Neutral during WWII, and claiming a "Middle Way" between east and west in the post-war twentieth century, Sweden - its people, institutions, and culture - has left its mark on our global society. In today's world, the influence of Swedish ideas and innovations can be seen in government structures, health and social policies, business organizations, working life, education, science, art, literature, and, of course, the design and style of many products and services which enjoy high demand. These are impressive impacts from a nation-state of only eight million people. What lessons are there for Americans and our institutions as we enter the twenty-first century where our leadership position, ability to determine the rules and control the agenda of world economic and political affairs are diminished? In this course, we focus on "the people philosophy" of Sweden, its government, businesses and organizations. We cover healthcare issues and policy, sustainable development, the European Community and the human relations issues in organizations. This course will include meetings with academics and leaders from industry, government, health care, science, media, arts and culture. Students will meet with and learn from these representatives in order to explore Swedish organizational dynamics, both in terms of its economic prosperity and the problems Swedish society faces today.

What makes an economy grow? This question has been asked – and answered – many times over in the modern era. From Adam Smith’s classic Wealth of Nations (1776) to today’s political leaders, many have debated the ingredients necessary for a nation to prosper, or policies to promote growth. Some point to the need for fiscal responsibility, others an educated labor force, or to tariffs, natural resources, and the right laws. This seminar explores the deep history of this problem of economic growth. Students will read works by economists, social scientists, and historians that present different theories for why some nations develop faster than others. With case studies from across the globe, we will tackle topics like why Europe industrialized first, or the paradox of why the abundance of natural resources does not necessarily contribute to long-lasting economic development. This course also asks students to think critically about the metrics used to measure “success” and “failure” across nations, as well as how such comparisons between societies have been mobilized to legitimize imperial expansion, human exploitation, environmental destruction, or political repression. By discussing how governments, corporate interests, and individual actors have implemented strategies to increase national wealth, students will also be asked to grapple with some of the consequences of economic growth for the environment, human welfare, and social inequality.

Economic Development encompasses a range of professional practices, from finance to marketing, education to hospitality. Historically, economic development practitioners have marshaled these tools in the name of economic growth, though more recently equity has received increasing attention in the space. Drawing on literature as well as the real-world experiences of a number of practitioners who will join the course as guest lecturers, this class will provide a survey of the range of techniques utilized in the practice of economic development as well as an analytic framework for understanding their efficacy. Students will be asked to critically consider the costs and benefits of the various approaches to economic development, putting themselves in the position of policymakers to think about the circumstances under which each best applies.

How and when do media become digital? What does digitization afford and what is lost as television and cinema become digitized? As lots of things around us turn digital, have we started telling stories, sharing experiences, and replaying memories differently? What has happened to television and life after New Media ? How have television audiences been transformed by algorithmic cultures of Netflix and Hulu? How have (social) media transformed socialities as ephemeral snaps and swiped intimacies become part of the "new" digital/phone cultures? This is an introductory survey course and we discuss a wide variety of media technologies and phenomena that include: cloud computing, Internet of Things, trolls, distribution platforms, optical fiber cables, surveillance tactics, social media, and race in cyberspace. We also examine emerging mobile phone cultures in the Global South and the environmental impact of digitization. Course activities include Tumblr blog posts and Instagram curations. The final project could take the form of either a critical essay (of 2000 words) or a media project.

This course explores the social and cultural history and current views of the many Wests we think we know, In 1872, President Grant established Yellowstone National Park, only the first of many national and state nature reserves in the west. Even while the Parks were widely celebrated, in 1876 Grant allowed miners and land speculators into the Black Hills, or Paha Sapa, land long considered sacred by the Lakota peoples and 'protected' for them as recently as 1868 Treaty of Laramie. From this pairing of events in the 1870s spring the many overlapping themes this course will address: Native peoples, their beliefs and material cultures, pressured by the arrival of scattered industries (gold rushes, silver and copper mining); irregular sources of industrial and banking capital from England, New York, Chicago, and elsewhere; the arrival of the US Army in 1851, then a break removing troops for the Civil War, then their renewed and constant appearance from 1866 on and the making and breaking of other treaties; the irregular scattering of land speculators and dirt farmers, even while the US government insisted the Sioux and Cheyennes, among other peoples, not disturb the passage of planters on the Oregon Trail, even as their hunting grounds were enclosed by the Union Pacific and North Pacific railroads by 1870. Naturalists, hikers, and artists arrived by rail to the western parks: Yellowstone, Yosemite (1890), and the Grand Canyon (1919). By 1900, American tourists went west to see wild West Indian Shows and wonder at the new parks. They ate at restaurants serving western food, wore western ware and cowboy boots, and listened to western music that finally reached its high point when folklorist Hal Cannon founded the National Cowboy Poetry Gathering in Elko, Nevada, in 1984, still active today with offshoots in Durango, Montana, and Texas.

