First Year Forum, XPL
50:525:162:01
Dr. Lee Ann Westman
Tuesday & Thursday 2:00pm-3:20pm
The Honors College First-Year Forum is a 3-credit course organized around the 2022/23 theme “What is a Just Community?” This course is required of all first-year Honors College students in their first or second semester at Rutgers-Camden. Faculty from across campus will join us each week to discuss how their discipline approaches the question of “What is a Just Community” and students will work with Honors College Teaching Assistants and each other on semester-long projects to produce a change-making product, service, or initiative.
Upper Division Honors Courses
Contemporary Art: Seeking Justice, AAI
50:525:152:01
Cyril Reade
Tuesday & Thursday 9:35am-10:55am
In this course we work with the 1619 project, a history of slavery in the US. We begin by reading essays addressing different topics each week and identifying artists whose work addresses a similar issue.
A just society
The 1619 Project is a multi-authored re-writing of US history through the lens of the institution of slavery. The project was launched to commemorate the 500th anniversary of the arrival in the US of the first vessel transporting kidnapped Africans in 1619 and the creation of a slave economy that has since emancipation distorted American life. Slavery is the root of the injustices, discrepancies, inequalities, and discrimination that have driven US political, financial, social and cultural life.
The course takes as its vantage point this interpretation of US history. Authors, writing from different disciplinary vantage points, trace various aspects of slavery and its post-emancipation legacy in maintaining an unjust society. We assume that the authors shine a light on these dark corners so that society can move towards just communities, as Nikole Hannah-Jones lays out in the first essay. In the first weeks we find artists whose work complements this search for justice, each individual and community working towards defined goals within their field of concern. We also narrow the scope of the 1619 project to discover its history in Camden and in the lives of its residents.
Truth, Justice, and Reconciliation, GCM – FULL
50:525:153:01
Nate Walker
Monday 12:30pm-3:20pm
Course Description: Throughout the world, Truth and Reconciliation Commissions formed in response to political unrest, racial segregation, war, and genocide. They have become one of the most effective geopolitical tools for local communities to create cultures of resiliency. For instance, organizers in South Africa provided a public space for people to speak the truth about their part in violence and train perpetrators and victims to achieve an authentic state of reconciliation. In this cross-national course, students will apply theories of Restorative Justice to the study of Truth and Reconciliation Commissions that formed throughout the world, with attention to South Africa, Rwanda, Bosnia, New York City, and Philadelphia.
What is a Just Sporting Community?, EAV
50:525:155:01
Dr. Catherine D’Ignazio
Tuesday & Thursday 2:00pm-3:20pm
Sport occupies a unique place in the American culture and psyche. Purportedly rules based and impartially monitored for breeches of those rules, sport provides us with a ubiquitous metaphor of fairness and justice, “the level playing field.” Sport is proffered as a potentially fair and just culture within a larger less so one. Because of this sport is a space attractive to those seeking fairness and justice At the same time such ideals are professed, American sport enthusiasts created a culture where sportsmanship and gamesmanship are admired equally. And if balancing between admirable and deplorable were not enough of a contradiction to sport’s claims to fairness, the very bodies that play/do/make sport can fall within or outside other rules for engagement; are the bodies the “right” sex, gender, race, complexion, origin, political and polite presentation? What are the rewards for being the “right” ones or reprimands for not? And most importantly is there a community that also experiences those individually targeted rewards and reprimands? Do communities fashion responses to rewards and reprimands? In other words, how are the institutional, symbolic and personal consequences of rewards and reprimands in the world of sport experienced?
This course will explore the many ways sport has offered the space for efforts to expand and participate in American culture based upon sport’s purportedly close association to fairness and justice.
Searching for Utopia, EAV
50:525:155:02
Shauna Shames
Tuesday & Thursday 11:10am-12:30pm
This course will wrestle with the question of what makes a “just community” by examining fictional and historical attempts to envision or enact utopia. Communist societies are perhaps the best known empirical examples, and we will examine the theory and practical application of these; but these and other examples of utopian thinking, when put into practice, have been disastrous for millions. Fictional attempts at achieving utopia have similarly examined both the causes and consequences of attempts to institute utopian thinking (generally with a focus on the negative consequences for individuals). This course will consider both the positive goals and visions behind such experiments as well as their fairly terrible results overall.
Seminar on Professional Nursing
57:705:102:H1
Jamille Nagtalon-Ramos
Tuesday 8:00am-10:50am
This introductory nonclinical course in nursing is designed to provide the student with a foundation in nursing knowledge that will provide the basis for ensuing theory and clinical nursing courses. Major foci will be the discipline and profession of nursing, its history, its conceptual and theoretical structures, and the patterns of knowledge needed for developing the science and practice of nursing. It requires the integration of previously acquired knowledge in the sciences, arts, and humanities and introduces basic concepts in epidemiology, demographics, and cultural competencies, as well as the knowledge necessary for a beginning understanding of the research process, and for development of interpersonal and interdisciplinary communication skills. The ethics and values of the profession as well as the scope of practice and other legal and regulatory aspects will be introduced. Current issues in nursing and the many roles of the baccalaureate-prepared professional nurse will be examined and discussed as the student is socialized to become a self-reflective, accountable, lifelong learner given to self-appraisal as she or he navigates the route to achieving the terminal objectives of the curriculum.