UCOR Section Descriptions

Course Description

Class Piano is designed for students who have no previous experience in piano playing. The course introduces basic keyboard and musicianship skills that enable students to be musically creative and expressive, as well as enable them to enjoy the process of creating music. Emphasis is placed on developing listening skills, performing skills, and a few useful elements of music theory. Beyond developing basic playing skills, this class will enable students to develop the confidence to make aesthetic judgments, express themselves creatively through the piano and interpret and analyze music.

Course Description

This course will both broaden and deepen your understanding of music through the study of—and hands-on experience with—experimental approaches to contemporary popular music composition and production across a wide range of styles and genres. A strong emphasis will be placed on the development of listening skills, the ability to write critically and meaningfully about connections between music and culture, and creative engagement with the musical tools and techniques we will be covering.

Course Description

In this course we will be addressing the identity of the Asian/Asian-American through literature, film, and Critical Race Theory. Students will be introduced to key concepts that help us better understand the historical condition of the Asian/Asian-American persona including assimilation, model minority myth, shame, vulnerability, and others, that continues to change with generational differences.

Course Description

This course examines how movies can engage issues of social justice. By analyzing how movies construct logical arguments, appeal to audiences' desires, and invoke a variety of emotional responses, this course traces the methods by which audiences are transformed into active social participants. Through analysis of films that engage a variety of social justice issues, students in this course will gain an understanding of how moving images wield the power to affect social change.

Course Description

Do video games matter? How do they make meaning? We'll explore the ways in which various video games communicate messages to audiences, focusing on their words, design, and play. Addressing matters ranging from console design to specific games and the people who play them, this class will investigate how video games communicate and why that process of media representation is meaningful.

Course Description

Do we live in a posthuman (or transhuman) world? Is the category of the human no longer expansive enough to account for all the ways in which we live today? Virtual existences, scientific advancements, and philosophical investigations have pushed us to what some would consider the "limit" of a purely human existence. However, the category of the hybrid, the marvelous, the cybernetic has been a topic of literary investigation for hundreds (if not thousands) of years. This course reads some of those literary texts alongside the concepts of both humanism and posthumanism-interrogating the literary texts for the ways that they frame and respond to the category of the human.

Course Description

This class examines the technologies by which images and visual forms are produced, circulated and received, as well as the theories of seeing that make the visual world intelligible. It will introduce students to the social role of images and visuality (the structures and power relations of society), with a particular focus on frames of race, gender and sexuality.

Course Description

Stories are the vocabulary necessary to "cultural literacy." We need stories to read with. Without stories, the world is uninterpretable. In this course, students will explore a story archetype that they will quickly recognize in their own lives. It is the lived story, provocatively told in great films and literature, of our approaching, pushing, and transgressing boundaries.

Course Description

This course will be an intellectual history of the two movements that stand as the foundation of modern Western thought and culture: the Enlightenment and Romanticism. The goal will be to come to an understanding of the manner in which these two movements articulated competing and alternative visions as to the nature of individual and collective life. In this manner, we should come to better grasp the assumptions and presuppositions that still underpin contemporary thinking about political, social, cultural, ethical, and spiritual matters.

Course Description

This course asks how art objects can provide us access to the meaning of place in ways that reveal spaces, regions, landscapes, cities, and nations to be terrains of competing interests and complicated senses of belonging. We will focus on the role that the American West has played in the American popular imagination through a variety of forms of visual art, including: 19 c. landscape painting and survey photographs, Native American art and notions of place, 20th c. regional painters such as the ''Northwest Mystics," the 1962 Seattle World's Fair, 1970s land and environmental art, and contemporary practices that address the experience of the rural and the urban. We will read material from art history, literature, geography and urban theory in this course. There will be a take-home essay exam and students will be required to write papers that synthesize readings and the analysis of art works, and complete a research and writing project on a facet of the local Seattle environment.