How much have humans altered the planet they live omn? Beyond climate change, humans have altered the Earth's land, oceans and biosphere to such an extent that the concept of a new geologic epoch defined by th eaction of humans is seriously debated.This seminar will examine th eorigins of the Anthropocene, the ways in which humans have altered Earth systems, whether or not these altera-tions warrant a new geologic designation, and what the future potentially holds for both humans and the planet.

This course will examine the ways in which humans manipulate - and have been manipulated by - the organisms we depend on for food, with particular emphasis on the biological factors that influence this interaction. The first part of the course will cover the biology, genetics, evolution, and breeding of cultivated plants and animals; the second part will concern the ecological, economic, and political factors that influence food production.

Virtually every business imaginable–from oil refining to semiconductor manufacturing to cloud computing—requires copious supplies of fresh water. As climate change makes many parts of the world hotter and drier, it is increasingly important for today’s business leaders to be able to understand water challenges and to implement solutions that will enable businesses to thrive in the future. This course will begin by focusing on global water risks and global, national, and local water governance. It will also cover private governance and water. The course will examine the duties of corporate officers and directors in developing and implementing a firm’s water sustainability program, how major water projects are financed, and the business ethics issues surrounding “doing the right thing” in a module on water and ESG (environmental, social and governance factors). It will conclude with an “H2O Shark Tank” exercise where student groups pitch their best ideas for sustainable water solutions to a panel of potential funders, including investment banks, corporate executives, and foundation leaders.

This course explores the ways Victorian literature wrestled with and helped shape the way we understand ourselves and the natural world, forming the basis of modern ecology.

This class explores the social, economic, ecological, and cultural dynamics of metropolitan and community food systems in U.S. cities. Field trips and assignments immerse students in various forms of experiential learning - including farming and gardening, cooking, eating, and more. After a broad introduction to global, regional, and urban food systems in our first three weeks, across most of the semester we follow the food chain (or cycle), from production to processing, distribution, cooking, consumption, and waste. Specific topics include urban agriculture, community kitchens, grocery, hunger and food assistance, restaurants, neighborhoods, food cultures, food justice, and community food security. Students will gain broad literacies in: metropolitan and neighborhood food environments; food production, processing, distribution, access, and preparation; and the relationships between food, culture, and society. Students taking this class should be open to trying new things, getting hands dirty, and working with others in various settings and activities.

From Wall Street to rural Sub-Saharan Africa, technology innovation to aging infrastructure-this course will explore the; impact of water and consider what future leaders need to know about the dynamics of the industry, investment and business opportunities, and water-related risk; Opportunities for water are booming around the world, in large part because of existing or looming shortages and decades of underinvestment, population growth, rapid industrialization and urbanization, pollution, and climate change. Water is the only irreplaceable natural resource on the planet. Its critical role in every aspect of the global economy, could, in fact, lead it to be the next gold or the next oil; This course will address the fundamentals of the water sector from an international perspective. The future of water will be critical to our global economic, social and political development and will likely become one of the most influential factors in business decisions for the future. Furthermore, it is essential for leaders across all sectors-from pharmaceuticals to financials, energy to agriculture-to understand how to sustainably manage and account for water resources, capitalize on new technologies, mitigate water-related risks and navigate through complex and dynamic policy and regulation. The course will engage students in high-level discussion and strategy formation, challenging them to develop creative and sustainable solutions to some of the greatest challenges facing environmental, business and water industry leaders today. Interactive sessions and projects will provide an introduction to appropriately managing, valuing and investing in water assets to create sustainable and compelling business opportunities.

This course will provide an understanding of the Earth's climate system and how and why this has changed through time. The emphasis will be placed on spatial and temporal scales in the modern system while exploring the evidence for past change, possible mechanisms to explain these changes and the implications of these changes to past, present and future global climate. Students will learn to reconstruct the history and scales of climate change through the use of proxies; understand the mechanisms that act to drive climate change; show and understanding of the long-term natural climate variability on a global and regional scale; understand the importance of natural environmental change, against which to assess human impacts, recent climate change and issues of future environmental change.

This is a class about the live(s) and afterlives of information from 1850 to the present. Not only can information be reproduced (in a variety of material conditions); it can be repurposed and funneled through a variety of different applications, some of them serving radically different purposes than the first purpose of gathering it. Thoreau's journals of plant flowering, for instance, have become important indicators of climate change. More controversial is the sale of biomedical information by personal genomics services for drug discovery, or the construction of forensic databases consisting of the DNA of suspects arrested as a result of racial profiling. We will study the ways in which data has become a way for us to understand and define change, stability, place, and time, beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, a period of accelerated and increasingly systematic gathering of data,particularly medical, forensic, and environmental data. The class will proceed both chronologically and thematically in three units, from the gathering and use of biomedical data as a way to make patient populations "legible" (to borrow from James Scott), to data as a way to make the environment understandable, and finally to data as a tool for producing and reproducing social relations. As a final project, students will trace a particular data set from its original gathering to its latest usage. Students will also have an opportunity to create their own course content in the final three weeks

An advanced undergraduate course or graduate level course on the fundamental physical principles underlying the operation of traditional semiconducting electronic and optoelectronic devices and extends these concepts to novel nanoscale electronic and optoelectronic devices. The course assumes an undergraduate level understanding of semiconductors physics, as found in ESE 218 or PHYS 240. The course builds on the physics of solid state semiconductor devices to develop the operation and application of semiconductors and their devices in energy conversion devices such as solar photovoltaics, thermophotovoltaics, and thermoelectrics, to supply energy. The course also considers the importance of the design of modern semiconductor transistor technology to operate at low-power in CMOS.

