WRDS 151 Winter Session Term 2 – Course Topics

Instructor:  Tom Andrews

Sections:   530

Available Times 11:00 - M/W

This section of  WRDS 151 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:  Rohan Karpe

Sections:   510, 511

Available Times  8:00, 9:00  - M/W/F

In this WRDS 150 section we explore behaviours, norms, and behavioural change.

We have voluntarily adopted some of these behaviours, norms, and changes; some have been enforced, and still others have been influenced by those around us. These behaviours, norms, and changes appear at personal as well as at societal levels. How do various disciplinary researchers study behaviours, norms, and behavioural change. What research writing practices do they engage in to communicate their findings about behaviours, norms, and behavioural change? Using peer-reviewed scholarly journal articles, writing exercises, discussions, and critical feedback on writing assignments, you will be able to construct your own text-based research proposal and research paper on a behaviour, norm that you’re keen to study. Your paper will assist keen readers to change their understanding of your chosen topic.

Instructor: Jonathan Otto

Sections:  527*, 537*, 567*

*Some seats in these sections are reserved for students in the BIE Program

Available Times: 10:00, 11:00, 2:00 - M/W/F

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.

In this course, we will do so by reading sustainability research from scholars in multiple academic disciplines within the Faculty of Arts and in fields within other faculties like engineering and the natural sciences.  Given their diverse training, scholars within these disciplines understand “sustainability” to mean different things, analyze it in different ways, and write about it in genres that are unique to their disciplinary communities.  We will examine how knowledge about “sustainability” is produced and communicated in each of these disciplinary contexts and highlight commonalities and differences across them.  We will also draw on scholarly research to consider alternative ways of conceptualizing human-environment relations that extend beyond the concept of “sustainability.”  In addition to reading scholarly research, you will have the opportunity to conduct your own research on “sustainability” and to communicate your findings in scholarly genres.  In doing so, you will be able cultivate a critical understanding of the concept of “sustainability” and to develop your own identity as a novice researcher and member of the university.

Instructor: Kimberly Richards

Sections:  542,  581

Available Times:  12:00,  4:00 - M/W/F

From public apologies issued by politicians for historical violences to theatrical strategies activists deploy to draw attention to injustice, performance is an important mode and medium of political communication. In this course, we will study some of the ways that political actors use performative strategies on stage and in everyday life with real consequences in the world. We will examine how diverse actors use scripts, choreographies, rehearsal practices, acting strategies, stage design, and recording technologies to persuade audiences of their righteousness, legitimacy and authority, and gain social, cultural, political and/or economic power in the process of doing so. We will observe how scholars working in social movement studies, critical Indigenous studies, discourse studies, celebrity studies, gender and women’s studies, and critical media studies describe, analyze, interpret and critique how power is gained, invoked and maintained through performance analysis. Doing so will help us to become more attentive and engaged citizens.

Instructor: Kimberly Richards

Sections:  577*

*Some seats in this section are reserved for students in the BIE Program

Available Times:  3:00 - M/W/F

Why do some cultural forms—like certain foods, music, or films—become highly valued while others are overlooked? This course examines culture as both a system of meaning and an economic force, asking how value is produced, assigned, and contested. Through critical reading and analytical writing, students investigate how cultural goods and practices are produced, priced, circulated, and legitimized, and how these processes determine who benefits from them—and who is excluded.

Across contexts—from everyday tastes to global media industries—the course considers how preferences signal distinction and reproduce social difference. Cultural capital, institutional gatekeeping, and education systems help determine whose tastes come to count, while cultural industries operate through markets structured by pricing, intellectual property, platform economies, and algorithmic visibility. These dynamics raise central questions: Do markets expand access or entrench hierarchy? How do funding systems and cultural policy define “excellence,” “innovation,” or “access,” and with what consequences? The course also examines creative labor and precarity, global cultural flows, cultural tourism, and the role of culture in urban development.

Writing is not separate from these questions; it is a primary tool for analyzing them. Students use writing to define and test concepts of economic and symbolic value, build arguments about how culture circulates and accumulates worth, and evaluate evidence about its social and material effects. Through analytical assignments, students learn to make persuasive claims, work with sources, and adapt their arguments for different academic contexts while critically examining how cultural value is constructed, measured, and contested.

Instructor: Jennifer Cowe

Sections:  541, 561, 571

Available Times: 12:00, 2:00, 3:00 - M/W/F

This course will aim to explore how different academic disciplines engage with the concept of nostalgia. Nostalgia is a word, or more usually a feeling, that most people have used or felt; however, very few understand its constant presence in everyday life. We will study nostalgia from its earliest appearance in academia as a form of mental illness in the seventeenth century and follow its growing influence over, and manipulation of, contemporary ideas of national identity, consumerism, class, social media and the environment. We will attempt to understand how the politics of memory, belonging and collective remembrance reflect and inform current political discourse.

Instructor: Mary Ann Saunders

Sections:  530, 540

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

Course update in progress

Instructor: Alexis McGee

Sections: 711

Available Times:  9:30 - T/TR

This course investigates the importance of voice as it is composed through a variety of forms. What does it mean to read voice within texts? How do we listen to voices? How can we craft voice when we write? In addition to seeking answers to these questions, this course builds working definitions for the features defining voice, loosely, by engaging with scholarly conversations across discourses (sociolinguistics, writing studies, postcolonialism, etc.). By the end of this course, students should be able to identify, develop, and understand of how voice can be used rhetorically.

Instructor: Stephen Dadugblor

Sections:  721

Available Times: 11:00 - T/R

The proliferation of digital technologies has enabled the generation, storage, and processing of data on unprecedented scales, with implications for our social and political lives. In this course, we will focus on social networking sites as an example of such technologies to examine how they shape citizens’ participation in politics and democratic processes. We will discuss key concerns regarding the practice of politics and democracy today: digital activism, fake news, misinformation/disinformation, and demagoguery, among others. We will read research by scholars across multiple disciplines who study the connection between social networking sites and political participation across cultures. As we discuss these scholarly articles, we will gain familiarity with knowledge-making in the disciplines, learn scholarly conventions of academic discourse communities, and participate effectively as apprentice members.

Instructor: Jennifer Gagnon

Sections:  751

Available Times: 7:00 - R - online

Video games are neither “just for kids,” nor simple escapist entertainment. Indeed, video games are fast becoming one of the most profitable and innovative forms of creative and artistic expression today. Deeper study reveals that video games as a genre are heavily influenced by social and political understandings of ability, gender, race, sexuality, and identity. Issues related to diversity and inclusion such as who gets to play, whose stories are told, and who is represented, have taken centre stage in recent explorations of the future of gaming at the intersections of fun, profit, and politics. While video games let the player be in control, not everyone’s stories are represented. The theme of this course will explore how aspects of identity such as gender, race, ability, and sexuality, influence the ways that we experience and respond to the genre of video games as a media making and political practice.

Instructor: </TBA

Sections:  732

Available Times: 2:00 - T/R