Programs and Courses

The ultimate question that all life is bound to ask is: how do I survive? Our species, evolved a uniquely human answer, which led to our ascendance as the most dominant on the planet but at what cost? This course explores a central human paradox: how altruism, community, kindness, and war and genocide are all driven by the same core adaptation. We'll call this the Trust Paradox and the evolution of this suite of traits, best described as coalitionary cognition, is one of the most complex and ancient in our species. We will explore how this, often imperceptible drive, is responsible for our capacity for both cooperation and competition, and allowed us to navigate increasingly complex social landscapes. But in our vast modern world, has this blessing become a curse?

This course explores confinement, institutions, and incarceration from a broad anthropological perspective. Bioarchaeological, archaeological, and ethnographic research on institutions (e.g., asylums, poorhouses, prisons) will be critically examined. The goal of the course is to provide students with a complex understanding of institutionalization through time and how health vulnerabilities are created and recreated.

This independent study course is designed to offer students advanced supervised reading, research and planning for a publishable report on an anthropological topic not covered in other courses, or covered only briefly. Students who wish to pursue this option with a specific faculty member should approach the faculty member early - before the start of the academic term - to negotiate the research and study program.

This independent study course is designed to offer students advanced supervised reading, research and planning for a publishable report on an anthropological topic not covered in other courses, or covered only briefly. Students who wish to pursue this option with a specific faculty member should approach the faculty member early - before the start of the academic term - to negotiate the research and study program.

This course introduces students to the exploration and analysis of biological data through computation. Students will learn to import biological datasets, parse and manipulate the data, and develop an intuition for basic statistical thinking through practical exercises and lectures.

Biology has become a data-driven science with the arrival of complex datasets. Extracting information from these large-scale experiments requires approaches that unify statistics and computer science. The course will focus on strengthening mathematical intuition on core topics such as hypothesis testing and statistical models while connecting these to machine learning.

This course explains the fundamental principles of biological data analysis by focusing on neuroscience datasets. Students will learn methods for sampling data, testing hypotheses, multiple linear regression, PCA, clustering through both lectures and practical exercises. These methods will be discussed in the context of current research in understanding brain functions.

This course explores how infrastructures shape society, culture, and understanding of the human condition. We examine different infrastructures from electric networks to communication networks, data farms, environmental sensing systems, smart cities, and satellite technologies and our reliance on them. We will also examine how these infrastructures are sustained and maintained. By building on critical theories and approaches to infrastructures and their impact, the course investigates the power of infrastructure to establish the conditions of our daily lives.

This course will instruct students in the use of programming languages such as Python or Processing for novel applications, including cases from animation, design, and information visualization. Appropriate use of code libraries, platforms and programming techniques will be developed. Assessment will be based on both programming and the expressive use of programs in their case context.

Reinforcement learning is a powerful paradigm for modeling autonomous and intelligent agents interacting with the environment, and it is relevant to an enormous range of tasks, including robotics, game playing, consumer modeling and healthcare. This course provides an introduction to reinforcement learning intelligence, which focuses on the study and design of agents that interact with a complex, uncertain world to achieve a goal. We will study agents that can make near-optimal decisions in a timely manner with incomplete information and limited computational resources.

The course will cover Markov decision processes, reinforcement learning, planning, and function approximation (online supervised learning). The course will take an information-processing approach to the concept of mind and briefly touch on perspectives from psychology, neuroscience, and philosophy.

This course focuses on perception algorithms for robotics applications and sensors. The aim is to provide an understanding of the challenges encountered when deploying perception algorithms on a robot and introduce some of the tools and algorithms typically used to address these challenges. The algorithms will also be implemented and evaluated using real-world data from common use-cases.

This course examines the economic basis for law and legal institutions. The topics covered include the microeconomic analysis of property rights, contract law, tort law, crime, and the limitations of economic analysis. The appropriate economic measures of damages in tort and contract cases will be discussed. No previous familiarity with the law is assumed. (This is an economic analysis of legal issues, not a course in law.)

This course is a continuation of ECO320H5 An Economic Analysis of Law: Part 1. The topics covered include the microeconomic analysis of corporate law, law and financial markets, bankruptcy law, intellectual property law, marriage and divorce law and the choice between regulation and the common law.

