Systematic introduction to the nature of politics and government, organized around the dynamic relationship between power, principle, and process in democratic politics. Provides historic and contemporary overview; explores the interactions among government, laws, and societies at the national and international levels.
General Education Code
PE-H
Introduces key concepts in political discourse and key debates generated by contested terms such as powers, ideology, and multiculturalism. Students read from canonical texts, feminist scholarship, historical materials, and contemporary cultural and postmodernist writings.
Instructor
Yasmeen Daifallah
What does a citizen do? What kind of citizen activity is appropriate to democratic aspirations? Course uses political theory to answer these questions as they relate to current and historical events, primarily in the North American context. Draws on texts ranging from Aristotle, Locke, Thoreau, Ellizon, and Ranciere, as well as present-day debates, to bear on the relationship of citizen action and identity.
General Education Code
TA
Explores intellectual and empirical trends shaping the U.S. relationship with the global economy. Traces debates about liberalism and interventionism, surveys post-war American foreign economic policy and discusses varieties of capitalism emerging around the world.
Introduces the study of politics through an analysis of the United States political system and processes. Topics vary, but may include political institutions, public policies, parties and electoral politics, and social forces.
Instructor
Melanie Springer
General Education Code
TA
Introduces key principles for understanding state politics in California and how power is mobilized for transformative change. Analyzes distinctive features of California's political development and culture in the governance of enduring social problems and policy dilemmas.
General Education Code
ER
Introduces the study of politics through the analysis of national political systems within or across regions from the developing world to post-industrial nations. Typical topics include: authoritarian and democratic regimes; state institutions and capacity; parties and electoral systems; public policies; social movements; ethnic conflict; and globalization.
General Education Code
CC
Introduces social policy around the world. Some countries provide free and good-quality health and education, as well as a minimum income to all citizens. Others, instead, provide meager benefits to few citizens.
General Education Code
CC
Can common global interest prevail against particular sovereign desires? Surveys selected contemporary issues in global politics such as wars of intervention, ethnic conflict, globalization, global environmental protection, and some of the different ways in which they are understood and explained.
General Education Code
PE-H
Focuses on methods and approaches to writing effective and persuasive argumentative essays as a core component of the study of politics. Topics vary by instructor, and consider central concepts and issues in political life. The course material is explored as a means through which to develop basic and advanced skills in writing, as well as in argumentation, analysis, and critical engagement with readings through seminar-style discussions.
Instructor
Megan Thomas, Thomas Serres, Vanita Seth, Melanie Springer
Quarter offered
Fall, Winter, Spring
Overview of research methods and data analytic techniques used in politics. Through hands-on learning, students critically evaluate social research reports, conduct investigations, describe data, assess statistical relationships, and test hypotheses. Prepares students to conduct the in-depth research required in upper-division courses.
General Education Code
SR
Introduction to conceptualizing and executing qualitative research in the social sciences. Qualitative methods are non-statistical modes of social inquiry, including case studies, interviews, and archival research. Research methods cannot be done in a passive way. Really understanding methodology requires Doing Research.
Instructor
Sara Niedzwiecki
Situates ongoing debates around feminist theory and practice within the context of political theory, the role of the state, and the position of women in contemporary (predominantly Western) society. Engages with classical political theory, second wave feminism, and the role of the state on matters pertaining to pornography and prostitution.
Instructor
Dion Farquahar
Explores tensions between reason and revelation, justice and democracy, and freedom and empire through close readings of ancient texts. Emphasis on Athens, with Hebrew, Roman, and Christian departures and interventions. Includes Sophocles, Thucydides, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Stoics, the Bible, and Augustine.
Cross Listed Courses
LGST 105A
Instructor
Dean Mathiowetz
Studies republican and liberal traditions of political thought and politics. Authors studied include Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau. Examination of issues such as authorship, individuality, gender, state, and cultural difference.
Cross Listed Courses
LGST 105B
Studies in 19th- and early 20th-century theory, centering on the themes of capitalism, labor, alienation, culture, freedom, and morality. Authors studied include J. S. Mill, Marx, Nietzsche, Foucault, Hegel, Fanon, and Weber.
