This course provides a broad overview of the fascinating field of Forensic Psychology. Students will gain an understanding of the application of psychology within the criminal justice system. Topics to be discussed include police selection, interrogations, criminal profiling, lie detection, eyewitness identification, jury decision-making, and psychopathic, sexual, and violent offenders.

This course provides an introduction to the cultural and language traditions within the Spanish-speaking world from an interdisciplinary perspective. The course focuses on the interaction between language and the cultures that underlie it, paying equal attention to the Spanish language (studied both experientially and theoretically) and the distinct societies that speak it. Consequently, to study the Spanish language as a cultural product provides the student a more meaningful way to gain cultural and linguistic proficiency.

This course examines contemporary issues and key concepts of equity/inequity and social justice in a global context. It provides students with the opportunity to critically consider and evaluate social responsibility and participation in local, national and international communities. The course unpacks and seeks a deeper understanding of the following topics/issues: social analysis, media literacy, cultural values, social exclusion, power and privilege, gender, class and social action.

Focusing primarily on Western European art, this course is an introduction to art history. Moving chronologically from the pre-modern era to post-modernity, students will engage with the ways in which works of art act as windows into the historical contexts that inform them. This course will examine how artworks at once build on and transform classical definitions of visual culture, including also the artistic styles and forces that animate them. Students will be encouraged to consider what constitutes "Art" and how art deeply affects human lives, experiences and ways of being in the world.

This course introduces students to the seminal ideas of major western thinkers of the modern period. This course provides an historical and integrated inter-disciplinary perspective on the development of those ideas that have shaped the thought of our own time.
The twenty-first century begins with the promise of new ideas, new technologies as well as the challenges associated with these apparent changes. This course is designed to facilitate the development of students' capacity to think both critically and historically about their own time, the past and social movements. It will introduce students to the ideas that have shaped our age and our ways of thinking thereby placing their own thinking within a larger context and increasing the clarity of that thought.
In addition to the professor responsible for and the primary lecturer of the course, students will be active participants through class discussions, presentations, and debates.

The average person in Canada spends about 230 minutes per day watching TV and 200 minutes per day on the Internet. That's about 325 eight-hour days, a full-time job! We spend another 70 minutes per day with other media, including newspapers, magazines, and traditional radio. That's more than 3,000 hours per year of media use, more time than we spend on anything else, including working or sleeping. This consumption of information sustains our economy, and most of the economic activity in North America now involves producing, processing or distributing information including the output of the mass media, Internet, telecommunications and computer industries. The goal of this course is to prepare students to thrive in today's increasingly integrated communications and information environment.

Any art form is a product of the society and/or culture in which it is created, and as such, reflects and/or challenges the prevailing values and beliefs. "Film Wars" takes a cinematic look at the social and cultural history of North America from the silent film era to today. By examining the films of two major rival Hollywood studios, Warner Brothers and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, we will discover that the stories they chose to bring to the screen and the stylistic and cinematic techniques and devices that they used, were dramatically different. By looking at several of the classic films from each of these studios, we will develop a deeper understanding and appreciation of both film style and cultural history.

As we move through the world and interact with those around us, we all play the role of "psychologist", trying to understand why we and others do what we do, feel what we feel, and think what we think. This course is designed to introduce you to the scientific study of human behaviour and mental processes. By understanding how psychological research is conducted, by examining the evidence that has been accumulated in the field, and by using critical thinking and analysis, it is hoped that the assumptions and intuition you have gained through your own experience with the world will be re-examined and re-evaluated in a new and interesting light. A variety of areas within this broad and fascinating field will be examined. These may include learning, memory, social psychology, developmental psychology, stress and health, personality, and abnormal psychology.

As an introduction to queer studies, this course will explore the history of sexuality, in particular shifting concepts of male-male desire, as well as related issues pertaining to queer sexuality and identity through the medium of literature, theory, and film.

Examining sport as both a phenomenon in its own right and as a metaphor for our contemporary world, reveals the often paradoxical nature of modern, and post-modern, living. Individuals and communities invest personal time and expenditure, along with significant emotional capital, in apparently ephemeral activities, whose financial rewards and honours most often accrue to a wealthy sponsor and an elite playing class of performers. Public and private resources, extensive media attention, and national identity are either additional beneficiaries or victims of this phenomenon.

This course is divided into two parts: theory and practice. In the first part, we examine the philosophical foundations of the defining political ideologies of our time: liberalism, conservatism, communism, socialism, and their intellectual heirs and hybrids. Authors include John Locke, Adam Smith, Immanuel Kant, Edmund Burke, Karl Marx, John Stuart Mill, among others. In the second part, we turn to questions of public policy and to the ways in which various ideologies approach, and attempt to solve, difficult political questions. Issues include education, health care, immigration and citizenship, among others.

