Society of College Scholars

Overview to the Colloquium

This small seminar introduces some of the brightest and most promising students entering the University of Oregon to the diverse, eclectic, intriguing and sometimes outrageous research, scholarship and interests found in and around the social sciences.  This seminar will introduce you to parts of the world, peoples, cultures, ideas, forms of expression, ways of governing, producing, trading, behaving, cooperating and fighting that will perhaps be unfamiliar, challenging, and I expect, fascinating. 

The seminar is a kind of movable feast, a buffet table where you get to try some of the spiciest, most complex, and delicious dishes the University has to offer.   In doing so, you’ll get an idea of some of the questions that have brought us into the “life of the mind,” careers focused on teaching, research and wondering: why the ongoing war in Iraq; whether globalization really can lift the lives and hopes of the world’s poor; the origins of our species; the reasons capitalism developed first in Britain and not China or Mesoamerica; how our evolutionary history shapes our choices of Presidents, detergent and life partners; whether phrases like “sustainable development,” “fair trade,” “benevolent dictator,” and “dorm life” are really meaningful or just oxymorons.

But the seminar is more than this smorgasbord of the most engaging, cutting-edge research in the social sciences. The seminar will also give you a good sense of what social research is all about: how we come up with explanations, figure out how to research them, refine our guesses, argue our points, learn from one another and from the world around us.  My hope is that this course will open your minds, eyes and hearts to new issues, ideas, and ways of seeing, whetting your appetite for more courses, perhaps a minor or a major in one of the disciplines we’ll sample this quarter.