WRDS 150 Winter Session Term 1 – Course Topics

Instructor: Jonathan Otto

Sections: 010, 011, 013, 015

Available Times: 8:00, 9:30, 11:00, 12:30 - M/W

Designed to introduce you to the world of scholarly research and writing, this section of WRDS 151 will do so with a focus on the concept of “sustainability.”  As a concept, “sustainability” gained international popularity following discussions about “sustainable development” at the 1992 United Nations (UN) Conference on Environment and Development in Rio de Janeiro. Twenty-three years later, the UN created the “Sustainable Development Goals,” consisting of a broad set of principles aimed at guiding the sustainability efforts of member countries.  The popularization of the concept has inspired significant “sustainability”-related work by inter-governmental organizations, governments, and non-governmental actors, including researchers, businesses and universities.  In order to understand the influence “sustainability” as a concept, it is important to review its origins, explore the diverse ways individuals, governments and other actors use it, and to assess how it inspires these actors’ relationships with the natural environment.

Instructor: Katie Fitzpatrick

Sections: 036

Available Times: 3:30 - W/F

The recent Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization (2022) decision has drawn attention to the battle for abortion access in the United States. But, for many activists around the world, that battle is only one part of a larger effort to secure autonomy for families and pregnant people. As feminists of colour have long argued, reproductive justice includes the right to end a pregnancy, but also the right to “have children…and parent the children we have in safe and sustainable communities” (sistersong.net, n.d.). Unfortunately, these rights are often distributed unequally on the basis of race, class, sexuality, and ability (Davis, 1981; Luna and Luker, 2013; Silliman, 2004).

This course will explore fights for reproductive justice through international research in disciplines like history, sociology, and public health. Sample topics may include: the geopolitics of commercial surrogacy, the economics of parental leave, access to reproductive technology for queer and trans people, and structural racism in maternal healthcare and child welfare systems. While learning about these issues, students will also learn how to conduct scholarly research and write in a variety of scholarly genres. At the end of the course, students will work with secondary and primary sources to produce a research paper on a topic of their own choosing related to reproductive (in)justice anywhere in the world.

Instructor: Jackie Rea

Sections: 012, 014, 017 - online

Available Times: 9:30, 12:30, 3:30 - M/W - all online

Typically, sections of WRDS 150 are designed around a research topic—a concept or issue that has attracted both public interest and scholarly attention. In this section of WRDS 150B, we will focus on the commonplace but nonetheless complex phenomenon of humour from several disciplinary perspectives, including computer science, environmental communication, and neuroscience.

We will consider how scholars in these disciplines study and talk about humour. For example, what do these scholars say about humour’s scientific and technical functions and effects? More specifically, what might those in the field of science communication say about humour’s role in messages to the public about climate change and sustainability? What might neuroscientist say about humour types and brain response? What might researchers in computer say about the social functions of humour, particularly as these relate to improvements in and/or perceptions of human-computer interaction (HCI) or humour’s use in AI more generally? More importantly, how do scholars in these disciplines produce knowledge about humour – what methods do they use? And, most importantly, how is this knowledge-making activity represented in their scholarly writing?

Instructor: Mi-Young Kim

Sections: 016, 018, 019

Available Times:  2:00, 3:30, 5:00 - M/W

This section of WRDS150 will introduce a selection of unabridged, peer-reviewed scholarly articles and discussions on the theme of “Living in the Time of Artificial Intelligence (AI),” with a focus on AI/ChatGPT and deepfake/misinformation. Throughout the course, we will critically examine both the opportunities and concerns AI brings, including questions of ethics, mis/disinformation, academic integrity, privacy, and human creativity, among many others.

The course emphasizes how scholars frame research questions, select methodologies, and construct arguments, as well as how these choices shape research outcomes. Through the study of diverse research genres, methods, data types, and writing practices across disciplines, students will explore how knowledge is constructed, circulated, and evaluated in academic contexts.