What is the nature of love? In his novel La Nouvelle Héloïse, Jean-Jacques Rousseau's female protagonist, Julie, states: So many people speak of love, and so few know how to love.... The experience of romantic love raises several philosophical concerns. Is love an emotion or a feeling? Why do we say? I fell in love? Is love irrational or can one deliberately choose to love? Is there a difference between love and its trashy cousin lust? As one commentator explains, Love thrives on candlelight and conversation. Lust is equally happy in a doorway or a taxi. Is love at first sight? logically possible? Is love necessarily exclusive (i.e. can you be in love with two persons at the same time)? Is true or genuine love possible, or is love perhaps an illusion, a chimera? In this course, we will probe and interrogate your most intimate intuitions and notions of love as they are defined historically and characterized contemporarily.

Although philosophers have considered the nature of the mind for millennia, a new interdisciplinary approach developed in the 20th century: cognitive science. After millennia of study, the problems remained the same: Is the mind different from the brain? What is consciousness? How can I tell if other people have minds? Is it possible to create an artificial intelligence? Are humans truly rational? Cognitive science includes approaches from computer science, linguistics, anthropology, philosophy and psychology in an attempt to answer these ancient questions. Students will be introduced to central themes in cognitive science by reading key articles and excerpts from books from important cognitive scientists across the various disciplines.

This course examines some of the most influential ethical theories, emphasizing practical application in real world situations. Starting with timeless issues affecting persons throughout history, the main focus will be on current ethical problems unimaginable to the founders of western ethical thought along with future scenarios at the boundaries of our own imaginations. Students will explore how to make ethical choices in our complex, technologically mediated, and rapidly changing world.

This course will look at how Canadian society will be shaped by technologies that are at the cutting edge of current research. These may include self-driving autos, crispr gene editing, social media engineering, and auto-diagnostic artificial intelligence. We will focus on the proven accomplishments in these fields and expert opinion on the likely course of development, using sociological concepts to draw conclusions about how Canadian society will be impacted.

The graphic novel emerged in the last quarter of the twentieth century as a complex narrational medium, powerfully combining telling and showing. From its antecedents in comic strip and comic book, the graphic novel evolved, through a sequence of thematically, narratively, and semiotically challenging comics, into a full-fledged narrative art form. This course surveys a range of graphic novels, both mainstream and independent. The emphasis, however, will be on the independent graphic novel. Secondary readings in history and criticism will help students understand better the context from which the graphic novel emerged, and to grasp more firmly their visual and textual aesthetics.

This course analyzes physical phenomena related to light and sound and their manifestations in nature and in the arts. Students will discuss examples of reflection and refraction, and will examine optical devices and the human eye. They will learn about colours, colour mixing and applications. Students will review the nature of sound waves and analyze wave behaviour in nature. Throughout the course students will apply their theoretical knowledge to solving numerical problems of light and sound phenomena in everyday life.

Real time information systems have resulted in a high degree of economic interdependence among nations. Canada has an opportunity to push forward the production possibilities frontier and obtain a higher level of equilibrium with help of the international trade.
This course is designed to provide a theoretical and analytical framework for understanding the complexities of international trade. It will provide insight into the effects of ever changing economic and political order on international trade, with particular reference to the Canadian economy. Implications of the current Canadian international trade policy and our multilateral agreements will be also analyzed. In addition, students will develop an understanding of the fundamental principles of exchange rate determination. Students will explore issues such as: Is free trade beneficial for a country? Why do some countries adopt protectionist's policies? What are the effects, short-run and long-run, of major trade agreements on the Canadian economy? Why does the exchange rate fluctuate constantly?

This course offers a comprehensive analysis of theory and research related to group dynamics. Student explore social processes in groups and their impact on individual behaviour and are introduced to the following group elements: norms, roles, coherence and dissonance, group think, validation, types of groups and membership, referencing, group symptoms, leadership styles. The student will practice leading and participating in groups where observation and recording skills will be stressed.

In this course, we examine the ethics of globalization: What is justice in our globally interconnected world? Do obligations of justice extend beyond national borders? If they do, how can justify, and then act upon, our duties to distant others? A key theme throughout the course is the issue of global poverty: we begin with an historical assessment of how the world came to be so economically unequal, and then turn to the ethical consequences of such inequality. On what philosophical grounds can we condemn the world as it is? The course then concludes with the question of reform: What, exactly, would a more just world look like? And how can we bring that world into being, practically speaking?