Cross Listed Courses
LGST 105C
Examines the condition of modernity as it is understood, dwelled upon, and critiqued by political theorists since the second half of the 20th century. Explores how the modern condition was viewed by Euro-American thinkers, who saw themselves as its originators and heirs, as well as Chinese, Indian, Arab, and African thinkers for whom European modernity was an inescapable, if not an insurmountable, imposition to be engaged, transformed, and critiqued. (Formerly Late-20th Century Political Thought.)
Cross Listed Courses
LGST 105D
Instructor
Yasmeen Daifallah
Introduces a variety of critical and aesthetic theories and various ways in which aesthetics are mobilized politically. Students are challenged to consider the politics of aesthetics as well as the aesthetics of politics both theoretically and historically. Enrollment restricted to sophomore, junior, and senior art, critical race and ethnic studies, feminist studies, history of art and visual culture, history, legal studies, philosophy, and politics majors.
General Education Code
IM
Examines revolt, rebellion, and revolution as ideas in political theory, and as prisms through which we can analyze historical events. Introduces works of political theory (historical and contemporary), and looks at historical events considered to be revolts and/or revolutions.
Examines current problems in law as it intersects with politics and society. Readings are drawn from legal and political philosophy, social science, and judicial opinions.
Cross Listed Courses
LGST 110
An introduction to constitutional law, emphasizing equal protection and fundamental rights as defined by common law decisions interpreting the 14th Amendment, and also exploring issues of federalism and separation of powers. Readings are primarily court decisions; special attention given to teaching how to interpret, understand, and write about common law.
Cross Listed Courses
LGST 111A
Introduces the literature on the history of the body. Explores the multiple ways in which the body, in the West, has been the site of cultural and political inscription from the Middle Ages to the 19th century. Topics may include: pornography, criminality, sexuality, art, race, and medicine.
A course on the political and philosophical sources of ecological and social sustainability and how they affect and inflect the design, implementation, and practices of sustainability. Asks whether they offer a realistic alternative to liberalism and other political and economic ideologies and practices.
Examines how ideas about labor, rights, exchange, capital, consumption, the state, production, poverty, luxury, morality, procreation, and markets were woven in political-economic discourse from 1690-1936. Readings include Locke, Mandeville, Smith, Malthus, Mill, Hegel, Marx, Lenin, and Veblen. Particular focus given to theoretical origins of and justifications for poverty and implications of economic interdependence for politics.
Instructor
Dean Mathiowetz
Introduction to techniques used to produce power, notably by manufacturing and distorting truth from overt propaganda to public relations or advertising. Each week will focus on one conceptual apparatus used to frame reality, its related techniques and strategies as well as its economic, social or political objectives. Frameworks will include bureaucratic rationality, totalitarian propaganda, colonial mythology, state euphemism, "democratic' story-telling, conspiracy theories, branding, and green-washing. Enrollment by permission of instructor.
Instructor
Jackie Gehring
General Education Code
IM
Course uses a multidisciplinary approach to the study of politics through significant contemporary authors and approaches in critical theory. Topics include: democracy action, violence, subjectivity, identity, power and resistance, the body, political economy, and post-colonialism. (Formerly Topics in Contemporary Political and Critical Theory.)
Study of political development, behavior, performance, and significance of central governmental institutions of the U.S. Emphasizes the historical development of each branch and their relationship to each other, including changes in relative power and constitutional responsibilities.
Cross Listed Courses
LGST 120A
Examines the role of social forces in the development of the American democratic processes and in the changing relationship between citizen and state. Course materials address the ideas, the social tensions, and the economic pressures bearing on social movements, interest groups, and political parties.
Cross Listed Courses
LGST 120B
Instructor
Melanie Springer
Examines the relationship between state and economy in the U.S. from the 1880s to the present, and provides a theoretical and historical introduction to the study of politics and markets. Focus is on moments of crisis and choice in U.S. political economy, with an emphasis on the rise of regulation, the development of the welfare state, and changes in employment policies.
