The Honors College Faculty Fellows program encourages curricular innovation, giving
faculty the opportunity to design new Honors College courses that also fit within
the General Education Foundations (GEF) course framework.
The sixth cohort of Honors College Faculty Fellows will challenge WVU students to re-examine their assumptions about ethics, science and even reality itself through innovative new courses.
Scheduled for the 2022-23 academic year, the courses will cover ethical dilemmas in transplant surgery, understanding the metaverse, justice in law and literature, science’s societal limitations and promises and information literacy through film.
2022-2023 Faculty Fellows
Vagner Benedito
In “Use and Abuse of Science,” students will explore the mechanisms and limitations of science from its potential to solve societal problems to cases of intentional scientific fraud and abuse. They will develop the skills to analyze the world around them and evaluate scientific claims in advertising, politics, commercial products and on social media. From ongoing societal issues, such as global warming, food and energy production, and the pandemic, to historical cases of scientific flaws or misconduct, such as bias in Artificial Intelligence algorithms and the clearly unethical experiments with the Tuskegee syphilis study, scientific literacy is an indispensable skill for full participation in civic discourse and our communities.
View the Fall 2022 "Use and Abuse of Science" lecture recording here.
Rose Casey
ENGLISH, EBERLY COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES
“What Makes For A Just World” brings together law and literature to engage global perspectives
on justice. By reading novels, poetry and drama alongside legal statutes, resolutions
and conventions, students will see how law and literature employ similar methods
to build a more just world. They’ll learn about laws that have discriminated
based on race, gender and nationality and examine how legal systems around
the world have protected individual and group rights. By exploring continuities
between countries as diverse as India, South Africa, the U.S. and the U.K.,
“What Makes For A Just World” inspires students to think expansively about justice: what
it is, what is has been, what it could be.
View the Fall 2022 "What Makes For A Just World" lecture recording here.
David Smith
REED COLLEGE OF MEDIA
“Extending Reality” will present students with a guided media and discussion-based
tour of XR technology (virtual, augmented and mixed reality), learning about
its origins, current applications and future growth potential. With the increasing
merging of the digital and physical worlds, we are presented with new opportunities
for interactivity and communication as well as new problems of privacy and
digital identity in the metaverse. Students will learn about these concepts
through lectures, class discussions and hands-on learning activities. The course
will culminate in students pitching, planning and producing a meaningful XR
project made to benefit a campus or community partner.
View the Fall 2022 "Extending Reality" lecture recording here.
Lynne Stahl
RESEARCH SERVICES, WVU LIBRARIES
“Exploring How Films Produce Meaning and Impact” will teach students literacy in the art and language of
film, pushing students to analyze the stories we tell in relation to the sociopolitical
contexts and information economies in which they are produced and viewed. Students
will learn how films produce meaning and impact and how our own cultural contexts
shape our intellectual and emotional responses. How is the production, dissemination
and consumption of information bound up in our political systems and norms?
Students will consider how these contexts change our conceptions of knowledge,
access, authority and merit.
View the Fall 2022 "Exploring How Films Produce Meaning and Impact" lecture recording here.