This course focuses on the examination of contemporary patterns of globalization in all its forms. The 20th century has experienced great social upheaval and transformation. We fought two world wars, saw the rise and fall of the Soviet communist regime, and witnessed the formal dismantling of European empires. We experienced dramatic technological change and the ascendancy of corporate capitalism as the primary global economic model. We have also witnessed unprecedented economic disparities and ecological hazards from air, water and soil pollution to global climate change. The 21st century promises to see these trends accelerate and intensify.

We negotiate the world through visual culture, whether we are sighted or have low vision that requires adaptive or assistive technologies, and whether we live in urban spaces saturated with surfaces covered in advertisements and signs or remote places in which we depend on our screens to connect with "the world". The term "visual culture" encompasses many media forms ranging from fine art to film and television to advertising to visual data in fields such as the sciences, law, and medicine. In this class we will examine what it means to study these diverse forms together. We will also discuss how we attach meaning to these visuals and how they impact our culture and society.

It is universally recognized in art, literature, history and individual experience that human beings are social beings. Who we are, how we think, how we feel, and how we behave are all subject to the influence of the situation in which we find ourselves. Social psychology is the science that attempts to examine, describe, and explain the impact of social situations on individuals and on groups. This course will examine topics within the field such as how we see ourselves and others in a social context, how attitudes are formed and changed, and the power of social situations to influence our behaviour. Building on the knowledge the learner has of psychological research methodology, this course aims to improve the student's understanding of how psychologists study social influence and interaction. Both group and individual processes will be examined in depth to encourage critical analysis of a variety of theoretical viewpoints, and to develop the learner's ability to investigate and report on current perspectives in social psychology.

How does the brain control our thoughts, feelings, and actions? Can the brain improve with training? How does it repair itself after illness or injury? Such questions are at the basis of the topic of brain plasticity.
Students examine the relationships between the brain and mental processes, such as language, reasoning, and planning. They explore how thoughts change the structure and functions of the brain and how these changes alter thinking. They examine the various therapies used for brain injuries and mental disorders.

This course is designed to provide theoretical and analytical framework for understanding the structure and conduct of labour markets with particular reference to Canadian economy. It draws on contemporary methods to model and analyze key aspects of labour supply and labour demand. It also reviews labour legislation, labour market data and important trends that affect organizational, individual and government decision-making. These aspects are combined to explore the determination of wages, alternative pay schemes and the implication of major policies such as minimum wage legislation, non-wage benefits, alternative income maintenance schemes and unionization on the labour market. The acquired tools are applied to discuss current topics such as human capital investment, immigration, discrimination and unemployment.

If current trends persist, one half of all species on earth will be extinct in less than 100 years. The results of such a loss would be devastating for humans. Biodiversity is essential to support the ecosystem services that we depend on for our wellbeing, such as food, fresh water, clean air, raw materials for construction, fuel, medicine, and the pollination of crops. Understanding the links between human wellbeing and biodiversity is essential knowledge for the 21st century. In this class, students learn the benefits of, and threats to, biodiversity, and evaluate some of the possible solutions to the current extinction crisis. Students critically examine the role of hunting and fire suppression, and identify best practices in the design of protected areas and strategies for the conservation of endangered species.

Why is it easier to believe falsehoods when they're voiced by celebrities and powerful authority figures? How can we avoid falling for unsupported and often dangerous medical advice? Why is it so hard to acknowledge weaknesses in our own social and political perspectives while effortlessly finding faults in the views of others?
As humans, much of our thinking is fast, intuitive, and relatively effortless-we take mental shortcuts by necessity, and this often results in predictable mistakes. Cognitive errors shape who we vote for, what we fear, and our responses to emergency situations. To better cope with and thrive in our increasingly complex social environment-a world of virtually unlimited information and connectivity-we need to understand the limitations of our miraculous yet fallible minds. By developing greater awareness of pervasive heuristics and biases, this course aims to lay the foundation for identifying, avoiding, and responding to some of the errors to which we regularly fall prey.

Are psychopaths born or made? This course provides students both with an analysis of the development of criminals and in particular that of psychopaths and serial killers. The biological, developmental, learning and situational factors that contribute to criminal antisocial behaviour will be explored in detail. Since there is sound research on psychopaths, a particular focus will be placed on psychopaths. The diagnosis of psychopathic personality, connections between psychopathic and normal personalities, neuroscience findings and research on emotion and thought processes in psychopaths will be examined. Case studies will be examined to bring the research to life.