Honors Courses
Instructors: J. Peter Moore, Clinical Assistant Professor, John Martinson Honors College
This section meets synchronously online.
Nicole Fadellin, Visiting Clinical Assistant Professor, Honors College
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 university core requirement for Written Communication and Information Literacy.
Instructor: Mayari Serrano, Visiting Clinical Assistant Professor, Honors College
Credit Hours: 2
This course meets during the second 8 weeks, March 4 – April 26, 2024
Course Description: Exploring Place is an examination of the cultural, social, technological, and historical dynamics that influence communities and relationships of a site. Blending independent study and distance learning, in this experiential learning course, the student and the instructor work together to design an individualized, in-depth study of where the student is located. In this section, your study will be attentive to the interactions we have with technology and how these interactions and technology have shaped this place over time. We will also focus on community life and the relationships between residents, institutions, organizations, and others in this place. Exploring Place allows students to better understand the people, places, and technology around them, expand their worldviews, and increase their self-awareness as they engage within these spaces and understand their place.
This course meets the university core requirement for Human Behavioral and Social Sciences.
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.
Instructors: Adam Watkins, Clinical Associate Professor, Honors College
Credit Hours: 1
Course Description: This Independent Study course is intended for JMHC students who have been awarded the Lead Forward Fellowship Grant. The course provides Lead Forward Fellows a space to receive further instruction on social impact leadership, to share their experience with enacting social impact projects, and to support each other's success and learning. Depending on availability, students who are undertaking social impact projects but are not Lead Forward Fellows may also enroll in the course, per approval from the course instructor. Enrollment in Lead Forward Fellowship I is a prerequisite for participation in this course.
Instructor: Adam Watkins, Clinical Associate Instructor, Honors College
Credit Hours: 1
Course Description: Ready to make a real difference in the world? This course provides students with the practical knowledge and community leadership skills they need to launch their own social impact initiative. Students will have ample opportunities to explore the causes or social issues that matter to them, while also participating in workshops on essential social impact practices like vision setting, asset and stakeholder mapping, coalition building, grant writing, and much more. Many of the workshops will be facilitated by experts at Purdue and from Greater Lafayette, which will allow students to cultivate their leadership network and discover how others approach social impact. Students interested in applying for the Lead Forward Fellowship Grant are strongly encouraged to take this course.
Instructor: Mehmet Kocaoglu, Visiting Scholar, Honors College
Credit Hours: 3
This course meets asynchronously online.
Course Description: This course acts as an asynchronous, curricular companion to students’ extracurricular leadership experience. Students will choose from a menu of course modules, allowing them to tailor the instruction they receive to their own 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. Ultimately, the course will enhance students' performance in their leadership roles, promote deeper learning about leadership best practices, and help students cultivate a research-based leadership approach that is suited to their strengths and values. Enrollment in Leadership Praxis I is not a prerequisite nor requirement for participation in this course.
Instructor: Kathryn Dilworth, Professor of Practice, Honors College
Credit Hours: 3
This course meets asynchronously online.
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.
Instructors: Heidi Fahning, Visiting Clinical Assistant Professor, Honors College
Temitope Adeoye, Clinical Assistant Professor, Honors College
Credit Hours: 3
Course Description: This course offers students hands-on research experience in participatory, community-engaged, and/or citizen-powered research projects. Through a collaborative research process, students will learn how to develop trusting relationships, effectively communicate with various audiences, and ensure research is relevant to communities. Students will engage in a faculty-led research project to address challenges spanning disciplines and to improve lives. No prior research experience is required.
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: Ed Zschau, Adjunct Professor, Honors College
Credit Hours: 3
Course Description: This practical, “hands on” case-based course is designed for sophomores and juniors in the John Martinson Honors College who aspire to start value-creating enterprises early in their careers and/or who want to be key contributors in emerging technology-based companies directly after graduation. It introduces students to the conceptual frameworks, the analytical approaches, the knowledge and skills, the needed resources, and the actions required to create and launch a successful technology-based enterprise. In addition to helping students develop their entrepreneurial skills, the course introduces students to a few public policy issues that impact new technologies, startup enterprises, and economic growth.
