Ò»±¾µÀÎÞÂë

Instructors: Peter Adams, Kasia Snyder, James Wynn

Many consider climate change to be the most serious social, political, and environmental issue of the 21st century. As human activities increase the level of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere, scientists have established the reality of climate change and have estimated its impacts on human society and the natural world. Despite the scientific consensus on its existence, causes, and consequences, a substantial number of Americans and citizens of other countries still question these conclusions and a small but vocal group of doubters continue to challenge the science and scientific consensus on climate change. In spite of some social division over these issues, governments at local, national, and international levels have made concerted efforts to craft policies to address climate change. These policies have shifted over time as the information, attitudes, and technology associated with climate change have evolved. In this course, we will explore the challenges and complexities of climate change by investigating the subject from a variety of angles: scientific, political, rhetorical, cultural, economic, technological, and ethical. Over the course of the semester, we will inquire: What is climate change? How do scientists know it is happening? Why is there public debate over it? What solutions are available? And what are the pros and cons of the different solutions?

Instructors: Paul K. Eiss, Mark Kamlet, Kody Manke-Miller, Kathy M. Newman

This Grand Challenge first-year seminar on inequality is inspired in part by the specter of global income inequality. Income inequality has reached such a peak that eight men own as much wealth as half the world's population, the world's poorest 3.6 billion people. Inequality may be a feature of all societies across history to some degree. But inequality strikes us an especially timely topic because of the current demands for greater political, social, and economic equality. The four of us will use the disciplines we come from - economics, anthropology, history, psychology, and literary/cultural studies - to introduce you to the concept of inequality in the age of capitalism. We will consider how inequality emerged as a social and political problem in the 18th and 19th centuries, and how it has re-emerged as a key concept for socio-political movements in our current moment. We will conclude with an inquiry into what the future of inequality might look like, especially with the coming of increased automation and the elimination of at least 50% of the jobs currently being done by human beings.

Instructors: Jess Klein, Candace Skibba, Lisa Tetrault

Gender Based Violence (GBV) is a global heath & human rights crisis in which, according the World Health Organization, one in every three women has been beaten, coerced into sex, or abused. Discourse surrounding GBV enters into the sacred space of the home, the strategies of advertisers, the halls of the Senate, college campuses, and the galleries of the world's most well known museums. It is, literally, everywhere. Although it is everywhere, wide spread, and catastrophic, GBV is often minimized, concealed, and dismissed. This course will explore the many manifestations of GBV, from stalking to human trafficking, removing it from the shadows and bringing it into the open so that we can do something about it. Toward that end, we'll simultaneously explore the many creative ways people are combating this global epidemic. Throughout our work, we'll explore how gender based violence intersects with multiple, overlapping systems of oppression, from race to heteronormativity. Finally, you'll imaginatively develop your own resistance strategies through a culminating, group project.

Instructors: Mariana Achugar (S17), Ayana Ledford (S18), Richard Purcell, Nico Slate

Racism is everywhere in the twenty-first century. In August 2009, the renowned Indian actor, Sharukh Khan, was detained at Newark International Airport. According to Khan, his Muslim surname led American immigration officials to question him about the nature of his visit for over two hours. Was his treatment racist? In 2011, Luis Suarez a Uruguayan soccer player was punished for allegedly calling French footballer Patrice Evra "negro" in England. But was the word "negro," said in Spanish, racist? Racism is a complex phenomenon that refers to historically hierarchical power differences between groups (e.g. Native populations and Europeans during the conquest), ideas about how humans can be classified into groups by "race," and also discriminatory practices against non-dominant groups. This system of social relations and ideology serves to justify social inequality and differential treatment. If we are to end racism, we must strive to understand it. What are the historical origins of racism? How is racism reproduced? How does race influence identity formation? Can racism produce positive identities? Why has the struggle against racism shifted from a demand for human rights to a search for diversity and inclusion? This course will examine racism in Pittsburgh, in the United States, and in several other countries and regions throughout the world. We will approach racism from multiple academic perspectives with a team of three faculty from the departments of History, English and Modern Languages. This team-based interdisciplinary approach to Freshman Seminars draws on several departments and guest speakers.

Instructors: Mara Harrell, John Oddo, Daniel Oppenheimer (F18), Mandy Simons

Without language, there would be no politics. Politics is about persuading others to adopt policies, to vote for candidates, to get out and march. Politics is about careful choices of language to frame issues, to make others see those issues in our preferred way. In this course, we will put the rhetoric of politics under the microscope, to identify its components and understand how they fit together into a powerful structure. We will use the tools of multiple disciplines in our analysis: rhetorical theory, both ancient and modern; cognitive science; contemporary discourse analysis; ethics; and philosophy of language. We will ask what it means for political rhetoric to be propaganda. We'll explore how political advertising uses marketing techniques, taking advantage of our innate biases and cognitive dispositions. We will look at how a skillful speaker can control the topic in a dialogue or a debate. And throughout, we will ask the question: is this ethical? Where does persuasion cross the boundary into manipulation, and does that matter? What type of rhetoric do we want our political process to rely on? Our goal in this course is to provide students with the skills to recognize the rhetorical tools that political agents are using, and to develop their own responses in a skillful and informed way.

