Ideas, Information, and Inquiry (Triple-I) Course Development

• Luc Bovens, Department of Philosophy
• Douglas MacKay, Department of Public Policy
• Brian McManus, Department of Economics
  

This interdisciplinary course provides an overview of some core conceptual tools used to analyze issues at the intersection of philosophy, politics, and economics (PPE). It introduces students to the tools of economic analysis, including markets, prices, economic efficiency, welfare measures, and market failures. It discusses the philosophical dimensions of economics and public policy, including discussion of the nature of utility or well-being, the ethics of the price system, the value of individual liberty, and the nature of socio-economic justice. It also introduces students to the tools of political or institutional analysis, including game theory and public choice. This collection of tools, which are often employed in isolation, gain considerable power when they are brought together. Students will read widely on PPE tools, and they will explore applications to contemporary social problems. Lectures and recitations will feature a mix of traditional lectures, group work and discussions, simulations, and strategy games.

• Jeannie Loeb, Department of Psychology and Neuroscience
• Jocelyn Chua, Department of Anthropology
• TIm Marr, Department of American Studies (Spring 2019)
• Jennifer Larson, Department of English and Comparative Literature (Fall 2019)
  

Death and dying are universal human experiences. Yet there is immense cultural variation and historical fluidity to the ways we define, understand and treat death, dying and relations between the living and the dead. This course explores the concepts of death and dying from three different disciplines (examples may include, but are not limited to, Anthropology, English and Comparative Literature, and Psychology and Neuroscience). This course will consider similarities and differences between the three discipline research methodologies and will also introduce students to data literacy and principles of evidence.

• David Pier, Department of African, African American, and Diaspora Studies
• J. Michael Terr, Department of Linguistics
• Daniel Matute, Department of Biology

This course, taught by a biologist, a linguist, and an ethnomusicologist, focuses on the idea of “race.” Historically, the idea that humans can be divided into distinct races has been a singularly pernicious one, having been used to justify the persecution, enslavement, and extermination of groups based on their presumed biological inferiority. Today, scientists agree that race is a false and distorting concept for understanding biological diversity among humans: what we describe as races are in fact social constructs, not genetic realities. Nonetheless, the idea of biological race persists in the popular imagination. In this course, students learn why race is not a viable human biological concept, how the idea of race arose historically (and continues to be maintained), and what alternative concepts exist for understanding human diversity and change over time.

• Priscilla Layne, Department of Germanic and Slavic Languages and Literatures
• Courtney Wooods, Department of Environmental Sciences and Engineering (Public Health)
• Michele Berger, Department of Women’s and Gender Studies

This course focuses on the question of how the genre of science fiction (film and literature) has been used to address the world’s environmental concerns and how these concerns affect characters differently depending on their gender, race, and class. Using this lens, the course investigates longstanding global environmental challenges including water resources, overpopulation, consumption, climate change, etc. This course provides students with a complex toolkit to understand environmental issues. We pay special attention to texts with characters or created by artists who are women and/or ethnic minorities. Our focus throughout the course is support comparative, global, intersectional and interdisciplinary thinking.

• Arne Kalleberg, Department of Sociology
• Barbara Fredrickson, Department of Psychology and Neuroscience
• Claudio Battaglini, Department of Exercise and Sport Science

This course will expose students to diverse approaches to studying topics related to happiness and subjective and physical well-being. The three professors will approach this topic from three disciplines: physiology; positive psychology; and sociology. An important aspect of the course is teaching students a variety of life skills, such as teamwork, developing social connections including “belongingness” at UNC, being physically active, and becoming confident that they can obtain the skills to increase their happiness and health.

• Anna Bardone-Cone, Department of Psychology and Neuroscience
• Cary Levine, Department of Art and Art History
• Maxine Eichner, School of Law
  

What is gender and where does it come from? Is gender something that people are born with? Or are they socialized into gender roles? Is gender in the eye of the beholder? To what extent do artists represent gender issues differently? How might one best critique or challenge gender norms? Are gender differences legal ground for treating men and women differently? Or should the law prohibit treating people differently based on gender? This course will consider these questions and more through the lenses of psychology, art, history, and law. The class will explore gender-related experiences across the lifespan, consider how gender has been represented and challenged in art throughout history, and discuss the differing ways that courts and lawyers have approached cases involving gender. This course will establish a foundation from which students can think critically about gender from multiple perspectives—personal, social, cultural, political, and juridical.