Cross Listed Courses
LGST 120C
Examines racism as a logic of governance in American politics and traces racial reasoning in transcendent notions of "justice" in the U.S. from the nation's founding into the 21st century. (Formerly offered as Race & Justice in America.)
Cross Listed Courses
LGST 121
General Education Code
ER
Examines political and social dimensions of recent transformations in the U.S. labor market. Includes classical and contemporary theoretical debates over the nature and functions of work under capitalism. Focuses on shifts in the organization and character of work in a globalizing economy. Addresses recent trends in low-wage and contingent work, job mobility and security, and work/family relations. Includes attention to the roles and responses of business, labor, and government.
Examines the sources and implications of economic inequality in the United States. Explores theories of social class and its intersections with race and gender inequalities. Focuses on the role of politics and public policies in diminishing and/or exacerbating income and wealth inequalities.
Introduces the literature on interest groups and attempts to answer the question: Do such groups promote or hinder American democracy? Class readings and lectures review and assess the participation of interest groups in the electoral process and in Congress, the executive branch, and the courts.
Explores several important topics in the study of parties and partisanship in American politics; for example, the development of the party system, parties as organizations, parties in government, parties in the electorate, polarization, partisan identification, and state-level variation.
Instructor
Melanie Springer
Introduces key concepts pertaining to voting, elections, and political behavior in the United States. Several topics are covered, such as campaigns, electoral institutions, reform, political participation (including but not limited to voting), presidential and congressional elections, partisan identification, and polling.
Instructor
Melanie Springer
Examines the evolution of the policy and politics of American national security, from the Cold War to the present. Content of military policy explored with analytic focus on formation of policy and interactions between military policies and domestic policies.
Explores the rich history and fundamental legal concepts surrounding water in California. Students identify, evaluate, and debate some critical water policy questions faced by Californians today and in the future.
Cross Listed Courses
LGST 132
Instructor
Ruth Langridge
Examines the United States Congress and the nature of the representative and legislative processes. Topics include: districting and elections; bicameralism; party organization; institutional and behavioral influences on legislative action; and the efficacy of Congress as a legislative body. Focuses on the contemporary Congress with comparisons to other legislative and representative institutions.
Cross Listed Courses
LGST 134
Course charts the history of immigration policy and debate in the U.S., highlighting the ways economic, social, and geopolitical factors influenced the processes and outcomes of immigration debate and policy making. Focuses on interaction between society and state in formulation and implementation of immigration policy, and the ways policy outcomes may differ from expectations.
Explores the political and economic systems of advanced industrialized societies. In addition to specific comparisons between the countries of western Europe and the United States, covers important themes and challenges, including immigration, globalization, and the crisis of the welfare state.
Instructor
Eleonora Pasotti
Overview of major approaches to the study of Latin American politics. Introductory survey of historical and contemporary democratic populist, authoritarian, and revolutionary regimes. Special attention is given to region's recent transitions toward democratic rule, market-based economic models, and decentralized governance. Evaluates institutional arrangements (including presidentialism, electoral rules and party systems), as well as a variety of social movements and strategies of resistance among subaltern social groups and classes.
Instructor
Sari Niedzwiecki
Explores the political development of East Asia's primary democracies: Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan. Examines the historical origins of these states, the process through which they emerged from authoritarian roots, and topics such as protest, corruption, and women's political roles.
General Education Code
CC
Covers different aspects of the evolution of the contemporary Arab nationalist state. The Arab world has weathered a series of revolutions, military coups, civil wars and liberalization attempts during the past six decades. Before the 2010-2011 uprisings, the region was mistakenly labeled as the home of "failed" and "rogue" states and understood to be the only region in which genuine democratic change was absent. Course shows that popular legitimacy and political ambitions have not always been lacking in the region, focusing primarily on Egypt, Syria, Tunisia and Algeria to emphasize the changes and continuities in the multiple constructions of state power in the Arab world since decolonization. Students cannot receive credit for this course and POLI 152.