This course serves as an introduction to theory and research in the related fields of health and education.  Students will learn to identify, address, and manage health-related risk in school environments by deepening their knowledge of holistic and brain-based theory. The course will explore health and wellness as a fundamental human right by addressing proactive approaches through the Determinants of Health and Developmental Assets Framework. Active research will include investigation of school-based policies and practices (e.g, the critique of a new fitness technology, examination of a school food and nutrition program, assessment of a school health campaign). 

This course introduces students to various literary traditions of writing about the visual arts, from the close analysis of images in novels, poems, and essays to verbal forms (such as ekphrasis and calligrammes) that make poetry and fiction out of paintings, photographs, and sculptures. While the puzzle of translating between space-based and time-based arts will be at the centre of our inquiry, the course will also consider texts and books as visual objects; how writers create visual experiences and mental images; and how literary writing is inspired by museums and exhibitions. Students will have opportunities to practice writing about the arts in collaboration with the Blackwood Gallery at UTM and its featured artists, and, when possible, with other Peel Region and Greater Toronto Area artists and galleries.

An introduction to the legends, beliefs, and values of the Anishinaabek Nation. Students will explore literary and non-literary texts, media, and/or performances, spanning traditional and innovative forms, genres, and mediums. Content may include contributions by Basil Johnston, Jane School Craft, George Copway, Richard Wagamese, Winona LaDuke, Margaret Noodin, Drew Hayden Taylor, Louise Erdrich, Waubgeshig Rice, Alan Corbiere, Isaac Murdoch, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Debajehmujig Theatre Group, and Aanmitaagzi.

A study of poems, novels, dramas, and prose works by British and American authors such as Mary Astell, Aphra Behn, Anna Laetitia Barbauld, Frances Burney, Maria Edgeworth, Eliza Haywood, Hannah More, Judith Sargent Murray, Mercy Otis Warren, Charlotte Smith, Phyllis Wheatley, and Mary Wollstonecraft. Topics may include professionalization and the literary marketplace; domestic labour; motherhood and children’s literature; class and education; personal agency and political engagement; colonialism, slavery, and abolition; Bluestocking culture; and early feminist thought.

This course engages with British poetry, drama, and prose from the later seventeenth century through early eighteenth century—a period that saw the restoration of the monarchy, the Glorious Revolution, the Acts of Union, and the transition from Stuart to Hanoverian rule. Topics to be addressed may include religious and political dissent; colonialism and slavery; libertine culture; theatrical performance; female actors and women writers; the “birth” of the novel; and the establishment of the periodical press. Authors may include Aphra Behn, John Bunyan, Susanna Centlivre, Daniel Defoe, John Dryden, Anne Finch, Delarivier Manley, Samuel Pepys, and the Earl of Rochester.

This course engages with British poetry, drama, and prose from the “Augustan Age” through the early Romantic period. Topics may include the flourishing of print culture; satirical and sentimental literature; the “rise” of the novel; art and aesthetics; science and technology; colonialism, slavery, and abolition; and women writers. Authors may include Frances Burney, Henry Fielding, Thomas Gray, Eliza Haywood, William Hogarth, Samuel Johnson, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Alexander Pope, Samuel Richardson, Mary Robinson, Richard Brinsley Sheridan, and Jonathan Swift.

A study of poems, plays, prose fiction, and polemical works by medieval and early modern writers such as Anne Askew, Mary Wroth, Queen Elizabeth I, Mary Sidney, Amelia Lanyer, Lucy Hutchinson, Hester Pulter, and Margaret Cavendish. Topics may include race, women and science, love poetry from a female perspective, gender and trans studies, renarrations of the story of Eve, sexuality, and editorial history and practice.

This course will introduce students to historical and cultural concerns of nineteenth-century America through major subgenres of the novel, including the gothic, the sentimental, realism, and naturalism. Emphasis will be on shifts in the novel across the century as well as the relationship of the nineteenth-century novel to print culture, including serial publication in literary magazines and newspapers. We may also think about how non-fiction texts from this period draw on the conventions of fiction. Authors studied may include Charles Brockden Brown, Fanny Fern, George Lippard, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Charles Chesnutt, Mark Twain, Edith Wharton, and Pauline Hopkins.