Instructors: Joel Greenhouse, Christopher Phillips

In a time of big data and widespread skepticism of science, it is crucial to understand how data and facts can be turned into conclusions, and then into public policy. Using topics from medicine, epidemiology, and public health, this course provides students an introduction into the grand challenge of understanding how evidence is used (and abused) in support of scientific conclusions. Questions of health and disease are particularly important areas for thinking about facts and figures because many life-or-death decisions have to be made on the basis of fragmentary and unreliable evidence. Every trip to the doctor, illness, and vaccination involves a complicated mix of public policy, scientific evidence, and emotional and historical factors. This course helps students understand the sciences and the humanities as united in their desire for rigorous argumentation rather than as competing or incompatible ways of thinking. Moreover, by taking a wide-angle lens to the topic, students will see how and why standards of scientific proof have changed over time, and track what these changes mean for thinking about evidence. Co-taught by a statistician and historian, this course draws on many different disciplines, providing students a broad introduction to reasoning across the humanities and social sciences. Students will be required to participate in written and oral arguments, read scientific articles as well as political, historical, and legal documents, and prepare a capstone project in which they will be asked to weigh real-life evidence and recommend a course of action to the Food and Drug Administration. Other topics may include vaccination controversies, regulation of carcinogens and toxic chemicals, mammography screening standards, and the treatment of infectious diseases in global health settings.

Instructors: , Abigail E. Owen, Gloria Silva, John Soluri

Food in the twenty-first century is ripe with paradox: fewer people than ever work as farmers or ranchers, but the quantity and global variety of foods available to consumers continues to expand; public health officials around the world are raising alarms about diseases linked to the over-consumption of fats and sugars, even as hundreds of millions of people do not know where their next meal is coming from; organic agriculture is booming, while agribusiness giants like Monsanto continue to expand. Producing food consumes more land and water resources than any other human activity. The individual and collective decisions people make about food shape individual and community health, social justice, and sustainability. If we are to make sound decisions about how to feed the world and feed ourselves, we need to understand the highly creative and contentious ways that people produce and consume food. In this class we will address the following central questions in order to unravel some paradoxes, and help us make informed choices, about foods we consume: (1) What are the origins of agriculture, and why does it matter for the future of food? (2) How do cultural, ecological, economic, and technological contexts shape food acquisition, preparation, and consumption? (3) What are the causes of hunger - can we feed 8 billion people healthy food and not trash the planet? And (4) what roles have science and technology played in shaping "industrial food," and in shaping the world around us?

Instructors: Peter Freeman, Tom Werner

Space, as a television series once told us, is the final frontier. But what lies out there? It could be that the billions of rocky planets and moons in the Milky Way are just inert and ready to be terraformed and colonized...but what happens when we encounter life, intelligent or otherwise? In Beyond Earth, co-taught by an astrostatistician and a linguist, students will consider the various rationales for engaging with the rest of the galaxy...and the potential consequences of doing so. Why should one consider leaving the Earth, and where would he or she go? Just to Mars, or to other planetary systems? How long would it take to get to these other systems? The distances involved in space travel are immense, and we cannot rely on warp drives.

Inter-generational space travel is a possibility, but who is willing to leave Earth and spend the rest of his or her life on board a spaceship? When one's descendants finally arrive in a suitable planetary system, what happens if they find life? If so, what should they do - communicate with it, control it, or fly away from it? Perhaps these are the wrong questions...perhaps we need to ask if humans have the right to occupy other planets and moons in the first place. But even if we choose not to leave Earth, there will still be the issue of communication: from radio signals to satellites leaving the Solar System to proposed light sails that will be pushed to the nearest stars, we are making ourselves known. Should we do this? And if we send signals into space, how should we design them to make ourselves understood? What should we talk about? Just how should we go about engaging with the rest of our galaxy? By the end of the course, every student will be able to make an informed and dispassionate decision: stay on Earth and improve what we all have, or strike out into the great Beyond?

Instructors: Cheng Li, Tom Werner

The aim in the course is to foster in students a planetary perspective, to see Earth in its context of the cosmos and to see humans in their relation to real or possible forms of life in the universe. The obsession with outer space is found among scientists, business people and politicians, in deed and story, in film and even computer games. If we are to fully appreciate the potentials of space, we must also consider the search for intelligent life in its scientific and societal aspects, and investigate how we could adapt our systems of communication to reach species across distances that may be physically insurmountable. This interdisciplinary course will be taught by scholars from distinct cultural and linguistic backgrounds. Course materials will be taken from scientific literature, the history of science, and science fiction. We will explore scientific writing and reasoning, the space race between global powers, space travel and colonization, and the promise and pitfalls of interspecies and interspace communication. A planetary perspective, once achieved, can change the way one sees other inhabitants of this planet - as partners in survival in a universe which sets enormous odds against it, or as unwelcome intruders grasping for scant resources within this thin epidermis of soil, air, and water which surrounds Earth and makes our lives possible.

