HAS Courses in the South
Baylor University
Environmental Sciences
Heidi Marcum
Animal Enrichment Field School. This class is designed to provide hands-on training in the enrichment of captive animals through individual and group work, often without direct supervision. Class objectives include: experience in enriching captive animals; hands-on, practical experience with a current environmental problem; experience with designing enrichment activities, taking data and writing up results; experience presenting results using Powerpoint.
Bellarmine University
Freshman Seminar
Tami Harbolt-Bosco
Animal Studies. Animal Studies will introduce students to the history and philosophy of animal rights and welfare. The 19th century and 20th century humane movements coincided with other historical social rights movements, such as temperance, abolition, suffrage, and civil rights. Studying the rights of animals allows for a reading of Western culture that considers gender, class, ethnicity, the role of scientific authority, and an exploration of the species boundary.
Broward College, South Campus
English
Vicki Hendricks
Animal-Human Interaction in Literature - Fully Online Course. Animals in literature have always captivated readers. The evolution of animal-human relationships from the 19th century to the present offers an interesting field of study, including animals as symbols, concepts of ownership versus companionship, cooperation and conflict in nature, suffering and morality, and literalist anthropomorphism as opposed to otherness-in-connection. Poe's "The Black Cat," Tolstoy's Strider: The Story of a Horse, London's The Call of the Wild, Woolf's Flush: A Biography and contemporary works Seabiscuit by Laura Hillenbrand, The Life of Pi by Yann Martel, and The Dogs of Babel by Carolyn Parkhurst are the selected texts for discussion and written analysis.
Eastern Kentucky University
Psychology
Robert Mitchell
Introduction
to Animal Studies. A survey of the field of animal studies, focusing on
animals’ lives and histories, and the human experience of animals as food, as
objects of entertainment, spectacle and science, as companions, and as
representations. The course will introduce students to the field of animal
studies by reading, discussing, thinking, and writing about various traditions
in the field, including anthropology, art, biology, history, literature
philosophy, psychology, and sociology.
Florida Gulf Coast University
Theatre Program
Michelle Hayford
Devising Performance: Human-Dog Connections. We are partnering with The Humane Society of the United States’ Humane
Society University to create a civically engaged original performance about
human-dog connections and the abuse of dog fighting in particular. We will investigate critical performance ethnography
in both theory and praxis. This is an
engaged theatre laboratory in ensemble building techniques via in-class
exercises to develop an original ensemble-created performance for the as yet
un-named spring production of TL003: A Performance Constellation. Performance dates are in April 2013 in the
Theatre Lab.
Louisiana State University
Veterinary Medicine
Animals in Society I and II. Human-animal relationships, human-animal bond, pet facilitated therapy, animal welfare, and animal rights. Two part course
Middle Tennessee State University
Sociology
Angela Mertig
Animals and Society. Non-human animals have played important, often unrecognized, roles throughout the history of human society. Even so, sociology, as the study of society and its component parts, has typically viewed other animals as part of the environmental back-drop that could be safely ignored. Recently, however, sociological and other disciplinary recognition of animals in society has grown. Not only have sociologists gained greater appreciation for social impacts on animals (and their environments), but they have increasingly come to see that other animals are social agents as well. This course is devoted to exploring many of the ways that non-human animals and humans interact in sociologically meaningful ways.
Texas Christian University
Carol Thompson
Animals, Culture and Society
Non-Human animals are an ever-present part of our lives. This presence, even though salient, is often taken for granted by humans. Even sociologists, for the most part, have neglected the study of animal/human interaction and the importance of animals in human societies. This course will attempt to correct this oversight by addressing the roles, places, meanings, and significance animals have in human society. We will explore the cross-cultural differences and the major social and philosophical arguments regarding the place of animals and the capacity of animals to think, feel, express, interact etc. We will also examine beliefs, social practices and policies regarding animals and their well-being and the social, cultural, and political bases of these practices and policies. This course will apply sociological approaches to the study of human-animal relationships. It will be revealed that humans are not consistent in our perceptions of, or relations with, other animals, indicating that socially constructed realities extend into human/animal relations. We will challenge traditional representations of nonhuman animals and connect these representations to enduring social problems such as racism, sexism and violence against the vulnerable. Central to this course will be an exploration of the ways in which �animal' lives intersect with human social life. The overarching goal is to examine these topics in a way that is both scholarly and practical, thereby providing a rich and meaningful intellectual experience.