We often categorize literature by its nation of origin when we study and teach, though we also recognize the limitations involved in doing so. Over the past several decades, the study of U.S. literature, in particular, has been shaped by transnational and global approaches that emphasize the porous nature of any “national” literature. In this course, students will study approaches to American Literature in global contexts. These may include hemispheric approaches to U.S. literatures that emphasize U.S. interactions with Central America and the Caribbean, engagements with Africa in U.S. literatures, or U.S. literatures and the Pacific from the eighteenth century through the present.

This course examines medieval works of art and architecture that challenge long-held ideas about the European Middle Ages as monocultural and exclusively Christian. It considers the mobility of people, objects, and ideas through migration, trade, diplomacy, conquest, and pilgrimage, and focuses on particular places where multiculturalism flourished, including Spain, Sicily, and Venice. It also evaluates multiculturalism from different eras, from the Middle Ages to the contemporary world, to better understand its different meanings and manifestations, as well as its impact on art history.

This course provides an introduction to second language pedagogy with a particular focus on French. Students will learn key concepts in pedagogy and compare the teaching and learning processes and experiences of first and second language learners as well as the roles of classroom teachers and learners via the creation of linguistic portraits and pedagogical materials.

This course provides a linguistic introduction to the French language and French-language phenomena. Students will learn to analyze meaning, word, sound, and sentence structure; describe linguistic phenomena including first and second language acquisition, bilingualism, and creoles; and identify the linguistic variation observed among French speakers and speech communities.

This course allows students to explore innovative pedagogical approaches such as the Action Oriented and Plurilingual & Pluricultural Approaches, building on knowledge and skills acquired in FRE227H5 Teaching and Learning a Second/Foreign Language. This is accomplished through the examination of the linguistic and cultural diversity observed in French Language classes today, and the discovery of innovative and current teaching approaches followed by the creation of pedagogical materials. Particular emphasis is placed on students’ abilities to transfer knowledge into practice.

This course explores the phonetic and phonological properties of second language French learners' speech. Particular emphasis is placed on students' ability to summarize typical characteristics and phenomena of second language speech learning, identify segmental and prosodic features of non-native French including inter-learner variability, and conduct acoustic analyses of real learner speech.

This course examines the effects of cognitive (e.g., aptitude, working memory) and affective differences (e.g., motivation, L2 anxiety) on second language acquisition. Students will come to understand the nature of these differences via empirical studies on learners of French and the use of assessment instruments including questionnaires and on-line tests. Particular emphasis is placed on students' ability to discuss between-learner differences in comprehension and production, identify relevant individual differences capable of explaining such variability, and conduct their own individual differences research.

This course explores media and culture in the Francophone world through textual, graphic, musical and cinematographic content. Students will apply previously acquired knowledge in cultural studies, and their oral and written competences in French to the study of multiple cultural and mediatic forms including movies, graphic novels and songs. Particular emphasis will be placed on extending attentive reading skills as ways of thinking about texts, images and music, and on deploying these skills to better understand the relationship between different Francophone cultures within our contemporary world.

This course provides students with the opportunity to engage in, and reflect on, a professional forensic experience that contributes to their employment eligibility after graduation. They will develop networking skills, enhance professional competencies, and are given the opportunity to locate and select their own experience relevant to their career goals, which may include (but is not limited to) a possible: work-study position, conference workshop, professional certification, field school, paid or unpaid internship or agency co-op. All opportunities must be approved by the program director in the term prior to enrolment.

Grounded in human geography and qualitative methods, this course investigates the meaningful non-tangible relationships between humankind and environment. These relationships include emotional attachment (to place), aesthetics (of landscape), ethics (of environment), and relationships (to place and to other species). We will examine these ideas through exploration of the geohumanities; ways of seeing or apprehending the world; ways of being in place; ways of translating or reproducing the world; and possible paths forward in the relationship between us and the landscapes around us.

Students apply prerequisite knowledge and techniques to real-world GIS projects requested by external clients. Through background research, proposal, data management, and implementation, students develop GIS professional competencies, which will be demonstrated through collaboration, presentations and reports.