Instructors: Marlene Behrmann, Sharon Dilworth

Art and Science — two fields of study that are most often considered diametrically opposed. Art is frivolous entertainment. Science is hard rational fact. In this Grand Challenge course, we hope to break that supposition or at least examine it in great detail. Specifically, we will use theater to argue that drama can produce challenging, demanding and intelligent work that showcases the impact of science on current discourse. We want to link the two cultures. The word "theater" has the same etymological root as "theory" — both words come from the Greek thea meaning view. This shared origin demonstrates ways we can work to analyze and interpret both fields and show the common ground between these two cultures. As we attend to plays and writing ranging from Tom Stoppards Arcadia and Michael Frayns Copenhagen to Caryl Churchills A Number and Oliver Sacks Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat, our class discussions will consider questions that include: Why is science a trend in contemporary theater? Does it reflect on our dependence on technology? What kinds of questions are being asked when science or scientific theory is presented on the stage? Are people attracted to plays about science because of their difficult subject matter or does it does it lack the engagement of popular culture? In addition to integrating humanities and scientific approaches within Dietrich College, this course will utilize the expertise of both individuals in the School of Drama and the producers in the local theater community, and local science writers. Finally, in addition to weekly writing assignments, the course will ask students to produce original dramatic scenes that incorporate scientific exploration which will, ultimately, lead to staged readings of their work.

Instructors: Doug Coulson (F21, F22), Jeria Quesenberry, Nico Slate (F20)

From gerrymandering to online political ads, data is being used in ways that raise urgent questions about the integrity of democratic elections. But the relationship between democracy and data goes far beyond elections. In a world of constant surveillance, in which vast amounts of data are gathered from our phones, our computers, and from other facets of our lives - and in which new breakthroughs in machine learning and data analytics make such data dramatically more powerful - what does it mean for average citizens to have control over their own lives? What does democracy mean?

Instructors:  (F22), Teddy Seidenfeld (F20), Lisa Tetrault

This course investigates the sacred American practice of voting, the cornerstone of American democracy, using the 2020 election cycle as our laboratory. The course uses a multi-disciplinary approach, examining the topic from several different perspectives. We'll investigate social movements to expand the vote, the role of technology, game theory, polling, predictions, electoral mapping, social media, the structures of American governance, and more. Questions include: What is the electoral college? Who gets to vote and why? How well is that vote accounted for? How can voting systems be compromised? Why is it so hard to predict who will win? How do people make decisions? How useful are polling & predictions? What disrupts voting? Why is turnout so low? How does money play a role in the election cycle? Why do we vote the way we do? How is social media changing elections? What are global best practices? Did the founders even intend for a mass democracy? (The answer is no!) Many of you will be first-time, eligible voters in one of the most remarkable presidential campaigns in American history. We'll build your skills as new democratic citizens, of this nation or others, and help you make sense of the history-making U.S. news cycle.

A note on partisanship: All political viewpoints are welcome in this class. This is a course on how we navigate and account for political difference in a diverse, disparate nation. This is something we'll practice in class, while we will also study that very process across the nation.

Instructors: Catalina Arango Correa (S22), Neil M. Donahue, Abigail E. Owen (F20)

Wondering what the "Green New Deal" proposal is about? Does it seem like you have to choose between protecting people and protecting the planet? How does environmentalism connect to struggles over social justice and human rights? This first-year interdisciplinary seminar is an introduction to the Grand Challenge: Environmental Justice. In Giovanna de Chiro's words, the environmental justice movement is working "toward building diverse, dynamic, and powerful coalitions to address the world's most pressing social and environmental crises global poverty and global climate change by organizing across scales and 'seeking a global vision' for healthy, resilient, and sustainable communities." In this seminar, we'll study the history and science behind two interconnected challenges for environmental justice: global climate change and fine-particulate air pollution. Both types of pollution start with combustion of fossil fuels. Particulate air pollution kills roughly 7 million globally each year; these air pollution deaths happen close to the source, with unequal levels of exposure and risk for people according to class and race. Climate change, mostly from carbon dioxide and methane emissions, is spread globally and lasts well beyond our lifetimes, yet the effects are again disproportionately based on class and race. In this course, we'll explore the science, history, ethics, and public perception of these problems, with implications for Pittsburgh and the planet, and for the near- and long-term future.

Instructors: Nevine Abraham, Michal Friedman

In a region beset by conflict, how do food cultures allow us to approach cultural intersections and connections? This course is designed to provide students with a historical, cultural, and linguistic understanding of the hybrid nature of Jewish and Arab cultures, and the multiple ethnic contributions to local food cultures in Israel and Palestine. The two instructors, from the fields of Jewish history and Arabic Studies, will introduce students to the history, literature, film, and languages of the region, as well as to critical scholarship on food and foodways in the Palestinian and Israeli context. Students will have the opportunity to engage in cooking either locally or in Philadelphia - subject to travel restrictions - and to learn from Michael Solomonov and Reem Kassis, two award-winning US-based celebrity chefs and authors of Israeli and Palestinian cook books respectively. Throughout the semester we will also host a range of guest speakers who will deliver lectures on our course topic in the classroom and in the community.

