CONN155 centers on the social functions of quilting in the U.S. Units on the AIDS Memorial Quilt and the African American quilting community of Gee's Bend familiarize students with humanistic, artistic, and social scientific ways of knowing, while deepening understanding of quilts' power to memorialize, to resist, and to inspire. As students study quilting as a subject, they apply their knowledge and ideas to the creation of a community quilt. Each student hand sews two squares, and collaborates on arranging the squares into a quilt top and hand quilting the blanket.

This course investigates the theory and practices of restorative and transformative justice and abolition from multiple disciplines including fiction, legal studies, first person accounts, theory and film. The course begins with an introduction to the principles and practices of RJ and TJ, emphasizing the concepts of harm, healing and repair. To present a context for the rise of the Restorative Justice Movement in the US, the course examines the ways in which the US criminal legal system causes, rather than deters or prevents harm and violence.

In modern times, it is hard to go more than a few days without reading or hearing about a pandemic or epidemic. The opioid epidemic is constantly in the news, along with the continued reporting of the long term impacts of COVID-19, and emerging threats like MonkeyPox (MPox). But, how do pandemics and epidemics differ? Is there a way to measure the impact of disease outbreaks? What can be learned from these devastating events? How have past outbreaks shaped culture throughout history?

Technology has been instrumental in driving changes in both the decisions by states to go to war and the ways soldiers fight on the battlefield. From the introduction of the stirrup and gunpowder, to the atomic bomb, long-range missiles, and artificial intelligence, war and technology have advanced hand in-hand. This course will explore the changing nature of war and how that change is driven by scientific breakthroughs and emergent technologies.

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.