This course is designed for senior undergraduate students in a workshop format with a specific focus on application. Topics include space-time data collection, processing, analysis, and visualization. Widely used space-time analysis tools and newly developed data mining techniques will be introduced and discussed with examples and hands-on practices in the class. With practical experience on real-world space-time datasets, students will learn the basic knowledge and various tools for analyzing spatiotemporal datasets. The course encompasses practical instruction and training in ArcGIS Pro to use multiple public available space-time datasets. The primary outcome for students taking this course will be an independent analysis of a substantial space-time dataset, a formal report of the analysis, and a professional oral presentation.

A cultural history of North Africa and Western Asia from the 1870s to World War I. This late Ottoman period, known in Europe as the fin de siècle, was marked by imperialisms, nationalisms, and revolutions, as well as anxiety and alienation, environmental degradation, famine, and genocide.

In (mis)information age, it seems that the more we know, the less we understand. This course examines how data, fact, and information all have their own history, and that their production and circulation are shaped by politics, emotion, capital, as well as mediated by technology.

Microhistory focuses on a small part of the past to address big questions. By encouraging us to examine evidence up close, it provides a powerful way to investigate the rich texture of earlier societies and think about connections with our own time. This course considers classic microhistorical studies as well as more recent works, balancing theories with examples of the approach.

This research-intensive seminar looks at alternative histories of decolonization in Africa, including revolutionary nationalisms, secessionist movements, and pan-Africanism– as well as ongoing debates over boundaries, citizenship, and sovereignty in postcolonial Africa.

This course provides a rewarding opportunity for students in their second year to work in the research project of a professor in return for IMI299H5 course credit. Based on the nature of the project, projects may satisfy the Social Sciences or Sciences distribution requirement. Students enrolled have an opportunity to become involved in original research, learn research methods and share in the excitement and discovery of acquiring new knowledge. Participating faculty members post their project descriptions for the following summer and fall/winter sessions in early February and students are invited to apply in early March. See Experiential and International Opportunities for more details.

This course provides a rewarding opportunity for students in their third or fourth year to undertake relatively advanced work in the research project of a professor in return for IMI399H5 course credit. Based on the nature of the project, projects may satisfy the Social Sciences or Sciences distribution requirement. Students enrolled have an opportunity to become involved in original research, learn research methods and share in the excitement and discovery of acquiring new knowledge. Participating faculty members post their project descriptions for the following summer and fall/winter sessions in early February and students are invited to apply in early March. See Experiential and International Opportunities for more details.

This course provides a richly rewarding opportunity for students in their second year to participate in the research project of a faculty member in return for 299H course credit. Based on the nature of the project, projects may satisfy the Humanities, Sciences or Social Sciences distribution requirement. Students enrolled have an opportunity to become involved in original research, learn methods and share in the excitement and discovery of acquiring new knowledge. Participating faculty members post their project descriptions for the following summer and fall/winter sessions in early February and students are invited to apply in early March. See Experiential and International Opportunities for more details.

This course provides a richly rewarding opportunity for students in their second year to participate in the research project of a faculty member in return for 299Y course credit. Based on the nature of the project, projects may satisfy the Humanities, Sciences or Social Sciences distribution requirement. Students enrolled have an opportunity to become involved in original research, learn methods and share in the excitement and discovery of acquiring new knowledge. Participating faculty members post their project descriptions for the following summer and fall/winter sessions in early February and students are invited to apply in early March. See Experiential and International Opportunities for more details.

This course provides a richly rewarding opportunity for students in their third year to participate in the research project of a faculty member in return for 399H course credit. Based on the nature of the project, projects may satisfy the Humanities, Sciences or Social Sciences distribution requirement. Students enrolled have an opportunity to become involved in original research, learn methods and share in the excitement and discovery of acquiring new knowledge. Participating faculty members post their project descriptions for the following summer and fall/winter sessions in early February and students are invited to apply in early March. See Experiential and International Opportunities for more details.

This course provides a richly rewarding opportunity for students in their third year to participate in the research project of a faculty member in return for 399Y course credit. Based on the nature of the project, projects may satisfy the Humanities, Sciences or Social Sciences distribution requirement. Students enrolled have an opportunity to become involved in original research, learn methods and share in the excitement and discovery of acquiring new knowledge. Participating faculty members post their project descriptions for the following summer and fall/winter sessions in early February and students are invited to apply in early March. See Experiential and International Opportunities for more details.