Instructors: ,

Virtual news stories and game worlds are accessible by putting on cardboard goggles, theme parks are engineered to provide convincing multisensory experiences, and workforces are reliant on augmented views of factory floors. Immersive and spatial media constitute a suite of emerging technologies that offer the opportunity to expand arts, entertainment, science, design, commercial enterprises and countless other domains in ways that were previously limited to science fiction. The potential for augmented reality to disrupt our current technological ecosystem is tremendous. Many of these technologies are now 50 years old and just starting to enter the commercial realm. As immersive experiences and augmented realities become more integrated into our work and leisure, do we need to worry about the ways that unreality affect our experiences of reality, or our interactions with each other? How do we know that we can trust our senses to tell us what is real? How do we begin to grapple with the ethical, cultural, social, technological, and regulatory implications of this shift?

Instructors: Stephan Caspar (S21), Sébastien Dubreil, Korryn Mozisek

Sports have been celebrated for bringing people together; yet, sports have also been a locus of tensions and conflict that most of us only experience from the sidelines. We understand sports, the people, and their cultural impact through the stories that we tell about them in such places as museums, stadium tours, and Halls of Fame as well as in books, documentaries, and podcasts. Through immersive technologies, these stories are brought to life and bring fans to the heart of the action. In this course, students and faculty together will seek to achieve two main objectives: (1) examine ways in which cultural and societal values are reflected in sports and (2) how Virtual Reality (VR) technology can help design experiences that enhance the users awareness of these issues by engaging with these cultural and societal perspectives. We will first unpack sports stories that are squarely situated at the crossroads of sports and culture(s) (e.g., racism, human rights, and the role of government and/in national politics). Then we will explore the role of VR technology to help craft these narratives. Students, then, will discover what it means to write stories for VR experiences. The course will culminate in students designing an immersive experience about a sports conflict of their choice, which will be developed more fully to be displayed in the Askwith Kenner Global Languages and Cultures Room.

Instructors: Jason D'Antonio, Julie Downs, Andreea D. Ritivoi

We live in times when health is a major global concern, whether we worry about the increase in Covid-19 cases, await our immunization, strive to understand the disproportionate impact of the disease on BIPOC populations, or debate mitigation measures not to mention ongoing concerns with common chronic illnesses such as diabetes, cancer, autoimmune disease, depression, anxiety, etc.. Health, or lack thereof, has always been a critical part of the human experience, and it is fundamentally impacted by different human experiences. This seminar will introduce students to the scientific aspects of health, its political and social determinants, ethical constraints, historical roots, as well as to the cultural and communicative skills required to dialogue about health, make decisions, and engage empathically with others in their health stories. We will read and discuss a broad variety of materials from medical science articles to social psychological experimental reports and personal or literary narratives about health. The course is divided into three components: health and preventative behaviors, managing chronic health challenges, and coping with disruptive health experiences. We believe these components can represent a broad array of interest and engage students on a personal level.

Instructors: Kevin Jarbo, Kody Manke-Miller

Race matters. How have social institutions and historical factors led to the belief systems and stereotypes that shape how race is experienced in American society, and how do these belief systems affect the way individuals come to view and define themselves and others? This course considers how race and identity affect peoples lived experiences - how they think, feel, and act - in America. In this course, we will examine the structural and systemic origins of the racial status quo, as well as the way that individuals navigate the social and racial landscape of modern-day America. Including insights from psychology, literature, economics, sociology, and history, the course will focus on how race matters at both a societal level and an individual level. We will consider different racial situations throughout American society to understand how individuals navigate and experience race and identity. Throughout the course, we will watch films, read literature, and analyze music and art that reflect the experience of race and identity.

Instructors: Paul K. Eiss, Anne Lambright

How did Indigenous people respond to the challenges of populating the American hemisphere and creating complex, diverse and dynamic cultures, languages and political entities? How did they survive, adapt to, and resist the conquest and colonization of their lands, and ensuing social and cultural dislocations? How have they resurged politically, culturally, artistically and intellectually in recent years? This course considers the history, experiences, and perspectives of native populations across the Americas. It seeks to reckon with the facts of the Native American experience, while challenging the fictions of stereotypes and narratives that have often relegated Indigenous people to the social and cultural margins of the nations in which they now live. After introducing students to a few of the myriad Indigenous groups of North, Central and South America, we will then survey the implications of the era of European conquest and colonization. Well consider the implications of the rise of new nations in the Americas, as new and intensifying campaigns of violence were unleashed against Indigenous populations. We will consider the rise of Native American civil rights and political and cultural sovereignty movements from the late 20th century forward, as they coalesced into major political challenges to native marginalization and demands for recognition and reparation of historical injustices. Finally, we will explore how contemporary Indigenous artists, authors, and political and social activists are reimagining indigeneity (the condition and experience of being Indigenous) in ways that demonstrate how indigeneity is not a fixed kind of identity, not one that is confined or defined in any way by a static conception of tradition, but rather one that challenges the present and reimagines the future in dynamic and creative ways.