Introduces themes of Chinese politics from 1949 to present, including: the establishment and substantial dismantling of socialism; movements and upheavals, such as the Cultural Revolution and 1989; and issues, such as Hong Kong and Tibet. Surveys current institutions, leaders, and policies.
Historical-political survey of Russia within the U.S.S.R. is followed by examination of the 1991 revolution, the attempt to recover a national identity and establish a unified Russian state. Highlighted in this course are cultural and political factors central to the Russian experience: personalistic modes of political organization, a remote and corrupt state apparatus, collectivist forms of thought and self-defense.
Comparative study of revolutionary transformations of East European, Soviet, and former Soviet nations to post-Communist political orders. Focus on reemergence of political society, social and economic problems of transition, and maintenance of many cultural norms and authority patterns associated with previous regime.
Instructor
Roger Schoenman
Examines similar political trends in four Andean countries: Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru. Trends include mobilization of indigenous populations, breakdown of traditional party systems, and reconstruction efforts in post-conflict environments. Students who have taken prior courses in Latin American politics, including POLI 140C, will be best prepared for this course.
Comparative study of contemporary sub-Saharan African states. Selected issues and countries. Internal and external political institutions and processes are studied in order to learn about politics in contemporary Black Africa and to learn more about the nature of politics through the focus on the particular issues and questions raised by the African context.
Examines the phenomenon of territorial conflict within countries. Focuses on territorial cleavages that occur when minority groups are geographically concentrated within particular territories, and emphasizes attempts to accommodate these cleavages through measure like autonomy, federalism, and decentralization.
Overview of social movements by analysis of specific theories and examples. Course connects the study of theories and movements to larger political processes. Topics may include: New Social Movement theory; gender and social movement; democratic, historical, transnational, global and/or local social movements.
Explores democratization processes from a variety of historical and geographical perspectives. Examines the role of foreign influences, economic development, civil society, elites, and institutions in the transition and consolidation of democratic systems.
Instructor
Eleonora Pasotti
Uncovers the important debates in politics and law around the functions of courts, litigation, and rights--and the political nature of law itself. Course is interdisciplinary, and draws from literature in political science, law, and sociology.
Cross Listed Courses
LGST 151
Provides an introduction to issues and challenges facing cities in the U.S. and abroad, as well as the policy remedies available to government and the private sector. The first part of the course provides the foundations to the study of urban politics by examining core questions in local government institutions and urban coalitions. The second part of the course examines urban policies in a variety of areas, such as growth, redevelopment, housing, and poverty.
Instructor
Eleonora Pasotti
Introduces students to the histories, societies, and politics of the Philippines. Surveys major historical eras, and treats topics such as the state, revolts and revolution, labor, religion, the environment, martial law.
General Education Code
CC
Examination of analytical perspectives on international and world politics, international and global political economy, war and conflict, corporations and civil society. Explores theoretical tools and applications, recurring patterns of global conflict and cooperation, the nexus between domestic politics, foreign policy and international and world politics. This is not a current events course.
Origins and development of international law: international law is examined both as a reflection of the present world order and as a basis for transformation. Topics include state and non-state actors and sovereignty, treaties, the use of force, and human rights.
Cross Listed Courses
LGST 160B
Genesis and theories of conflict and war and their avoidance (past, present, future). Relationship between foreign policy and intra- and interstate conflict and violence. National security and the security dilemma. Non-violent conflict as a normal part of politics; violent conflict as anti-political; transformation of conflict into social and interstate violence. Interrelationships among conduct of war, attainment of political objectives, and the end of hostilities. Civil and ethnic wars. Political economy of violence and war.
Introduction to the politics of international economic relations. Examines the history of the international political economy, the theories that seek to explain it, and contemporary issues such as trade policy, globalization, and the financial crisis.
