SEN 1345: Coming of Age Narratives: The Art of TV, Film and Popular Culture

Instructor: Kristina Dang

This seminar will explore the genre of coming-of-age TV shows with themes such as love and sex, gender, substance use, wealth and class, and generational trauma. We will watch shows such as Degrassi, Euphoria, Gossip Girl, Glee, and One Tree Hill. Through engaging lectures and interactive discussions, students will be able to contextualize the TV shows they watch. Additionally, students will contribute to conversations by sharing TV shows they enjoy. By the end of the course, we will have a profound appreciation for the art of visual storytelling and depiction of real-life experiences in pop culture.

MKT3501 Communicating for Consumer Behavior Change
4 Free Elective CreditsIn this course, students learn and draw upon interdisciplinary theories in psychology, marketing and persuasion/influence to explore the nature of behavioral change at the individual, consumer and societal levels. Centered around a major social marketing project, students will test theories of persuasive communication and choice architecture to explore how to use the knowledge of human experience to shape behavior for social good.

Prerequisites: MKT 2000

COM3504 Communicating in Global Virtual Teams
(Formerly MOB3504)
4 Advanced Management CreditsIf you took and passed MOB3504, you cannot register for COM3504, as these two courses are equivalent

In this course, students will learn how to successfully engage, collaborate and communicate in global virtual teams. Students will begin by reading and discussing assigned course reading on global communication, virtual collaboration, organizational communication, and writing in groups in preparation for a major cross-institutional global project.

In collaboration with Marshall School of Business at USC, students will participate in the 6-week global Virtual Business Professional (VBP), project, which puts students in diverse international teams using Slack's communication platform to complete a written social media assessment project for Google, Amazon, or Starbucks. At the conclusion of the project, faculty teaching in the program will choose the best report for each company. Google, Amazon, and Starbucks are partnering with the project and a representative from each company will pick one of the three winners.

Students will be expected to hold virtual meetings, use project management tools, create online presentations, and write a final report using state-of-the-art technology used in today's corporate environment. The VBP project runs from approximately week 4 to week 9 of the academic semester. During this time, class work will include discussing experiences working in the project, identifying and considering shared challenges, and engaging with scholarly and popular reading that can help students in the project.

Prerequisites: None

POL4645 Comparative Latin American Politics
4 Advanced Liberal Arts Credits

Comparative politics is a core subfield of Political Science and International Relations. The study of comparative politics has a lively and engaging body of scholars who are dedicated to understanding the potentials and limitations of democracy. The field has developed many interesting areas of research focusing on the comparison of political systems, national institutions, gender rights, environmental issues, and economic development.

This is an advanced level course, focused on contemporary Latin American politics. The course begins with an introduction to theories and methods of comparative politics, and a brief overview of basic concepts in political science such as different forms of government, electoral systems, and democratic systems. The course then discusses six central themes in comparative politics in Latin America: Party Systems and Political Representation, Economic Development and Inequality, Environmental Policies, Gender Policies, Regional Migration, and Foreign Relations. In each of these six themes, we will use cases from various Latin American countries for an in-depth discussion.

Prerequisites: Any combination of 2 ILA (HSS, LTA, CSP, LVA, CVA)

HSS2033 Comparative Politics
4 Intermediate Liberal Arts CreditsComparative politics is a field that seeks to understand political dynamics within states and to understand a variety of political phenomena common in many countries. This course will use such cases as Britain, France, Russia, China, Iran, India, and Brazil to look at issues of nationalism, economic policies, institutional design, development, and social change. Comparative Politics is also characterized by a methodology that seeks to illuminate the reasons for similarities and differences across countries and provide some tools to think more critically about various political claims and proposals.

Prerequisites: (FCI1000 or AHS1000) and (WRT1001or RHT1000)

OIM3600: Computer Science for Business Students

4 advanced liberal arts credits

This course, Introduction to Computer Science for Business Students, is designed for business students who are interested in learning about the fundamental concepts of computer science. The course covers a wide range of topics including hardware, the internet, programming in Scratch and Python, basic algorithms, web development using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, SQL, and Flask. In addition, the course also covers important concepts in cybersecurity. Throughout the course, students will work on multiple projects including a final capstone project that integrates and applies the knowledge and skills learned in the previous sessions. Group work and projects are significant elements of the course, as students will have the opportunity to collaborate and learn from each other in a team setting. By the end of the course, students should have a strong foundation in computer science and be able to apply these concepts in a business context.

