Spring 2023 Course Offerings

Instructor: Shawn Parkison, Visiting Clinical Instructor, Department of English

Credit Hours: 3

 

Course Description:

This course is a writing-intensive course in which students learn how to find, evaluate, and use credible information, how to express themselves well in a variety of different written genres, and how to write for different audiences. This course meets the core requirement for written communication and *may* be used as a substitute for English 106 or 108.  Consult your primary advisor.

Instructors: Nicole Fadellin, Visiting Clinical Assistant Professor, Honors College

Credit Hours: 2

Course Description:

In this course, students from Purdue University (West Lafayette, Indiana) and Unisinos (Porto Alegre, Brazil) will collaborate virtually in interdisciplinary teams to identify solutions to a major global challenge. At the start of the course, students at both universities will meet together to learn about the topic from a range of disciplinary perspectives through guest lectures, assigned readings, and class discussions. Students will then be divided into interdisciplinary teams with members from both universities and provided a prompt related to the theme.

Teams will spend the remainder of the course focused on researching, developing, and packaging their solutions, which they will present publicly at the end of the term. In addition to increasing knowledge of the topic and improving teamwork skills, students in this course will advance in intercultural knowledge, skills, and attitudes through their international collaborative experience. *Those completing this course will be given first priority to enroll in a subsidized study abroad program to Porto Alegre over the subsequent Spring Break period for additional credit.*

Instructor: Nathan Swanson, Clinical Assistant Professor, Honors College

Credit Hours: 2

Course Description:

In this course, students from Purdue University (West Lafayette, Indiana) and the University of Padova (Padova, Italy) will collaborate virtually in interdisciplinary teams to identify solutions to a major global challenge. During the first eight weeks of the course, students will prepare for the Solutions Lab through training in intercultural competencies and increasing their knowledge of Italy. Mid-way through the semester, students will begin to meet with their peers at Padova.

After a week of virtual introductions, students will receive first priority to participate in a low-cost study away program to Italy during Spring Break to meet their Padova counterparts in-person and explore both student life and the semester topic in Italy. They will then return home to continue the virtual class experience. During these initial weeks of the Solutions Lab, students at both universities will learn about the semester’s topic from a range of disciplinary perspectives through guest lectures, assigned readings, and class discussions.

Working in interdisciplinary, cross-cultural teams, students will then spend the remainder of the semester researching, developing, and packaging their solutions, before presenting them publicly during the final class meeting. In addition to increasing knowledge of the topic and improving teamwork skills, students in this course will advance in intercultural knowledge, skills, and attitudes through their international collaborative experience. 
This course meets synchronously online.

 

Instructor: Hyunju Lee, Visiting Clinical Instructor, Honors College

Credit Hours: 2

Course Description: Through HONR 299: Lead Forward Practice, students learn how to put social impact leadership into action. This is done through a variety of active learning strategies, including workshop format class sessions on setting a clear vision, needs assessment, cultivating ethical relationships with diverse stakeholders, coalition building, grant writing, measuring impact, and more. The course will involve social impact practitioners from campus and Greater Lafayette, allowing students to learn from a diverse array of leadership experiences. Ultimately, the course will prepare students to enact a social impact leadership vision through the Lead Forward program or other opportunities.

Instructor: Hyunju Lee, Visiting Clinical Instructor, Honors College

Credit Hours: 3

Course Description:

Leadership Praxis acts as an asynchronous, curricular companion to a student's extracurricular leadership experience. Students will choose from a menu of course modules, allowing them to tailor the instruction they receive to their leadership context. A portion of the course is designated as a leadership lab, which makes time devoted to the leadership role part of the course. The course helps enhance students' performance in leadership their roles as well as turns those roles into opportunities for learning about leadership best practices and one's own unique leadership style. This course meets asynchronously online.

Instructor: Zahra Tehrani, Clinical Assistant Professor, Honors College

Credit Hours: 3

This course meets March 6 – April 29, 2023 and includes field trips over spring break.

Course Description: The recent advancement of DNA editing technology using CRISPR has renewed the call for shaping the human gene pool through germline gene editing to improve human lives. This has sparked a fiery debate among scholars as well as concerned citizens about the possibility of a new eugenic movement. Many argue there is a moral obligation to prevent heritable diseases in future generations and that “new eugenics” can avoid the pitfalls of the “old eugenics” from the early 20th century if certain safeguards are put into place. Others believe it could lead to a less inclusive society that pressures everyone to be the same.

