Seminars

UC San Diego offers one-unit first-year and senior seminars, CAT 87 and CAT 192 respectively, to provide students with an opportunity to meet with faculty in a small-class environment. They are taught by senior UC San Diego faculty and researchers and are limited to twenty students. The seminars are taught by faculty in their fields of expertise and explore topics of intellectual importance. Students participate in critical discussion with a small group of peers and faculty. Topics differ every quarter.

CAT 88 is part of UC San Diego's Learning Sustainable Well-Being (LSW) program. LSW is sponsored by the T. Denny Sanford Institute for Empathy and Compassion in collaboration with the Office of the Executive Vice Chancellor.

CAT 90 is a one-unit reflection seminar designed for students who engage in summer experiential learning activities and would like to apply these activities towards the experiential learning requirement. Please note that only Dr. Geibel's course offered each fall quarter fulfills the requirement; other versions of CAT 90 do not satisfy the experiential learning requirement.

Preauthorization requests for CAT 90, CAT 87, and CAT 192 can be submitted through the Enrollment Authorization System.

Spring 2026

CAT 87: Televising the American Family

Phoebe Bronstein

Associate Teaching Professor, CAT

Week 1-Week 5 Friday 10:00-11:50 a.m.

This seminar will examine the idea of the American home, family, and domesticity as these concepts and ideologies developed in and around mid-century television programming. Not only was television physically integrated into the new post-war domestic space (literally built into the structure of suburban homes) but its programming defined new—white, middle-class, and suburban—ideas of the home and asserted raced and gendered roles within that space. As television rose to the status of national medium in the 1950s, so too did television content provide a site of struggle over the meaning of the nuclear family, race, the home, and by extension, the nation. This legacy remains visible in contemporary programming and in social media spaces, including in the construction of the tradwife, while questions about families, homes, and domesticity—what they look like and what they mean—remain central to American television and national identity.

CAT 88: Learning Sustainable Well-Being: The Narrative and Rhetoric of Compassion

Liz Popko

Assistant Teaching Professor, CAT

Monday 11:00 a.m.-12:20 p.m.

This experiential course explores how storytelling and language contribute to psychological well-being. Through a variety of narrative and rhetorical practices (reading, journaling, discussion, performance, creating, etc.) we examine the relationship between narration, rhetoric, and mental/social health. Each week there is discussion on a specific topic and workshop-style exercises.