Instructors: ,

This course will explore the societal impacts of artificial intelligence (AI) based decision-making systems, especially focusing on the societal biases they may enhance or reduce. Students will gain a fundamental understanding of how these systems are designed and work, as well as the role of data in mitigating or enhancing biases. The course is multidisciplinary in nature and brings together social scientists, engineers, data scientists, and designers to tackle the grand challenge of dealing with issues of bias and fairness in Human-AI collaborative systems, ranging from the data that is used to train them, to their human creators that are responsible for deciding how they work and get used. Students will investigate policy, technology and societal elements aimed at reducing and mitigating the impact of AI biases that can negatively impact society, especially its vulnerable members.

Instructors: Felipe Gómez, Gabi Maier

“My heart is in my work” is a phrase that once rang true to many Ò»±¾µÀÎÞÂë students and remains the motto our institution lives by. But what happens if our hearts suddenly aren’t in our work anymore since life has been interrupted by a global pandemic? How do we as a society respond to challenges and struggles that go beyond our daily work routine and encompass threats to our physical and mental health, our social interactions, our family life, and our hobbies and leisure activities? Today, when the “new normal” seems to be lasting forever and we as a society are facing an unprecedented mental health crisis, how can we address questions of resilience, wellbeing and perseverance in the classroom, both from an academic and a personal point of view? How can we prepare ourselves to rebuild communities and societies after traumatic and scarring events, communicate and collaborate across disciplines to solve complex problems, and establish a world where we will be able to thrive and succeed again? In a more fundamental way, what does it even mean to be resilient, and where is the boundary between our own health and wellness and the cultural, societal, or economic expectations around these ideas?

To answer these questions, this course will use graphic novels from English-speaking, German-speaking, and Spanish-speaking countries as its core to introduce students to a variety of graphic approaches to the concept of resilience, including from a genre known as graphic medicine. We will explore mental and physical health and healing in innovative ways to analyze different perspectives on and models for wellbeing. Working comparatively across cultures, the graphic novels in the course will help re-examine and re-define our understanding of wellbeing and health and explore how visual storytelling can drive social change around issues of individual and community resilience.

Students will reflect upon and eventually tell their own personal narratives using a variety of storytelling tools and techniques (e.g., critical reading skills, comic theories, comic-making software and the support of local comic artists). In addition, students will work in groups to offer their newly-acquired knowledge or creative ideas to the Pittsburgh community (e.g., to a high school class or non-profit organization where students can showcase their work or discuss their ideas with interested audiences). All in all, students will a) gain a sense of curiosity about wellbeing and health-related questions, b) develop their ability to critically examine the voices of those who are allegedly well and those who are not and c) deepen their storytelling skills as both a form of advocacy and a source of resilience.

Instructors: Chante Cox-Boyd, Ezelle Sanford III

Why do some people live well into their nineties while others are more likely to die at an earlier age? The answer to this question can be more complex than one might think. Life expectancy can be influenced by a host of individual and population-level factors. This course is designed to critically examine the social factors research has found to impact individual and population health experiences. This course will introduce students to the multiple approaches to researching the complex problem of health disparities in the United States with particular emphasis on perspectives from the social sciences and humanities. Specifically, students will examine how factors such as socioeconomic status, education, crime, housing, health care and food availability play important roles in the production of disparate health.

Students will examine psychological factors that can create disparate health experiences and the impact of such disparities on psychological health. We will address health disparities at the individual and population levels, learning how disparate health experiences are historically and socially produced, and how such disparities produce negative physical and mental health outcomes for individuals and minoritized populations. At the end of the course, students will present a collaborative group project that examines a specific facet of US health disparities and offer a proposed solution. Using a multi- disciplinary perspective, we will challenge students to discover just how important seemly unimportant interpersonal and structural factors can be in explaining health disparities and how important it is for society to take measures to address these disparities.

Instructors: Timothy Haggerty

This seminar examines the manner in which American culture and politics have utilized the tools, tactics, and values of the military during both war and peacetime. From the interdisciplinary perspectives of history and rhetorical criticism, we will consider the different ways that gun culture, military mobilization, veteran affairs, and police power have influenced social policy, including how people relate to—or fear—one another in society. We will explore some historical roots of the U.S.’s militarized culture, alongside the linguistic, argumentative, and narrative trends that have contributed to urgent antidemocratic issues like police brutalityand domestic terrorism.

