Explore UW Tacoma: Majors and Minors

This course examines the role of public engagement in urban planning and development decision making in the United States. Through a collaboration with various public agencies of the City of Tacoma, this class provides an opportunity for students to gain hands-on experience working with local public officials and local residents on development challenges currently facing the city. Students will explore local case studies of presently emerging planning challenges—shared by local public officials and resident activists—and learn how and why members of the local public become involved in shaping decision-making related to those challenges. The central aim will be to build knowledge of the US urban context and build engagement skills that contribute to inclusive urban development and positive social change.

The current federal administration is removing references to "pollution" and decreasing protections for vulnerable populations. It is important for everyone to know what pollution is, where it comes from, how you are exposed to it, and how it affects you and your family and community. In this course we will analyze pollution sources, human exposure, and ways to address the problem. This course is very “hands on” and will include lab work and data analysis.

What makes a crime a hate crime, and who gets to decide? Where does free speech end and a criminal act begin? Why is it so hard to know how often hate crimes really happen?

In this course, students dig into questions that don't have easy answers. We look at why people commit hate crimes, how these crimes affect whole communities, and how hate groups recruit, organize, and operate today, including online. Some of that history happened right here: in 1885, Tacoma forcibly expelled its entire Chinese community.

Students read research, historical documents, and journalism side by side, and learn to weigh evidence and spot a weak source, skills that matter well beyond this class. We also look at what works: how laws, communities, and individuals push back, and how people leave hate movements.

This course provides an introduction to the field of “law and society,” also known as sociolegal studies. This diverse and wide-ranging field is built on a basic shared premise: law and society shape and influence one another. Using an interdisciplinary social science perspective, we will explore how law is lived in people’s everyday lives. How does law shape our social reality? How do people experience, think about, interact with, use, resist, and transform law? 

We will explore the various ways culture and identity shape one's relationship with the natural world. In addition to encountering literary expressions of human relationships with the natural world, we will also turn inward and reflect on our own place in this conversation. Our discussions will consider many factors that shape these perspectives. The assigned anthology of nature writing will serve as our entry point to broader discussions of environmental concerns. The selected assigned readings will create opportunities to interrogate the term "nature writing" and help us to work toward a broader understanding of how humans engage with the more-than-human world. 

In this course, we will explore the role of space, place, and environment in U.S. literature. Narratives don't develop in a vacuum--they expand across time and space, whether real or imagined. This course takes as its core assumption that these places matter, that they perform a specific and unique function in the text. The literature will serve as the foundation of the course, but it will also open up opportunities to explore and develop our own relationships to specific places.

Networking is the basis of all IT and fundamental to an understanding of cybersecurity. Why did the IP packet cross the network?

Learn about applying economics to understanding and evaluating current policy issues.