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Literary text-mining is a decades-old field that uses quantitative methods to answer enduring literary questions about texts' meaning, significance, politics, context, and more. Text-mining methods offer researchers the chance to answer new questions at larger scales. This course introduces students to a variety of computational methods, from foundational counting methods to machine-learning. Students will investigate several literary datasets using Jupyter notebooks or Pycharm and the Python programming language.

Data & Reality is a multidisciplinary course that delves into the myriad ways data shapes, defines, and mediates our daily experiences. Drawing from fields such as art, computer science, sociology, and philosophy, students will critically examine how data collection, interpretation, and dissemination influence our perceptions, decision-making processes, and interpersonal interactions.

Work is an activity that consumes much of our existence. Whether we love it, hate it, avoid it, struggle through it, tell others how to do it, or worry when we don't have it, most of us will center some form of work in our lives. Work is a site for observing social power: Class, race, gender, ethnicity, disability, age, and other social dynamics intersect and condition people's life chances beyond the workplace. It is also the focus of a great deal of music, comedy, theater, film, and art.

This course explores how art can begin and is used by social movements and everyday forms of resistance. From movies to fashion, dance to street theater, art can transform how we understand systems of power and ourselves. Such transformations in identity and worldviews can seed protest. Art can be used not just to mobilize people but also as a form of enacting opposition.

The Wizard of Oz is a classic 1939 film musical starring Judy Garland as Dorothy, a girl from Kansas who makes some unusual friends as she follows the Yellow Brick Road, defeats the Wicked Witch of the West, and learns valuable lessons about truth, home, and flying monkeys. Not only telling a great story through song, dance, and dazzling visuals, The Wizard of Oz has also provided a rich text for scholars from a rainbow of different disciplines to examine and interpret.

Using the text The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study by Fred Moten and Stefano Harney as a foundation, this class employs the concept of a "study group" to explore ways to navigate the terrains of a liberal arts education, practice community and self-care, and make operative and empowering use of knowledge through a highly interdisciplinary approach.

In this course students will learn and practice the human-centered engineering and design process with the goal of contributing to a pressing real-world problem. Problems could include homelessness, salmon restoration, water pollution, microplastic pollution, or the need for inexpensive prosthetics in the developing world. Students will work in groups on a semester-long project to either design, prototype and build a device or to collect and analyze data to address the chosen problem.

The novel Dune by Frank Herbert is widely recognized as a foundational text for modern science fiction. Less known are its origins in the Pacific Northwest, as Tacoma native Herbert sought to address issues of climate change, resistance and conflict that were unfolding around him. This course engages Dune through a multidisciplinary lens. Students will examine the interplay between such topics as ecology, locality, empire, and identity, tracing the narrative's origins, influence, and eventual transition to film.

What is study abroad and how can it help us understand the political, economic and social forces that shape globalization and the world we live in? This course explores the various meanings and modalities of study abroad, how to prepare to take advantage of this opportunity, and how curriculum designs connect with global affairs. In addition, we discuss the meaning and experiences of study abroad for students from other countries, and how they differ from those of Americans.

This course explores the art of collective negotiation, organizing, and civil rights advocacy through a semester-long study of the 1955 -1956 Montgomery Bus Boycott. The course is organized around a published documentary history of the bus strike titled Daybreak of Freedom by Stewart Burns, and the 2001 dramatic film "Boycott" directed by Clark Johnson and starring Jeffrey Wright and Terrence Howard. The course has three areas of focus. First, students learn the legal challenges and court opinions involved in the Montgomery Bus Boycott.