This course aims to broaden and deepen students' understanding, experience, and critical thinking skills with regard to cultural differences and cross-cultural interactions. Students analyze diversity through the disciplines of socioeconomics, physical anthropology, biology, geography, and arts and the humanities. IDS-400 requires ENG-122 and ENG-123 as prerequisites, and students analyze relationships among culture, diversity, and self, integrating interdisciplinary approaches to diversity issues.
A genuinely interdisciplinary approach to diversity
The course deliberately analyzes diversity through five distinct disciplines, socioeconomics, physical anthropology, biology, geography, and the humanities, rather than treating diversity as belonging to any single field, reflecting that cultural difference is genuinely shaped by factors across all these dimensions.
Connecting diversity analysis back to self
IDS-400 explicitly analyzes the relationship among culture, diversity, and self, ensuring the course builds genuine personal reflection alongside academic analysis of diversity as an external topic.
Key topics in IDS400
- Cultural differences and cross-cultural interaction
- Socioeconomic dimensions of diversity
- Physical anthropology and diversity
- Biological and geographic dimensions of diversity
- Culture, diversity, and self
- Strategies for overcoming diversity-related obstacles
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Worked example: diversity through five disciplinary lenses
- Single-discipline approach: Studying diversity only through a sociological or cultural lens
- IDS-400's approach: Analyzing the same diversity questions through socioeconomics, physical anthropology, biology, geography, and the humanities together
- Lesson: IDS-400 teaches that genuine understanding of cultural diversity requires this full interdisciplinary range, not a single field's perspective alone
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Frequently asked questions
Cultural differences and cross-cultural interactions are genuinely shaped by factors spanning economic conditions, biological and physical variation, geographic circumstance, and cultural-historical development, meaning restricting diversity analysis to just one of these disciplines would miss real, contributing dimensions of how diversity actually manifests and is experienced. IDS-400 takes this multi-disciplinary approach because it produces a more complete and accurate understanding of diversity than any single field could provide alone.
IDS-400 requires students to analyze diversity across multiple disciplines, integrate interdisciplinary approaches, and articulate cultural responsiveness viewpoints. All of which depend on the college-level reading, writing, and critical analysis skills that ENG-122 and ENG-123 are designed to build first. Requiring these composition prerequisites ensures students enter IDS-400 with the genuine writing and analytical foundation needed to handle its interdisciplinary, discussion- and analysis-heavy coursework.