This collection of resources considers the obsession with high and low art forms found in late 17th and early 18th English literature.

This class explores the political and aesthetic foundations of hip hop. Students trace the musical, corporeal, visual, spoken word, and literary manifestations of hip hop over its 30 year presence in the American cultural imagery. Students also investigate specific black cultural practices that have given rise to its various idioms. Students create material culture related to each thematic section of the course. Scheduled work in performance studio helps students understand how hip hop is created and assessed.

This course provides a basic overview of the history of women in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). Students will learn about specific contributions of women across a variety of disciplines and will gain a broad perspective on how these contributions played a larger role in the advancement of human knowledge and technological achievement. The class will also grapple with how both historic and modern biases within the STEM disciplines, as well as in representations of women and girls in media and popular culture, can affect outcomes in these areas.

This manual is intended to help people who care about human rights to become effective educators, able to share both their passion and their knowledge. To further human rights education in all its many forms, The Human Rights Education Handbook lays out the basics: why, for whom, what, where, who, and how. It draws on the experience of many educators and organizations, illustrating their effective practices and distilling their accumulated insights.

This book is a tool for bringing the United Nations' Universal Declaration of Human Rights into the lives of people in the United States: kindergartens and unions, Scout troops and senior citizens centers, religious organizations and prison programs. Although obviously useful for educators in schools and colleges, Human Rights Here and Now was also written to serve the needs of community organizers and activists.

Game theory is an excellent topic for a non-majors quantitative course as it develops mathematical models to understand human behavior in social, political, and economic settings. The variety of applications can appeal to a broad range of students. Additionally, students can learn mathematics through playing games, something many choose to do in their spare time! This text also includes an exploration of the ideas of game theory through the rich context of popular culture. It contains sections on applications of the concepts to popular culture. It suggests films, television shows, and novels with themes from game theory. The questions in each of these sections are intended to serve as essay prompts for writing assignments.

Intro to Sociology / SOCI 101

Examines small group interactions and cultural patterns of American and other societies using the conceptual, theoretical, and methodological principles and applications to explain how values, roles, norms, social interaction, and social inequality as well as other concepts influence individuals, groups, and society.

Introduction to Sociology 2e adheres to the scope and sequence of a typical, one-semester introductory sociology course. It offers comprehensive coverage of core concepts, foundational scholars, and emerging theories, which are supported by a wealth of engaging learning materials. The textbook presents detailed section reviews with rich questions, discussions that help students apply their knowledge, and features that draw learners into the discipline in meaningful ways. The second edition retains the book’s conceptual organization, aligning to most courses, and has been significantly updated to reflect the latest research and provide examples most relevant to today’s students. In order to help instructors transition to the revised version, the 2e changes are described within the preface.

Discuss the roles of both high culture and pop culture within societyDifferentiate between subculture and countercultureExplain the role of innovation, invention, and discovery in cultureUnderstand the role of cultural lag and globalization in cultural change

Reading list of open and library resources.

Course Description
Introduces Viking history, culture, and society through mythology, art, sagas, warfare, politics, and conversion to Christianity. Examines Viking influence on North America, the British Isles, Continental Europe, and Russia. Covers modern conceptions of the Vikings through contemporary popular culture. Prerequisites: WR 115, RD 115 and MTH 20 or equivalent placement test scores. Audit available.
Intended Outcomes for the course
Upon completion of the course students should be able to:

Articulate and interpret an understanding of key historical facts and events in Scandinavian history during the Viking Age.
Identify the influence of culturally-based practices, values, and beliefs to analyze how historically-defined meanings of difference affect human behavior.
Identify and investigate historical theses, evaluate information and its sources, and use appropriate reasoning to construct evidence-based arguments on historical issues.
Construct a well-organized historical argument using effective, appropriate, and accurate language.

The Iraq Hurr website is a news broadcast website that includes radio and video components as well as news articles. The majority of the content concerns Iraq, but world news is also reported on the site. Components of the website include current events, politics, economics, security, society, and various programs such as sports and human rights in Iraq. Podcasts are also available, as is a free app for both iPhones and Android.

Modern Westerners brought up on a steady diet of popular songs and romantic movies tend to believe that interpersonal attraction and mate selection are both random and very subjective. Popular culture propagates the notion of "love at first sight" and teaches us that "love is blind, "love just happens," and "you can't help who you fall in love with." Research shows, however, that this is not necessarily true and that, in reality, society aims Cupid's arrow more than we like to think. In this exercise we explore the concepts of homogamy, routine activities, social networks, and mere exposure by examining how similar respondents are to their partners on a variety of social characteristics and how they met and became involved with their partners.

What makes a superhero super? By comparing popular culture superheroes with heroic characters in children's literature, students learn to think critically about character traits, and consider how cultural perspectives influence the kinds of heroes we choose.

