Spring 2024 Quest 1 Courses

How can Indigenous values about the relationship between nature and culture help us address the challenges of climate change, food insecurity, public health, and social justice?

What does it mean to dwell between the heavens and Earth?

To what extent do representations of gardens in literature and art increase our enjoyment of the gardens we visit in real life?

When we see dance - from ballet to Beyoncé – how does it inform our ideas about race, ethnicity, and/or gender?

How would your life change if you lived during the American 1950s, and how would that shape your UF experience?

How can we use performance to uncover and highlight hidden histories?

How are personal and social identities understood as adaptations? What stories are we adapting to construct our own identities? Finally, how does understanding and utilizing adaptation as an analytical tool teach us to understand how identities are personally, socially, or politically significant?

What power does music have over us and how does it shape our world?

How did "the Blues" as a popular musical form, in its many sonic and regional manifestations, become a catalyst for social change and an innovation that united the Black community in its struggle for equal rights in post-Emancipation America?

Does the capitalist system erode community or enhance it?

How is comedy an expression of citizenship: that is, how do we use comedy as responsible citizens in a democratic republic? 

How do we develop the character to handle life’s conflicts and tragic events?

How can heterogenous populations live together as fellow citizens, and what does it mean to live collectively within self-imposed limits? We sometimes call this condition constitutionalism, a condition which this course investigates from a plethora of angles."

What does it mean to live in a consumer society?

What is Black Popular Culture and how has it changed the world?

What does it mean to be free and equal? 

How does belief in God shape the way one views the natural world? 

How does being born female dictate human experience?

What is orientalism and colonialism, and how do these ideas promote further global and intercultural awareness and understanding?

Were pirates pariahs, or were they vigilantes seeking justice against tyrant monarchs, and what does this tell us about the motivations of people for engaging in piracy?

How is political violence represented, conceptualized and memorialized across shifting literary and visual texts? What ethical questions arise in our engagement with representations of traumatic limit events and the experience of horror these events entail?

"How does one change what is not just?” 2) “Who has the power to make change?” 3) “What is powerful about social justice?”

How do numbers impact the stories we tell about our social and cultural lives?"

How have people in different societies used the supernatural to try to understand and affect the natural world? What objects, words, rituals, and images have they employed to explain and harness the supernatural?

How does our connection to place, as expressed through placed-based narratives, shape and strengthen our individual and community identities?

How does war shape the human condition? 

What is America For?

What is the common good and how is it harmonized with individual rights?”

What, if anything, justifies the use of force?

What does it mean to be wise and what does it mean to live heroically? 

How have women expressed their agency, authorship, worldview, and their power through their contribution to various movements in music and how have women transformed the production and consumption of music?

How does music move us spiritually? Or, to put it another way: Why do organized sounds have the power to catalyze spiritual experiences? How does music shape our spiritual experience and how do our spiritual beliefs and practices shape our musical taste and aesthetic experiences?

How can we pursue our disagreements with each other in a way that is both fair and productive?

How does soccer exemplify the dynamics of justice and power both on and off the field of play? 

Thinking systemically and individually, how do phenomena like car culture, agriculture, and productivity impact your quest for a just and equitable society?

What are the primary beliefs and ideas that shaped the United States at its birth, throughout its history, and into the twenty-first century? 

When we see dance - from ballet to Beyoncé – how does it inform our ideas about race, ethnicity, and/or gender?