The exploration level of the University Core Curriculum is a new addition to the Core that started in Fall 2022. Classes for this level will be designated by an “X” in the course number, with the “X” suggesting the intersection of multiple Core Habits of Heart and Mind. The list of class offerings
will evolve each semester.
Only students who entered UP in or after the Fall 2021 and are enrolled in the ‘revitalized’ Core will need to take Exploration classes. These students will take two such classes at some point before graduation.
The exploration level is intended to build off the foundation level, so students should wait until making significant progress on foundation level classes before taking exploration courses. Students will be eligible to take exploration courses starting in their sophomore year, but many will wait until junior or senior year in order to have completed foundation level coursework.
The intention of the exploration level is for students to add breadth to their educational experiences, so students should try to take exploration classes outside their major areas. If, for example, students are majoring in a science, technology, engineering, or math (STEM) field, they should look to offerings in the humanities or social sciences. If students are majoring in arts or humanities, they should look to offerings in the sciences. All exploration courses are designed to be accessible for any student who has completed relevant foundation level course work.
Exploration level courses also intentionally address two Core Habits of Heart and Mind, offering multiple lenses from the liberal arts to understand timely and timeless issues of human concern. Approved exploration level courses will be designated by having an “X” in the course number and are listed below with the two Core Habits most relevant to the course.
Course Description: The study of chemistry in a variety of art forms. Students engage in creative processes through in-class activities, some of which result in the creation of a tangible piece of art (etched glass, fresco, cyanotype, diazo print, copper etching, and jewelry colored by thin film interference). Other topics include pigments and dyes, paintings, photography, and techniques used to analyze artworks and detect forgeries. Two papers and a student-designed final project are assigned.
Scientific and Quantitative Literacy and Problem Solving
Course Description: This course explores the chemistry involved in the creation and cultures of food. Students will learn through lab activities such as kitchen spherification about chemistry in the appearance, taste and shape of food. Students will also use scientific thinking to engage in sous vide cooking and the making of cheese, bread, and kimchi. A survey of the anthropology of fermentation offers a sense of how global consciousness informs the science of food.
CORE 391X Imagining our Futures: Climate Change, Human Rights, and Our Global FamilyScientific and Quantitative Literacy and Problem Solving
Course Description: In this responsive, transdisciplinary course, and with the collaboration of multiple University faculty and outside participants, students grapple with some of today’s biggest crises. Students will use an array of lenses to explore how climate change, human rights, and our global family intersect in the pursuit of a sustainable, peaceful, and just future. Team-taught by faculty, professionals, and community leaders, this course asks the most challenging questions of our time and builds community within and beyond the Bluff. While this course will meet weekly, learning will also take place asynchronously online.
CORE 392X Our Strange Universe: The History and Science of Modern PhysicsScientific and Quantitative Literacy and Problem Solving
Course Description: Core students will examine the historical development of modern physics and ask both what scientific and cultural forces led to its development and, in turn, how the scientific progress affected history and society. Students will look at the influence of larger trends in science and the industrial revolution, historical events such as WWII and the cold war, and the personal biographies of key figures in the development of modern physics. For the science at the Core Exploration level, students will join PHY 306 students in the introduction to the basic ideas at a conceptual level. They will study the experimental evidence that led to the development of modern physics, and explore a few of the consequences, including some applications relevant to modern life (GPS, MRI, nuclear power, etc.) Any quantitative activities will be scaffolded and students will be provided with appropriate support.
CST 333X The Future of WorkCourse Description: The nature of work is changing rapidly. New professions proliferate, new technologies disrupt, and new social and political changes impact communication inside and outside of organizations. This experiential course prepares students for “future” work. Students will draw from cutting-edge research on labor, organizing, and technology to develop an understanding of the future organization and their role in it.
CST/IHW 391X Health CommunicationCourse Description: This survey course investigates theoretical and practice-based evidence for the powerful role communication plays in the knowledge, awareness, maintenance, and promotion of health and wellness across individuals and communities. Students learn pressing issues in health communication campaigns with particular attention to misinformation, technology, public health disparities, and the consequences on health outcomes. Students will design and implement health communication research and intervention projects for a specific audience.
