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New Social Sciences Courses for 2006-2007
Below you will find information about a couple of new courses and information about other offerings you might not know about. We encourage SS majors to seriously consider our upper division offerings, where you can count on being the main audience.
Fall 2006
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Susanna Peters
Intellectual Property Law is a new course that will be jointly taught by Susanna Peters, Joel Touriniemi (Business), and James Baker (Intellectual Property Office). Students will explore Intellectual Property fundamentals through lecture, discussion, and hands on projects involving Copyright, Trademark, Trade Secrets, Patent development and Licensing. This course is ideal for students who are interested in government policy and business entrepreneurship as well as systems and software development, communication and engineering. It will familiarize students with issues that arise in the arenas of work, economy, global politics and individual expression. This course confronts significant issues for students who plan to write, invent, develop or create.
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Carol MacLennan
This course covers the sub-field of environmental anthropology, which boasts a rich literature on how communities around the world deal with ecological changes posed by globalization and industrialization. The class will explore the politics of environmental change in indigenous communities, peasant societies, and developing nations. Discussions and reading in this class will focus upon cases of mining in sensitive lands of the arctic and Pacific islands, pesticide use in Latin American agriculture, conflict between national parks and indigenous peoples, and intellectual property rights of indigenous communities. Students will produce a professional research report and presentation on a topic of their choice and participate in seminar discussions.
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Above: The Russian city of Noril’sk lies in Siberia at the western edge of the Putorana Plateau roughly 300 kilometers (180 miles) north of the Arctic Circle. This city of 230,000 people has only one reason for existence in this isolated location: mining. Image and caption by NASA Visible Earth. |
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Kathleen Halvorsen
This graduate course emphasizes sociological concepts, research methods, and public participatory processes as tools to understanding and resolving environmental problems. It is typically an interdisciplinary course with students from the graduate program in Environmental Policy, as well as students from Forestry and Engineering disciplines. Students develop skills in analyzing our social world through a sociological perspective and developing interview skills that can be used to better understand this world. Involving the public in environmental decision making through public participatory techniques builds on this understanding. The course ends with a presentation and research paper or proposal that uses course concepts to analyze an environmental issue of the student's choosing. Advanced, serious Social Science Seniors are encouraged to contact Kathy Halvorsen kehalvor@mtu.edu to discuss the course. They must have permission of the instructor to take it.
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Above: Discussion about conservation easement. |
Added Section:
Adjunct Professor Steven Karpiak
Alternate year courses for Fall 2006:
Timothy Scarlett
Michael Bennett: Note change instructor
Reminder About SS Methods
ALSO – SS Majors should be aware that SS 4010, Social Science Methods, is being offered in its regular alternate year cycle during spring 2007. This course is one of the ways that students may meet the methods class requirement. Depending upon your degree program, other methods course options include SS 4500, Historiography (fall semester, odd-numbered years); SS 3211, Ethnographic Methods (spring semester, even-numbered years); and SS 3210, Field Archaeology (summers).
Spring 2007
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Bruce Seely
Examines the development of scientific enterprises in the U.S. from the colonial period through the present day. Emphasizes institutional bases of science and the place of scientific activities within American society.
Left: Benjamin Franklin, American Scientist. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Detroit Publishing Company Collection. |
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Michael Bennett
Consideration of the social, economic, political, and ethical aspects of the emergent science and engineering for nanotechnology.
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Carol MacLennan
This course examines Pacific island geography, archaeology, history, and culture from New Zealand to Hawaii. We will look at the unique bio-physical world of Pacific islands, the origins and spread of culture through navigation technologies, colonial consequences of encounters with the West, indigenous literature and film, and life in a post-colonial world.
Spring 2007 Offering for Anthropology/SS Majors & Others
MWF 2-3 p.m.
Left: Te Ara (Pathway). Encyclopedia of New Zealand. |
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