This course is intended to offer students advanced supervised reading and research experience within the areas of writing studies, numeracy, and pedagogy. Based on the nature of the project, projects may satisfy the Humanities, Sciences or Social Sciences distribution requirement. Students interested in this course should obtain a supervisor before applying directly to the Institute for the Study of University Pedagogy.

This course is intended to offer students advanced supervised reading and research experience within the areas of writing studies, numeracy, and pedagogy. Based on the nature of the project, projects may satisfy the Humanities, Sciences or Social Sciences distribution requirement. Students interested in this course should obtain a supervisor before applying directly to the Institute for the Study of University Pedagogy.

How can you get a computer to tell grammatical and ungrammatical sentences apart? How does it know whether 'cricket' refers to the game or the insect in a sentence like "The cricket jumped over the fence"? This course is designed to introduce students with either a background in Linguistics or in the Computing Sciences to the intersection of linguistics and computing, with a focus on the question of how computational algorithms and data structures can be used as a formal model of language. Topics may include finite-state automata for phonology and morphology, context-free grammars, semantic parsing, vector space semantics, computational cognitive modelling, and computational sociolinguistics. No programming skills are required to take the course.

This course provides an overview of second language vocabulary acquisition research and the resultant implications for second language teaching. Topics include dimensions of vocabulary knowledge, incidental and intentional vocabulary learning, textbook analysis, learning strategies, and teacher beliefs about vocabulary teaching and learning. Implications are drawn for pedagogical practices, including best vocabulary teaching practices, materials selection, and measuring vocabulary knowledge.

This course provides experience in language analysis based on elicited data from a native speaker of an understudied language. It emphasizes procedures and techniques and provides an opportunity for first-hand appreciation of linguistic unity and diversity.

This course provides an overview of second language vocabulary acquisition research and the resultant implications for second language teaching. Topics include dimensions of vocabulary knowledge, incidental and intentional vocabulary learning, textbook analysis, learning strategies, and teacher beliefs about vocabulary teaching and learning. Implications are drawn for pedagogical practices, including best vocabulary teaching practices, materials selection, and measuring vocabulary knowledge. This course is taught in English and is open to students from other disciplines. Written work to be completed in French/Italian for credit towards a Specialist (French or French & Italian) or Major (French/Italian).

Acquaints students with the statistical principles that managers need in order to extract information from numerical data, and to understand the formal principles of decision-making under conditions of uncertainty. Covers descriptive statistics, elementary probability, expected values, sampling distributions, point and interval estimation, hypothesis testing for normal and binomial data.

This course provides second year undergraduate students, who have developed some knowledge of a discipline and its research methods, an opportunity to work in the research project of a professor in return for course credit. Students enrolled have an opportunity to become involved in original research, develop their research skills and share in the excitement and discovery of acquiring new knowledge. Project descriptions for participating faculty members for the following summer and fall/winter sessions are posted on the ROP website in mid-February and students are invited to apply at that time. See Experiential and International Opportunities for more details.

This course will introduce the students to a diverse collection of big data and machine learning techniques. These techniques are often aimed at identifying and quantifying various structures in the data to answer business problems and provide managerial insights. Model validation and effective communication of model-based results will be stressed. The course will employ a "whitebox" methodology, which emphasizes an understanding of the algorithmic and statistical model structures. Following leading industry standards, the course will use Python to apply a number of different algorithms to real-world big data.

This course provides senior undergraduate students who have developed some knowledge of a discipline and its research methods an opportunity to work in the research project of a professor in return for course credit. Students enrolled have an opportunity to become involved in original research, develop their research skills and share in the excitement and discovery of acquiring new knowledge. Project descriptions for participating faculty members for the following summer and fall/winter sessions are posted on the ROP website in mid-February and students are invited to apply at that time. See Experiential and International Opportunities for more details.

This course studies risk management from a holistic perspective for various institutions (i.e. non-financial and financial). Various risk categories will be considered such as investment risk, financial risk, cyber risk, operational risk, market risk, energy risk, technology risk, etc. Cases, models, and frameworks will be integrated into the course. Depending on current market issues, the data and cases may cover various areas from energy (i.e. weather), sports, accounting, finance, government (public), arts/entertainment, health, technology, etc. Special topics may also be considered such as environmental, social, and corporate governance (ESG) issues.

