This course explores a diverse range of musicians and musical genres through the lens of Tacoma's history. Utilizing primary source readings, listening examples, and guest lectures by local musicians and historians, the course presents a survey of the musical history of Tacoma, from the region's native peoples and early settlers to the present day. The final project engages students with primary research to share local music history stories.

Students in this cross-disciplinary course develop an understanding of both the historical and contemporary experiences of African-American business leaders in the United States. Black business leaders herein are defined as either entrepreneurs or as managers and executives working within for-profit enterprises. Students draw connections and contrasts between critical issues and decisions facing black business leaders past and present by analyzing the influence of racism and prejudice on the evolution of American black capitalism.

What does it mean to live and die well, and who determines when life begins or ends? The class will discuss and theorize these questions through several case studies including reproductive justice and abortion, the right to die, mass incarceration, and climate change and non-human life. The class explores theoretical concepts such as slow death, vulnerability, value, autonomy, choice, dignity and quality of life to understand the deeply political nature of life and death.

In 1872, Prussian-born and longtime Brooklyn resident John Gast painted "American Progress," an artistic rendering of Americans' dominant-cultural belief that they were destined to expand throughout the continent. In the painting, Columbia, an angelic female figure betokening Anglo-American "civilization," drives benighted forces of "savagery" into oblivion and ushers in their replacements, those 19th-century emblems of progress, the telegraph wire, the locomotive, the farmer, the schoolbook.

This course explores the political, cultural, historical, and social footprint of urban life in the contemporary era of unprecedented mobility. Students explore scholarly frameworks used to understand contemporary migration and mobility, and the foundational scholarship that shapes our conceptualization of urban space and the urban landscape. Putting theories regarding state formation of immigration regimes into conversation with the lived experience of migrants in the urban landscape provides a multidimensional vantage point on the patterns and consequences of migration.

This course engages scientific and social scientific disciplinary approaches to environmental issues. While environmental issues reflect certain empirical realities about our physical world, they come to our attention through human contests over values. This course uses environmental science to understand the factors behind and consequences of a wide range of issues like pollution, climate change and declining biodiversity. It also employs social science to understand the relationship of human behaviors to environmental conditions and the important role governments play.

Technological innovations over the past several decades have greatly increased our ability to tell stories in which the reader's choices affect the narrative. These can range from text-based novels in electronic form that contain a couple of branching plot points, to episodes of television shows that require the viewer to select an option to advance the narrative, to sophisticated computer and video games featuring multiple alternative storylines. Historically, the term "interactive fiction" has tended to refer to computer-enabled stories that are text-based.

Wine is a simple thing. The idea of wine, however, is very complicated, since it reflects both wine itself and wine's complex and dynamic social and economic terroir of values, attitudes, and interests. Because wine intersects social processes in so many ways, the question of which idea of wine will prevail, or how the contractions between and among the different ideas will be resolved or not, has important implications.

Seeing (in contrast to mere "looking") involves a learned propensity to notice (or ignore) particular aspects of what is perceived through the lenses of one's culturally filtered perspectives.

The emergence of Islamic fundamentalism and Islamist political thought in the twentieth century has garnered much media attention in the last few decades. This course examines how Islamic fundamentalism developed in the first half of the twentieth century in the wake of Western colonization and why it gained so much support during the second half of the century.