid=1282
# of Credit Hours: 3
Days and Times: MWF 9:30-10:20
Brief Course Description:
Few contemporary issues provoke more heated discussions than immigration. With an estimated 11 million undocumented residents in the U.S. today (some 6 million of whom are Mexican nationals), immigration is a topic of great importance to politicians and ordinary citizens alike, and every educated person has an obligation to understand the basic issues involved. Many U.S. citizens regard the immense influx of immigrants in recent years with dread and anger, citing economic burdens on schools, hospitals, and every other public service, shrinking wages for low-end jobs, and possible undesired changes to the nation’s ethnic, social, and economic identity.
Spain faces remarkably similar issues, as over half of all new jobs in Europe in the past five years have been created there, and it has the largest influx of immigrant workers of any country in the European Union, including many from its neighbors to the south in the Maghreb. Additionally, since 9/11, concern has mounted among policymakers and law-enforcement authorities in both countries that foreign terrorists affiliated with al Qaeda might use Mexico or Morocco as transit points to enter the United States or Europe, using the same people-smuggling networks as undocumented immigrants, thereby getting lost in the large undocumented flow. It should be no surprise that all of this creates panic in the citizenry.
Students of this course will begin with selected critical readings designed to give them some succinct ideas of immigration-related hot-button issues. The class will read five novels and view one film per week that will give a personal face to immigration; specifically that of Mexicans to the United States and North Africans to Spain. Students will journal about the readings and viewings.
As the semester progresses, the class will design and carry out a limited-scope research or community service project related to immigration in Indiana. The only prerequisite is a desire to study many sides of these complicated issues.
CLA students: fulfills “Other Cultures or Global Perspective” in core requirements
MANAGEMENT students: fulfills “World History or International Elective” in Mgmt, Acct & IM; “Other Cultures or Global Perspective” in Econ
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