Students in this course will learn about the science behind CRISPR technology and its potential therapeutic applications, the history of the eugenics movement, and the question of whether modern eugenics can be good for the individual and society. Students will critically examine literature from the perspective of scholars in science, medicine, bioethics, and disability studies, and propose possible solutions that address the concerns of different stakeholder groups.  Over spring break, students will visit sites in Indiana that have a historical significance from the American Eugenics movement. 

*There is an additional fee for this course. Students can apply for need-based support.*

Course Description:

This course will cover the history and motivation behind philanthropy, nonprofit organizations, the US Nonprofit Sector as well as the role of ethics in private action taken for the public good. Students will also learn the fundamentals of nonprofit leadership and fundraising. 

Instructor: Craig Svensson, Professor of Medicinal Chemistry and Molecular Pharmacology

Credit Hours: 1

Course Description:

This course is designed to enable students to gain an understanding of current conceptions of addiction and society’s response to this affliction. The first half of the course will focus on key issues such as defining addiction, the view of addiction as a disease, whether or not addiction is a life-long affliction, the role of mental health as a factor in addiction, understanding what drives drugs use, and whether evidence supports common treatments for addiction.

During the second half of the course, students will participate in several mock “Senate Hearings” designed to present opposing sides of a controversial topic in the field of addiction, such as the legalization of recreational marijuana use, increasing alcohol taxes to curb problem drinking, and the creation of legal drug injection sites.

Instructor: Adam Watkins, Clinical Associate Professor, Honors College

Credit Hours: 3

Course Description:

This course will boldly go where no course has gone before, providing students the chance to explore strange new ideas about space and time. Want to write a sequel to Interstellar or your own episode of Star Trek? Want to see how our idea of spacetime has evolved in response to religion, philosophy, and physics?  Want to hear Purdue scientists talk about science fiction that matters to them? To study spacetime requires that we engage a variety of perspectives from the past and present. In that sense, Spacetime! is deeply historical and philosophical in its approach.

The course also takes an active interest in creative processes behind scientific thought. Students will explore how arts and symbolic thought have played significant roles in scientific discoveries, including Einstein’s. Students will also practice creative modes of inquiry firsthand, as course projects will be based in creative writing practices. [Note: projects will be assessed on critical and creative thinking, not artistic quality.]

Instructor: Jason Ware, Clinical Associate Professor, Honors College

Credit Hours: 3

Course Description: Jazz artists “speak to each other in the language of music.” In “Jazz,” we will explore the nature of this artistic conversation with many of its cultural influences, geographical variations, and temporal iterations, and we will interrogate varying facets of the social impact such a conversation facilitates. Furthermore, we will explore the musical language of jazz with its power to make collective performance stronger both within and beyond music. And we will investigate the ways in which this artists' talk became the "talk of the town" and country as a medium through which people could break from dominant cultures.

We will make sense of and process our journey by creating our own metaphorical jazz ensemble, featuring the complex and layered textures of our lives as inspiration for the note and lyric.   **You do not need to be a musician to take this course**

Instructor: Anish Vanaik, Clinical Associate Professor, Honors College

Credit Hours: 3

This course meets the core requirement for Human Behavioral and Social Sciences.
Course Description: In this course students will explore the entangled relations between humanity and the environment from multiple social contexts and time periods.  Specifically, in “Climate Solutions” we tackle the question what is the way out of the climate crisis and examine the different answers that are emerging to this question in popular conversations and in policy circles.

Throughout the class, students will read, analyze and discuss interdisciplinary scholarship from the social and behavioral sciences.  Classroom activities will take the form of discussion, projects and group assignments, and writing assignments, with an emphasis on peer-to-peer learning. 

Students will create a project aimed at a public audience that demonstrates knowledge about key course topics and communicates connections between social/behavioral knowledge and personal, civic, ethical or global decisions and policies.  As a result of taking this course, students will be able to understand and evaluate critical questions about humanity and climate change, analyze and understand the motivations and visions behind the solutions being proposed, recognize the importance of those questions for various audiences, and draw connections between course materials and their own perspectives about the world.

Instructor: Katie Jarriel, Clinical Assistant Professor, Honors College

Credit Hours: 3

This course meets the core requirement for Human Behavioral and Social Sciences.
Course Description: In this course, students will explore the entangled relations between humanity and the environment from multiple social contexts and time periods.  Specifically, “Life on the Coast” explores the complex relationships between people, the sea, and coastal environments. In this course, you will explore human-coastal interactions from the perspectives of anthropology, history, environmental and climate studies, and political science to contextualize past maritime culture and better understand precarious coastal futures.