This course explores various digital marketing strategies in the context of online and mobile advertising platforms, and will provide a comprehensive understanding of both existing marketing strategies and emerging trends. Various domains will be covered in this course (search, display, mobile, social, etc.) to enable students to explore how emerging technologies are used to facilitate B2B and B2C transactions. This class will explore the strengths and weaknesses of different approaches to digital marketing while helping students develop a better understanding of various elements of marketing campaigns from formulation to integration and assessment.

This course is designed to introduce students to the challenges and pitfalls of financing new enterprises. We can think of entrepreneurial financing decisions in terms of a life cycle. The cycle begins with identifying opportunities and refining the business plan, moves to marshaling resources to take advantage of these opportunities and executing the business plan, and ends with harvesting the venture's success.

An intermediate-level course on one or more philosophical traditions from the South Asian world, including orthodox Indian schools (Nyaya, Vaisheshika, Samkhya, Yoga, Mimamsa, and Vedanta) and non-orthodox schools such as Buddhism and Jainism, with a focus on their theories of religion, ethics, epistemology, or metaphysics.

How can understanding perception help to explain what we do in the world? In this course, we will consider questions from engineering and human factors through the lens of perceptual research, tackling the human side of design and engineering problems. Topics include driver behaviour, interface design, data visualization and the perceptual and psychological foundations that dictate their success or failure.

In this course, students will learn how to develop and design experiments to answer scientific questions of their interest in the study of perception. Students will learn psychophysical methods, which relate the physical properties of the world to perceptual experience, and apply these advanced methods by carrying out experiments and analyzing data.

What will religion look like in 2100? This course asks how early twenty-first century society is using religion to imagine its future around such questions as climate change, neoliberalism, authoritarian capitalism, pandemics, artificial intelligence, etc. Readings pair history, anthropology, and critical theory with science fiction, news media, and visual culture.

This course studies the interplay between religion, magic, and astrology. It analyzes how magic and astrology have been viewed in history by different world religions, and how these religions have integrated, or excluded, magical practices and astrological beliefs in their mainstream practices and beliefs.

The course will introduce students to the core and cutting-edge sociological and interdisciplinary scholarship on Asian Canada and Asian diaspora from transnational perspectives. We will examine the history of Asian migration to North America on the context of colonialism, the Cold War, and capitalist development, as well as the experiences of various Asian immigrant communities in the contemporary era.

This course introduces students to the core and cutting-edge sociological and interdisciplinary scholarship on law and crime in Asia and Asian diasporas across the world. It examines major topics in criminology, law and society in various Asian contexts (e.g., legal consciousness, legal pluralism, dispute resolution, policing, rights mobilization, etc.), as well as the experiences of Asian immigrant communities with legal and criminal justice systems. 

In this course we will take an in-depth look at a number of topics related broadly to masculinity and the internet, including such things as the “manosphere”, incels, and representations of masculinity on social media. These topics will be examined through the lens of the sociological literature on gender and masculinities. A recurring theme relates to the questions: “Is masculinity changing?” Students will be encouraged to critically examine and evaluate these topics and the sociological literature in multiple ways.

The body is an inevitable part of our existence, but it has not always played a central role in sociology. This course aims to bring the body into sociology by drawing on multiple approaches to theorizing and researching the body as a fundamental element of social interactions. We will work to connect the body to power, social problems and diverse forms of exploitation, but we also examine how the body serves as a source of pleasure, joy, and resistance. Fundamentally, we will study the processes by which bodies are shaped, and in turn, shape our social life. Body topics that may be covered include, but are not limited to, the following: health and illness, fatness, fitness and sport, diet culture, taste, aging, disability, sexuality, beauty, cosmetic surgery, and eating disorders.

This course examines the transnational, national and local historical, social and political contexts that produce, and is in turn affected by, criminal, state and other forms of violence in Latin America, and the challenges that this poses for the functioning of Latin American democracies and for the everyday life of people in the region, whose human and civil rights are frequently violated.  Examples of transnational factors examined may include the legacies of the Cold War, the impact of the U.S. war on drugs, and the circulation of ideas about punishment throughout the hemisphere. We also contextualize the presence of violence into the historical and contemporary political and social realities of particular Latin American countries.

