Health and Science

Instructor(s)

Barbara Campbell

Course Description

This course will examine representations of disability in American culture in the 20th and 21st centuries through literary texts, film, art, music, and dance. Our class will use disability studies theory to analyze how artists with disabilities critique ableism and complicate conventional narratives of disability. Stereotypical depictions of the disabled figure in literature, art, and popular culture reinforce, sometimes inadvertently, discrimination towards people with physical, intellectual, and psychiatric disabilities. The disabled subject is often represented as the object of pity, scorn, or as heroic inspiration for ableist culture. Works by artists with disabilities tend to challenge these depictions in content and form in unconventional and radical ways. We will engage with a variety of texts to discuss how artists draw attention to inclusivity, access, and social justice.

Instructor(s)

Charles Allen
Brent Hege

Course Description

Through reading and critical discussion around theological, philosophical, and sacred texts, students will be able to explore the meaning of faith, doubt, and reason and ask big implicated questions, such as: what is faith, how do you know what you know, can divinity be proven, and what is the relationship of science to faith? The first semester of Faith, Doubt, and Reason focuses on developing writing skills. The second semester of Faith, Doubt, and Reason will provide an opportunity for students to write and present on issues in need of action in our world.

Instructor(s)

JD Amick

Course Description

While the field of science writing has been around for quite some time, with the ubiquity of the internet has come a broader field of science communication that has moved beyond the pages of “Cell” and “The New England Journal of Medicine.” Internet content creators across multiple platforms, from Youtube to TikTok, have been taking lessons learned from these big name journals and the legacies of TV science celebrities like Steve Irwin and Bill Nye to build a new generation of science communicators in this ever changing internet frontier.

This course aims to be a survey of the field of “science writing” in the broadest of terms. We will look at the history of the practice and the work that major science journals have done to establish the field while also examining the inception of popular science and the growth of science communicators and educators in TV and movies. This course will attempt to provide an overview of what the field looks like today in the broadest of terms. What does it look like working as a science writer for a major national laboratory? How does this diff er for TikTok creators that have over two million followers? Readings will include articles from major journals, interviews with science communicators and internet content creators, craft essays on both, and TV/video viewings. This collection of materials aims to illustrate the depth and width of the field, and the multitudes of opportunities that lie within it. Students will participate in a variety of activities and assignments, from conducting their own interviews with scientists and experts to creating their own TikTok videos.

Instructor(s)

Brian Day

Course Description

In this class, students will be exposed to the field of Human Factors Psychology, which, broadly defined, examines the relationship between human beings and technology in an attempt to make human-technology interactions safe, effective, and efficient. Students will be presented with background on human factors and various real-world applications before transitioning to thinking about taking what has been learned to design their own life in accordance with human factors principles. For instance, students will be asked to reassess their study routines, sleeping habits, and daily technology usage. Students will also be tasked with making changes in their lives which will impact things like their happiness and state of mind. The goal of this class is for students to learn about the field of human factors psychology, and to take what is being learned and make intentional changes to how they live their lives. 

Instructor(s)

Susanna Foxworthy Scott

Course Description

In this class, we will explore such topics as mental illness, birth, death, the AIDS epidemic and addiction by reading works that offer ethical, historical, cultural and scientific perspectives. By reading patient and physician memoirs and literary works, we will gain an understanding of how the experience of illness as well as the experience of treating illness can be influenced by socio-economic and cultural factors. We will learn about the ethical, economic, and political dilemmas facing patients, doctors, and communities. Suffering comes not only from medical condition itself but from injustices, unequal access to care, stigma, neglect, and isolation. As patients and perhaps future health care providers, we need a fuller understanding of these dimensions of illness and health care.

Instructor(s)

Tonya Bergeson

Course Description

Is music the universal language? Is music independent of language? This class will examine the relationship between music and language from the perspective of philosophy, psychology, communication science, and neuroscience. We will explore the relevant data and theories from various perspectives such as linguistics and music cognition, and we will investigate music and language across the lifespan and in different populations, such as aphasia and amusia.

