Explore Colloquium Course Offerings

This course examines major areas and issues in contemporary Africa. Using an interdisciplinary approach, it examines in some detail the major political, economic, cultural, and environmental realities that characterize contemporary Africa. Among the topics to be explored are the impact of the spread of capitalism and consumer culture, the dynamic involvement of international organizations, and the influential power of the media. The course’s ultimate goal is to familiarize students with the many challenges and opportunities facing Africa and its diaspora in the global twenty-first century.

Baseball is so much more than a game! It tells a story about how we see, think, and act—a mirror of the human experience that also reflects issues of race, identity, and social change. Technology and modern analytics have also redefined expertise and success, transforming how the game is played and understood. Through literature, film, history, psychology, data science, and philosophy, we will explore baseball by reading, watching, and debating how America’s pastime connects to larger questions about knowledge, identity, culture, and time.

A first-year colloquium designed to introduce students to the concept of building their own personal brand. Drawing from foundational principles in marketing and professional development, the course challenges students to explore and articulate their values, goals, and strengths as they begin their academic journey. In addition to developing a personal brand, students will hone fundamental skills including collaborative teamwork, analytical thinking, clear and concise writing, and building/delivering strong presentations. Emphasis is placed on producing college-level work, engaging in thoughtful peer feedback, and building the confidence and self-awareness necessary to navigate academic and professional environments.

"Camp" has been characterized as excessive, ostentatious, affected..., gay. It has been described as an aesthetic, sensibility, style, or taste where high art meets popular culture "in" fashion. Camp is where the Tiffany Lamp meets Lady Gaga, where Judith Butler meets Susan Sontag, or where drag meets Patrick Swayze. Historically speaking, to "read" camp is to "know" - to finally be "seen" within a culture that rarely "looks". This colloquium is an introduction to camp in its various forms. Like camp itself, we will bring together high theory and popular culture and explore our own presence and resistance within our readings of identity, performativity, and sexuality. We will wrestle with such questions as: Do we always know camp when we see it? Who is able to participate in camp? Is camp always subversive?

Color is both familiar and puzzling. If you're color-sighted, you can tell red from green just by looking, but are you sure that they look the same to you as they look to someone else? For example, could it be that the color you see when you look at a raspberry is the color that I see when I look at spinach? Can we rule out this possibility somehow? Now consider pigments and light. When we mix red and green pigments, the result is brown, while when we mix red and green light, the result is yellow. What accounts for this difference between pigments and light? Finally, consider that color naming systems vary widely across languages. Are there corresponding differences in the ways that native speakers of those languages actually perceive color? In this course, we'll investigate questions like these. We'll start with in-class experiments with pigments and light, developing theories to account for the phenomena that we observe. We'll then extend our examination of color into other fields, including philosophy, anthropology, and the visual arts. You'll emerge from the course not only with a better understanding of color but with a sharper appreciation for the strangeness of ordinary things.

In an era of rapid urbanization, the city leaders of Bearcatopolis face a high-stakes challenge: how do you design a city that works for everyone—when resources are limited and trade-offs are unavoidable?
How do you build an energy grid that is both sustainable and affordable? How do you protect the environment without stalling economic growth? How do you ensure that subpopulations of your community aren't disproportionately impacted by the decisions you make?
These aren’t abstract questions—they’re the real optimization problems shaping cities around the world every day. And they’re only getting more complex.
In this course, you’ll step into the role of a decision-maker, exploring how principles from urbanization and industrial engineering can be used to tackle these challenges. You’ll learn how to define, measure, and optimize for equity while balancing competing priorities in city planning.
If you’re interested in solving real-world problems, making data-driven decisions, and designing more equitable and sustainable communities, this class is for you.