ENG 337X Modern/Contemporary Arabic LiteratureCourse Description: This course focuses on literature by Arab writers, spanning from 1962-2021. Many of these works are banned or censored throughout the Arab world. Students will learn about the religions, histories, geographies, and politics of Arabic cultures, be exposed to the varied ethnic groups and their traditions and cultures and focus on a variety of topics such as “al Nakba,” political incarceration, honor, superstition, FGM, gender, marriage and family, and the Arab Spring (“al Rabia’ al Arabiyya”).
Course Description: This course takes a delicious approach to studying who we are as human beings. The course will invite students to take a close look at the food on our plates and as it appears in literature to learn more about our individual selves and our identities, our ties to family, our past, our culture, and other cultures around the globe. Through our journey students will cultivate multiple ways of exploring essential questions and strengthen fundamental habits for engaging meaningfully with the world around them and living a reflective, purposeful life.
Scientific and Quantitative Literacy and Problem Solving
Course Description: This course will delve into the growing philosophical and scientific literature on the nature of consciousness, exploring which non-human animals could be said to be conscious and why, whether insects are conscious, and whether it makes sense to talk about plant consciousness. The course engages the interdisciplinary field of consciousness studies and then looks at the ethical implications of finding consciousness in the non-human world.
Course Description: This course introduces students to key issues in the field of Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies (GWSS) with a special focus on voice: Who gets to speak? By what means? And for whom? this class considers the ways that categories of identity (e.g., gender, sexuality, race, class, religious affiliation, and citizenship status) intersect and shaped lived experience. Similar to an introductory course, this class is open to anyone curious about GWSS.
HST 332X Saints and Sinners in the Middle AgesCourse Description: Using primary texts (including martyrdom accounts, inquisition records, and biographies of medieval men and women) and works by leading medievalists, this course examines the relationship between religion and culture by studying changing notions of sanctity and heresy in the medieval Western World.
Course Description: In this course, students will demonstrate a historical and cultural consciousness through studying the development of Japanese history and culture since approximately 1750. Students will also study key aspects of Japanese art since the 1700s to recognize ways that products of Japanese creative and artistic expression have informed the Japanese human experience.
Scientific and Quantitative Literacy and Problem Solving
Course Description: The purpose of this course is to examine the connections between disease, mortality, technology, and human development. How has disease influenced human history? How have humans attempted to adapt to disease? When can we speak of humans actually “curing” disease and promoting health in a scientific fashion? Areas of particular focus will include major epidemics, the rise of germ theory, and the intersection between economic development and human health.
Course Description: This course will offer historical and literary perspectives on World War I, with topics ranging from the geopolitical background to the peace settlements. The global conflict will be considered from military, political, economic, and cultural perspectives. The course includes discussion of the Easter Rising in Ireland, the Russian revolutions of 1917, and the fragmentation of the Middle East.
IHW 392X Navigating Uncertainty: Stress, Creativity, and Well-Being
Core Habits of Heart and Mind:Course Description: Navigating Uncertainty is a course that explores the skills required for achieving and sustaining well-being in an uncertain world. The course draws upon insights from the arts, humanities, psychology, and health sciences to define the challenges and opportunities presented by uncertainty. Following the course, students will be able to craft their own practice of leveraging uncertainty to gain vitality, clarity, and direction.
MUS 302X Music History II: The Influence of Revolution, War, Immigration, and Women's Suffrage, 1820-2022Course Description: In this course, students study the historical and cultural contexts of Western music from the 19th Century through today. Music is not composed in a vacuum, so it is imperative to explore the influence of art, cultural, and sociopolitical conditions. How do war, protest, peace, and religion impact music? This course includes classical, jazz, theater, opera, movie music, and contemporary works. Required of music majors and open to all students.
MUS 412X History of Musical TheatreCourse Description: An exploration of this American art form, from operetta and music comedy to contemporary musical theatre. The class will explore the musical and theatrical influences that led to the modern musical theater genre, as well as the common elements that make up a successful musical. The class will also explore the historical and cultural contexts in which musical theater works were written and the issues they reflect.