Prerequisites: None

HUM4620 Constructing and Performing the Self
4 Advanced Liberal Arts CreditsIn Constructing and Performing the Self students will examine and attempt to answer the most fundamental of questions: Who am I? A question this significant cannot be adequately answered by any one approach, thus the course brings together two very different approaches to guide the investigation. Psychological studies of identity marshal the tools and methods of science to develop and test theories that describe and explain the self. Theater studies bring interpretative and aesthetic perspectives to represent and reveal identity. In this course, these two approaches will be purposely inter-mingled: the questions asked and the answers derived will be informed equally by psychology and theater. Students will see, on a daily basis, how each field informs, supports, and speaks to the other. While there are some class sessions and assignments explicitly grounded in only one field to build students' fluency, the major activities of the semester will require both.

Given how personally applicable both psychology and theater are, students' own sense of identity will be the central text in this course. Like Tom in The Glass Menagerie, students are both the main character in their own life stories and also the narrator of them. This course aims for true interdisciplinary integration, and students will be called upon to use and apply the theoretical work as they build and create an original solo performance about a key moment in their lives. Our hope is that by semester's end students will have taken a concrete step forward in understanding and articulating their sense of self and feel comfortable and confident in their ability to perform for a live, public audience.

Students are asked to alternate between four roles in this course: scholar, writer, actor, and critic.
- Scholars consume information in analytical ways and produce new knowledge that is deeply grounded in their foundational knowledge.
- Writers produce new works, both analytical and creative, that take a novel position and support it.
- Actors give life to both old and new characters, conveying their shifting objectives over time to impact an audience.
- Critics evaluate texts (in our case, performances) with a constructive, thoughtful, and respectful approach that brings new insights.
Some days students will only adopt one role, other students will be asked to oscillate between the
them.

Prerequisites: Any combination of 2 ILA (HSS, LTA, CSP, LVA, CVA)

MKT3510 Consumer Insights and Research
(Formerly Marketing Research)
4 General CreditsThis course provides students with hands-on experience with marketing research and analysis. Marketing research is simply an organized way of developing and providing information for decision-making purposes. The quality of information depends on the care exercised at each step of the marketing research process. These steps include problem definition, research design, data collection methods, questionnaire design, measurement, sampling, data analysis, data interpretation. The class will discuss key elements and issues in marketing research including sources of data, data collection techniques and analytical approaches for providing information to be used in managers' decision. The first part of the class will focus on research process and design. In this section students will learn how to formulate a research problem, determine a research design, evaluate methods for data collection and develop instruments for data collection. The second part of the class will focus on how to analyze the data and recommend the appropriate action to management.

Prerequisites: SME2011 or MKT2000

MKT3550 Consumer Psychology and Shopper Marketing
(Formerly Consumer Behavior)
4 General CreditsThis interdisciplinary course discusses how the consumer is the focus of the marketing system. Drawing on research from sociology, psychology, strategy and economics, this course focuses on the factors that shape consumer needs and influence buying behavior. The content of the course explores individual behavioral variables (needs, motives, perceptions, attitudes, personality, and learning) and group influences (social groups and culture) as they affect the consumer decision-making process. The objective of the course is to help students understand how to analyze marketing programs, especially the communications mix and market segmentation, to improve consumer satisfaction.

Prerequisites: SME2011 or MKT2000

HUM4640 Contagious Cultures: Narrative, Film, Society
(Formerly Literature and Film of Contagion)
4 Advanced Liberal Arts Credits

Wherever you live in the world, it is almost certain that your life has been affected if not profoundly transformed over the past two years. The experience of living through such a vast contagion prompted me to think not about illness (I think we're exhausted by that), but about the spreadability and transmission of all sorts of infectious content. In this course, we will look very little at narratives of actual physical contagions. Instead, we will study contagion-as-metaphor for the expansion of a wide range of ideas and movements that propagate, spread, go viral, catch on, etcetera. Through narrative and film, discussion and debate, we will consider such overt topics as humor, laughter, and fear, but also beliefs, environmental contagion, cheating, social media, scapegoating and cancel culture, hair and fashion styles, protest, hope, and happiness, among other possibilities. Why and how do we aspire to some concepts going "viral," while striving to contain others? How is the speed and profusion of transmission of things other than disease both a positive and a negative aspect of our contemporary world?

Prerequisites: Any combination of 2 ILA (HSS, LTA, CSP, LVA, CVA)