The course has two primary goals: 1) to familiarize students with the conventions of academic writing and the basic principles of research (theoretical), and 2) to support the development of students’ scholarly identities as a member of academic research communities through independent research on issues related to AI (practical).

Instructor: Tom Andrews

Sections: 030, 032, 035

Available Times: 8:00, 11:00, 2:00 - W/F

This section of WRDS 150 is focused on Critical Thinking in the Digital Era. These modules cover issues including social networking behavior and privacy, climate change denial and hyper-critical thinking, and ‘slacktivism’ and bandwagon political engagement in the 21st century.  We will read articles from scholarly and non-scholarly sources from social science, political science, and humanities backgrounds as well as watching interviews, Ted Talks, and discussion panels.  In doing so, we will endeavor to answer such questions as: does the internet still offer users a place to share and consume information honestly?  Do the harms caused by social media use outweigh its many advantages in contemporary society?  How have internet communication platforms changed political engagement and awareness?  What biases or fallacies are perpetuated by an online world?

Instructor: Gillian Saunders

Section:  037

Available Times:  3:30 - W/F - online

Course Topic: TBA  

Instructor:  Tara Lee

Sections:  201, 221, 241

Available Times: 8:00, 10:00, 12:00 - M/W/F

During this recent COVID-19 pandemic, troubling data has emerged in relation to racial inequalities when it comes to the effects of the virus. What role does race play in your life? How do you see it circulating in universities, workplaces, social media, the political realm, and social environments? Although “race” is considered to be a social construct, as an identity marker, it continues to have significant material consequences in terms of access to resources, perceptions of legitimacy, marketing strategies, and even socializing patterns. This course looks at research by scholars in a variety of disciplines who examine complex issues related to race (e.g. how race figures in conservation projects), often also taking into account other intersectional identity categories (e.g. gender, class, sexuality). As you read and discuss relevant scholarly articles, you will also become acquainted with the conventions of scholarly discourse, disciplinarity, as well as the production of new research knowledge within a field. Ultimately, the goal is for you to increase your critical engagement with the world around you, in addition to cultivating your skills and confidence as an academic writer and researcher.

Instructor: Laila Ferreira

Sections: 222, 231, 252

Available Times: 10:00, 11:00, 1:00 - M/W/F

This section of WRDS 150 will take as its focus the concept of Inclusive Design. We explore how inclusive design is defined, what it involves and how it impacts the work that scholars do in Science, Math, Engineering, and Computer Science. Throughout the term, we will evaluate the scholarly research and writing practices of STEM fields through academic articles about the application of inclusive design principles to a range of topics and design projects. Students will have the opportunity to produce research and research writing that explores current knowledge about inclusive design well as the future possibilities of inclusive design in STEM.

Instructor: Katja Thieme

Sections: 232, 251

Available Times: 11:00, 1:00 - M/W/F

This section of WRDS 150 is specifically designed for students who are studying in a faculty other than Arts at UBC. To help us focus our investigation into how different disciplines write and communicate, we will investigate how the concept of surveillance is developed and used in areas such as health studies, media studies, and ethics in science and engineering. Surveillance has become a research issue of practical concern (e.g., with what surveillance tools can global spread of diseases be effectively observed and controlled?), as well as of ethical questions (e.g., what should the ethics be for using drones in applied science work?). Looking at examples of how these questions have been discussed in research writing, this course will help you identify and use different research methods, types of data and evidence, and elements of style in research writing.