Several teaching and learning techniques are used for the course. The primary technique is an instructor-led classroom discussion by students assessing a real technology venture situation as described by a Harvard Business School case and determining the critical decisions and actions needed to address effectively the opportunities and challenges facing that startup enterprise. Ed leads these case discussions from a classroom studio in his Nevada home with the students in the Stewart G-52 classroom which has been specially designed, equipped, and operated to enable effective interactive classroom conversations to be conducted remotely. Students also learn by doing: Creating individually a plan for commercializing in a startup venture a technology invented and developed on the Purdue campus that each student discovered, studied, and evaluated. Guest entrepreneurs personally share their experiences and the lessons from them in several class sessions. Students will also learn from studying an existing startup venture of their own choosing and writing the story of that company based in part on their personal interviews with the founders. For this assignment, students will experience contacting entrepreneurs that they may not know personally and highlighting the learning from their study of that emerging company plus offering their recommendations for its future success.
Instructor: J. Peter Moore, Clinical Assistant Professor, Honors College
Credit Hours: 2
This course meets during Spring Break, March 11-16,2024
Course Description: This five-day course offers students a hands-on introduction to the Honors College Print Bay, a fully equipped center for the experiential study of letterpress printing. This vintage method, once the dominant form of industrial printing, has over the past several decades experienced a dramatic revival. At a time when the campus is overwhelmed with posters and flyers that all look the same—with the usual fonts, preset templates and stock images—letterpress introduces into the visual landscape an unmistakably warm and vibrant alternative. A synthesis of art and machine, letterpress is an analog process that allows the user to physically compose layouts, and work within a completely unique set of visual constraints. The resulting prints testify to the beauty of irregularity, the joy of a meditative tactile practice, and the benefits of collaboration. By the end of our course, students will receive instruction in the following skills: grid layout, typesetting, form lock-up, make-ready, press operation, plate etching, press maintenance, and all relevant safety precautions. While no previous experience is necessary, students with an interest visual design, mechanical technology and/or creative expression are encouraged to enroll. Enrollment in Print Bay Immersive I is not a prerequisite nor requirement for participation in this course.
Instructor: Richard Rand, Professor, Visual and Performing Arts
Credit Hours: 2
This course meets during Spring Break, March 11-16, 2024
Course Description: The word "vocation" comes from the Latin vocare "to call." There are different voices calling out to us, telling us what it is we should do and be, but what is our life’s true calling? The word "education" comes from the verb educe, which means “to draw forth from within,” but what is it we're supposed to draw forth? To fulfill our educational mission as students and teachers, we need to listen for what is authentic and meaningful - within us and outside of us - and let those two voices lead us in the direction of our greater purpose.
Journaling, partnering, group, and storytelling exercises, together with personal and historical research into your life culminate in a capstone project - The Personal Anthropology – and a Personal Narrative performed for class and invited guests. Prompts and partnering exercises give students opportunities to share their values, world views, histories, and philosophies of life. Classroom exercises include self-portraits, collaging and/or choreographing defining experiences, creating sociograms, an essence analysis of self, sharing stories about meaningful artifacts, and "embodying" friends and family members who tell us about you.
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.
Instructors: Zahra Tehrani, Clinical Assistant Professor, Honors College
Maren Linett, Professor of English
Credit Hours: 3
Course Description: In Eugenics: Then and Now we explore the aims and methods of early 20th-century eugenics, their ethical ramifications, and the ways they have been reconfigured in the age of the genome. Students will read a range of types of literature, from poetry and fiction to bioethics and philosophy, to scientific articles and chapters. Together we will explore the drawbacks and potential benefits of trying to biologically improve the human species. In doing so, this course will examine the social and ethical implications of science and technology using interdisciplinary methods and approaches. This course fulfills the university core requirement for Science, Technology, and Society.
