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Culture, Art, and Technology

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Catalyst Building, First Floor
https://sixth.ucsd.edu/cat/

All courses, faculty listings, and curricular and degree requirements described herein are subject to change or deletion without notice.

The Culture, Art, and Technology program at Sixth College houses interdisciplinary writing classes (CAT 1, CAT 2, and CAT 3, as well as CAT 125 and CAT 125R) that synthesize conversations between humanities, social sciences, and STEM. In these classes, students use writing as a process to learn and think as they engage with a diverse array of topics. Whether examining the origins of civilization or the history of Hollywood and the future of the environment, students in CAT grapple with big questions about where we’ve come from, who we are, and where we are going.

The core sequence consists of three quarters of lecture—fall, winter, and spring—with accompanying discussion sections. Writing instruction is integrated into the curriculum and is not offered as a stand-alone course in Sixth College.

Each quarter we offer a selection of interdisciplinary courses, which take varying approaches to culture, art, and technology.

  1. CAT 1 courses (four units, fall quarter) teach critical reading and drafting by examining how culture, art, and technology have intersected in the past. Students must have completed the Entry Level Writing Requirement in order to enroll in CAT 1.
  2. CAT 2 courses (six units, winter quarter) are writing intensive, foregrounding argumentation, revision, and writing as process by examining case studies of culture, art, and technology interacting in the present moment. Students must have passed CAT 1 in order to enroll in CAT 2.
  3. CAT 3 courses (six units, spring quarter) are writing and research intensive, focusing on collaboration, research, and art-making by speculating on how the relationships between culture, art, and technology will be transformed in the future. Students must have passed CAT 2 in order to enroll in CAT 3.

Students in CAT learn through a combination of lectures, discussions, questions, readings, guest speakers, hands-on activities, writing assignments, and multimedia projects. Sixth College offers a learning environment that extends beyond the classroom and emphasizes teamwork, critical thinking, close reading, pattern recognition, and creative approaches to problems, drawing on models and methods from a variety of fields.