EVALUATION & IDEAS
Course description | This course aims to introduce students to black life in the U.S. through a study of the humanities. The course asks: what are the political, economic and social conditions that have shaped African American identity? How have African Americans defined themselves and made sense of their shared experiences? What are the cultural forms African Americans have produced to express these experiences? What is the political impact of this cultural production? How have cultural forms been used to reach, coordinate, and politicize African Americans? Through lectures, readings, film screenings, discussions, and written assignments -- including a research assignment -- students are provided with the beginning of a critical dialogue and process of inquiry that will assist them in further studies. Students are expected to locate and critically analyze a primary cultural document.
Course description | Taken by students throughout the College of Natural Resources and Economics, this course will explore various economic theories and the racialized consequences of policies derived from them. Specific constituencies in the Agricultural and Resource Economics domain to be explored in greater detail include: farm, forest, and environmental service workers, reservation and urban Native Americans, African American, Chicano, and Japanese farmers, Portuguese and Vietnamese commercial fishers.
Course description | This course is aimed at students who are interested in learning how archaeologists attempt to understand a variety of anthropological issues through the material remains of past people: social relations, economic practices, political structures, and experiences that enrich human life and thought, from the arts to religion and science. The course explores how archaeology plays a role in contemporary socio-politics, contributing to global tourism and the production of national and factional identities. This is an inquiry-based course and students are expected to carry out research and contribute to a research database through the creation of information guides, which will be discussed debated and explicated in various ways throughout the course.
Course description | The course approaches architectural history as a lens through which to examine American culture. It delves into a series of institutions (domesticity, education, religion, finance, the library, the museum, etc.), their building types, and the ways in which they have shaped our built environment. In addition to offering a survey-level grounding in American architecture, the course will ask students to do research on several different building types, encouraging direct investigation alongside library research. To understand the built environment is to become a more active citizen, to make demands on the way we use our resources and shape our world.
Course description | The course follows a core-to-fringe path through the body of new media and its participants. Part I's lectures and experiments focus on the early origins of the computer as it was envisioned by Lovelace, Turing, von Neumann and on the performance of gender through logic. Part II studies collective behaviors of many users, non-users, network nodes and computers off the grid. Part III focuses on the Digital Divide. Students will receive weekly online assignments, allowing them to gain confidence in their use of new media tools while increasing their understanding of how new media can reinforce pre-existing social hierarchies but also open possibilities for transcending them. Students will study each other’s original online content and configure their own cyber-culture. The resulting emerging network of online credibility will offer a basis for quantitative and qualitative analysis of the performance of race, gender and ethnicity online. Students will be able to track traffic to their sites, and experience first-hand the online presence or absence of racism, and sexism, technical chauvinism.
Course description | The primary objective of this course is to introduce students to Asian American studies, an interdisciplinary field of inquiry that deals with the history, cultural productions, and contemporary concerns of diverse groups of Asians in the U.S. Students learn about the major critical terms and issues in Asian American Studies, including racial formation, Orientalism, transnationalism, and diaspora. Students explore the interpretive frameworks for understanding the experiences of Asian Americans and analyze how these have changed or persisted over time. Special emphasis is placed on comparative analyses of the experiences of different Asian American ethnic groups, the ways that national origin, gender, class, region, and generation inform the diversity of Asian America, and the agency of Asian Americans to shape and transform their lives as well as U.S. history and contemporary society.
Course description | This course serves as the general introductory biology course for all biological science students at Berkeley. Part one of the class presents a general introduction to the structure and function of biological molecules and the cell. Classical genetics and molecular biology are the major topics addressed in part two of the class, while animal development, form and function form the main focus of part three. In addition to lectures, students are provided with hands-on experience through a weekly 3-hour laboratory. Students also carry out an independent project that will include searching for and evaluating the scientific literature.
Course description | The course covers a broad range of introductory chemistry topics such as quantum mechanics, thermodynamics, equilibrium, acids and bases, and kinetics. Students attend three 50-minute lectures a week and one 4-hour laboratory/discussion session. Approximately two thirds of the students in Chem1A continue on to Chem3A and Chem3B. The Chem1A faculty is mindful that they must prepare the students to be successful in organic chemistry, since 1A is only the first part of a three semester chemistry sequence.