Instructor: Christie Shee, Visiting Clinical Assistant Professor, Honors College
Credit Hours: 3
This course meets during the second 8 weeks, March 4 – April 26, 2024
Course Description: This course focuses on local ecosystems conservation through discussion and field-based classes. Students will learn how community science can be used as a tool for conservation and will have the opportunity to contribute to ongoing citizen science research. We will explore the science behind conservation, read scientific literature, and learn about technologies used to capture scientific data, and how different cultures and attitudes influence ecosystems. In doing so, this course will examine the social and ethical implications of science and technology using interdisciplinary methods and approaches. This course fulfills the university core requirement for Science, Technology, and Society.
Instructor: Kristen Bellisario, Clinical Assistant Professor, Honors College
Credit Hours: 3
Course Description:This course introduces students to approaches of art and research that consider environmental sound. Students will learn technical skills, develop compositional processes, and engage with theoretical perspectives to inform the generation of original creative works, ranging from composed and improvised musical and film pieces to aural communication strategies in shared community spaces. Topics covered will include frameworks for environmental acoustics, including ontologies of sound; listening practices; field recording; microphone technique; compositional strategies; audio editing and creative audio processing; spectral analysis; sonification; and more. The outcome of this course will meet the requirements of a JMHC scholarly research project. This course fulfills the university core requirement for Science, Technology, and Society.
Instructors: Ashima Krishna, Clinical Associate Professor, Honors College
Nathan Swanson, Clinical Assistant Professor, Honors College
Credit Hours: 3
Course Description: Students will be a part of an interdisciplinary team in a semester-long exploration of the physical, social, and cultural geographies of US diplomatic facilities located within World Heritage Sites (WHS). Student teams will explore the interconnectedness of the historic, built, and natural environments and the human interventions and interactions that occur within them. We will work closely with the US Department of State’s Cultural Heritage Office, and students will have the opportunity to interact with State Department historians and officers. In this workshop-based hands-on course, students will develop a variety of mapping, presentation, analytical, and team building skills. Beyond traditional classroom texts and tools, students will learn to employ cutting-edge visualization techniques through VisionPort, an immersive pedagogical tool housed in the John Martinson Honors College. The course will culminate in a collaborative project report that will be presented to our partners in the US Department of State. In doing so, in this course, students will explore the entangled relations between humanity and the environment from multiple social contexts and time periods. This course meets the university core requirement for Human Behavioral and Social Sciences.
Instructor: Anish Vanaik, Clinical Associate Professor, Honors College
Credit Hours: 3
Course Description: What is the way out of the climate crisis? This course will examine the different answers that are emerging to this question in popular conversations and in policy circles. Over sixteen weeks, we will try to analyze and understand the motivations and visions behind the solutions being proposed and the key forces that speak for and against them. In doing so, in this course, students will explore the entangled relations between humanity and the environment from multiple social contexts and time periods. This course meets the university core requirement for Human Behavioral and Social Sciences.
Instructor: Elizabeth Brite, Clinical Associate Professor, Honors College
Credit Hours: 3
Course Description: At the turn of the new millennium, Nobel Prize Laureate Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stormer proposed that we had entered a new geologic epoch - the Anthropocene – a time when humans had become the dominant force on planet Earth. Anthropocene means “the human age,” and it is a concept that has become widely popular in scientific communities as a way to denote the extreme impacts humans are now having on the climate, the environment, and virtually all living things on Earth. Despite its popularity, however, the Anthropocene remains a hypothetical and hotly debated idea. The International Committee on Stratigraphy has yet to recognize it as a true geologic epoch (one that can be empirically observed in the layers of the Earth) and arguments persist over exactly when it may have begun, or the ways that the concept may mask the inequalities of environmental harm. At its heart, the Anthropocene asks us to reconsider the role of humanity on planet Earth and drives us towards agendas focused on planetary change. In this course, we will explore the philosophical and scientific discourses of the Anthropocene and the concept’s implications for our present and future. Students will engage in developing their own positionality in relation to emerging knowledge on planetary change through a group project to bring prominent scholars of the Anthropocene to campus. In doing so, in this course, students will explore the entangled relations between humanity and the environment from multiple social contexts and time periods. This course meets the university core requirement for Human Behavioral and Social Sciences.
