Interdisciplinary Studies (CISS)

The Business Fundamentals Lab aims to help students develop a clear, basic understanding of the central unit of the institution of business: a company. Led by a practitioner, students will learn the components and functions common to companies, and explore the internal workings by which companies assess their ability to achieve multiple goals while generating profit. Acting as the managerial and executive staff of a hypothetical company named "Helios," students will experiment with making complex decisions while addressing competing demands, not only concerns about immediate, short-term profit but also broader concerns about shareholders, stakeholders, ethical impact, and company culture. The Lab is designed to fulfill the Fundamentals requirement for the minor in Business, Ethics, and Society, but is open to any student interested in understanding how businesses function and the decision making processes they follow. Students should have Microsoft Office on their computers.

It is recognized that poverty plays a central role in many preventable diseases. With the development of nations have come improvements in health. The linkages between health and development can only be understood within the broader context of socio-political and economic factors. In the landscape of globalization and international development there has emerged a vast international health regime. This course focuses on these linkages in the context of this international political economy of health. Key aspects are critically examined including the concepts and architecture of global health, the global burden and epidemiology of disease, health and development of nations, and political-economic determinants of health and development. This foundational course in global health will use a variety of analytical perspectives including political, legal, economic and epidemiological. The course focuses on developing countries. One unit.

The course focuses on the final glory days of Austria. After dominating Europe as imperial city and court of the Holy Roman Empire for centuries until 1806, Austria steadily diminished in geographical size and as a political powerhouse. However, at the turn-of-the-century, intellectual and aesthetic achievements secure Vienna's fame apart form the house of Habsburg. The course strives to convey the awe-inspiring diversity of innovations in art, architecture, design, music, journalism, criticism, literature, philosophy, and science through texts, slides and recordings. At the same time, the course addresses the cultural phenomena in the historical, political, and social context of events leading up to and following WWI.

The course focuses on the final glory days of Austria. After dominating Europe as imperial city and court of the Holy Roman Empire for centuries until 1806, Austria steadily diminished in geographical size and as a political powerhouse. However, at the turn-of-the-century, intellectual and aesthetic achievements secure Vienna's fame apart form the house of Habsburg. The course strives to convey the awe-inspiring diversity of innovations in art, architecture, design, music, journalism, criticism, literature, philosophy, and science through texts, slides and recordings. At the same time, the course addresses the cultural phenomena in the historical, political, and social context of events leading up to and following WWI.

Counting, symmetry, pattern, and position are foundational concepts that appear in both dance and mathematics. This interdisciplinary course will engage students in observing, creating, analyzing, and identifying the shared principles between these two fields. Through movement exercises, choreographic projects, mathematical analysis, and reflective discussions, students will explore how mathematical thinking informs dance composition and how embodied movement can deepen the understanding of mathematical concepts.

Worcester and Its People is a study of the history of Worcester and the people who have lived here from the time of European settlement in the late 17th Century to the present. The course's principal focus is on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, a period in which Worcester became one of America's leading industrial centers and the magnet for thousands of immigrants. Worcester's history reflects most of the major concerns and issues in the history of the nation, providing a microcosm for their study. One unit.

A course in reading, writing, and presentation of case law material. Students apply American Trial Association rules of argument and evidence in preparing for mock trial competitions. Working in small groups and working alone on detailed arguments are both required. One unit.

Consistent with the mission of Holy Cross and the vision of Jesuit higher education outlined by Fr. General Kolvenbach, this course offers CBL scholars and SPUD interns the opportunity to engage in the "gritty reality of the world" in order to reflect meaningfully upon the question of what responsibility each of us has towards creating a more just society and how each of us can use our individual gifts and talents to contribute toward this aim. In order to address these questions effectively, the course will utilize texts, articles, websites, movie excerpts, and community engagement experiences to enable a deeper understanding of social problems; to analyze how social problems directly impact individuals within our society; to consider questions of equity and social justice; and to reflect upon what influence our personal choices have on social problems. One unit.

Entrepreneurship begins with a vision. This course focuses on the foundations of entrepreneurship and is appropriate for students from any major. It is designed to introduce students to the entrepreneurial process so that they may begin to shape their own entrepreneurial vision. Course objectives include an introduction to the challenges of entrepreneurship, an understanding of the ethical environment in which entrepreneurs operate, the skills to think critically and work toward the ability to evaluate opportunities in the business. This is a course that includes project-based entrepreneurial activities where students work to test and validate ideas.Due to the project-based nature of the class, the beginning of the week we will focus on learning the concepts, whereas the lab will be time to do fieldwork, peer-to-peer feedback, and building of venture. In addition to classes, faculty will hold periodic mentor meetings with teams. One unit.