This course will foster intercultural awareness through the study of modern and contemporary visual artists and poets from different continents. Many of these artists and authors developed friendships and cultural connections, thereby creating an intercontinental channel of cultural exchange. We will study the poetic work of Federico García Lorca (Spain), Gabriela Mistral (Chile), Aimé Césaire (Martinique) and Mahmoud Darwish (Palestine), among others. Along with these poets, we will explore the art of influential cultural icons around the world, such as Frida Kahlo (Mexico), Salvador Dalí (Spain), and Yayoi Kusama (Japan). We will delve into this intercultural dialogue between artists of words and images using an anthropological approach. This approach involves examining poems and artworks, as expressions of cultural identity-- within their social, historical, and political context, as well as analyzing their symbolism and themes alongside the relationships between artists, their audiences, and the power dynamics at play. With this perspective, we will appreciate visual art and poetry not just for their aesthetic value but as windows into the cultural psyche and social fabric of its time.

Every object you use or consume has traveled an extraordinary journey through a global supply chain to reach you. The coffee in your cup, the phone in your pocket, and the sneakers on your feet have each passed through dozens of hands and countries before reaching you. Together, these journeys form a vast network stretched across the globe, shaping economies, communities, and environments at every node. Yet this network remains largely invisible to consumers — we see only the final product, never the complex web of labor, logistics, and decisions that produced it. This colloquium pulls back the curtain on that hidden world. In this course, you will learn to critically examine supply chains and explore the economic, ethical, and environmental dimensions of the choices embedded within them.

What is the difference between being a human being and being moss, a bit of garbage, or a cauliflower? What a cauliflower is is fixed, let us suppose, by nature: science tells us what such things are. According to the existentialist, this is not true of the human being. That is, what is true of us is, at least in part, a function of what we say or think about ourselves, how we live our lives. We are, as it is sometimes said, self-interpreting animals; as such, freedom is fundamental to the kinds of beings we are. Consequently, we bear a kind of responsibility for what is true of us that the cauliflower does not, and nothing can disburden us of that responsibility. What, if anything, can have authority for me, in view of my radical freedom? Can anything, and, if so, does nothing? What can authority even mean in such circumstances? What does obedience to such authority look like? In what ways can authority and obedience be deformed? Such questions are not unique to the philosophical movement known as existentialism, but it is characteristic of the latter that it so consistently leaves the asking and answering of them entirely to the individual, particularly concerned as it is with the various ways in which we tend to disown responsibility for asking and answering them ourselves. Existentialist themes are the stuff of great modern literature as well as of European philosophy in the mid and late 20th century. Our colloquium will focus on one seminal example: Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, in which a young and impoverished law student named Raskolnikov commits an apparently senseless murder with the aim of determining whether morality is truly binding on him. The bulk of the novel is spent trying to decipher Raskolnikov’s peculiar motivations and to understand the significance of his ostensible failure to “step over” morality. In our Colloquium we will read and critically analyse Dostoevsky’s great novel with an eye to understanding his conceptions of good, evil, and human agency.

Icons and media celebrities, advertising and news images, and a myriad of visual messages that we encounter in our daily life all try to shape the way we think, feel, and respond to the reality around us. They are designed to influence our beliefs and values, our sense of identity, our consumer preferences, as well as our social commitments and affiliations. In our intellectual journey we will learn to critically understand such artifacts of visual culture; visual literacy is the aim of this colloquium. We will consider approaches to visual expression and focus on the web presence of art, performative events, and architecture in Berlin, Vienna, and Shanghai as well as the representation of these metropoles in film, literature, and music. The colloquium will include a viewing of works at the Hallie Ford Museum of Art.

Where does our food come from and how does the study of food systems help us understand issues of justice and race? How can we change food systems to address issues of equity, justice, and health? This course provides an introduction to issues of food justice and food sovereignty locally, nationally, and globally. Topics include historical, political, and ethical context of food systems and sustainable agriculture; problems with the current industrial food system; critical assessment of alternative agriculture movements; how race, culture, and economics shape notions of food justice and food sovereignty; challenges and opportunities for creating a more just and local food system in the mid-Willamette Valley. The course will include farm work at Willamette’s Zena farm and area organic farms as well as service learning with community partners.