PHL 325X BioethicsCourse Description: This course will examine ethical issues in medicine, biotechnology, and related fields. Issues to be discussed may include the concept of informed consent, stem cell research, reproductive technologies, human enhancement, end of life issues, the global AIDS epidemic, genetics, biomedical research, and justice in the distribution of healthcare.
Course Description: Metaphysical questions concerning the meaning, nature, and possibility of being have been of interest to a diverse array of philosophers, theologians, physicists, and cosmologists. This course offers a synopsis of the major topics and approaches in the history of philosophical reflection on being, from the beginnings of metaphysical speculation in the pre-Socratics, through the contemporary period. These include discussions of potency and act, essence and existence, identity and difference, causality, the ontological foundations of logic, the nature of language, and the question of God. The course will take up these discussions from a variety of different perspectives, including existential Thomism, contemporary continental philosophy, theology, and recent accounts in popular physics and cosmology.
Course Description: Discussions concerning the nature of personal identity and self-consciousness engage a range of metaphysical issues. This course explores some of the most important and controversial of these concerns, such as problems of identity over time, what makes someone a person, the nature of self-consciousness, the relationship of the self to a body, the relation of self and freedom, and the development of the self in the context of society and socio-political relations. The course may also extend to consider the metaphysical assumptions and implications of discussions and images of self and personal identity in neuroscience, psychology, sociology, art, and politics.
Course Description: This course explores philosophical issues regarding fundamental concepts of science that grew out of the Scientific Revolution. It asks the following questions: What metaphysical presuppositions about the world changes from the medieval world to the modern world? What conception of science grew out of this period? And what does our “modern” perspective owe to the so-called “dark ages” of the medieval period?
Course Description: This course covers central topics in social epistemology, a field that examines the social dimensions of knowledge. In this course, we will examine the nature of peer disagreement, and learn various perspectives on our rational obligations when we encounter intellectual peers who disagree with us. In the next section, we examine a deeper form of disagreement known as polarization and learn different explanations as to why such wide divisions emerge and our moral and epistemic duties when we confront them. Finally, we will study a form of injustice known as epistemic injustice in which the victim is harmed in their capacity as knower, and thereby prevented from contributing knowledge as a reliable and respected informant. The course aims to both familiarize students with the landscape of these debates and develop the skills of critical reasoning and writing.
Course Description: This course explores issues of social justice in both the United States and across the globe. We explore different conceptualizations of justice within the US and across the world, including secular and religious approaches to defining social justice as well as consider how social justice is implemented into specific state policies and how it plays a part in the way individuals and states view and act on the world. While one person might be interested in one justice issue, and another might be interested in another, the vulnerability of certain peoples makes intersectionality a critical lens through which to examine justice, injustice, and policy priorities. Power and privilege play a role in how individuals perceive, and governments address, issues of social justice.
POL 351X International Law and OrganizationsCourse Description: This course is designed to help students more deeply understand how different actors in the international system influence one another, and in what ways these actors are, or are not, constrained by the presence of international laws and global governance norms and institutions. We will examine the basic philosophy behind the development of international law and global governance institutions, and then examine topical issues within the international system from both international law and global governance lenses. Students will examine the role of institutions like the United Nations, the International Criminal Court, and the World Trade Organization in order to understand the behaviors of various actors in the international system.
Course Description: This course explores the following questions: What role does American culture play in shaping how and why the United States goes to war? Over the course of American history, what are the continuities and changes in how and why the United States has fought its wars? What is the relationship between how the U.S. fights its conventional wars and irregular wars?
Course Description: This course examines historical and contemporary intersections of race and the U.S. legal system. Through an exploration of four themes: slavery, sovereignty, immigration and citizenship, and civil rights, students will gain a deeper understanding of how law simultaneously functions as a tool of liberation and oppression. Drawing on a range of legal and nonlegal materials, this course will investigate how law operates both within and outside of the court system.
SOC 336X Race and Racism in the United StatesCourse Description: This course introduces concepts and theories in the sociology of race and racism to develop racial literacy. The course examines how race and racism structure everyday life and shape the life chances of individuals and groups. The course emphasizes historical and contemporary race relations in the US, but comparative analyses of race and racism are also explored.