Instructor: Sang Wu

Sections: 261, 272

Available Times: 2:00, 3:00 - M/W/F  and 6:00pm - R

This course introduces students to academic reading and writing through analysis of scholarly discourses in the sciences, social sciences, and humanities. We will focus our investigation on climate change and other global crises, and issues of responsibility concerning them, in the era of the Anthropocene. Coined at the turn of the 21st century, the word is compounded from the Greek anthropos (“human”) and kainos (“new”). The Anthropocene is the new epoch of humans: one in which planetary conditions are shaped by human activity rather than vice versa, humankind as a force of geological agency has overtaken physical geography and natural history, and the familiar distinction between man and nature no longer holds. A closer look at the scientific and semantic implications of the term, however, reveals it to be less straightforward than initially appears. Currently not officially recognized as part of the Geologic Time Scale, what should be understood or measured as the basis for the Anthropocene means different things to different disciplines. How do scholars from fields as diverse as geology, climatology, sociology, history, anthropology, and psychology, engage with the common idea of the Anthropocene? Do studies of pre-industrial greenhouse gas emissions, critiques of environmentally unsustainable trends of industrial, socioeconomic, and technological acceleration in an age of world capitalism, and theories of the end of human history at the limits of human “meaning” and modernity, ask similar research questions despite starkly contrastive methodologies? How are the discursive challenges posed by referring to singular abstractions (e.g., humans as a “species,” the sense of a “universal” history or geostory, the “Anthropocene”) represented across multiple disciplines, reflective of the conceptual difficulties which arise in accessing or preserving a nature no longer distinguishable from the human interventions that create and destroy it? How is our sense of what it means to be natural objects or human subjects, and what it means not to be, informed by how our discourses produce meaning?

Instructor: Adrian Lou

Sections:  271

Available Times: 3:00 - M/W/F

Traditionally, metaphor has been understood as a stylistic device that poetically decorates language. Metaphorical expressions (e.g. my love is a rose) are thus thought to be statements that do not reside in the realm of everyday speech. However, contemporary research in cognitive linguistics has shown that many conventional expressions are inescapably metaphorical. Consider, for instance, how we rely on metaphors to talk about abstract concepts, such as love (e.g. you’re breaking my heart), illness (e.g. the patients are battling cancer), and time (e.g. we’re running out of time). In this course, we will read academic articles that evaluate the use of metaphors in biology, healthcare, psychology, Indigenous studies and politics in order to have a better understanding of how metaphors shape the way we think about the world around us. Ultimately, students in WRDS 150 will learn how to read academic papers in a critical way, identify the rhetorical strategies used in academic writing, and write an original research paper that draws upon ideas and concepts from the course

Instructor: Sang Wu

Sections: 461

Available Times:  6:00 - R - online

This course introduces students to academic reading and writing through analysis of scholarly discourses in the sciences, social sciences, and humanities. We will focus our investigation on climate change and other global crises, and issues of responsibility concerning them, in the era of the Anthropocene. Coined at the turn of the 21st century, the word is compounded from the Greek anthropos (“human”) and kainos (“new”). The Anthropocene is the new epoch of humans: one in which planetary conditions are shaped by human activity rather than vice versa, humankind as a force of geological agency has overtaken physical geography and natural history, and the familiar distinction between man and nature no longer holds. A closer look at the scientific and semantic implications of the term, however, reveals it to be less straightforward than initially appears. Currently not officially recognized as part of the Geologic Time Scale, what should be understood or measured as the basis for the Anthropocene means different things to different disciplines. How do scholars from fields as diverse as geology, climatology, sociology, history, anthropology, and psychology, engage with the common idea of the Anthropocene? Do studies of pre-industrial greenhouse gas emissions, critiques of environmentally unsustainable trends of industrial, socioeconomic, and technological acceleration in an age of world capitalism, and theories of the end of human history at the limits of human “meaning” and modernity, ask similar research questions despite starkly contrastive methodologies? How are the discursive challenges posed by referring to singular abstractions (e.g., humans as a “species,” the sense of a “universal” history or geostory, the “Anthropocene”) represented across multiple disciplines, reflective of the conceptual difficulties which arise in accessing or preserving a nature no longer distinguishable from the human interventions that create and destroy it? How is our sense of what it means to be natural objects or human subjects, and what it means not to be, informed by how our discourses produce meaning?