Course description | 1B introduces students to the practice of research in tandem with refining and building on the writing skills learned in R1A. Additionally, this class offers students from various majors the chance to learn about the libraries on campus, and to become acquainted with research methods from various fields. The focus of this course in College Writing will be cross-disciplinary, with a focus on a range of texts beyond literary texts. In College Writing R1B, library research is combined with field research in order to emphasize this cross-disciplinary approach.
Course description | Introduces students to climates, factors that influence climates and climate change, and the history of climate change as recorded in the geologic record. Climate data from ice cores, coral layering patterns, pollen records from lakes, and the distribution of plants in the fossil record are included. The role of people in introducing increasing quantities of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere through coal burning, oil and gas is discussed as are the human responses to climate changes over the past 2,000 years. The impacts of developing energy from fossil fuels on climate and health are explored with particular emphasis on Los Angeles and the central valley of California. All of the major alternatives to fossil fuels are reviewed, including local wind farms, solar panels, bio-diesels, as is local legislation supporting alternative energies. The development of research and presentations skills is emphasized.
Course description | Within this course focus is placed on the conceptual categories of race, class, and gender in the organization of educational opportunity in the United States. The course provides students with a basis for understanding the educational experiences of individuals with multiple group memberships; an analytic framework for understanding the complex relationship among diversity, difference, equality, inequality, and educational systems, both historically and in the present; and an ability to apply these concepts to their own experiences as well as to broader social, political, economic, and educational issues. In groups, students develop research skills by analyzing the equity challenges facing diverse Bay Area cities (San Francisco, Oakland and Berkeley).
Course description | This course addresses the ways in which sport as social practice both reproduces and resists the dominant ideologies in American society. It challenges the "peculiar institution" (Watt and Moore, 2001) of intercollegiate athletics as a distinctly American phenomenon. The intent of the course is to help students become more critically aware of sport in society and their own place as sports participants, consumers, and social agents. The curriculum is designed to teach undergraduates in the ways in which sports help frame existing American values and worldviews. This gateway course fulfills the Social and Behavioral Science (SBS) breadth requirement for the College of Letters and Science while also fulfilling one of the required courses for the Education minor.
Course description | This course seeks to expand students' knowledge and understanding of the principles of research in the field of education. The course focuses on students as consumers of educational research, engaging them in applying the principles of scientific inquiry to the analysis of research across a broad range of education related topics. Through readings, lectures, written assignments and oral presentations, students learn how to locate, read, understand, and critique research in education as well as how to articulate and develop their own thesis for investigation.
Course description | IDS 110 serves large numbers of students as a gateway to Business as well as non-Business majors. There are three lecture hours per week, plus two weekly labs. Students learn technical aspects of designing and building a web site, plus a programming language to add interactivity to their sites. The class employs online discussion forums, talking slides, web cast, and other media, but more importantly, explores the pervasive power of computers as a cultural force. We examine computers from the perspectives of communication, media, community, philosophy, education, human intelligence, and more.
Course description | This course is built around individual research projects that students initiate and implement while learning to use the forms, formats and style of technical communication. Students write several short and long reports and give three oral presentations.
Course description | This course, a version of technical communications tailored for non-native English speakers, asks students to (1) evaluate why and how they write as they do; (2) identify aspects of their present writing style which need to be modified to create effective technical documents; (3) examine how they give oral presentations and participate in group discussions; and (4) work to improve in these areas by discovering where and how to locate working models in the literature and workplace. Each student will be asked to master a cutting-edge research topic related to an engineering or science course s/he is taking, or which was the focus of a recent internship experience. The course will be taught in an Engineering computer lab so students can use state-of-the-art software and library databases to create research reports and oral presentations.
Course description | This course provides exposure to the environmental field and reaches a broad range of students. For many, this is their first experience looking closely at the natural world, collecting field samples, analyzing data, and drawing conclusions from such evidence. An optional element of the course will involve a research experience.
Course description | This course introduces the principles of epidemiology in the context of critically interpreting studies of health in human populations. Students will develop and practice analytical/critical thinking skills while learning how to read and assess published epidemiological studies. Emphasis is placed on assessing the quality of the studies. Students will also master a range of research areas including study design, sampling, measurement, sources of error, analysis, interpretation and application of results. Finally, students will conduct an in depth investigation of a disease or health problem of their choice that exists anywhere in the world.
