Core Courses Fall 2024

Civic Conversation and Education for Democracy

This class focuses on the practice of productive public conversation about complex topics, a necessity not only for university education but for a functional democracy.  We will build skills for three distinct kinds of conversation – dialogue, deliberation, and debate – through engaging with three “cases,” social inequality, artificial intelligence, and freedom of expression. The class will include biweekly mentored, small-group meetings.

TBD

TBD

TBD

Digital Activism in Dystopic Times

Stories about the walking dead, climatic apocalypses, and world-ending disasters are in no way new. Yet they prevail in films, novels, and other media today. Our society continues to seek out stories that present dismal settings of dystopic futures and, within them, moments of hope for humanity. Why?

In this course, we will explore how and why digital activists utilize stories to drive movements and inspire hope for humanity amid a world that feels more and more like a dystopic film. We will investigate how language, digital platforms, and other communicative resources support recent and current activist endeavors and will rhetorically analyze complications with using stories – both fictional and lived – for activist endeavors in public digital spaces. This course is set up for students to dig into what social media and other daily digital expressive deliverables can teach them about effective and meaningful writing and communication, whether in the classroom, in their communities, or in the digital spaces they inhabit in our increasingly socioecological, dystopic world.

Digital Activism in Dystopic Times

Stories about the walking dead, climatic apocalypses, and world-ending disasters are in no way new. Yet they prevail in films, novels, and other media today. Our society continues to seek out stories that present dismal settings of dystopic futures and, within them, moments of hope for humanity. Why?

In this course, we will explore how and why digital activists utilize stories to drive movements and inspire hope for humanity amid a world that feels more and more like a dystopic film. We will investigate how language, digital platforms, and other communicative resources support recent and current activist endeavors and will rhetorically analyze complications with using stories – both fictional and lived – for activist endeavors in public digital spaces. This course is set up for students to dig into what social media and other daily digital expressive deliverables can teach them about effective and meaningful writing and communication, whether in the classroom, in their communities, or in the digital spaces they inhabit in our increasingly socioecological, dystopic world.

Writing, Rhetoric, and Technology

In this course, we will examine how communicators use technology to meet their various communicative goals across different contexts (creativity, academics, activism, professional life). We start by examining the affordances of multimodal communication across media, and how these affordances can be leveraged to create and share different types of information with different audiences.

We advance our digital and information literacies by understanding the role of technologies and media in how information is accessed, distributed, and communicated. We look at how selected technologies work and impact they have on learning and society. As an example, we learn about algorithms and become aware of how algorithms shape the outputs we get when we search for information as well as how we can disrupt algorithms and take charge of the output.

We look at generative aspects of technology such as how technology can support writers who struggle with writing (e.g. planning or revising), or how digital platforms can be utilized for the public good (e.g. advocacy or activism) in creating and maintaining communities who work towards common goals.

With the rapidly changing communication landscape due to the introduction of AI and machine learning, we learn about these two phenomena and how they function. We look at when and how AI might help students learn and writers meet their communicative goals, but we also inquire into the limitations and problems AI and machine learning present for creativity, learning, and social justice.

We look at other social justice issues such as access to information and technology, and implications of the digital divide between those populations who have and don’t have access to technology across regions and demographics. We look at how this digital divide has implications for a variety of issues such as education, healthcare, or voting.

Writing, Rhetoric, and Technology

In this course, we will examine how communicators use technology to meet their various communicative goals across different contexts (creativity, academics, activism, professional life). We start by examining the affordances of multimodal communication across media, and how these affordances can be leveraged to create and share different types of information with different audiences.

We advance our digital and information literacies by understanding the role of technologies and media in how information is accessed, distributed, and communicated. We look at how selected technologies work and impact they have on learning and society. As an example, we learn about algorithms and become aware of how algorithms shape the outputs we get when we search for information as well as how we can disrupt algorithms and take charge of the output.

We look at generative aspects of technology such as how technology can support writers who struggle with writing (e.g. planning or revising), or how digital platforms can be utilized for the public good (e.g. advocacy or activism) in creating and maintaining communities who work towards common goals.

With the rapidly changing communication landscape due to the introduction of AI and machine learning, we learn about these two phenomena and how they function. We look at when and how AI might help students learn and writers meet their communicative goals, but we also inquire into the limitations and problems AI and machine learning present for creativity, learning, and social justice.

We look at other social justice issues such as access to information and technology, and implications of the digital divide between those populations who have and don’t have access to technology across regions and demographics. We look at how this digital divide has implications for a variety of issues such as education, healthcare, or voting.