• Gabriela Valdivia, Department of Geography
• Gosia Lee, Department of Romance Studies
• Susan Harbage Page, Department of Women’s and Gender Studies
  

This Triple-I course is taught by a visual artist, a Spanish teacher, and a geographer. It examines linguistic, geopolitical, and socio-environmental boundaries to foster an intersectional understanding of identity and belonging in the Americas. Course topics (e.g., migration, justice, and environmental wellbeing) are examined through Spanish language-based films and artwork. Critically engaging with a variety of films, students will expand their speaking, writing, vocabulary and grammar in Spanish language and study in context art and have an opportunity to discuss and learn about global issues, indigenous populations, transnational connections between different countries (immigration, cultural adaptations, labor and exploitation, ethnicity and religion) and diversity (gender issues, class, regional and religious differences). Students are asked to respond to films and art with individual and collaborative assignments that involve performance, creative design, and fabrication. The assignments seek to forge connections between the arts, humanities, and sciences. Students will create e-portfolios to feature their creations and the skills gained to a broader audience.

• Megan Plenge, Department of Geological Sciences
• Troy Sadler, School of Education
• Kate Sheppard, School of Media and Journalism
  

Students often come into science courses with preconceptions about how the world works. These preconceptions are often retained even if the course content illustrates that they are incorrect. The role of educators then is not only to teach students new content, but also to help them to dismantle pre-existing misconceptions so that they can create new foundational ideas for understanding science.

This course will explore how news media’s portrayals of controversies (or perceived controversies) in science affects how students learn in the classroom. Students will be taught science content using passive and active instructional techniques and will analyze the data to explore how each teaching technique addressed their own misconceptions. They will also explore best practices for conveying potentially controversial science information in the news media and analyze how objective science information can become biased prior to media dissemination.

• Melinda Beck, School of Public Health; Department of Nutrition
• Sarah Dempsey, Department of Communication
• Lindsey Smith Taillie, School of Public Health; Department of Nutrition
  

Have you ever really thought about the meal that you just consumed? If you ate a hamburger, fries and milkshake, or a kale salad, where did that meal come from, and what does it mean to you? If you were living in a different country, what might that meal look like? Who are the laborers who made the meal possible? What are the ethics surrounding the work that went into that meal? How does that meal interact with your body? Is your body designed for this food? How do we make policies about food in the US? Is it any different in other countries? What are the ethical concerns of food policy? All of these questions and more will be discussed in this course.

• Fabian Heitsch, Department of Physics and Astronomy
• James Rives, Department of Classics
• Marc Lange, Department of Philosophy
  

Astronomy is one of the oldest global enterprises of humanity. This course will focus on astronomy as it developed in the ancient Mediterranean and in early modern Europe, taking students on a voyage through time — from astronomy’s early beginnings as a means to keep calendars and as the underpinnings of mythology, to its central role during the early modern period in the development of natural sciences as we understand them today. The logical, epistemological, and conceptual foundations of early modern astronomy became the model for all future scientific research. Since astronomy lives at the intersection of mythology and language, philosophy, and natural sciences, students will encounter research methods specific to each of the three subjects. Students will acquire the logical, quantitative, and analytic skills necessary for understanding how different epochs interpreted the generation of knowledge; how their interpretations were influenced by their culture, mythology, and religion; and how science arrives at knowledge even when the empirical evidence is logically compatible with many rival theories.

• Florence Dore, Department of English and Comparative Literature
• Jocelyn Neal, Department of Music
• Fitz Brundage, Department of History
  

The Mason and Dixon line marks a physical boundary, but beyond geographic location, what is the US South? Did its swamps spontaneously produce the blues? Did bluegrass music arise magically from the hills? How did Mississippi produce two such distinct figures as William Faulkner and Elvis Presley, and how were their works related to their origin? What does the history of slavery in the US South have to do with the emergence of country music, R & B, Soul, or Flannery O’Connor’s fiction? Should we understand the New York born James Baldwin as a southern author, given his family’s lineage in the South? In this course, we will examine the South in its cultural and historical incarnations to examine how it both generated and was generated by economic, technological, and political factors. Through textual and data driven analysis, we will come to understand how the South can be simultaneously the birthplace of rock and roll and the origin of the “Southern Strategy”—at once the seat of American authenticity and origin of Coca Cola, America’s first global brand.