Course description | This class serves as an introduction to the field of American race and ethnic relations. The first half of the class will look at various interpretations -- both historical and sociological -- of race and ethnicity in the United States. This will provide a basic understanding of the theoretical issues involved. The second half will focus on contemporary perspectives (or representations) of the current situation. These will be quite diverse, ranging from performance art (Anna Deavere Smith) to theoretical reformulations (Guinier & Torres). We will review the ongoing speculation about our future(s) as a "multicultural" nation.
Course description | This course focuses on the theoretical analyses of race and ethnicity, seeking to clarify the meaning of race and ethnicity with reference to diverse racial and ethnic groups. It seeks to clarify the meaning of these concepts and to familiarize students with its varied uses in historical, philosophical, and sociological literature. For many students, this will be their first rigorous exploration of theories of race and ethnicity, the meaning of racism, and the theoretical responses given by racialized subjects to the ideas and institutions that sustain or propagate racist views, behavior, policies, and structures. An individual or group research project will form part of the coursework.
Course description | This course explores the role of race and ethnicity in the history of the United States. Central to the course is an examination of the role migration has played in the development of America. The main concerns of the course are to understand theories of international migration, the competing explanations for the incorporation of immigrants and their descendants into American society, and the economic, political and social responses to immigration. Particular focus is placed on European migrations of the 19th century, African American migration from the south to north in the early part of the 20th century and Latin American and Asian immigration since World War II. The course concludes with a discussion of immigration in an era in which opposition and alarm to immigration is once again rising.
Course description | The goals of this survey course are to gain a global view of French literature throughout the ages and to be able to articulate literary arguments in French. Students will concentrate on improving writing skills: how to construct a logical argument, locate convincing textual proofs, and ensure a logic in their arguments. Students will read a range of French texts from the Middle Ages to the 20th Century with particular attention being paid to how the French have portrayed "the Other" (non-French populations) at different times throughout their history.
Course description | This course provides a framework for recognizing and analyzing the major distinctive regions of the world in comparative context. The most important inter-relations between environment, economy, ethnicity, and the national identity and viability of states will be explored. Major topics include the advent of agriculture, the transition from feudalism to capitalism, colonialism and race, the industrial and green revolutions, and globalization. Emphasis is placed on the diversity of the world's peoples, environments, and political-economic systems and the complexity of classifying them and defining the boundaries of regions.
Course description | This new course will address cultural production in the last days of the Habsburg Empire, including Hungary and the Slavic borderlands as well as the ethnically German crown lands of Germany. We will look at the capitals and the provinces, the insiders and the outsiders, of one of the great multi-ethnic, multi-lingual empires of the Old World. Students will study a complex, older model of empire and influence that does not lend itself to explanation in contemporary post-colonial terms. Students will be taught how to design and conduct research on specific topics related to the belle epoque in Central Europe.
Course description | This introductory course surveys the history of modern Latin America from independence to the present, with a strong emphasis on the twentieth century. The focus will be on broad transformations in place, politics, identity, and work. The course will be built around comparative case studies of seven countries: Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Cuba, Guatemala and Mexico. Topics covered include dependency and development; agrarian struggles and state building; migration and citizenship; urban growth and industrialization; popular culture and mass politics; social revolution and military dictatorship; and the role of the United States. Readings will be drawn from primary sources, personal narratives, ethnographies and historical monographs, and will be supplemented by films and music.
Course description | This course will consider the multifarious impacts of slavery on life in the United States and the development of its most basic institutions. While the course pays close attention to slavery's effects on African Americans (and their responses to it), it is based on the premise that a complete understanding of any aspect of U.S. history in this era requires acknowledgement and exploration of the broader impact of slavery. Specific topics include electoral politics, popular culture, economic organization, and racial identify. The course supports a serious research/writing assignment through a writing intensive section for self-selected students.
Course description | This course offers students a top-down (political and legal history), bottom-up (social and cultural history), and comparative (by race and ethnicity, as well as region) view of America's struggles for racial equality from World War II to the present. Students will be guided through the research process, beginning with a short prospectus assignment leading up to a historiographic paper in which they will critique some of the extent scholarship on their chosen topic and delve deeply into primary source-based research. Cross-listed with American Studies 101.
Course description | This course has two goals: to explore the place of the visual or visuality in Renaissance England, and to develop research skills. A major part of the course will involve the analysis of primary sources (visual and written), the formation of an original research topic, the accumulation of materials that help students address their topics, and the writing of a substantial research paper. The research paper should be what best represents students' own best questioning, detective work, reading and looking, analysis and writing.