At the 2019 UN Climate Action Summit, Greta Thunberg noted that ‘We are in the beginning of a mass extinction’. She attributed this to a long history of misguided environmental policies that were driven by ‘money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth’. Thunberg’s speech rightly points out that our understanding of the environment is routinely informed by adjacent cultural values, like, as Thunberg suggests, economy. Though, the opposite relationship between culture and environment is also true: attitudes toward the environment often implicitly justify other kinds of political action, like the colonization of particular lands and people. As Karen J Warren suggests, ‘there are important connections between how one treats women, people of color, and the underclass on one hand and how one treats the nonhuman natural environment on the other.’ This course will investigate the ways in which thinking and re-thinking environment has influenced various political and aesthetic movements, including feminism, Black Power and Black Arts, capitalism, Marxism, indigenous belief systems, and queer activism. We’ll do this primarily by examining how authors from myriad cultural experiences have represented the environment. Attention will also be devoted to film, fine art, and political cultures. 

Engaging the World: U.S. Cities and the Narratives of Crisis
The last few years have brought a number of radical disruptions to the daily lives of people living in the United States. Political and civic leaders, pundits, and academics speak of a three-part crisis wrought by a global health pandemic, an economic recession, and a reckoning with a centuries-long national history of white supremacy. For urban residents across the country, however, many of whom have taken the streets in protest after facing public health disparities, a ballooning wealth and income gap, and racism for decades, this concept of ‘crisis’ is not a new one. To better understand the history of these ‘urban crises’ narratives in the United States, this class will interrogate a number of questions, including: what are the origins of these ‘crises,’ and how have communities living in urban centers grappled with them across the twentieth century? How and why have urban populations changed, and how have residents understood the communities that develop in urban spaces? Who holds economic and social power in urban areas, and who has the ‘right’ to live in an urban space? And, how do urban residents organize to mitigate or reverse the effects of these economic, public health, and racial ‘crises’ on their communities? With these questions in mind, this course offers an introduction to the twentieth-century history of cities in the United States, focusing specifically on the development of a crisis narrative in urban space. Throughout the course we’ll pay special attention to the complicated and conflicting ideas about cities that have emerged in relation to adjoining rural and suburban areas, examine the rise of the modern metropolis, interrogate the role of public health in urban development, and analyze the political, social, and environmental dimensions of cities’ growth. We will examine the relationships between cities and migration, while also studying the ways in which the distinctions of city and country have been continually drawn and redrawn over time. We’ll seek to understand what caused these massive fluctuations in urban life, with a special focus on cities in the Midwest, as well as how these shifts connect to larger national and transnational trends. Focusing on economic, social, environmental, demographic, and cultural change, this course offers an introductory overview of what it has meant to be an urban denizen across the twentieth and early twenty-first century.

This class looks at contemporary social issues through the lens of the economic, ideological, and institutional structures that frame them.  We will look at the historical context of these structures and attempt to venture some ideas on how to overcome the tensions and injustices that face us here in Milwaukee.

This class looks at contemporary social issues through the lens of the economic, ideological, and institutional structures that frame them.  We will look at the historical context of these structures and attempt to venture some ideas on how to overcome the tensions and injustices that face us here in Milwaukee.

Preserving the City as Art and History

This course will introduce students to the history of architecture, parks, monuments, and urban design in America as well as the theory and practice of historic preservation. Through object analysis, historic research, and extensive fieldwork, students will learn how to “read” a building, monument, or cultural landscape as form of public art and as a source of historic evidence, think critically about their built environment, and discover the role which citizens can play in preserving art, history, and community. Using Milwaukee and Chicago as case-studies for these themes, students will come to understand “the power of place” to shape their lives—and their own power to shape civic life.

Placemaking and Memory in Urban Landscapes

This course draws on theories about landscape from archaeology, anthropology, geography, and philosophy to explore how places are made, remembered, erased, and forgotten in urban environments. Landscapes will be considered as mnemonics and chronotopes rather than passive vistas, symbolically materializing history and cultural identity. Students will conduct research and fieldwork on a chosen topic that demonstrates the connections between place, memory, history, and cultural identity, situating themselves ethnographically by dwelling within the ongoing and dynamic process of placemaking.

