UNIV 1784 Sections

All first-year Honors students will take a section of UNIV 1784 (Honors First Year Seminar) in the fall. One portion of the class will be led by a faculty member (full descriptions below), while the other portion will be led by an Honors staff member. Both the faculty and staff led portions of UNIV 1784 are critical for how incoming Honors students are supported. In addition to the topic below, you can expect an introduction to academic and social resources, cultivation of your relationships with other Honors students, advice on succeeding at UConn and in Honors, and a focus on “staying whelmed.”

Students not registered for UNIV 1784 on the 10th day of classes will be eligible for dismissal from the Honors Program.

Mark Overmyer-Velazquez

Tuesdays 11-11:50am (weekly for the whole semester), Thursdays 11am-12:15pm (for the first 10 weeks of the semester)

In this introductory seminar, students learn and work alongside other UConn students, instructors, and local community organizations as they examine how power, social justice and education intersect in Hartford and in their own lives. Together, seminar participants “encounter” the capital city through readings and other interactions. Hartford Encounters examines how we might co-create new models of just, democratic, and sustainable urban life that identify and address key challenges faced by Hartford and other cities around the world. With our location in this diverse state capital, the seminar leverages the campus’s proximity to key stakeholders: policymakers, businesses, and community organizations to better understand those challenges.

Following introductory sessions that facilitate healthy, critical, and courageous community building among class participants, we explore some of Hartford’s histories of inequality and social change. We then learn from a variety of local practitioners how they determine and address select conditions of urban life including, (im)migration, anti-racism, civic engagement, government, environment, and religion. This interdisciplinary and intersectional course concludes with student-generated examinations of social justice themes relevant to their own experiences and explorations of how to enact positive change.