SW 455X Black Feminist ThoughtCourse Description: This course explores Black feminist perspectives with an eye to the intersections of race, gender, class, and sexuality in the United States context. It centers theories, experiences, and subjugated knowledges of Black Womyn and provides an overview of the evolution of Black feminist thought from antebellum through the 21st century. Students engage texts on topics from violence to media/art to queerness.
SW 455X Organizing for Environmental JusticeCourse Description: This course examines the role of social work and community practice in addressing environmental injustice. Drawing on interdisciplinary perspectives and action research, we examine threats to sustainability and equity (e.g., environmental racism, extractive economics) as well as implications of climate collapse for marginalized communities. Local and global environmental organizing efforts will be discussed.
THE 317X Trickery, Gender, Power, and Politics in the BibleCourse Description: This course explores the theme of gender in the Bible, the cultures that shaped the texts, and how the biblical culture and stories continue to have an impact on life today as we struggle for gender justice in a globalized world. The course explores such topics as power, politics, kyriarchy, the intersectionality of gender discrimination with other forms of discrimination. Emphasis is on liberation, transformation, and ethical praxis.
THE 330X Environmental Justice and Interreligious DialogueCourse Description: This course brings to bear religion, faith, and ethics on environmental justice, in the light of the connection of God, human person, the earth, and non-human. Engaging the voices of different religions and taking up case studies that present global environmental problems, the course opens the students to a world beyond their own, appreciating both contrary views and intriguing resemblances, all in pursuit of the common good that binds all. Learning goals include: Students engage in comparative study of religions, through the lens of ecological ethics, in exploring answers to ultimate questions about God, human, non-human, earth, and cosmos; Students reflect on the beliefs, attitudes, and worldviews of different religions and cultures through the lens of ecological ethics, appreciating diversity, inclusion, and common good.
THE 344X Spirituality and the ArtsCourse Description: This course examines how artists who identify (in loosely defined ways) as people of faith communicate their experience of the sacred. Students learn how to interpret artistic works like poems, paintings, and music to better understand other people's experience of the sacred, while reflecting on and deepening their own understanding of what is sacred. Art is thus experienced in this course as a means of self-discovery and spiritual formation. Students are expected to experiment with their own creativity, encouraged to understand there are lots of ways they already are and can be creative.
THE 364X Christianity, Gender, and SexualityCourse Description: This course explores gender and sexuality vis-à-vis Christian tradition, covering Biblical literature, development of doctrine, and contemporary theologies, incorporating perspectives from feminist theory, critical race theory, and the sciences. We will discuss the tradition’s wisdom, its limitations, and potential innovations in relation to topics such as marriage, singleness, the Catholic sex abuse crisis, rape culture, and queer identities.
THE 391X Catholic Social Teaching and Professional EthicsCourse Description: In this course students will critically engage themes from Catholic Social Teaching, such as the common good, workers’ rights, subsidiarity, and solidarity. While engaging these themes, students will learn how to develop moral sensitivity and moral imagination within professional environments. Students will carry out a project where they network and conduct interviews of professionals in their chosen field. (Prerequisites: THE 105 and THE 205)
THTR 307X A History of Theatre and CultureCourse Description: Introductory overview of global theatre history from the earliest oral storytelling traditions to the modern day, looking at how theatrical trends are birthed from their cultural moment. Students will not only consider the people, plays, and movements that have impacted theatrical history but also how that history has been told and consider how it can be told. Emphasis is that what we learn is always A theatre history, not THE theatre history.
Course Description: This course will give the student an introduction to the role of the dramaturg and practical experience in dramaturgical methods, including a survey of contemporary critical theories as they apply to the work of a dramaturg. By the end of the course, students will be familiar dramaturgical approaches to both classical and contemporary plays.
THE 445X Fashion History and Gender Expression
Core Habits of Heart and Mind:
Course Description: In-depth study of the history of fashion in western dress from Ancient Egypt through the 20th century with a focus on gender roles throughout history. This class will explore the meaning of fashion in the broadest social context as it relates to the arts, theatre design, and its function in society, and will also use an interdisciplinary approach examining fashion through a gender and women’s studies lens.
University of Portland
5000 N. Willamette Blvd.,
Portland, Oregon 97203-5798
503.943.8000
