1 - 10 of 240 results for: %

Transportation accounts for nearly one-third of American energy use and greenhouse gas emissions and three-quarters of American oil consumption. It has crucial impacts on climate change, air pollution, resource depletion, and national security. Students wishing to address these issues will need to reconsider how we move, finding sustainable transportation solutions. This course will provide an introduction to the issue, covering the past and present of transportation and its impacts; examining alternative fuel proposals; and digging deeper into the most promising option: battery electric vehicles. Energy requirements of air, ground, and maritime transportation; design of electric motors, power control systems, drive trains, and batteries; and technologies for generating renewable energy. Two fun opportunities for hands-on experiences with electric cars. Prerequisites: Introduction to calculus and Physics AP or elementary mechanics.

Theory and research on African Americans' roles in post-Civil Rights, US social movements. Topics include women¿s right, LGBT rights, environmental movement, and contemporary political conservativism.

Preference to sophomores. The inauguration of Nelson Mandela as president in May 1994 marked the end of an era and a way of life for S. Africa. The changes have been dramatic, yet the legacies of racism and inequality persist. Focus: overlapping and sharply contested transitions. Who advocates and opposes change? Why? What are their historical and social roots and strategies? How do people reconstruct their society? Historical and current sources, including films, novels, and the Internet.

Preference to freshmen. The everyday lives of African American women in 19th- and 20th-century America in comparative context of histories of European, Hispanic, Asian, and Native American women. Primary sources including personal journals, memoirs, music, literature, and film, and historical texts. Topics include slavery and emancipation, labor and leisure, consumer culture, social activism, changing gender roles, and the politics of sexuality.

Not since the turn of the last century have Americans experienced such a profound gap between those who have and those who do not, between wealthy and working poor, between defacto upper and lower classes, between those of the status quo and those who slip to the social periphery. We will be examining literary and artistic explorations of social and economic inequity, fiction and art that looks at reversals of fortune as well as the possibilities for social change. Readings include Jacob Riis¿ How the Other Half Lives, W.E.B. Du Bois¿ The Souls of Black Folk, Edith Wharton¿s House of Mirth , James Agee & Walker Evans¿ Let Us Not Forget Famous Men , T.C. Boyle¿s The Tortilla Curtain, Julie Otsuka¿s When the Emperor Was Divine and Occupy Movement art.

We may "know" "who" we "are," but we are, after all, social creatures. How does our sense of self interact with those around us? How does literature provide a particular medium for not only self expression, but also for meditations on what goes into the construction of "the Self"? After all, don't we tell stories in response to the question, "who are you"? Besides a list of nouns and names and attributes, we give our lives flesh and blood in telling how we process the world. Our course focuses in particular on this question--Does this universal issue ("who am I") become skewed differently when we add a qualifier before it, like "ethnic"? Satisfies PWR2.

Preference to freshmen. Mark Twain has been called our Rabelais, our Cervantes, our Homer, our Tolstoy, our Shakespeare. Ernest Hemingway maintained that all modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. President Franklin D. Roosevelt got the phrase New Deal from A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court. Class discussions will focus on how Twain's work illuminates and complicates his society's responses to such issues as race, technology, heredity versus environment, religion, education, and what it means to be American.

This seminar focuses on the interface between two important subjects: law and popular culture. Before class, students will see a series of films or television shows relating to law, lawyers, and the legal system. There is also a weekly homework assignment based on materials in the assigned text and the assigned film or TV show. We will discuss the pop culture treatment of subjects such as the adversary system, good and bad lawyers, female and gay lawyers, the work life of lawyers, legal education, ethical issues, the jury system, and criminal and civil justice. The seminar discussions will draw on film theory and film-making technique to deepen understanding of the interrelationship between law and popular culture. The discussions will illuminate the ways in which pop culture products both reflect and change social views about law and lawyers. The assigned text is Michael Asimow & Shannon Mader, "Law and Popular Culture: A Course Book" (Peter Lang 2004).

Preference to sophomores. Introduction to the ideas, sensibility, and, to a lesser degree, the politics of the American 60s. Topics: the early 60s vision of a beloved community; varieties of racial, generational, and feminist dissent; the meaning of the counterculture; and current interpretive perspectives on the 60s. Film, music, and articles and books.