Course description | The course spans pre-history to the present, its largest component covering the period from 1492 to the present, with special concentration placed on issues of political economy. Included among the topics covered: the role of the state, the development of nationalism, the importance of colonization, the place of industrialization, and the significance of coerced labor to global development and integration.
Course description | Undergraduate design students will learn to "read" original architectural documents as a source for technical information, historical context, philosophical movements, design excellence and inspiration. Students will discover how to evaluate the creative process through time by using primary sources as research documents, not simply as illustrations. This class promotes a balance of visual and verbal expertise by engaging seniors in the primary sources housed at the Environmental Design Archives, a world class collection of historic landscape and architectural drawings.
Course description | This course will address a variety of basic issues, such as: What is a legal system and how does it differ from other forms of dispute resolution or social control? What is the history of legal institutions currently operating in the U.S.? What role does law play in advancing or resisting social change? How does that history and those institutions compare to developments in other cultures and societies? Topics covered include: the criminal justice system, the role of law in shaping American culture and in particular racial and ethnic identities, and the so-called "litigation crisis." The course will introduce students to the multiple disciplinary and interdisciplinary paths used by scholars to study the legal system in its social context. Students will be required to participate in one of several group research projects drawn from different disciplinary traditions including survey research, archival research, and participant observation research.
Course description | This course will examine the relationship between race, culture and the law through the study of historical, legal, and interdisciplinary materials. It will stress the continuity and discontinuity across history of certain understandings of race, while also studying race through a comparative frame, focusing simultaneously on the experiences of different racial groups with the U.S. Legal histories of racial formation will be foregrounded and linked to our understanding of contemporary racial politics. The concept of culture will play a prominent role in class discussions of how racial difference has been constructed, both historically and in our colorblind present, when culture forms the terrain in which racial difference is most acceptably expressed. Gender and sexuality and how these identity categories have intersected with race will also be a focus of study. Students will be required to engage in collaborative projects examining sites within California where the law has enabled the formation of racial communities on a local, regional, or statewide level.
Course description | This course presents an overview of the contact between Native Americans and Europeans in North America. Materials are drawn from history, anthropology, and linguistics. The course addresses both the conflicts associated with contact and the results of contact, especially political incorporation, assimilation, and cultural mixture. We examine the various ways in which indigenous peoples have been politically incorporated into Canadian, American, and Mexican life, and ways in which they have remained separate. We compare two mixed race groups, the Métis of the northern Plains and La Raza, to examine the conditions leading to culturally coherent mixtures and to explore the common challenges these groups have faced in more recent contact with English speakers. Although the course is organized historically and geographically, the material is discussed in ways that emphasize comparison and contrast of the cultural underpinnings of the groups studied.
Course description | This class provides a culminating experience in experimental research designed to develop skills in preparing written reports in a variety of formats, strengthening collaboration skills, and developing skills in the identification, retrieval, and analysis of technical and scientific information resources. Course and laboratory topics include electronics, phase equilibria, chemical reaction kinetics, metallography, corrosion, deformation an dislocations, and others.
Course description | This course meets the requirements for several majors in Near Eastern Studies, is a gateway course for the department, and fulfills the College of Letters & Science's breadth requirement. It is designed as a general introduction to 5,000 years of ancient Egyptian civilization, Egyptian archaeology, and the modern field of study Egyptology. Students will gain a basic overview of what modern scholars know or think they know about ancient Egyptian culture and the tools they use to study that culture. Heavy reliance is placed on archaeological materials to elucidate the culture.
Course description | This is the first required course for Nutritional Sciences majors and also fulfills the College of Letters and Science breadth requirement for biological science. The students are a heterogeneous mixture: many have had Advanced Placement Biology or Chemistry in high school; some are taking NST 10 as a breadth requirement have had minimal high school science; and some more advanced students in a variety of disciplines question the ‘why’ aspects of nutrition. Discussion sections constitute the third hour of this three-unit course and are required because students are expected to present new material complementary to the class lectures. Students work in small groups to research topics and give presentations to their section.
Course description | This course examines the role of war in the construction of American national identity and purpose, as well as how war itself is interpreted through the narrative of American nationalism. It considers the influence that U.S. wars have had in shaping the worldviews and life-chances of succeeding generations of Americans, from Puritan New England to the current war in Iraq. The analysis of race, ethnicity, and class as prisms filtering the experience of war and the meaning of nationhood in American history and culture is of special concern.