Instructor: Matthew Joseph, Post Doctoral Research Associate, Honors College
Credit Hours: 3
Course Description: To understand and combat systemic injustices, our students must be equipped to engage with the historical and present-day racial and ethnic “reckonings” that define the United States, and large parts of the globe. This course offers students an opportunity to focus on cultural landscapes/contexts, to learn how race and ethnicity permeate cultural texts, genres, and industries. The course trains students to recognize how race-and-ethnicity-based inequities intersect with issues of class, gender, and/or sexuality, and how these intersections articulate themselves in/through culture. Students will grapple with the colonial, national, transatlantic, trans-cultural, and diasporic underpinnings of culture. Topics that will be explored will vary each semester, but to attend to the diverse ways in which students learn and demonstrate their learning, all sections will use interdisciplinary materials like songs, films, video games, sporting events, poems, neighborhood maps, photographs, fine art pieces, oral histories, interviews, and newspapers, in addition to traditional/scholarly publications.
Instructor: Aparajita Jaiswal, Intercultural Research Specialist, CILMAR
Credit Hours: 2
Course Description: Storytelling with data is a critical skill that one needs to develop, it involves transforming raw data into a meaningful story that can inform, persuade, or engage an audience. In this course, students will learn how to tell a story using data. They will master the art of storytelling by actively engaging in the processes of problem identification, data collection, analysis, and interpretation. Students will be instructed on approaches to problem identification, crafting research questions, and designing studies that encompass the collection of both quantitative and qualitative data. They will also acquire skills for data analysis, which includes statistical techniques and thematic analysis, and learn how to convey their findings through report writing and poster presentations.
Instructor: Megha Anwer, Clinical Associate Professor, Honors College
Credit Hours: 3
Course Description: This course is about one of the largest film industries in the world. The popular Hindi film industry, better known as Bollywood, plays a significant role in shaping India’s cultural identity on a national and global scale. In this course, we will explore some of the most iconic Bollywood films, focusing primarily on those released since the 1990s, when the Indian economy embraced globalization. In these last 30 years, India’s cultural and political terrain has undergone a significant shift. We will trace the contours and consequences of these transformations. The films we will study record India’s transition from the glee and gusto of liberalization at the end of the 20th century, to a nation contending with post-millennial failures and inadequacies of neoliberalism’s promises. Simultaneously, the films offer audiences a visual account of a society in which women, religious minorities, Dalits, and political dissidents continue to be systematically disenfranchised. In this course, we will immerse ourselves into the messy worlds that Bollywood films construct, learning to embrace their opulence, joy, melodrama, romance, global settings, and larger-than-life characters. At the same time, we will also delve into the mirkier politics of class, caste, religion, gender that these films represent, reproduce, and resist.
In doing so, we will examine various dimensions of industry that produces these films: it’s recovery post-COVID-19; it’s relationship to other film industries in India; the new stardom and celebrity cultures that have emerged in the last decade; the changing status of women actors; the persistence of feudal nepotism; Bollywood para-texts that circulate as gossip, controversies, talk-shows, and on social media platforms; the high-end, global couture and leisure-travel trends that the industry endorses. In other words, while this course is about Bollywood, it is also beyond Bollywood. Through this course, students will be equipped to engage with the power of popular culture, in any geographical context, and decipher the intricate, complicated relationship that exists between art, artists and the societies that produce them.