BIOL 1001H 901 LEC   
MWF 9:00-9:50am; Th 6:00-6:50pm        Stephanie Abramovich

BIOL 1001H 902 LEC 
MWF 11:00-11:50am; Th 6:00-6:50pm     Stephanie Abramovich

BIOL 1001H 903 LEC 
MWF 1:00-1:50pm; Th 6:00-6:50pm         Stephanie Abramovich

DIS 961    M   2:00-2:50pm
DIS 962    T    9:30-10:20am
DIS 963    T    2:00-2:50pm

CHEM 1001H 901 LEC    TTh   9:30-10:45am      

            941 LAB    T      8-10:50am                  

            942 LAB    W     2-4:50pm   

            943 LAB    Th    8-10:50am             

            944 LAB    W    2:00-4:50pm 

            961 DIS     W    1:00-1:50pm   

            962 DIS     W    1:00-1:50pm

            963 DIS     T     3-3:50pm   

            964 DIS     T     3-3:50pm   

CHEM 1013H 901 LEC    MF       9:00-10:15am     Adam Fielder

            941 LAB   W     9:00-11:50am                  

COSC 1820 901      TTh     11am-12:15pm                  Michael Zimmer

*This is an Honors for All course, a course that is open to all students at Marquette and gives Honors elective credit to students completing the Core Honors curriculum.  

Held at Racine Correctional Institution: 

CRLS 3150: Reentry and Life After Incarceration
Th 5:30-8pm, Darren Wheelock

SOWJ 3170: Policy and Practice for Children Impacted by Incarceration
Tu, 6-8:30pm, Wendy Volz Daniels

BIOL 1420: Introduction to Environmental Biology
Wed, 6-8:30pm, Chelsea Cook

Held on MU Campus:

PHIL 4320: Contemporary Ethical Problems
Th, 6-8:30pm, Theresa Tobin

*These coursese are not officially honors sections, but honors student who enroll will receive honors elective credit.*

ENGL 4755 101     TTh     12:30-1:45pm                  Melissa Ganz

ENGL 4615 101      MWF     9-9:50am                 Amy Blair

*This is not officially an honors section, but honors student who enroll will receive honors elective credit.

** This course requires a permission number to enroll and spots are limited, contact Erin for a number.

HEAL 1025H 901     W     10-12:45am                  TBD

HEAL 1025H does not require a permission number. If you have trouble enrolling, please contact the Nursing department.

HIST 4271H 901     MWF    12-12:50pm             Alan Ball

MUSI 1120H 901   W, Sun  5:00-7:00pm     Andrew Mountin

^please note MUSI 1120H is 1 credit. To receive one full honors elective credit, students will need to complete three semesters of MUSI 1120H.

PHIL 1001H 901 LEC    MWF     12:00-12:50pm              Michael Olson

PHIL 1001H 902 LEC    TTh        3:30-4:45pm                 Abram Capone

PHIL 1001H 903 LEC    TTh       9:30-10:45am                Clark Wolf

PHIL 1001H 904 LEC    TTh       11am-12:15pm              Yoon Choi

PHIL 1001H 905 LEC    TTh       12:30-1:45pm                Yoon Choi

PHIL 1001H 906 LEC    TTh       2-3:15pm                       Abram Capone

PHIL 1001H 907 LEC    TTh       12:30-1:45pm                Clark Wolf

PHIL 1001H 908 LEC    TTh       5-6:15pm                       Abram Capone

PHYS 1003H 901          MWF 9-9:50am; M 6-8pm             Jax Sanders     

PHYS 1003H 902          MWF 10-10:50am; M 6-8pm         Dave Haas

PHYS 1003H 903          MWF 12-12:50pm; M 6-8pm         Dave Haas      

PHYS 1003H 904          MWF 1-1:50pm; M 6-8pm             Timothy Tharp    

            941 Lab            W 5-6:50pm         Melissa Vigil

            942 Lab            Th 4-5:50pm         Melissa Vigil

            961 Disc           W 5-5:50pm         Melissa Vigil

PHYS 1013H 901          MWF 1:00-2:50pm                        Christopher Stockdale

POSC 2201H 901          MWF 10:00-10:50am                     Karen Hoffman

POSC 2801H 901          TTh 12:30-1:45pm                        Darrell Dobbs

PSYC 2050H 901 LEC          TTh 12:30-1:45pm                   Astrida Kaugars

  941 LAB          W 12:00-12:50pm

PSYC 4956H 918      Ed de St. Aubin

This course requires an application to enroll. Applications are due March 20. Apply here: https://marquette.az1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_0j5wgWPn5bbqafI

Contact Professor de St. Aubin for additional information.

THEO 3020 101          MW   2-3:15pm          Matt Neujahr

*This is an Honors for All course, a course that is open to all students at Marquette and gives Honors elective credit to students completing the Core Honors curriculum.