Seminars

Upcoming Seminars

Fall 2025

First Year Forum, XPL
Dr. Lee Ann Westman
50:525:162:01
Monday & Wednesday 9:35am-10:55am

The Honors College First-Year Forum is a 3-credit course organized around the 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

Human-in-the-loop: cyber-physical systems and artificial intelligence, LQR
Benedetto Piccolo
50:525:114
Tuesday & Thursday 11:10am-12:30pm

The course will provide a basic introduction to cyper-physical systems and the use of Artificial Intelligence. Cyber-physical systems (briefly CPS) are defined as systems with a physical component and a digital one. A good example is autonomy in driving. This includes autonomous vehicles, with capabilities such as maintaining lanes, regulating speed, parking, all the way to complete autonomy, but also intelligent infrastructure, such as travel speed suggestions, apps for best routes, alert systems. Both theory and practice struggled in the past with understanding the human-in-the-loop component. This refers to the fact that human actions influence the whole system, for instance in driving humans keep control of the vehicle and perform driving choices. A further complication emerges with the massive use of Artificial Intelligence (briefly AI) tools. The course aims at introducing both basics of CPS systems and AI, give a perspective on the current state-of-the-art, and stimulating questions on how to improve such systems for optimizing the human experience.  

Inventing Sex: Bodies, Gender, and Sexuality in the Archives, HAC
Jesse Bayker
50:525:151
Thursday 2:00pm-4:50pm

Modern American institutions are built on the premise that men and women are fundamentally different in ways that are obvious and indisputable. And yet human bodies and psyches persistently defy neat categorization into just two types. Sex categorization—the division of humans into male and female—has fascinated scientists, religious thinkers, and social theorists for centuries. Ideas about hermaphrodites and sexual intermediaries—people whose bodies and sexual desires did not fit into a strict binary system—have often been at the center of the debates about the very nature of being human. 
This course traces the invention of sexual categories from the medieval period to the modern era using a wide array of scientific and literary texts and archival visual materials. We analyze how scientists made meaning of the world through the practice of obsessively collecting, curating, and categorizing case studies, specimens, and scientific illustrations. In the process, students develop a critical understanding of modern queer, transgender, and intersex identities in historical perspective. Students then engage in archival practice and curate their own meaning-making collection of artifacts drawn from local and digital repositories related to queer and trans history. 

AI and Vulnerable Humans, GCM & EAV
Nathan C. Walker
50:525:153 & 50:525: 155
Monday 12:30pm-3:20pm

Artificial intelligence has the potential to both violate and advance human rights, particularly affecting vulnerable populations. But what does that really mean? Which rights are at stake, for whom, and why? How might vulnerable populations be compromised, and who bears the responsibility for protecting them? How does AI impact—negatively or positively—women and children, as well as racial, ethnic, Indigenous, and religious minorities? What can technology companies and regulators do to ensure that AI minimizes harm and maximizes benefits for persons with disabilities, older adults, LGBT+ people, refugees, and migrant workers? In this course, students will apply what the United Nations calls a “vulnerability lens” to evaluate AI’s impact on vulnerable populations throughout its lifecycle—from development to deployment to monitoring. No prior experience in computer science, philosophy, or law is required; however, students majoring or minoring in these disciplines are encouraged to enroll. 

Umwelt: Animal, Vegetable, Mineral, PLS
Sarah Allred
50:525:157
Monday & Wednesday 12:30pm-1:50pm

‘Umwelt’ is a German word that describes ‘what it is like’ for an organism to perceive the world. Human and non-human creatures alike experience the world through their senses, but the Umwelten of non-human organisms are decidedly different than the human Umwelt.  Some animals have similar senses as humans (e.g. vision), but their Umwelt is different because they have sense receptors that perceive light that humans do not. (For example, bees see ultraviolet light; and fire-chasing beetles see far-far-infrared light.) Some animals have entirely different senses that let them ‘see’ parts of the world that humans are ‘blind’ to, such as magnetic fields and electricity. Although plants to not have nervous systems and are thus argued by some philosophers not to have an Umwelt at all, plants clearly also take in information about the world and act on it.   
 
In this course, students will engage in extended interdisciplinary imagination of Umwelt. What would it be like to ‘see’ as a fungus does, with its million miles of hyphae inserted into tree roots across a forest?  What would it be like to ‘taste’ the direction of the south pole through the earth’s magnetic field, as loggerhead sea turtle does? Students will also learn about why human and non-human organisms have the Umwelts that we do. What features of the living and nonliving world shaped the Umwelt of the living?   

Seminar on Professional Nursing 
57:705:102:H1
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.