Texas Women's University
Women's Studies
Claire Sahlin
Ecofeminist Theorizing. This graduate seminar explores ecofeminist thinking concerning interconnections between the exploitation of nature and the subjugation of women and people of color, while considering ecofeminist reflections on activism and spirituality/religion. Through assigned readings, documentary films, guided discussion, and projects, we'll ask questions about the meaning of environmental justice, while studying ecofeminist perspectives concerning such topics as vegetarianism, corporate globalization, colonization, and religious fundamentalisms. Our study of ecofeminist theorizing, spirituality, and activism will prompt us to examine assumptions about epistemology (how we come to understand the world and whose knowledge counts), ontology (how we envision the nature of the universe, including the relatedness of beings and entities in the world), and ethics (the nature of moral behavior).
University of Georgia
Janet Frick
Humans and Animals in Society
University of Louisville
Philosophy
Andrea Reed
Philosophy of Animal Rights
University of Louisville
Philosophy
Environmental Ethics. Examination of the moral status of the natural environment and ethical problems of human/environment interaction.
University of North Florida
Bart Welling
English
Wild Encounters: Uncaging the Beast in Modern Literature. Why do "trained" wild animals turn on their human masters? Why do good pets go bad? What happens when humans give expression to "the beast within"? Our airwaves and movie houses in the U. S. have long been full of sensationalistic or simply trivial answers to problems like these. Meanwhile, generations of writers and theorists have been dealing with animal behavior, human/animal interactions, and questions of human/animal identity in ways that challenge our most fundamental assumptions about who we are, what-or who-"they" are, and how "we" ought to be treating "them." In this class we will not just encounter some of the most famous beasts in modern literature, from Melville's white whale to Faulkner's Old Ben to James Dickey's nightmarish backwoodsmen in Deliverance, but will frame our encounters with them by means of critical engagement with leading animal rights philosophers, biologists, ecocritics and ecofeminists, and other participants in the growing field of what might be called animal studies. Rather than advocating a particular political agenda, our goal will be to create an open and informed dialogue about the functions nonhuman animals and "beastliness" serve in American culture, and, more broadly, about the roles literature plays in helping humankind make sense of its place in a world full of other life forms.
University of North Texas
Philosophy
Ecofeminism. Examines the merger of feminism with environmental ethics and its subsequent evolution. Subject matter includes the analysis of patriarchy, gender issues and multicultural perspectives within the larger framework of ethical responses to ecocrisis.
University of North Texas
Philosophy
Eugene Hargrove
Seminar in Environmental Ethics. An intensive analysis of new positions in environmental ethics with special emphasis on their theoretical value as a contribution to contemporary philosophy and their practical value with regard to environmental policy and decision making.
University of North Texas
Cynthia Chandler
Counseling
Animal Assisted Therapy. Animal-assisted therapy is the incorporation of qualified animals into a therapeutic environment. Explores techniques to facilitate animal-assisted therapeutic interventions in a variety of settings, including schools, counseling agencies, hospitals, nursing homes, hospices, prisons and facilities for individuals with developmental disabilities. A variety of animals can be suitable for therapy programs. The student need not have an animal or pet to take the course.
University of Texas
Geography
Sharon Adams
Nature and Culture. The investigation of nature-culture relationships
lies at the core of academic geography. This course introduces students to the
study of the complex interactions and interrelationships between human society
and the natural world from a geographic perspective, with an emphasis on
nonhuman animals. Consideration of the more-than-human world is a rapidly
emerging field, and one in which geographers play an important and meaningful
role. Animals challenge and compliment our notions of identity and humanity; they
share our homes; they are present on our dinner tables; and they are
omnipresent in our popular culture. Animals also animate the world around us, personifying nature. As we examine the ways in which boundaries are
constructed, enacted, practiced, and challenged between the human and the
nonhuman animal, we undermine taken-for-granted dichotomies, and collapse the
distances constructed between human society and the natural world. By
broadening our discussion of natures and cultures, and bringing the animal
alongside the human, we cross through a rich terrain of interrelationships and
interactions that can expand our understandings of ourselves and our place
within the world around us.
University of Texas Pan American
Social Work
Catherine Faver
Spirituality and Social Work. This is taught as an elective in our MSSW program. Relevant topics include vegetarianism as spiritual practice and responsibility; the spiritual dimension of the human-animal bond; the therapeutic effects of companion animals in various social contexts
University of Texas Pan American
Social Work
Catherine Faver
Human Behavior and the Social Environment: Institutions, Organizations, and Communities. This is a required social work course. Relevant topics I included in the course: impact of the natural environment on human health and well-being (including the impact of factory farming and the benefits of vegetarianism); the link between animal abuse and family violence; the therapeutic effects of animals in various social contexts such as residential and other treatment facilities.