This course will address themes and questions such as:

• American exceptionalism: Does violence play an extraordinary role in American culture, in contrast to other nations? What are its historical antecedents?
• The escalation of violence in American political culture: Why does political polarization engender violence? Do traditional appeals to “freedom” accelerate such violence?
• The rise of the carceral state: How has America become a country of prisons and mass incarceration?
• Global impacts: How does the U.S.’s militarized political culture impact nations and people beyond its borders?

Instructors: Elizabeth Walker, Bonnie L. Youngs

In the days when threats were constant, human beings needed to assess possible danger quickly. Today, before even speaking, our brain assesses and categorizes others. Needless to say, these quick judgments are inaccurate and based on what is visible or perceivable: clothing, health, age, skin color, gender, facial features, body shape, accented speech …, and even on where we encounter each other: in a bar, a library, or a laundromat. Problematically, we don’t realize the influence of our own cultures and identities on our understanding of others. But how do we set aside our own biases and judgments to listen openly and honestly? Using TedX talks, open class discussions, excerpts from television programs, literary texts, and academic articles on societal norms, culture, and identity, students will understand why and how societies establish identities. Applying an ethnographic approach, students will then develop and implement an interview protocol to understand how to avoid bias and show respect in our interactions. To put these ideas into practice, students will themselves practice conducting interviews, assess the interviews, improve the questions, and then conduct interviews with campus peers and colleagues in order to assess aspects of the climate of inclusivity on campus. Through the interview data, students will uncover themes pertaining to feelings of unclusivity/inclusivity and create ‘inclusive campus action plans’ to help us develop deeper understanding and acceptance in the Ò»±¾µÀÎÞÂë community.

Instructors: Elizabeth Walker, Bonnie L. Youngs

Learning to reduce conflict requires understanding positionality and identities, and why and how societies build barriers in their populations. In this interdisciplinary course, students will learn how to talk to each other and strangers about identity: its defining characteristics and how our bias influences our judgments. The social sciences elements will stress Social Identity Theory, bias, stereotypes, and in-groups and out-groups. The humanities elements will include close-reading strategies and incorporate conceptual frameworks from cultural studies, literary studies, and narrative theory.

In addition to practicing the methodologies in these two disciplines, students will undertake two projects. In the first project, they will develop and implement a semi-structured interview protocol for their campus peers centered around belonging. In the second project, students will employ close reading techniques to analyze Young Adult novels that address complex questions of identity, isolation, bias, and rejection. Working with one novel and Project 1 data, each team of social sciences, humanities, and data specialists will create a website to highlight inclusive successes and challenges. This final cohesive ‘picture’ of themes pertaining to feelings of belonging on our campus will help guide the Ò»±¾µÀÎÞÂë community toward deeper understanding and acceptance practices.

Instructors: Nuria Ballesteros Soria,

Higher education classrooms bring together students from a wide variety of backgrounds and prior experiences. While students’ intersecting identities can be an asset in the classroom, they can also present challenges in terms of student learning. For example, how might coming from a low-resource school system impact a student’s achievement at the college level? How might the learning experiences of neurodiverse students or international students differ from those of neurotypical or US-born students? Through class discussions, guest speakers, and course assignments, students will have the opportunity to examine barriers to equitable education (e.g., gender, socioeconomic status, linguistic/cultural background, etc.) and initiatives designed to mitigate these barriers. Through reflective assignments, students will also have an opportunity to examine their own intersecting identities and identify what challenges or opportunities may have shaped their own learning. Over the course of the semester, students will work on a group project that asks them to explore different intersecting identities and how these identities may impact educational experiences. Finally, students will connect with campus stakeholders who advocate for educational equity at Ò»±¾µÀÎÞÂë, and create resources to help current and future Ò»±¾µÀÎÞÂë students thrive in Ò»±¾µÀÎÞÂë’s diverse higher education classrooms.

Instructors: Nuria Ballesteros Soria, Chloe Thompson (S25), (S24)

Recent U.S. Supreme Court decisions on affirmative action have reignited the debate about equitable access to higher education. Affirmative action has been challenged many times over the past 50+ years, and these challenges highlight the complex nature of providing equitable access to higher education in a society that is not “equal” on many measures. Students from historically marginalized communities or from underserved educational systems are often at a disadvantage when it comes to accessing higher education. Even those who are admitted to college may not have the tools or resources to succeed. Throughout its history, and especially since the 1960s, Carnegie Mellon has undertaken multiple initiatives to provide equitable education to underserved populations. 

This course explores these initiatives, both past and present, as well as the broader debates about affirmative action. As a highly selective institution, Ò»±¾µÀÎÞÂë serves as an important case study for exploring the challenges and opportunities for achieving equitable access and success in higher education. 

This course will heavily focus on two programs from Ò»±¾µÀÎÞÂë’s history, namely SCOPP and CMAP/CMARC, and ask students to consider how these programs aimed to address the problem of inequitable education. We will draw heavily on primary sources from the Ò»±¾µÀÎÞÂë Archives and students will be asked to analyze these sources using historical and linguistic approaches. We are interested in exploring how the language used in discussions of affirmative action and student identities changes over time and in response to different historical factors. 