Short Description:
Jacob Lawrence (1917-2000) is widely recognized as one of the most important American artists of the 20th century. He is best known for epic multi-panel narratives like the Migration Series (1940-1941) and Struggle: from the History of the American People (1954-56), which he created as a young artist living and working in in New York City. The second half of Lawrence’s career, which he spent in Seattle as a Professor of Art at the University of Washington, has received far less attention. The essays in this volume, researched and written by the participants in the Spring 2021 art history seminar “Art and Seattle: Jacob Lawrence” at the University of Washington School of Art + Art History + Design, fill in this gap. In so doing, we take our lead from the artist’s own framing of the Seattle period as a critical stage in his artistic development, in which conceptual and formal concerns explored across his long career converged and became more of the sum of their parts.

Long Description:
Jacob Lawrence (1917-2000) is widely recognized as one of the most important American artists of the 20th century. He is best known for epic multi-panel narratives like the Migration Series (1940-1941) and Struggle: from the History of the American People (1954-56), which he created as a young artist living and working in in New York City. The second half of Lawrence’s career, which he spent in Seattle as a Professor of Art at the University of Washington, has received far less attention. The essays in this volume, researched and written by the participants in the Spring 2021 art history seminar “Art and Seattle: Jacob Lawrence” at the University of Washington School of Art + Art History + Design, fill in this gap. In so doing, we take our lead from the artist’s own framing of the Seattle period as a critical stage in his artistic development, in which conceptual and formal concerns explored across his long career converged and became more of the sum of their parts.

Word Count: 66080

(Note: This resource's metadata has been created automatically by reformatting and/or combining the information that the author initially provided as part of a bulk import process.)

This course covers medieval Japanese society and culture from the twelfth to the nineteenth centuries, when political power rested largely in the hands of feudal warriors. Topics include religion (especially Zen Buddhism); changing concepts of "the way of the warrior;" women under feudalism; popular culture; and protest and rebellion. Presentations include weekly feature films. Assigned readings include many literary writings in translation.

This is a module framework. It can be viewed online or downloaded as a zip file.

As taught in Autumn Semester 2009/2010

This module consists of a detailed examination of the critical period in Japanese history from the end of the Pacific War through the U.S. Occupation between 1945 and 1952 and recovery in the 1960s and beyond. The lectures and seminars examine the following topics:

Japan’s Road to War
The Japanese experience of war and defeat
The A-bomb in history and memory
The ‘Allied’ Occupation of Japan
The changing Japanese family
Japan’s economic recovery in the 1950s and 60s
The environmental costs of rapid economic development
The Asia-Pacific War in Japanese memory and popular culture

Suitable for: Undergraduate year one students

Dr Susan C. Townsend, School of History.

Dr. Townsend is Associate Professor of Japanese history in the School of History, University of Nottingham. She has published on Japanese intellectual history, including Yanaihara Tadao and Japanese Colonial Policy: Redeeming Empire (Curzon, 2000) and her most recent monograph Miki Kiyoshi 1897-1945: Japan’s Itinerant Philosopher (Brill, 2009). She is now developing a major collaborative project entitled Motor Cities: A Comparative History of Nagoya, Japan and Birmingham, England in the Twentieth Century in association with the University of Leicester, Birmingham City University and Nagoya University. A major focus of the project is the role of the motorcar and the automotive industry in city-centre design and regional development.

This collection uses primary sources to explore the cultural impact of swing dancing. Digital Public Library of America Primary Source Sets are designed to help students develop their critical thinking skills and draw diverse material from libraries, archives, and museums across the United States. Each set includes an overview, ten to fifteen primary sources, links to related resources, and a teaching guide. These sets were created and reviewed by the teachers on the DPLA's Education Advisory Committee.

Law is a common and yet distinct aspect of everyday life in modern societies. This course examines the central features of law as a social institution and as a feature of popular culture. We will explore the nature of law as a set of social systems, central actors in the systems, legal reasoning, and the relationship of the legal form and reasoning to social change. The course emphasizes the relationship between the internal logic of legal devices and economic, political and social processes. Emphasis is placed upon developing a perspective which views law as a practical resource, a mechanism for handling the widest range of unspecified social issues, problems, and conflicts, and at the same time, as a set of shared representations and aspirations.
We will explore the range of experiences of law for its ministers (lawyers, judges, law enforcement agents and administrators) as well as for its supplicants (citizens, plaintiffs, defendants). We will examine how law is mobilized and deployed by professionals and ordinary citizens. We cannot cover all aspects of the legal system, nor focus on all the different actors. A set of topics has been selected to develop understanding of the situational and systemic demands within which actors in the legal system operate and perform their roles; at the same time, we will try to discover systematic patterns in the uses and consequences of law. Throughout the course there is concern for understanding what we mean by legality and the rule of law.

This blog aims to teach people the Lebanese dialect. It uses both video components and themed vocabulary lists such as weather and words for schools and universities. Vocabulary lists are written in both Arabic and transliterated English. Cultural components about Lebanon and occasional news items are included.