This course will investigate the scientific and political factors that have shaped responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. We begin by establishing the biological, historical, and national institutional context for pandemic response, tracing the development of epidemiology and public health mechanisms through cases including the Great Plague, cholera, and the 1918 influenza pandemic. We then move to address the evolution, and sources of authority, of international cooperative mechanisms like the World Health Organization, nongovernmental organizations, and epistemic communities by analyzing the response to recent public health crises, including the outbreaks of H1N1 influenza and Ebola. Thus prepared, we turn to COVID-19. We will first discuss the biology of the virus, the research that underpins our understanding of its transmission, epidemiological models of disease spread, and the biological bases of the treatments currently under development. This scientific understanding will allow us to make recommendations about ideal public health guidelines. We will then compare these ideal responses to those actually taken by national and international actors, while analyzing the reasons - social, political, and scientific - for the diverse policies pursued and the implications for future pandemic response.

Capitalism in Context will introduce students to the intellectual foundations and principles of capitalism, detailing how these intersect with ideas about individual liberty, social responsibility and human flourishing. Capitalism itself is a contested term, and we will explore some of the many 'capitalisms' that have arisen, always with an eye to normative questions about which accord best with the demands of morality and justice. Additional topics to be addressed may include, but are not limited to: debates about regulation and the proper relationship between the state and the market; theories of corporate social responsibility and the evolution of corporate governance; the challenges posed by the increasing focus on finance rather than industrial production as the main source of profit making; and the social, political and technological changes that have accompanied this shift.

Eloquentia Perfecta: Writing and Speaking for the Common Good invites students to build effective and ethical communication skills both within and beyond the classroom. Students will draw upon the theory and practice of rhetoric as a means to share their ideas and make change in the world. As students compose written, spoken, and multimodal texts, they will consider questions of intercultural communication, social justice, and the dignity of both the rhetor and the communities with which they engage.

Students will become confident in their own abilities to coherently and concisely relay data driven information. Drawing from their own disciplinary interests, students will conduct research and create policy statements and researched proposals in multiple formats and modes, including digital media. Emphasis is placed on the development and control of the writing process so that students can adapt their writing for a variety of audiences and writing circumstances.

This course helps students define digital literacy and provides practical instruction in some key skills associated with digital literacy. Topics include digital reading and writing practices, multimodal composition, managing an online identity, content ranking algorithms, generative artificial intelligence, and the politics and ethics of using digital technologies.

This course will critically evaluate global health theory and practice. Through the use of detailed case studies, students will discuss actual global health interventions and examine how and why some interventions work and others fail. We will interrogate the notion of global health: what it is exactly, who the main players are and who benefits from global health interventions and how. We will also examine health systems in the Global South and how they can be strengthened. Through exploration of these issues, students will become familiar with the doing of global health and with the notions of social determinants of health and health systems strengthening. An interdisciplinary perspective that draws on anthropological, feminist and public health concepts will be used throughout the course.

Each of us searches to make meaning of experience and to pursue meaningful lives. But what exactly constitutes meaning? Does it imply having a story, or are there kinds of understanding that lie beyond narrative?In this course we will use movement and words as creative tools to explore these questions and how they shape us - both as individuals and in community.No previous dance or creative writing experience required. This will be a multidisciplinary, collaborative course that will include movement, writing, performance, and art making.

This course will use an interdisciplinary perspective that draws from anthropology, development studies, human rights, gender studies and public health to examine how economic and social "development policies and initiatives influence human health and wellbeing around the world. We will discuss how notions of development and progress have been imagined and implemented at four key moments in history: during colonization, industrialization, the age of science and mass production, and the current digital/technological age. We will explore how human health and wellbeing have both been positively and negatively affected by the economic and social policies of each era. This course will broaden students understanding of the factors that influence health and wellbeing beyond the narrow biological and behavioral categories that are commonly used in publichealth. This will be accomplished by focusing on the political-economy as a key structural determinant of health. Case studies will be drawn from around the world and will include, among others, working conditions in multinational factories in Asia, the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in Ukraine, privatization of water in Bolivia, racism and income inequality in the US and colonial policies in Africa. We will conclude the course with a discussion of the potential rise of the cyborg, which is typically imagined in science fiction movies as representing the culmination of human economic development and, ostensibly, the end of disease and perhaps even the end of death. By the end of the course, students will:a. Have developed a nuanced understanding of the complex relationship between notions and practices of development and health outcomes in different parts of the worldb. Be able to apply theories of development to explain both positive and negative health outcomes within and between countriesc. Be able to use a gender lens to examine the differential impact of economic and social policies on the health of men, women and non-gender conforming personsd. Develop and refine their critical reading, thinking and writing skills

CreateLab: CommunityLiberate yourself from traditional assumptions about course structure; in this non-hierarchical environment students will play an active role in identifying learning goals, choosing paths of inquiry, and determining the creative research methods we ultimately engage. This class will help you develop strengths transferable to any other kind of work, academic or professional. One unit.

In his seminal essay "Rhetoric of the Image," Roland Barthes asked 'how does meaning get into the image?' Not only will this course seek to answer Barthe's question, but also explore how images and visuality affect how we see the world around us. What does it mean when trust is lost in digital images due to Photoshop and deep fakes? How are societal expectations of the body set in our culture through advertisements? Is standard Hollywood lighting racist? These, and many more questions will be asked, but also attempted to be answered through hands-on exercises where students will create their own visual texts.