A typical day in this class will emphasize discussion and peer education through team-based projects. A major project of this course asks you to communicate grand challenges in the study of human-coastal interaction to a public audience. As a result of taking this course, you will recognize and evaluate important questions about our relationship to maritime environments, understand the perspectives of different peoples and why the coast is significant to them, and draw connections between course materials and your own experience.

Instructors: Nicole Fadellin, Visiting Clinical Assistant Professor, Honors College

Credit Hours: 3

Course Description: Key scholars in the interdisciplinary field of infrastructure studies describe infrastructure as invisible until it breaks down. In this course, we will challenge this premise. On one hand, we will explore the perspective of the engineer, who is intimately aware of the materials, systems, and structures that sustain society. On the other hand, we will consider the embodied experience of the intended beneficiaries of infrastructure to ask when and for whom infrastructure is visible or invisible.

We will draw upon case studies from the US and Latin America to consider public policy, civil engineering, and cultural activism from comparative perspective. The course will conclude with on-site research at local infrastructure sites.

Instructor: Matthew Joseph, Post-Doctoral Research Associate, Honors College

Credit Hours: 3

Course Description: Fans of American music simply cannot escape debates over cultural appropriation. Countless think pieces and scholarly books discuss how and why white musicians have exploited nonwhite—and especially Black—artists. Did whites shamelessly claim jazz and hip hop or were they merely adoring fans? Does appropriation define American music? This course deals with issues of love and theft as it examines race and ethnicity in American popular music from slavery to the present.

Moving beyond a Black-white racial binary, we will explore how fans from diverse backgrounds came to tie their cultural identities to music created by Jews, African Americans, Latinxs, and Asian Americans. In doing so, we will discuss how the segregated nature of the music industry and American society have obscured cross-racial collaboration and contributed to genres being narrowly defined as ‘white,’ ‘Black,’ or ‘Latinx.’ As students read a variety of primary and secondary sources and listen to weekly song selections, they will grapple with what popular music can teach us about race and ethnicity in the United States. This course meets synchronously online.

Instructor: Dwaine Jengelley, Clinical Assistant Professor, Honors College

Credit Hours: 3

Course Description: Sport is much more than a pastime. It is also a force and a forum, which governments, interest groups, and individuals use to advance political causes or make statements for change. Take, for example, the 1994 Rugby World Cup in South Africa, when Nelson Mandela, the recently elected president of South Africa, used this sporting event as an opportunity for nation building.

The raised fists of John Carlos and Tommie Smith at the 1968 summer Olympics were a statement against racist policies in the United States, and the international stage gave these athletes a global audience to see/hear their message. Many scholars describe China's hosting of the 2008 Olympics and Brazil's hosting of the World Cup in 2014 as debutant balls for these rising global powers. In this course, we will examine the relationship of politics and sports. Through a case study approach, students will analyze how sporting events and sports overall serve various actors' political agendas.

Instructor: Mayari Serrano, Visiting Clinical Assistant Professor, Honors College and Engineering Honors Program

Credit Hours: 3

Course Description: This multidisciplinary course is for undergraduate students from engineering, public health, pharmacy, anthropology, sociology, and other social and basic sciences to come together and learn from each other through co-designing solutions to address health disparities. Together we will explore and uncover the intricate interplay of factors that affect the health of individuals and populations, and highlight examples of how engineering has historically contributed to alleviating (or exacerbating) health disparities and how we can work together to improve equity in health systems and outcomes.

Instructor: Elizabeth Brite, Clinical Associate Professor, Honors College

Credit Hours: 3

Course Description: In August of 2021, the world watched as America’s longest running war came to a dramatic, perilous, and heartbreaking end. The War in Afghanistan has been an engagement of deep and troubling conflict, but it has also been a monumental event of cross-cultural exchange throughout your lifetime. Despite this, few American universities offer robust opportunities to learn about this region.

Since 2014, this course has helped fill the gap, providing Purdue students a chance to explore and critically engage Afghanistan and Central Asia. For spring 2023, we will cover core areas of knowledge concerning the region’s people, culture, and history. Collaborations are currently being developed that may also include the opportunity to work with and/or support Afghan students in Afghanistan through an online service-learning project.

Instructor: Ximena Bernal, Associate Professor of Biological Science

Credit Hours: 2

Course Description: Playing games is a ubiquitous behavior of being human that, for many of us, extends into adulthood. The narrative of games motivates us and provides incentives to take risks and learn new perspectives. This course uses Pokémon, a popular video game, as a vehicle to teach students about biology focusing on ecological and evolutionary concepts. Through their smartphone, students navigate an alternative reality that allows them to collect data, apply biological concepts and learn about ecological and evolutionary processes.

