FSEM Courses

Suburb or city? Single-family home, row house or apartment? Where we live influences our access to schools, jobs, transportation options, safety (or crime), and many other life-altering opportunities. We will also think about how inequality is woven into all of these housing situations; examining how race, class, gender, age, and sexuality may each influence our housing choices, or contribute to our lack of choices.

In this course, we will explore the life and work of James Farmer, an exemplary leader of the U.S. Civil Rights Movement who taught at Mary Washington during the 1990s. We will investigate the history of the concept of race and its impact on how we perceive ourselves and the world.

Positive psychology is a field that developed in the 1990’s to identify and enhance the human strengths and virtues that allow individuals and communities to thrive. This course focus on using the science of positive psychology to gain skills to help you thrive in college and ultimately in life.

This course begins with the question of how we ought to remember the Holocaust. Some see Steven Spielberg’s film Schindler’s List as kitsch, for example, while others praise it as a monument to humanity. Are the monumental concrete steles of the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin an appropriate way to remember the victims? Or do they reduce the victims to an anonymous mass?

In this course, we’ll explore current topics of interest within the feminist movement from an interdisciplinary perspective.

This course examines how commerce has been conducted in the past and present. Students will review the evolution of commerce and will review, discuss, and theorize how it will change in the future. Students will evaluate historic and current patterns of trade, research the potential of expected changes to the business environment, and summarize the advantages and disadvantages of a potential change.

This FSEM examines the electoral process in contemporary American politics. The electoral process is how we carry out a fundamental aspect of republican democracy – allowing citizens to select representatives of the people to make decisions on our behalf.

Instead of thinking about places as simply the background setting of our sexual identities, we will engage with the ways in which they actively aid in constituting our sexualities. As an exploration of “queer space,” this course will focus mainly on the construction of spaces, communities, and neighborhoods by sexual and gender minority LGBTQ-identified people.

This course explores the geography of the global food system, examining food production and consumption models around the world and investigating the reasons why malnutrition persists.

I have been involved with the study of languages since I decided that I would take English as my college language requirement. Learning English proved more difficult than I anticipated (I thought I would learn it in a semester!), but it showed me how intricate and fascinating languages can be (i.e., messy). Ever since I started learning English, I became interested in other languages, how adults learn a second language, and lately, how our attitudes towards languages and dialects are shaped by our own ideas about the people who speak them.