Graphic medicine is a growing field that focuses on how visual communication can be used for public health purposes. Medical professionals and public health organizations have started using comics to communicate with stakeholders because the form's storytelling capabilities encourage empathy. Research has shown that patients and caregivers are more likely to pay attention to and understand information presented as a comic, rather than as an informational pamphlet.
This course focuses on information and communication technology (ICT) design, adoption, and use as seen through the lens of global development. We will begin with studying the history of technological advancement, the global development discourse (from the 1940s to the present era), poverty as experienced, before we engage with the design thinking process. We will then shift our gaze to particular domains of global development, discuss important questions and concerns in these areas of work in the present day, before asking what all this means for us as local and global citizens.
This short course reviews the basics of Asset-Based Community Development (ABCD) - working with communities based on their assets, or strengths - and then introduces participatory facilitation methods that can be used to implement ABCD with diverse stakeholders. These methods can be used by students and professionals alike to create truly equitable and participatory environments, whether that be in academic project work, in the community/field, or in their professional spaces.
“In-Humanity: Cruelty/Literature/Media” is broken up into various categories of violence (war, massacre, genocide, ecological collapse) via literature, diverse media, and policy. We’ll be reading a novel, a graphic novel, short stories, and excerpts from theoretical texts, as well as looking at photographs and videos to investigate both historical and contemporary conflicts and upheavals.
In this course, you will be a part of an international team, with students spanning our Atlanta, GT Shenzhen, and GT Lorraine campuses. Your global team will work to innovate customer segments and new solutions to some of the thorniest global challenges as framed by the UN SDGs. Each team will choose a goal (or goals) and set of relevant targets and indicators to focus their work on. This course will provide you with real-world, hands-on learning on what it’s like to create a global startup focused on a grand challenge.
Land use planning touches upon all the core areas of sustainable planning practice, from community development, environmental planning, and economic development, to transportation/mobility and climate change. The course introduces the process of land use planning and shows how the plan document is prepared. It also discussed the criteria for determining good plans and provides an overview of the tools used for implementing sustainable solutions. We draw from recent experiences with neo-traditional planning, smart growth, climate sensitive design, and smart city debates.
How many of today's leaders and citizens remember the Constitution's Preamble mandate to "secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves AND our posterity"? Perhaps it's not possible to design such a balance: doing so requires an awareness of intergenerational ethics, an ability to build long-term benefits and costs into our current policy analyses, a realistic understanding of the capabilities of our social and political institutions, and knowledge about the cognitive limits of humans to perceive and plan for future decades.
In this course, students will learn the policy implications of Complex Adaptive Systems, which is how cities function as a series of networks, institutions, and systems. The course brings together urban planning, municipal management, and policy, which have not typically functioned together. Each class will feature a lecture and readings based on the topic of the class, as well as a guest speaker leading efforts at the government, nonprofit, grassroots, and corporate levels.
This course is interdisciplinary by nature, referencing the projects and methodologies of architects and architectural historians, as well as archaeologists, artists, designers, environmentalists, ethnographers, photographers, urbanists, sociologists, technicians, and writers. Although we will cover topics and themes across the U.S., our focus will decidedly be on the American South and we will leverage our location in Atlanta.