The Holy Cross mission statement concludes with the hope that all members of the Holy Cross community will seek justice within and beyond the Holy Cross community. What does it mean to seek justice? How does this ideal connect to the broader mission of Jesuit higher education? How can one discover a personal path to seeking justice that utilizes one's unique gifts and talents? How has Holy Cross provided a foundation for a lifelong pursuit of justice? This course will provide seniors the opportunity to integrate the wide variety of experiences they have had at Holy Cross and reflect upon how these experiences have informed their answers to these questions.

Building on reflections documented in memos written during the work experience and texts read and debated during the Capstone, students in the Capstone Seminar complete three tasks: 1) They will draw individual conclusions about the proper role of business in a just, flourishing, and sustainable society. Students will choose among corporate sustainability, corporate social responsibility, and corporate political responsibility, and learn how to explain their choice to others who disagree. 2) They will develop a sense of their own preferences, strengths, and weaknesses as ethical agents, and develop strategies for acting effectively on their beliefs in the workplace. 3) They will prepare a pitch. After thoroughly researching an existing organization likely to confront one of the issue researched during their work experience, they will make an ethical, financial, and legal argument in favor of some action that organization should take to properly address the issue.

Of the 1.8 million new HIV infections recorded worldwide in 2017, 1.2 million were in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) alone. Why has this region been hardest hit by the HIV epidemic and why are prevention efforts seemingly not making much of a difference? Furthermore, who is at risk of HIV infection and why are some individuals more at risk than others? Why, for instance, do women in SSA account for 59% of HIV infections in the sub-region, while men account for 63% of HIV infections in the rest of the world. We will use an interdisciplinary approach to examine these questions in depth. We will also explore how notions of risk and vulnerability have changed over time as the epidemic increasingly evolves from a death sentence to being a treatable condition. Throughout the course we will critically evaluate the dominant public health and biomedical approaches that have been used to tackle the epidemic in sub-Saharan Africa. For comparative purposes, we will draw frequently on examples from other parts of the world, such as Cuba, Thailand, the US, Europe and China. Because HIV has not been all doom and gloom, we will also discuss some surprisingly positive effects of the epidemic (e.g., improved health care systems, employment creation etc).

Pop Culture, Race, and Sexuality is an interdisciplinary course that asks students to evaluate and create content that deals with pop culture and intersectional identities. Students will immerse themselves in several prominent genres including drama, the musical, and music videos, and engage a variety of critical lenses on different aspects of popular culture. They will also develop a familiarity with pertinent theoretical approaches including feminist studies, critical race studies, reception theory, queer theory, and camp studies. Students will engage with both traditional scholarly production as well as metacritical commentary distributed online.

The Writer's Workshop Practicum helps new writing consultants to apply composition and writing center theory to their praxis. The purpose of this course is to begin to prepare consultants to tutor various forms of writing and to work with students with differing abilities, identities, and literacies. This practicum gives consultants the opportunity to think through some of the critical issues in tutoring as they come up in a writing center setting. Students have multiple opportunities to learn through experience, engage with scholarship, and critically reflect on their developing tutoring practices.

An investigation of how people learn to write, and how they can be helped to write better. Topics include individual composing processes, academic discourse constraints, and cultural influences on writing. This by-permission course is required for all students who wish to become peer tutors in the Holy Cross Writer's Workshop.

This seminar deals with the historical, social, political and cultural forces, ideas and events leading up to the Holocaust, the attempted annihilation of all Jews and the almost complete destruction of the European Jewish communities. Using an interdisciplinary approach, the course offers a detailed study of this genocide across victims, perpetrators, bystanders and rescuers drawing upon historical documentation, first-person testimonies, photography, visual arts and music. One unit.

This course explores the intersection of gender, indigeneity, and environmental issues, emphasizing the roles of Indigenous women in shaping and caring their lands and ecosystems. Through case studies from the Andes in Latin America (Abiayala) and beyond, students will engage with Indigenous Knowledge Systems to examine the vital contributions of Native and Indigenous women to ecological stewardship, organic sustainability in relation to Environmental Justice (EJ) and Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK). Topics covered include, but are not limited to, Indigenous ontologies and epistemologies, feminismos comunitarios (community feminisms), environmental racism, settler colonialism, land rights, and the impacts of global development programs and projects implemented in Indigenous territories. The course places particular emphasis on how Indigenous women navigate, negotiate, and resist environmental policies that paradoxically perpetuate environmental (in)justices. Students will critically analyze how patriarchal structures intersect with colonial environmentalism by engaging with a variety of readings, media sources, and films, and classes conducted both indoors and outdoors in contact with nature. The course incorporates significant contributions from interdisciplinary thinkers and transnational perspectives. Additionally, it aims to support students professional development by encouraging reflection on their intellectual projects and academic aspirations through in-class exercises and final project.

For students who may not be associated with CISS programs, but who choose to do independent interdisciplinary study that might not be permitted under their major department's tutorial option. One unit.

Selected students take a seminar at the world-renowned American Antiquarian Society taught by visiting scholars. Seminar topics vary with the fields of the scholars. One unit.

For third and fourth year students who wish to do unique independent work that falls outside of disciplinary offerings. One unit.