This course provides an introduction to the cultural and language traditions within the Spanish-speaking world from an interdisciplinary perspective. The course focuses on the interaction between language and the cultures that underlie it, paying equal attention to the Spanish language (studied both experientially and theoretically) and the distinct societies that speak it. Consequently, to study the Spanish language as a cultural product provides the student a more meaningful way to gain cultural and linguistic proficiency.

Focusing primarily on Western European art, this course is an introduction to art history. Moving chronologically from the pre-modern era to post-modernity, students will engage with the ways in which works of art act as windows into the historical contexts that inform them. This course will examine how artworks at once build on and transform classical definitions of visual culture, including also the artistic styles and forces that animate them. Students will be encouraged to consider what constitutes "Art" and how art deeply affects human lives, experiences and ways of being in the world.

The average person in Canada spends about 230 minutes per day watching TV and 200 minutes per day on the Internet. That's about 325 eight-hour days, a full-time job! We spend another 70 minutes per day with other media, including newspapers, magazines, and traditional radio. That's more than 3,000 hours per year of media use, more time than we spend on anything else, including working or sleeping. This consumption of information sustains our economy, and most of the economic activity in North America now involves producing, processing or distributing information including the output of the mass media, Internet, telecommunications and computer industries. The goal of this course is to prepare students to thrive in today's increasingly integrated communications and information environment.

Any art form is a product of the society and/or culture in which it is created, and as such, reflects and/or challenges the prevailing values and beliefs. "Film Wars" takes a cinematic look at the social and cultural history of North America from the silent film era to today. By examining the films of two major rival Hollywood studios, Warner Brothers and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, we will discover that the stories they chose to bring to the screen and the stylistic and cinematic techniques and devices that they used, were dramatically different. By looking at several of the classic films from each of these studios, we will develop a deeper understanding and appreciation of both film style and cultural history.

Examining sport as both a phenomenon in its own right and as a metaphor for our contemporary world, reveals the often paradoxical nature of modern, and post-modern, living. Individuals and communities invest personal time and expenditure, along with significant emotional capital, in apparently ephemeral activities, whose financial rewards and honours most often accrue to a wealthy sponsor and an elite playing class of performers. Public and private resources, extensive media attention, and national identity are either additional beneficiaries or victims of this phenomenon.

This course is divided into two parts: theory and practice. In the first part, we examine the philosophical foundations of the defining political ideologies of our time: liberalism, conservatism, communism, socialism, and their intellectual heirs and hybrids. Authors include John Locke, Adam Smith, Immanuel Kant, Edmund Burke, Karl Marx, John Stuart Mill, among others. In the second part, we turn to questions of public policy and to the ways in which various ideologies approach, and attempt to solve, difficult political questions. Issues include education, health care, immigration and citizenship, among others.

The graphic novel emerged in the last quarter of the twentieth century as a complex narrational medium, powerfully combining telling and showing. From its antecedents in comic strip and comic book, the graphic novel evolved, through a sequence of thematically, narratively, and semiotically challenging comics, into a full-fledged narrative art form. This course surveys a range of graphic novels, both mainstream and independent. The emphasis, however, will be on the independent graphic novel. Secondary readings in history and criticism will help students understand better the context from which the graphic novel emerged, and to grasp more firmly their visual and textual aesthetics.

We negotiate the world through visual culture, whether we are sighted or have low vision that requires adaptive or assistive technologies, and whether we live in urban spaces saturated with surfaces covered in advertisements and signs or remote places in which we depend on our screens to connect with "the world". The term "visual culture" encompasses many media forms ranging from fine art to film and television to advertising to visual data in fields such as the sciences, law, and medicine. In this class we will examine what it means to study these diverse forms together. We will also discuss how we attach meaning to these visuals and how they impact our culture and society.

This course explains how the elements of film structure create meaning. Film is a complex collaborative art form with its own structural and syntactical patterns. Audiences' subliminal and conscious absorption of meaning depends on elements of film structure. This subject will provide an introduction to how movies work. It will present examples to help students grasp each production element and get a sense of film's history. Students will follow a structured approach to understanding how meaning is relayed through light, sound, and motion and the language of visual media products. To "see" and "read" a film, television production, or music video with critical awareness requires learning how film technology creates and shapes meaning.