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: Nadine Dolby, Professor of Curriculum & Instruction
Credit Hours: 3
Course Description: This interdisciplinary course will draw from the fields of education, sociology, animal science, veterinary science, human medicine, cognitive ethology, anthrozoology, family studies, psychology, environmental studies, and other disciplines to examine the history of human-animal relationships, the nature of the human-animal bond, the concepts of animal welfare and animal rights, and the changing role of different species and types of animals (companion, farm, and wild) in human worlds. The increasing effects of climate change on the planet, animals, and humans require responses grounded in a One Health approach, which recognizes the integrated nature of human/animal lives, and the future of the planet.
Instructors: Jillian Carr, Associate Professor, Department of Economics
Cara Putman, Clinical Assistant Professor, Department of Management
Kate Zipay, Assistant Professor, Department of Management
Credit Hours: 3
Course Description: Health Care costs and access is a challenge for many people. In Indiana it is a particularly vexing problem with Indiana placing 41st on overall health and 42nd out of 50 states for mental health. And 48th in public health funding. As Indiana (and other states) seek to improve economic development, a key to attracting new employers and skilled employees is through an improved health care system. Combining economics, legal policy, and organizational behavior, students will gain tools to apply in multiple contexts. For this iteration, public health is simply the framework.
Instructor: Mayari Serrano, Visiting Clinical Assistant Professor, Honors College
Credit Hours: 3
This course meets synchronously online.
In completing all aspects of this course, students fulfill the requirements for an Honors College Scholarly Project. This course is only open to 3rd and 4th year students.
Course Description: 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. This course fulfills the university core requirement for Science, Technology, and Society.
Instructor: Kathryn Dilworth, Professor of Practice, Honors College
Credit Hours: 2
In completing all aspects of this course, students fulfill the requirements for an Honors College Scholarly Project. This course is only open to 3rd and 4th year students.
Course Description: 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.
Instructor: Muiris MacGiollabhui, Visiting Clinical Assistant Professor
Credit Hours: 3
In completing all aspects of this course, students fulfill the requirements for an Honors College Scholarly Project. This course is only open to 3rd and 4th year students.
Course Description: 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.”
Instructor: Katie Jarriel, Clinical Assistant Professor, Honors College
Credit Hours: 3
In completing all aspects of this course, students fulfill the requirements for an Honors College Scholarly Project. This course is only open to 3rd and 4th year students.
Course Description: In the 1940s, rhetorician Kenneth Burke introduced the parlor metaphor, which describes academic scholarship as a lively conversation between people in a sitting room. This conversation started long before you arrived, and it will continue after you leave, with people coming and going. It is up to you to catch on to the nature of the discussion and add your own thoughts.
Taking the parlor metaphor a step further, this course aims to teach students how to analyze existing scholarly conversations by considering them as networks. By assessing knowledge as a network, you will better understand an area of inquiry, how disciplines form, and how ways of thinking emerge.
As part of this research-based course, you will complete your Scholarly Project by selecting a research topic that interests you, conducting a network analysis of its scholarship, and visualizing and presenting your findings. You will gain cross-disciplinary skills such as proficiency in network analysis software (including AI tools), reviewing secondary literature, data visualization, and research presentation. Class days alternate between discussion of background readings and applying course content to real-world projects.
Instructor: Christie Shee, Clinical Visiting Assistant Professor, Honors College
Credit Hours: 3
In completing all aspects of this course, students fulfill the requirements for an Honors College Scholarly Project. This course is only open to 3rd and 4th year students.
Course Description: Urbanization is a leading driver of habitat and biodiversity loss, and these losses are expected to continue with urban expansion. In this course, students will research and familiarize themselves with the life within an ecosystem in order to design their own sustainable landscape that promotes wellbeing for humans and non-humans alike. The course will draw upon ecology, entomology, horticulture, human health and landscape architecture.
