Seminars
Upcoming Seminars
Fall 2024
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 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
AI Ethics and Law, GCM, EAV
50:525:153:01 & 50:525:155:01
Nathan C. Walker
Monday 12:30pm-3:20pm
The dawn of artificial intelligence (AI)—technologies that simulate human learning, reasoning, self-correction, and perception—has given rise to new ethical and legal questions. In this course, students will examine the multi-national, national, corporate, and regulatory systems that seek to govern the artificial intelligence movement. Specifically, students will explore legal and ethical questions, such as How can AI technology stakeholders can apply principles of explainability, interpretability, and other disclosures to ensure transparency and foster trust? How can AI prevent harm and do good, ensuring that AI systems are just, fair, and equitable? How can AI prevent, monitor, and mitigate invidious bias and discrimination and promote inclusion and equality? How can AI ensure privacy, protect against abuses of civil liberties and human rights, and maximize freedom and autonomy? How can AI be used responsibly and with integrity, and what accountability systems are needed to ensure AI will truly benefit humanity and ensure a more equitable and sustainable future? This course does not require any previous expertise in computer science, philosophy, or law.
Equality, Opportunity, and Public Policy, GCM
50:525:153:02
Ralph Giraud
Monday & Wednesday 2:05pm-3:25pm
The proposed course is linked to the main Honors College theme for 2024-2025 because it focuses on how financial leadership can provide equal opportunity for underserved communities and populations. For-profit, non-for-profit and government organization leaders can make financial choices that can help create equitable opportunities, resources, and benefits for all people. “Stakeholder capitalism” is broader than a narrow corporate objective of simply maximizing shareholder value, as it considers investors, employees, the “greater community at large,” and the environment.
From a broader conceptual standpoint, finance, leadership, and a state of equality can “fill gaps” to end problems. In finance, a borrower lacks funds, and the lender “fills the gap” by providing funds to “make up the deficit.” The borrower is now in “debt” through incurring a loan, and the borrower ends the debt through paying back the loan. With leadership, the leader is the “bridge” that “fills the gap” where people who feel that they are at a “dead end” find the proper route to move forward, and their performance “crosses” towards fulfilling group objectives. Moving towards a state of equality attempts to “fill gaps” among different people who do not coexist in a state of being equal, especially in status, rights, and opportunities. The “state of equality” is a fragile one, where our current system of capitalism can easily feel like a world filled with “winners” and “losers,” instead of living conditions where everyone is truly equal, especially in status, rights, and opportunities.
Restorative/Transformative Justice-Practices, USW, EAV
50:525:154:01 & 50:525:155:02
Josh Staub
Tuesday & Thursday 9:35am-10:55am
This course is designed to teach students about the history and practices of
Transformative/Restorative Justice-Practices (TRJP), providing insight into how TRJP can be integrated into systems, making them restorative, how TRJP can impact and inform policy creating opportunity for innovations leading to an increased quality of life for all people, regardless of their identifying factors, and teaches hands-on skills like restorative conversations and four unique forms of circle practices equipping students with skills that will aid them in navigating their various career choices.
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.