Course description | This course provides students with a broad overview of the institutions, ideologies, processes, and contexts that constitute politics in the United States. Students learn the basic architecture of American government: the Constitution, federalism, and the core institutions of Congress, the Presidency, the Judiciary, and the bureaucracy. Students will also learn what contributes to democratic decision making -- public opinion, voting, political participation, mass mobilization, and the intermediating influences of political parties, interest groups, and the mass media -- and the by products of government -- civil rights and liberties, and economic, environmental, social, and foreign policies. Students are expected to grapple with the fundamental democratic concepts of freedom, equality, justice, legitimacy, accountability, diversity, citizenship, and community. PS 1 is a gateway course to other courses in American politics and political science; it is required for all political science majors.
description | Part I of this course introduces students to
African-American jazz musicians and their experiences of voice. Part
II concentrates on Hollywood "moguls" (many of whom were Jewish)
in the heyday of the "Studio System" when the Paramount decision
and the HUAC hearings put an end to it and addresses why the moguls'
coming voice was so restricted. Part III of the course explores border
music, encompassing the Cajun Iron Curtain and the U.S.-Mexican border.
The research component of the class is a student-initiated group project,
which takes the form of audio, visual, or textual presentations.
Course description | The course introduces students to the major theoretical approaches to international politics, explores important historical and contemporary questions and debates in international affairs, and teaches students to think critically about international relations. Topics covered include security issues in World War II and the Cold War; political economy, development, and globalization; and the contemporary issues of human rights, ethnic conflict, humanitarian intervention, environmental issues, immigration, and the post 9/11 world. Students will be guided in the use of books, journals, and documents from both international governmental and non-governmental organizations.
Course description | The course will examine the extent to which social and behavioral factors explain geographic, demographic, and socioeconomic patterns of health and well being in human populations. It will address the development, administration, and evaluation of social and behavioral programs and interventions in public health. An ecological model will be used which assumes that patterns of health and well being in populations are due to the interplay of biological, behavioral, social and enviromental factors, unfolding over the life course of individuals, families, neighborhoods, and communities. Special attention will be focused on tobacco exposure, alcohol consumption, diet/nutrition, physical activity, and sexual practices. Other topics include social capital, living arrangements, social networks and support, and self-efficacy and control. Instruction will be provided in the identification, access, manupilation and interpretation of data residing in major public health databases. Special attention will be given to basic research methods and students will be assigned to working groups addressing important questions in public health.
Course description (Powers) | This course examines social institutions and how they are rooted in, reproduce, and sustain key elements of social structure. Course materials encompass narrative literatures, scholarly research reports, tabular data, video documentaries, press reports and original interview materials collected and analyzed by students themselves. The course integrates analyses at the individual, group, and institutional levels. Attention is paid to socialization processes and social forces associated with the development and change of social structures – the class structure, the gender system, and the racial order — and the responses of individuals and groups to the dynamics and organization of social structures. In lectures and course materials students discover the historical development and effects of key institutions like the family, the workplace, labor markets, cultural systems (media, popular culture), political order and the educational system.
Course description (Kelsey) | This is a general introduction to Sociology - the study of social institutions, organizations and social relations that shape our lives and life chances, with particular focus on youth. The course examines how societies are organized and the social problems that can emerge from different forms of social organization. Once basic theoretical and empirical approaches have been explored to explain unequal social outcomes, the course looks at how educational systems can be used to perpetuate or resist social inequality.
Course description | This course is an introduction to the cultures, histories, and literatures of Indonesia, the Philippines, Malaysia, Singapore, Brunei, and East Timor. Grounded in the classical kingdoms of Southeast Asia through the coming of Islam and the early modern era, special attention is paid to the 19th and 20th centuries: the entrenchment of imperialism, the rise of nationalism, and developments in modern Southeast Asia. Course themes will be introduced through works of fiction and primary source materials in translation. Three essays will be required 1) a comprehension and interpretation assignment based on key course readings; 2) a primary source analysis; and 3) an 8-10 page research paper.
Course description | This course covers descriptive statistics, probability models and related concepts, sample surveys, estimates, confidence intervals, tests of significance, controlled experiments v. observational studies, correlation and regression. Course material is elementary mathematically, but challenging in its use of logic and quantitative reasoning. The course's research component will require students to use the library's collections of electronic journals to address scientific issues salient to their interests.
Project Manager: Pat Davitt Maughan | Project Director: Elizabeth Dupuis
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