Students will collaboratively engage with primary source material to develop a final creative project that considers the history of various affirmative action initiatives at Ò»±¾µÀÎÞÂë and makes connections between these earlier efforts and today’s current programs. Class meetings will consist of group discussion and small activities as well as guest speakers. Outside of class, students will complete a variety of course assignments, including readings, written assignments, reflections, and a collaborative project.

Instructors: Wayne Wu

The title of the show, Black Mirror, refers to the blank screens of tech devices that reflect back an image of the human user. The image captures some parts of us, say our facial expression, while deemphasizing, distorting or missing others, say the color of our eyes or skin. Further, the reflection is silent about what goes on under the surface in our heads, what we feel, think and value. At the same time, the screen presents a cover for a computational device which, when activated, is massively interconnected with local and global structures around us and with our minds in ways that we do not notice. Can we understand and explain this increasingly symbiotic relation, sometimes healthy, sometimes not? Through active discussion, group work, engaging with local and national experts, and argument and analysis in written work, we will explore the ways in which recent technologies mirror our minds as well as how our minds are impacted by and come to mirror those technologies. We will focus on the idea of bias and a type of informational selectivity we capture as attention. Topics will include: the nature of meaning, thinking and understanding in animals and machines, tests for cognition in artificial systems with focus on recent large language models such as CHAT GPT, biases in cognition and attention in humans and biases in algorithms and the impacts of these on society, the attention economy and the manipulation of our attention therein, and the symbiosis between mind and machine where machines extend our minds. These topics span philosophy, cognitive science and computer science. Our goal will be to acquire the analytical skills needed to help critically engage with and transform this symbiotic relation between mind and machine, moving it systematically towards a virtuous and healthy state.

Instructors: Jay Aronson, Robin Mejia 

This course will introduce first year students to the challenge of protecting and promoting human rights in a world fraught with conflict, political strife, economic exploitation, and environmental hazards. We will focus on how human rights frameworks can be used to make the world more just, equitable, and free. We will begin by discussing the theoretical foundations of human rights and the development of human rights institutions in the 20th century. Students will learn how rights have been constructed through legal action, activism, and treaty negotiations in the past and examine the emergence and contestation of new rights today. We will explore why particular rights frameworks are privileged in some societies but not others. We will then focus on how practitioners investigate and document potential rights violations around the world, including in our own backyard. The instructors bring disciplinary expertise in history, journalism, and data analysis, and the course will feature guest lectures by legal experts and human rights practitioners. Topics covered will include genocide and other war crimes; political repression; economic, social, and cultural rights; environmental rights; migration and refugees; gender identity and sexuality; and indigenous rights.

By the end of semester, students will be prepared to propose an action plan to address a specific human rights challenge in a community that they are familiar with. In previous semesters, our students have worked on projects related to deaths in Pennsylvania’s jails and prisons in partnership with local organizations, proposed a project to assess human rights violations of migrants at the US/Mexico border, and conducted an international open source investigation of human rights violations using online media and satellite imagery.

Instructors: Reem Alghazzi, Stephen Brockman, Kenya C. Dworkin y Méndez

The world is currently experiencing the worst refugee crisis since the end of World War II. Large numbers of people are forced from home for political, personal, or racial reasons, and many others leave home because of grinding poverty and need. Conflicts about the mass migration provoked by this crisis have emerged all over the globe, from the United States, Latin America, and Europe, to Africa, the Middle East, Asia, and even Oceania. Writers, filmmakers, and artists have attempted to address the plight of refugees and migrants in their works, and many writers, filmmakers, and other artists are themselves refugees or migrants. Pittsburgh has a unique institution, City of Asylum, whose mission is to assist and advocate for persecuted writers and other artists. It hosts the largest residency program in the world for writers living in exile under threat of persecution or worse: death. The goal of this Grand Challenge Seminar is (1) to familiarize students with today’s plight of refugees (e.g., social, political, economic factors; cross-cultural comparisons; dynamics of class, race, gender, and nationality), and (2) introduce them to a variety of textual (literary and theoretical) and visual materials and to the resources available through City of Asylum.

Through readings, discussions, guest speakers, short papers, and group film projects/presentations, students will examine the ways in which writers, filmmakers, musicians, and other artists have addressed exile and migration in their work by constructing, revising, and reinventing images and cultures of the homeland. Students will explore a variety of texts (e.g., films, documentaries, art, music, photography; prose, poems, and presentations by exiled artists; archival materials; news reports, articles) and meet with and interview exiled writers and other artists.

Instructors: Timothy Haggerty

The Appalachian region, which stretches from Georgia to New York's southern tier, has a particular place in American history and memory. This course will examine the political, literary, economic, and historical narratives that surround the region, as well as examining the role that Appalachia can play as a model for developing regions in other parts of the world.