Food gives us life and connects us to each other. It provokes strong feelings—we love some foods and hate others. What is food? What is cooking? How do we communicate about food? Together we will explore these questions through the study of food media. Every day we consume media that focus on food. Have you ever shared a photo of food with somebody in your life? Then you are also a producer of food media. In this course we will get a taste for the work of scholars, journalists, celebrity chefs, public intellectuals, food justice activists, business owners, and social workers who communicate about food. We will discuss, critique, and design food media of our own, sampling a variety of genres: articles, movies, social media posts, advertising messages, manga, cartoons, podcasts, and more. We will work in teams and share our food media critique, design, and production to become more conscious eaters who care about people, culture, and the environment and therefore about the system of food in our lives and in the world.

Ancient Greek and Roman history, literature, and culture have long been seen as foundational to "western civilization," the source of powerful ideas that drive heated debates even today. Why do we still care so much about these societies from two thousand years ago? This course provides an introduction to some of the key texts from Greek and Roman antiquity, as well as to the ways in which "the classics" have been used and misused in later eras. We will examine why they continue to be both so relevant and so fraught, and explore whether they can help us better understand some of the problems we are wrestling with today.

…you have never heard of is the Ancient Greek romance novel Aithiopika (3rd cent. CE), by a certain Heliodorus from Syrian Emesa. The princess Chariklea, exposed at birth by the Ethiopian queen because she was ashamed her infant was born White, only learns of her identity as a young woman, which sets her on a perilous journey from Greece accompanied by her beautiful lover Theagenes to reclaim her patrimony. Not only can Aithiopika be considered the first “passing novel,” when it was translated into French in 1547 it inspired the invention of the modern European novel – a work of prose fiction. We trace its impact on Western literature through a series of firsts: Oroonoko: Or, the Royal Slave. A True History (1688) by Aphra Behn, one of the first English women novelists; Samuel Richardson’s Pamela; Or, Virtue Rewarded (1740), the first "realistic" novel; and Of One Blood: Or, the Hidden Self (1903) by Pauline Hopkins, editor of the first African American literary magazine. Along the way we ponder questions both literary and cultural about the relationship between the real world and the world of the novel. CONTENT ADVISORY: These texts describe sexualized violence.

Plato is one of the most important philosophers who has ever lived. His writings are thousands of years old, yet they still have the power to provoke and captivate. His influence is so great that some have said that Western philosophy "consists of a series of footnotes to Plato." This course will be a study of several major works by Plato, works that stand out not only as wonderful examples of philosophy but also as examples of great literature. Some of the questions we will address are: What is the nature of reality? Do we have souls, and is there life after death? What does a just society look like? Is it possible to teach virtue? And what is the nature of love?

Russia's war on Ukraine will affect the world for generations. How did we get to this point? From the outset, twenty-first century Russia has been mired in violence, both physical and ideological. Putin's first action as Prime Minister in 1999 was to initiate the second Chechen war. He went on to use violence against the people of Georgia, Syria, and Ukraine. He has also waged war on the Russian constitution and the independent press, attacking nascent democratic institutions and individual human rights. Writers and artists across the region continue to push back. We will investigate their works, along with journalistic and historical texts, to better understand the context of these wars and their impact on ordinary citizens.

Have you ever wondered why magical stories often take place in dense forests or high up in the mountains? How did people come up with the idea of trees that can talk and walk? And why do impenetrable fortresses in the mountains always seem to have an abundance of gold and silver, and their inhabitants live forever? “Storytelling and Environment” is a course that delves into a vast collection of myths and tales from various cultures around the world, both ancient and modern. The course explores how humanity’s stories have always been intertwined with nature, and how these stories can help raise awareness about environmental conservation. Employing some theories on this topic, the course analyzes stories from different traditions, including Native American folklore, European tales, and Chinese and Persian mythology, to better understand the historical relationship between humanity and nature, and how storytelling can influence environmental consciousness and advocacy.

Cooperation is everywhere, but we often don’t pause to think about why it succeeds. Through multi-disciplinary readings and practical activities, we challenge our beliefs about self-interest, fairness, and what motivates people to collaborate. By examining institutions, animal behavior, and cultures around the world we aim to understand when cooperation thrives, when it breaks down, and how trust is built across significant divides. Students leave with new perspectives and practical tools to address the cooperation challenges that are most important in their lives and in the world.