Environmental Justice (EJ) mapping examines the intersection of environmental burdens and the vulnerable communities disproportionately impacted by their harm. From redlining to the static maps that first showed the correlation between race and waste, and moving through to today's truly dynamic EJ mapping tools, The Principles of Mapping for Environmental Justice explores how mapping quite literally put EJ on the environmental movement landscape. This is not a GIS course, nor a course on EJ generally, but an examination into the core components that are inherent to EJ mapping principles. Come explore the indicators and methodologies used by federal, state and local governments and the policy they influence, such as President Biden’s Justice40 Initiative.

This course will provide an overview of the cross-disciplinary fields of civil engineering, environmental sciences, urban hydrology, landscape architecture, green building, public outreach and politics. Students will be expected to conduct field investigations, review scientific data and create indicator reports, working with stakeholders and presenting the results at an annual symposium. There is no metaphor like water itself to describe the cumulative effects of our practices, with every upstream action having an impact downstream. In our urban environment, too often we find degraded streams filled with trash, silt, weeds and dilapidated structures. The water may look clean, but is it? We blame others, but the condition of the creeks is directly related to how we manage our water resources and our land. In cities, these resources are often our homes, our streets and our communities. This course will define the current issues of the urban ecosystem and how we move toward managing this system in a sustainable manner. We will gain an understanding of the dynamic, reciprocal relationship between practices in an watershed and its waterfront. Topics discussed include: drinking water quality and protection, green infrastructure, urban impacts of climate change, watershed monitoring, public education, creating strategies and more.

In the first decades of the sixteenth century, a new art form emerged in Northern Europe: the independent landscape. While perspectival views of rural settings had provided backgrounds to the religious scenes of Jan van Eyck and portraits of Hans Memling, by the 1500s artists such as Albrecht Altdorfer were making paintings, drawings and prints with no iconography other than the observed natural world. Tracing this theme through the Dutch paintings of Pieter Bruegel the Elder and Jacob van Ruisdael, we will investigate works of art as political assertions made during a time when the excavation of antique ruins inspired the forging of local histories and mythologies. Simultaneously, Europeans navigated to different continents equipped with invented claims that the “natural state” of Africans and the Indigenous peoples of the Americas legally legitimated colonization, development, enslavement, and the plundering of natural resources. Understanding how an idea of nature was instrumentalized to underwrite conceptions of occupation, appropriation, and “just war” will help us to read seemingly autonomous, “secular” artworks as rooted—and participating—in the construction of juridical, philosophical, and etiological ideologies.

Can theatre save the world? In the face of the climate crisis, this question feels especially urgent. This course will consider the relationship of theatre to the environment and climate change, looking at how we got to this point, and where we might go from here. We will consider how ideas about the environment have been spread through classic texts such as Shakespeare’s The Tempest and Ibsen’s Enemy of the People. We’ll compare how non-western performances offer different relationships with the environment. And we’ll analyze how performance has responded to climate anxiety; through visions of dystopia and an end of the world, as in Caryl Churchill’s The Skriker and Anne Washburn’s Mr. Burns, A Post-Electric Play; through arts activism; and through experimental performance like environmental and immersive theatre. This course is for anyone who is concerned about climate change and interested in how the arts could respond. Most sessions will function as seminar, with short lectures and in-depth discussion about artistic and theoretical texts. We will also workshop different ideas on their feet. The aim is for students to become comfortable enough with this artistic and theoretical mode that they can critique performances across genres from this perspective, articulate their own relationship to it, and see how it might inform their own work.

The course will explore all 4 sectors of the water business in the United States: The Drinking Water Industry, The Stormwater Utility, Water Resources (rivers, streams, reservoirs) Management and the Water Pollution Control Industry. The course will have 2 primary foci: 1. The influences on the industry from new technologies and infrastructure, acceptable levels of risk, public and private sector competition, climate change, the bottled water industry, resource recovery, rates and affordability and other influences will be investigated. 2. The management of a 21st century utility will be explored, including topics of organization and leadership, the role of environmentalism, infrastructure financing, water / wastewater treatment facility operations, public affairs and media, and designing a capital improvement program are examples of topic areas.

Thermodynamics studies the fundamental concepts related to energy conversion in such mechanical systems as internal and external combustion engines (including automobile and aircraft engines), compressors, pumps, refrigerators, and turbines. This course is intended for students in mechanical engineering, chemical engineering, materials science, physics and other fields. The topics include properties of pure substances, firs-law analysis of closed systems and control volumes, reversibility and irreversibility, entropy, second-law analysis, exergy, power and refrigeration cycles, and their engineering applications.