The paradoxes of Appalachia have confronted American culture since its first settlement by Europeans in the 18th century: a region of unparalleled biodiversity, it has nevertheless been characterized by ongoing poverty and isolation. Politically, it has given rise to both progressive collective action and conservative rhetoric. Economically, its natural resources have been widely exploited by outside economic and industrial interests. Its inhabitants have been characterized as either fiercely independent or widely dysfunctional, giving rise to the archetypes of Mountaineers, Rednecks, or Hillbillies. Its cultural ethos has resisted ready inclusion into mainstream culture.

This course will examine these paradoxes by utilizing history, literature, and public policy documents that detail the ongoing debates surrounding Appalachian development, while consulting with several invited writers, political figures, and artists who have interpreted the region’s role in American history.

Instructors: John Miller, Kevin Zollman

Most of the major issues confronting humanity–such as injustice, discrimination, climate change, financial collapse, ecosystem survival, and disease epidemics–are the result of complex social systems. Such systems have multiple interacting parts that create a whole that is radically different than its constituent parts. Unfortunately, traditional scientific methods that focus on reducing systems to their parts and then analyzing each part provide little insight into complex systems. In this seminar, we will explore the behavior of complex social systems including issues such as discrimination and injustice. We will examine how to model and understand social issues using various tools such as computation and game theory, and various field perspectives including economics, finance, philosophy, political science, and sociology. As part of this class, students will collaborate in teams to develop their own models of social processes.

Instructors: Richelle Bernazzoli, Korryn Mozisek

Why is there declining public trust in research and expertise? What kinds of skills are needed to assess the quality of research, and how prevalent are they in the general public? Finally, what can experts do to address the erosion of trust in research? This course will allow students to investigate the various causes of declining trust in research, such as data manipulation, plagiarism, and conflicts of interest in how research is funded, among others. We will explore the various disciplinary perspectives on research validity, and compare and contrast these with public perspectives on research validity. Along the way, students will be introduced to evidence synthesis methodology, a broad research approach that allows researchers to assess large bodies of literature and find points of consensus in any topic area such as climate change, vaccines, economic inequality, etc. Students will work in teams to formulate their research questions on a topic of their selection and then conduct evidence synthesis projects related to (mis)trust in that research area. The evidence synthesis project will have multiple stages of design and implementation and culminate in a final presentation of their findings as to how trust in research can be improved.

Instructors: Nuria Ballesteros Soria, Barbara George

How does air quality in one city differ from air quality in another? Do citizens have a right to clean air, regardless of where they live? How does global climate change impact the discussion of environmental and human health? The answer to these and other questions about environmental quality are complex and manifest at global and local levels. Access to environmental “justice,” that is, the right to a healthy environment, is linked to social factors like race, ethnicity, indigenous identity, income, educational status, and geographic location, among others.

By analyzing the case of Pittsburgh, a city in the rust belt and Appalachian region that is working to “reimagine” its environmental identity, students will trace past environmental issues and define current environmental concerns that may manifest both locally and globally. They will use environmental justice as a framework to examine how environmental issues are defined and how policies are created and enacted when different voices are included. Students will explore these topics as they relate to multiple sectors (e.g., air and water quality, agriculture, industry, transportation, architecture) and environmental impacts like human physical and mental health or global climate change. Students will also be introduced to concepts like “sustainable science” and “sustainable humanities,” and study how environmental problems and solutions are framed in different cultures, communities, and academic disciplines ranging from science to social science and art.

We will highlight guest speakers from various disciplines within the Pittsburgh sustainability community and offer hands-on learning opportunities, like short field trips. Along this journey, students will work individually and in pairs to engage in creative writing and reflection about the environment, as well as conduct a personal carbon inventory. As the final project, students will work in pairs to develop a proposal that addresses a selected environmental issue of their choice. Students will be encouraged to ground research and coursework in their own cultures, communities, and experiences.

Instructor: ,

In 1965 British mathematician I.J. Good wrote, "An ultraintelligent machine could design even better machines; there would then unquestionably be an 'intelligence explosion,' and the intelligence of man would be left far behind." As we enter an age where companies like Uber are testing driverless cars in Pittsburgh and innovative interfaces like IBM's Watson can play Jeopardy and learn techniques for medical diagnoses, how are we to negotiate an 'intelligence explosion' that for many individuals might threaten the very notions of what it means to be human? The future of human-to-machine relationships will likely define our historical epoch and yet, many young technologists and humanists underestimate the downstream impact of technological innovations on human society. Presently, we have little choice but to attend to this rapidly anxiety-ridden question. This seminar will attend to the challenge of contemporary existential questions on what it means to be human (read not machine) in the context of a rapidly advancing technological age. We will consider human narratives throughout history that exam how governments and individual citizens defined humanity in the context of slavery and colonialism as a framework for exploring and projecting what it means to be human in the age of rapidly advancing 'intelligent' machines. We will trace the technological advancements of the recent five decades and identify historical precedents and speculative narratives that help us to consider issues like labor, economic disparity, negotiations of power, human dignity and ethical responsibility within the context of human relations with advancing technological tools that are now coined, artificial intelligence.