This tool lowers traditional educational barriers that often reduce enthusiasm and degree of understanding of core ecological and evolutionary concepts such as challenges associated with using field/lab equipment and limited taxon-specific knowledge. This course is designed to integrate conservation biology, science communication and social justice providing opportunities for student to nurture their critical thinking skills and relate their experience in the game to current, pressing societal issues.

Students will develop group projects where they will dive deeper into biological phenomena of their interest in the Pokémon world or explore connections between science and other video games. By the end of the course students will learn about the role of games in human culture, be able to survey and measure biodiversity, understand current threats to biodiversity, master foundational concepts in ecology and evolution, and be able to effectively communication scientific evidence to general audiences. No previous experience with Pokémon or background in Biology is required.

Instructor: Richard Thomas, Professor of Visual and Performing Arts

Credit Hours: 3

Course Description: This course is for students who are keenly interested in exploring the relationship between the experience of music in life and the ideas attached to it.  Students do not need compositional ability or experience to be successful in the course; rather, grades are assigned strictly based on timely submissions and following submission guidelines and NOT the quality of the compositions. *Students who wish to create compositions for class assignments must have some ability to create and record sound, e.g., from their smartphones.*

Instructor: David TseTse, Visiting Instructor, Honors College

Credit Hours: 3

Course Description: The United Nations (UN) launched the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in 2015, which 193 members adopted. The course will focus on the roles of the UN Economic and Social Council, specifically UN Funds and Programmes, in defining, implementing, and achieving the SDG targets. Students will gain an understanding of the current discourse around the SDGs as well as examine how concepts, such as equity, climate change, and human security are crucial to one’s understanding of and the implementation of programs for achieving the SDGs. 

In this course, students will also learn how to measure progress and the role of different actors in achieving SDG targets. We will use a systems-thinking approach to examine the interconnectedness of human development, economics, and environmental disciplines in achieving the SDGs. This course meets synchronously online.

Instructor: Rosalee Clawson, Professor of Political Science

Credit Hours: 2

Course Description: We are witnessing a dramatic transformation toward an electrified transportation future.  We will learn about various aspects of this transformation and explore the context in which this revolution is occurring by investigating media coverage of electric vehicles.  We will pay particular attention to issues of equity and environmental justice, with an eye toward achieving a sustainable and equitable electrified transportation future – the emphasis of research conducted by the NSF-funded ASPIRE Engineering Research Center here at Purdue.

Instructor: Lindsay Weinberg, Clinical Assistant Professor, Honors College

Credit Hours: 3

Course Description: In completing all aspects of this course, students fulfill the requirements for the Honors College Scholarly Project as well as the Science, Technology, and Society core.  This course is only open to 3^rd and 4^th year students.

In this course, students will study interdisciplinary approaches to technology ethics for responding to today’s pressing technological dilemmas in a range of contexts, from healthcare, mass incarceration, and airport security, to social media, smart cities, and space travel. Students will grapple with how historical and present-day inequalities, institutional environments, decision-making cultures, and regulatory systems impact the technological design process and distribution of technology’s risks and rewards in society.

We will ask ourselves whose values and assumptions about the world get baked into technological designs; how technologies shape, and are actively shaped by, distributions of power in society; and how we might consider questions of fairness, equity, and justice when it comes to the work we do in the world.  

Instructor: Zahra Tehrani, Clinical Assistant Professor, Honors College

Credit Hours: 3

Course Description: In completing all aspects of this course, students fulfill the requirements for the Honors College Scholarly Project.  This course is only open to 3^rd and 4^th year students.

The protein folding problem is a grand challenge in biology. How does a protein’s amino acid sequence dictate its three-dimensional structure? FoldIt is an online game in which players determine the most stable folded structure of hypothetical proteins that have been predicted by unique computer algorithms to perform specific functions in the cell. Students in this course will be introduced to the mechanics of the FoldIt software to fold computer-predicted proteins into their native structures as well as design novel proteins that can bind and deactivate the Covid19 spike protein.

Instructor: Kathryn Dilworth, Professor of Practice, Honors College
                   Christie Shee, Visiting Clinical Assistant Professor, Honors College

Credit Hours: 2

Course Description: In completing all aspects of this course, students fulfill the requirements for the Honors College Scholarly Project.  This course is only open to 3^rd and 4^th year students.

This course establishes a new pathway for Honors completion through a critical reflection of a student’s engagement with the Undergraduate Research pillar of the college. This course empowers Honors College students to leverage their research, scholarly, and creative experiences in curricular as well as co- and extra-curricular experiences toward completing the scholarly project requirement. The major assignment of the course is a reflective portfolio, which will serve not only as a record and reflection of past experiences, but also will be an opportunity to undertake self-reflection about how your time as an Honors College student has shaped your research thinking and helped prepare you for life beyond the university. One section of this course meets synchronously online.

