CONN

Some believe that there are more Chinese restaurants in the U.S. than McDonald's, Burger King, KFC, and Wendy's combined. Many of the Chinese dishes most known to Americans, however, are not Chinese. What is Chinese food? Are Kung Pao dishes more "authentically" Chinese than chop suey? Why did this immigrant cuisine become so popular in the U.S.? This course explores American Chinese foodways as a form of cultural exchange, a chapter in American history, and a marker of Chinese-American identity, in the context of transnational interactions.

This course provides freshman students with a playground to explore their most interested topics through two gatherings per week. The course is designed for students to define their individuality in the history of civilizations through doodling, brainstorming & calligraphy, both individually and collaboratively. The entire doodling and beautiful writing process will be executed in three sections to show all participants' individual learning outcome through teamwork.

This freshman seminar is designed for students who are interested in cities and fascinated by urban life. Our semester is devoted to the field-based exploration of three emblematic features of northwest urbanism: dead malls, waterfront promenades, and ethnic enclaves. As we explore these urban themes, students will have ample opportunities to find their footing in the scholarship, and will explore ideas via active, field-based research pertinent to the urban planning and to life in the city.

This course introduces students to the values of a liberal arts education as it has been classically formulated (see "The Value of the Liberal Arts" in the Modules Library). It then contrasts the ideal of a mutually enriching relationship among its principal academic areas (humanities, creative arts, sciences, social sciences) with the current situation in higher education where these areas have become isolated and hierarchically ordered according to their perceived prestige and value to society.

"Dao" means way, or path, in Chinese. Our course will explore the "dao" as it relates to Chinese architecture. We will investigate the ways that nature, space, and power are conveyed, highlighted, and embodied in Chinese gardens, landscape architecture, temples, monuments, and imperial structures. We will construct some pre-designed model versions of a few sites, and then identify, model, create, and annotate a small-scale version of one other architectural site for display on campus.

To what extent is the United States achieving the ideal of "one person, one vote," and what role should mathematics play in democracy? In 2023, the Supreme Court ruled in Allen v. Milligan that Alabama's congressional map violated the Voting Rights Act by discriminating against Black voters. The majority opinion contains numerous references to the work of a geometer.

This course focuses on ghost stories from different cultures and time periods with special attention to nineteenth and early twentieth-century studies of the paranormal. Our investigations will draw on diverse fields of study, such as history, literature, philosophy, physics, and religion. Along the way, we will work collaboratively to produce a podcast on ghosts and ghost hunters in history.

Medical Narratives explores how the experience of health, illness, and medicine is shaped by language into multiple acts of storytelling, including the complex narrative interactions between patients and health care workers, health and illness, body and mind. The course will examine accounts of how cultural and individual lived experiences provide different conceptions of health and healing and illness and disease, and what those narratives reveal about medical knowledge and authority, empathy and belief, metaphor and fact.

This course will explore issues concerning human impact on water and the environment in urban and suburban Tacoma. This course is a learning-by-doing class. The class will investigate systems set up in Tacoma to reduce chemicals from being released to the environment and the health of urban streams and lakes. Experiential components of the course will include visiting a local creek to observe salmon returning to spawn, investigation of Tacoma's Green Stormwater Infrastructure, and a class project to devise and implement a plan to monitor pollutants in local creeks.

Tea is earth's most popular beverage. Each year, the world's population consumes billions of kilograms of tea at meals, as an afternoon break, to welcome guests, during ceremonies and rituals, in closing business deals, and on many other occasions. Drinking tea can be a pleasure; so can studying it. Scholars from different fields ask different kinds of questions about tea and use different methods to answer them.