Past utmONE Scholars Seminars

 

Past utmONE Scholars Seminars

UTM190H5:  Writing in Place

Taught by:

  • Sheila Batacharya 
    (Winter 2022, 2023)
  • Ken Derry
    (Winter 2023)
  • Andrea Olive
    (Winter 2024)
  • Sarah Seeley
    (Winter 2022, 2024, 2025)

From individual bodies to communities and nations, life occurs “in place.” This course offers students the opportunity to explore the interrelationships between writing, language, space, and place. We will examine topics including sound classification, (spatial) rhetoric, and argumentation. Students will have opportunities to develop and demonstrate their knowledge by engaging in close reading, conducting research, communicating with both public and academic audiences, and observing and reflecting upon the various “places” they inhabit as students, writers, and citizens. Students will complete assignments such as a double entry reading notebook, a rhetorical analysis, and a public facing “explainer” or tutorial in a medium of their choice.

UTM192H5: Artificial Intelligence Safety and Societal Impact

Taught by:

  • Christopher Eaton 
    (Winter 2022, 2024)
  • Michael DeBraga
    (Winter 2022, 2023, 2025)
  • Avery Slater
    (Winter 2023)
  • Lisa Zhang 
    (Winter 2025)

AI safety is a field that studies the potential intentional and unintentional negative consequences caused by AI, and the prevention or mitigation of these issues. We have seen a tremendous growth in the capabilities of artificial intelligence systems over the last decade. This growth has impacted our everyday life in many ways, and has created risks of various kinds: privacy risks from analyzing consumer data, risks of fairness/bias arising from using AI to make decisions, risks of misinformation from Generative AI, and economic risks from automation. There are also rising concerns that an Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) agent—an AI system with human-like intelligence on a wide range of cognitive tasks—can behave in ways that are surprising, unintended, and do not align with our values.

UTM193H5: Nations Colliding

Taught by:

  • Jed Khun
    (Winter 2021)

This course investigates the complexity of our global interconnectedness through the lens of a substantive topic. Questions vary annually, but may include: Do all nations benefit equally from this increasing connectivity? How do global connections affect culture? What strategies offer long-term sustainability? What are the impacts of interconnectedness, both to individual citizens and to societies at large? Questions will be explored using a multidisciplinary approach.

UTM194H5: Religion and Politics 

This course aims to engage with the current political challenges that religion in its diverse manifestations poses to secular society and political systems. This seminar will encourage students to become more thoughtful and self-critical about how society responds socially and politically to these challenges in the 21st-century.

UTM195H5: Curiosity and Control

Voyages of Discovery to North America Students will investigate how both a curiosity for novelty and a desire for control motivated the so-called "Age of Discovery" and shaped the experiences of First Nations, Africans, and Europeans in medieval and early modern North America. With a focus on how people adapted to new environments, this course will provide opportunities for students to explore historical questions with contemporary resonance from the perspectives of both science and the humanities. 

UTM196H5: Building Global Justice 

This course focuses on themes of social justice, global change, and conflict through the lens of multiple disciplines. Through the exploration of concepts such as class, race, gender, religion, culture, and power on a global level, students will be involved in assignments and small group activities that develop and refine key skills that contribute to student success in university courses. 

UTM197H5: Humans in Nature: Interactions and Impacts 

Taught by:

  • Monika Havelka
    (Winter 2021, 2022)

Interactions and Impacts This course will explore how humans have utilized the natural world and the impacts it has had on both the global environment and human societies. We will focus on topics such as human and natural history, conservation, sustainability, resource exploitation, domestication, GMOs, and our fascination with nature. The course will include a field walk in our campus environment.