Instructor: J. Peter Moore, Clinical Assistant Professor, Honors College

Credit Hours: 3

Course Description: In completing all aspects of this course, students fulfill the requirements for the Honors College Scholarly Project.  This course is only open to 3^rd and 4^th year students.

This hybrid course brings together elements of the humanities seminar, creative writing workshop, archival research trip, and printmaking studio to provide students with a framework for engaging with everyday forms of art and expression. Rather than accept the common as a settled category, we will attend to critical theories and literary works that treat it as an unstable concept, generating more questions than answers. How does social difference—race, gender, class—influence our conception of the common? What role does technology and media play in the consolidation and disintegration of shared values and ideals? Is the common a concrete set of observable phenomena (capable of being “mapped” within a taxonomy) or is it a matter of inchoate feeling? Poetry will be our primary means of communicating our findings, but the course is designed for those wanting to explore new possibilities for writing and art, whether or not they have an interest in writing poetry.

As a genre, however, poetry is integral to the discourse on ordinary life. It offers an amateur methodology for documenting commonplace experiences. It also foregrounds the issue of form, and thus provides an opportunity for adopting and adapting the patterns of common speech. Instead of canonical literary forms—haiku, sonnet, villanelle—we will experiment with an open and evolving set of popular, unconventional forms—the joke, public service announcement, and prayer. We will also think about the relationship of mechanical reproduction to the everyday, as students will have the chance to print their compositions on the vintage letterpress equipment in the Print Bay and exhibit their work in the Innovation Forum. This course meets synchronously online.

Instructor: Muiris MacGiollabhui, Visiting Clinical Assistant Professor

Credit Hours: 3

Course Description: In completing all aspects of this course, students fulfill the requirements for the Honors College Scholarly Project.  This course is only open to 3^rd and 4^th year students.

This class will introduce students to the concept of “Diaspora.” Over the course of sixteen weeks, students will assess how diasporic movements of people have constructed and inflected our world. This class will allow students to complete their Honors College scholarly project by immersing themselves in “research thinking:” the ability to critically think about an issue, problem, or situation and to find effective ways to address that issue, respond to that problem, or change the situation for the better.

Among the expected learning outcomes will be the ability to identify a question, the answer to which makes a contribution to an existing body of knowledge or creative practice.  Students will also learn critically read, analyze, and synthesize information from scholarly literature and/or traditions of creative practice. Finally, students will complete the class being able to demonstrate knowledge of disciplinary and/or interdisciplinary skills, methods, and abilities appropriate for their research/creative question. All these skills and learning outcomes will culminate with a research project at the end of the class revolving around the idea of “Diaspora.” 

Course Description:

This Scholarly Projects course, Documenting Heritage, is designed to help students hone some of the fundamental learning outcomes of an honors education: interdisciplinary thinking, critical thinking, problem solving, and research thinking. To accomplish these objectives, the course is simultaneously project-based and experiential. Students will work on applied research that emphasizes critical and multi-dimensional thinking about real-world problems. For Spring 2023, we will be focusing on documenting Black heritage sites in the Greater Lafayette area, with a special focus on the Purdue campus.

Through project-based learning, students will move their skills beyond identifying and understanding a problem, to identifying and formulating solutions to that problem; in this case, those solutions will come in the form of creating contextual and historical narratives for local Black heritage sites.

Instructor: Kristen Bellisario, Clinical Assistant Professor, Honors College

Credit Hours: 3

Course Description: In completing all aspects of this course, students fulfill the requirements for an Honors College Scholarly Project.  This course is only open to 3^rd and 4^th year students.

With increased habitat fragmentation, air travel, and travel corridors, noise is ubiquitous and has an impact on both wildlife and people. In this course, students will design and conduct a research study about noise in the local community and discuss novel ideas to address these issues. The technical component of the course will cover properties of sound, techniques of qualitative and quantitative analyses, and basic R programming. No prior experience with R or computer programming required. Students will learn the fundamentals in this course.  

Instructor: Temitope Adeoye, Clinical Assistant Professor, Honors College

Credit Hours: 3

Course Description: This course gives students hands-on research experience through the completion of a community-engaged research project. Working in collaborative groups, students will partner with a community-based organization to address a challenge identified by their community partner. This course introduces students to co-creative methods and has potential for developing trusting relationships and longer-term research leading into a scholarly project.  Students will be supported in using their existing and developing knowledge to pose solutions to community-identified challenges. No prior research experience is required.