Instructor(s)

Alexander Roehrkasse

Course Description

Many of our most salient watchwords— binging, multitasking, clickbait, doomscrolling—betray the pervasive feeling that attention in contemporary life is misused, even abused. By engaging with scientific, journalistic, and literary texts, this course investigates the nature of attention, mounting efforts to control and profit from attention through technology and design, and emerging movements to resist attentional exploitation. The course also explores attention-based practices such as mindfulness meditation to better align our attention with our goals and values and leverage it for vocational reflection. 

Instructor(s)

Jessica Reed

Course Description

From a graphic novel about Marie Curie to a film on Stephen Hawking, from plays and symphonies inspired by quantum physics to fiction and poetry on astrophysics and relativity, the arts are a powerful way to investigate the beauty and complexity of scientific ideas. Physics and literature have a rich historical past, reaching at least as far back as two millennia, with Lucretius’ didactic epic poem about atoms. And yet there is often a perceived division between science and art. This seminar will examine representations of physics in literature, celebrating their common ground, whether in essays by Alan Lightman and K. C. Cole, poetry by Arthur Sze and Brenda Hillman, fiction by Italo Calvino, plays by Steve Martin and Tom Stoppard, or graphic novels on great physicists such as Richard Feynman and Marie Curie. Contemporary poets such as A. Van Jordan, Rae Armantrout, Robert Hass, Tracy K. Smith, Forrest Gander, Bin Ramke, Alice Fulton, Alison Hawthorn Deming, Diane Ackerman, and more have brilliantly incorporated modern physics into their projects. Students will explore opera, dance, painting, photography, and sculpture that engage with the most fundamental questions physics poses, and in the process will discover how physics approaches the world.

Instructor(s)

Jesse Van Gerven

Course Description

This FYS will explore the stories that people tell each other about food.  Stories and narratives are extraordinarily powerful tools that people develop, use, and share for making sense of the world and making their way through it. Stories give structure and meaning to our lives.  Stories shape our perceptions of food and what food means to us.  We swim through a sea of stories about which foods are good to eat, and which foods are bad to eat; what foods are healthy, and what foods are unhealthy; stories about where food comes from, how it is prepared, and by whom; as well as stories about the nature of human societies and our relationships with other species and the environment.

In this course we will begin an exploration of these stories, their deeper meanings, and the  connections between them across different places, different times, and different social locations.  We will explore a wide variety of “texts” including children’s stories and nursery rhymes, short stories, novels, films, recipes and cookbooks, investigative journalism, TikTok and other videos, as well as academic articles and books.  This will include exploring various elements of different “food cultures” from around the world and from different periods of time.  Later, we will focus more specifically on stories about good and bad food, including the scientific stories of nutrition and food science.  This will lead us to yet other stories about food politics and how decisions about food are made and by whom, which leads to yet more stories about food companies and their roles in the food system.  Throughout the course you will have many opportunities to critically engage with these materials, issues, and ideas.  We will do some hands-on, experiential learning at Butler’s campus farm, you will have an opportunity to do some creative work writing a children’s story, nursery rhyme, or poem, as well as other individual and group projects and assignments.

Instructor(s)

Karly Keiper

Course Description

Many people do not realize that the laws prohibiting discrimination on the basis of disability are younger than most of our grandparents. In this course, we will explore the life of the “mother of the disability rights movement”, Judy Heumann. We will analyze how her unique personal story, life experiences, and fierce advocacy have shaped the law-making around disability and civil rights. We will discuss the evolution of the movement beyond Judy’s “birth” of it, exploring what accessibility meant, currently means, and what Judy (and many, many others) hope for it to one day mean.

Content warning: abuse, neglect, and violence against people with disabilities

Instructor(s)

Dan Barden

Course Description

In this seminar, we will spend the first semester reading and writing about the literature of addiction. Human beings have been fascinated with intoxication since they first learned how to intoxicate themselves, and the disease of addiction has influenced every part of our culture.

The second semester will explore the literature that has emerged, particularly in the last 75 years, from the experience of recovery from addiction. What have writers made from our attempts, both successful and unsuccessful, to triumph over addiction in all its forms.