Courses tagged with "Nutrition" (344)

Environmentalists have traditionally relied upon the power of their prose to transform the thoughts and behavior of their contemporaries. In this class, we will do our best to follow in their footsteps. We will consider the strategies of popular science writers, lesser-known geologists, biologists, and hydrologists, and famous environmentalists. Students will have a chance to try out several ways of characterizing and explaining natural environments. Weekly writing exercises will help students develop and explore material for the longer papers.

This course is an introduction to writing prose for a public audience—specifically, prose that is both critical and personal, that features your ideas, your perspective, and your voice to engage readers. The focus of our reading and your writing will be American popular culture, broadly defined. That is, you will write essays that critically engage elements and aspects of contemporary American popular culture and that do so via a vivid personal voice and presence. In the coming weeks we will read a number of pieces that address current issues in popular culture. These readings will address a great many subjects from the contemporary world to launch and elaborate an argument or position or refined observation. And you yourselves will write a great deal, attending always to the ways your purpose in writing and your intended audience shape what and how you write. The end result of our collaborative work will be a new edition, the seventh, of Culture Shock!, an online magazine of writings on American popular culture, which we will post on the Web for the worldwide reading public to enjoy.

"What people do with food is an act that reveals how they construe the world."
- Marcella Hazan, The Classic Italian Cookbook

If you are what you eat, what are you? Food is at once the stuff of life and a potent symbol; it binds us to the earth, to our families, and to our cultures. In this class, we explore many of the fascinating issues that surround food as both material fact and personal and cultural symbol. We read essays by Toni Morrison, Michael Pollan, Wendell Berry, and others on such topics as family meals, eating as an "agricultural act" (Berry), slow food, and food's ability to awaken us to "our own powers of enjoyment" (M. F. K. Fisher). We will also read Pollan's most recent book, In Defense of Food, and discuss the issues it raises as well as its rhetorical strategies. Assigned essays will grow out of memories and the texts we read, and may include personal narrative as well as essays that depend on research. Revision of essays and workshop review of writing in progress are an important part of the class. Each student will make one oral presentation in this class.

This course provides the opportunity for students-as readers, viewers, writers and speakers-to engage with social and ethical issues they care deeply about. Over the course of the semester, through discussing the writing of classic and contemporary authors, we will explore different perspectives on a range of social issues such as free speech, poverty and homelessness, mental illness, capital punishment and racial and gender inequality. In addition, we will analyze selected documentary and feature films and photographs that represent or dramatize social problems or issues. In assigned essays, students will have the opportunity to write about social and ethical issues of their own choice. This course aims to help students to grow significantly in their ability to understand and grapple with arguments, to integrate secondary print and visual sources and to craft well-reasoned and elegant essays. Students will also keep a reading journal and give oral presentations. In class we will discuss assigned texts, explore strategies for successful academic writing, freewrite and respond to one another's essays.

Learn about the ethical issues that arise when conducting human subjects research, as well as the history that grounds policies and debates in this area of biomedicine.

In this course we will learn about the features of higher education that were designed specifically to prepare workers and leaders for the Industrial Age, and we’ll strategize ways that, together, we can change learning--inside of school and out--for the world we live in now--and even to help improve our world. #FutureEd

Modern industrial activities - which MIT engineers and scientists play a major role in - have significant environmental and social impacts. Trends towards further industrialization and globalization portend major challenges for society to manage the adverse impacts of our urban and industrial activities. How serious are current environmental and social problems? Why should we care about them? How are governments, corporations, activists, and ordinary citizens responding to these problems.

This course examines environmental and social impacts of industrial society and policy responses. We will explore current trends in industrialization, urbanization, and globalization, analyze the impacts these trends have on human health, environmental sustainability, and equity, and then examine a range of policy options available for responding to current problems. The course will present key trends in both domestic and international contexts.

We will examine four policy problems in particular during the course: (1) regulating industrial pollution; (2) regulating "sweatshops" and the broader impacts of globalization; (3) protecting ecosystems; and (4) protecting urban environments during development. We delve into specific cases of these challenges, including: chemical safety and toxins; computers, e-commerce, and the environment; biotech and society; sweatshops; and food production and consumption. Through these cases, we will explore underlying processes and drivers of environmental degradation. Finally, we will analyze opportunities and barriers to policy responses taken by governments, international institutions, corporations, non-governmental organizations, consumers, and impacted communities.

Objectives and Aims

• An understanding of the complexity of environmental and social impacts of industry;
• An ability to critically analyze policy responses;
• An understanding of the roles of different actors and institutions in environmental and social controversies;
• Means to evaluate institutional barriers to environmental and social policies;
• New ideas for better integrating industry, environment, and equity;
• New strategies for regulation in the global economy;
• An understanding about personal responsibilities and roles in environmental and social problems.