Fall 2019 food-related courses

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At the School of Arts, Sciences, and Engineering (ASE):

  • ANTH 161 Fieldwork Lab
    A hands-on field course in ethnographic methods, the signature toolkit of cultural anthropology. Individual and collaborative small-scale projects. Students develop skills and experience in key strategies of “participant-observation”; research design; spatial, visual, and discourse analysis; formal and informal interviewing; fieldnote writing and coding; ethnographic writing. Fieldwork ethics, including IRB applications. Questions arising from the politics of difference, encounter, experience, and representation in relation to scholarly, community, and industry/client interests. Intensive but suitable for students at all levels. Monday 1:20-4:20 pm, Cathy Stanton
  • ANTH 178 Posthuman Thought
    Marshals animal rights, and other attempts to create a social contract across species lines, as a lens to examine changing forms of Western politics and consciousness about life, nature, and the idea of the human. Intensive reading of works by Haraway, Foucault, Derrida, and Latour. Topics include the concept of the animal, domestication, anthropocentrism and human exceptionalism, biopolitics, factory farming, consumption of food and clothing, experiences of life and death, genetic engineering and lively technologies, and non-human agency. Intended for those who have taken at least two previous Anthropology classes. Tues 1:30-4 pm, Alex Blanchette
  • BIO 10/ENV 10 Plants and Humanity
    Principles of botany accenting economic aspects and multicultural implications of plants, their medicinal products, crop potential, and biodiversity. Emphasis placed on global aspects of this dynamic science, with selected topics on acid rain, deforestation, biotechnology, and other applications. Also covered are medicinal, poisonous, and psychoactive species, as well as nutritional sources from seaweeds and mushrooms to mangos and durians. Three lectures. Tues/Wed/Fri 9:30-10:20 am, George Ellmore

  • BIO 155 General Physiology I
    Elements of homeostasis, circulation, respiration, and excretion are discussed at various levels, from the molecular to the organ system. Recommended prereqs: BIO 13 and 14, or equivalent. Tues/Thurs 6-7:15 pm  Instructor TBD
  • ED 14 Food and Schools
    The story of food and schools, investigations into students’ own school experiences as they relate to food and school; the history of food in U.S. schools; the ways by which school food is a battleground for many beliefs about school and society; and how some schools approach feeding students and teaching about nutrition and food. Field work will involve visits to local educational institutions. Tues/Thurs 10:30-11:45, Ryan Redmond
  • ENV 009 Food Systems
    Introduction to the structure and functions of past, present, and future food systems. Emphasis is placed on the psychological, biological, social, economic and political systems that impact food production, processing, distribution, and consumption. Examination of real-world issues facing stakeholders in the New England food system. Mon/Wed 10:30-11:45 am, Cathy Stanton
  • ENV111/HIST 102 Global Environmental History
    Exploration on a global scale of how physical environments have shaped human history and how humans have thought about and reshaped their natural surroundings. Particular focus on climate, food systems, energy use, sustainability, urbanization, politics, and social and economic structures. NOTE: This class needs to be petitioned in order to count for the food minor or food track; students will need to construct a final project for the course that is food-centered, and then submit a petition form explaining this focus. Wed 9-11:30 am, James Rice
  • EXP21 From Bees to Beetles: Insect Pollinators and Real World Science
    Visit the ExCollege course listings for more info.
  • PSY 25 Physiological Psychology
    The biological basis of behavior. Basic functioning of the nervous system; physiological basis of hunger, thirst, sex, aggression, sleep, sensory and motor systems, learning and memory. Lectures and demonstrations. Students cannot receive credit for both PSY 25 and PSY 103. Biopsychology majors, who completed PSY 25 before declaring the major, should speak with an advisor about substituting PSY 104 for the PSY 103 major requirement. Monday 6:30 – 9:00 pm, Carolyn Cohen-Knoepfler
  • UEP 285 Food Justice
    This class offers students different lenses, such as critical race theory to see how the intersectionality of race, class, gender, sexuality, ability and citizenship play out in the development of systemic structural and socio-spatial inequities and injustices in food systems. It develops an understanding and contextualization of the role of food justice activism within the broader narrative of the alternative food movement and offers emerging ideas about how policymakers and planners can take a role in increasing food justice beyond the more mainstream and ultimately contested notions of what is ‘local’ and ‘sustainable.’ The course will help participants chart their role(s) in advocating for ‘just sustainability’ as a defining factor in becoming food systems planners and policymakers. (Generally accepts only graduate students; the undergraduate “Food Justice” course is ANTH 140 and is taught in the spring in odd-numbered years). Tues 1:30-4 pm, Julian Agyeman

At the Friedman School for Nutrition Science and Policy

  • NUTR 203 Fundamentals of Nutrition Policy and Programming: How Science and Practice Interact
    This is a course that will allow students at the Friedman School to become familiar with policy processes (domestic and international), typologies of policy initiatives (laws, regulations, program interventions, legal restrictions and systems, institutional mandates), and to be able to critically analyze and discuss how policy and science interact with regard to food and nutrition. The class will cover: a) how science influences the policy agenda, and how policy debates influence the scientific agenda; b) the scientific underpinnings of food and nutrition policies; c) how empirical findings in scientific research and operational programming make their way into policy and law; d) debates and controversies in US and international nutrition; e) the range of options for intervention that exist (to improve nutrition), and those that are used; f) how do we know what works best and what the alternatives might be?; g) approaches to problem assessment and measurement; h) success stories in the nutrition pantheon; i) constraints to success (what makes or breaks major program successes), and j) key institutions and organizations involved in nutrition policy and programming in the U.S. and around the world. Thurs 1:30-4:30 pm, Eileen Kennedy
  • NUTR 215 Fundamentals of US Agriculture
    This course covers the major social, institutional and human aspects of the American agricultural system, both as it exists today as well as its historical development. After consideration of agricultural systems in general and of the values that underlie different concepts of agriculture, it covers some of the key historical forces that have made American agriculture what it is today, and the major role of the federal government, both past and present. The next part of the course deals with the economics of American agriculture as a whole and its large-scale structure, followed by an analysis of farming on the microlevel, emphasizing types of farms and farm-scale production economics. Requires graduate standing or instructor consent. Wed 9 am – 12 pm, Nicole Tichenor Blackstone
  • NUTR 227 International Nutrition Programs
    This intensive course provides presentations, readings, and exercises relating to the broad range of nutrition interventions utilized in international programs: growth monitoring and promotion, nutrition counseling and IEC, supplementary feedings and food-based income transfers, household food security and agricultural-based interventions, micronutrient activities, and breast-feeding. The course also covers malnutrition causality, nutrition and structural adjustment, social funds, economic and food aid, active learning capacity and the nutrition transition. Finally students become well versed in program design and appraisal techniques including dynamic models and program constraint assessments, and are responsible for major exercises relating to existing programs in Asia, Africa and Latin America. Wed 3:15-6:15 pm, Erin Boyd
  • NUTR 238 Economics for Food and Nutrition Policy
    This course equips students with the economic principles used for food policy analysis, applying the methods of economics to the major food and nutrition policy problems of the United States and the world. Students will gain familiarity with the data sources and analytical methods needed to explain and predict consumption, production and trade in agriculture and food markets; evaluate the social welfare consequences of market failure and government policies; and analyze changes in poverty and inequality including both fluctuations and trends in incomes, employment and economic development. Tues/Thurs 4:15:5:45 pm, William Masters