This course will apply sociological theories of inequality, health, and disability to contemporary problems associated with economic and health crises, including the COVID-19 pandemic. This course integrates both quantitative and qualitative methods across substantive themes, providing an opportunity for students to link theories to data.

This course is designed for heritage and native speakers with little to no knowledge of written Spanish who have basic to fluent speaking and comprehension abilities. The course provides foundations in understanding the Spanish grammatical system, opportunities to increase vocabulary and to develop writing skills and the ability to use the language across different contexts including in more formal situations. Students MUST complete the Spanish Language Assessment Questionnaire before enrolling in this course. Please visit https://www.utm.utoronto.ca/language-studies/language-course-assessment-questionnaires

This course is designed for heritage and native speakers with solid reading and writing abilities in Spanish as well as fluent speaking and listening skills. The course provides opportunities to develop a complex Spanish grammatical system as well as opportunities to increase vocabulary, and develop writing skills and the ability to use the language across different contexts including in more formal situations.

The course introduces students to the different ways in which speakers communicate across the diverse Spanish-speaking world. Students will analyze how culturally defined politeness, social norms, and speaker identities impact how language is used in diverse Spanish-speaking countries. Students will also explore, identify, and solve problems resulting from cultural differences between Spanish and other languages. Furthermore, students will develop pragmatic competence in Spanish and will compare variation in pragmatic norms among different Spanish-speaking communities.

This course introduces students to the discipline of linguistics through a focus on Spanish- speaking communities and the linguistic diversity amongst them. This advanced task-based course focuses on developing students’ pragmatic competence in Spanish, or the ability to use the language appropriately in different social contexts. To do so, students will analyze how culturally confined politeness norms, contextual elements, and speakers’ identities impact how language is used to carry out different speech acts such as requests, invitations, and apologies, among others, and will compare variation in pragmatic norms among different Spanish-speaking communities.

This course brings together first-year students to explore a current topic or problem at the intersection of science and social science in a small-group environment. The focus of each section will depend on the instructor’s areas of expertise and will provide students with the opportunity to develop foundational learning strategies and sharpen their academic skills to support the transition into university.

This course brings together first-year students to explore a current topic or problem at the intersection of science and humanities in a small-group environment. The focus of each section will depend on the instructor’s areas of expertise and will provide students with the opportunity to develop foundational learning strategies and sharpen their academic skills to support the transition into university.

This course brings together first-year students to explore a current topic or problem at the intersection of social science and humanities in a small-group environment. The focus of each section will depend on the instructor’s areas of expertise and will provide students with the opportunity to develop foundational learning strategies and sharpen their academic skills to support the transition into university.

In 1977 the influential critic John Berger wrote an essay called “Why Look at Animals?” which framed humans’ relationship with animals as a matter of vision or, as we now say, of visual culture. More recently the humanities have been described as taking an “animal turn,” influenced by posthumanist thought and the idea that we are living in a period of unprecedented human impact on the planet, commonly (yet controversially) known as the Anthropocene. How has visual culture studies developed on or challenged Berger’s insights since he wrote that essay? Building on critiques of the category of “nature” as something that somehow pre-exists “culture” and is outside of it, which in turn challenges the terms of our distinctions between humans and animals, how does recent scholarship approach the place of images and vision in human-animal relations, and indeed the very idea of the animal itself?

This seminar investigates these questions through texts that discuss key theoretical questions and examine representations of animals across a variety of media, species, historical or geographical contexts, and disciplinary approaches.

This course discusses, historicizes, and theorizes the undeniable connection between the health of our bodies and the health of our planet. This course engages with Indigenous feminisms, Black feminisms, and queer/decolonial/anticolonial thought to build a response to historic and ongoing colonial, gender-based, and environmental violence through grounded justice practices.

Introduction to Technical Communication serves as an introduction to the academic and professional fields of technical writing and communication. It explores strategies for analyzing organizational contexts, including professional audiences, professional purposes for writing, and organizational cultures. Assignments will build skills in technical writing, document design, documentation, accessibility, and ethical considerations for communication in professional settings.