Instructor
Roger Schoenman
Explores China's rising international power and the implications thereof. Special emphasis on China's interactions with the United States and related issues (Korea, Taiwan, the South China Sea). Also addresses China's dealings with South Asia, Southeast Asia, Africa, Japan, international organizations, and more. (Formerly Foreign Relations of China.)
Provides overview of U.S. foreign policy formulation: considers how U.S. political culture shapes foreign policy; examines governmental actors involved: the president, executive branch agencies, and Congress; then considers non-governmental actors: the media, interest groups, and public opinion.
Addresses whether and how global organizations are changing the international system. Examines multilateral institutions, regional organizations, and nonstate actors. Overriding aim is to discern whether these global organizations are affecting the purported primacy of the state.
Examines the magnitude and the political, economic, cultural, environmental, and social impact of today's movement of millions of people within and amongst states.
General Education Code
CC
Examines key issues in international trade, including the distribution of gains, fair trading practices, and preferential trade agreements. Focuses on the political dimensions of trade, the rules of the international trade system, and conflicts within countries that international trade generates.
Cross Listed Courses
LGST 167
Examines contemporary issues in international relations, global politics, and global political economy through theoretical and applied frameworks, program assessment, sectoral and structure analysis, and across levels of analysis.
Introduces the politics of development. Examines the theories, history, and economics of development. Analyzes several contemporary issues. Readings include contemporary writings in the field and classical works on theoretical approaches.
Examines the relation between the liberal State and perceived challenges to State sovereignty posed by transnational terrorism. How does terrorism as both a symbol and empirical phenomenon fit within the horizon of liberal ideology? What claim to sovereignty does the State make in the face of acts of terror? What political logic is required in/for a War on Terror? Students may not take both course 72 and this course for credit in the major.
Explores the global dimensions of complex environmental issues such as climate change, biodiversity, deforestation, and fisheries: how they are produced, how they manifest, and how they are governed in response.
Embraces an interdisciplinary approach to the study of human rights. Captures the malleable nature of human rights and the contours of its dual role as both law and discourse.
Cross Listed Courses
LGST 175
Explores the issues and challenges facing the five Southeast Asian countries that line the shores of the Mekong River: Laos, Cambodia, Myanmar, Thailand, and Vietnam. Examines the importance of the health of the Mekong to the lives of 70 million who depend on its flowing waters and how exploitation of the river and how its tributaries pose real and tangible opportunities as well as threats across a broad and diverse geography.
Instructor
Marco Mangelsdorf
Interrogates the presuppositions of punishment as legitimate state power. Decentering crime as punishment's conceptual predicate, wider analysis of the penal state's social-scientific, jurisprudential, and philosophical foundations force us to ask: What is punishment? Why punish? How, and whom, to punish?
Cross Listed Courses
LGST 182
General Education Code
PE-H
What defines just political rule in Islam? How do modern Muslim thinkers conceive the role of Islamic normative guidelines (Shariah) in the context of secular modern nation-states? Course surveys how major trends in modern Islamic thought try to answer this question.
Cross Listed Courses
LGST 184
Instructor
Yasmeen Daifallah
Provides a broad introduction to the growing interdisciplinary field of political psychology. Focuses on and critically analyzes classic and contemporary psychological perspectives, primarily through original sources. Draws upon theoretical ideas and experimental results to understand political actors, events, and processes.
Examines the politics surrounding both global health problems and policy responses.Traces the evolving interrelationships between these problems and policies from colonial health to the impacts of austerity on postcolonial health systems to today's globally targeted responses.
Cross Listed Courses
LGST 186
Examines global heath from a decolonial perspective. Investigates the health challenges and related policies and programs that have emerged in the wake of colonization, state building, economic dependency, western-centered knowledge production, and postcolonial nationalism. Focused on case studies from Africa and the Middle East, the course decenters western models of healthcare, enabling students to think critically about the diverse contexts and transnational dynamics that have shaped both global health emergencies and the emergence of global health as a field.
General Education Code
CC
Examines the lessons for global and community health that are emerging from our experiences of COVID. These experiences have been characterized by vast variations in exposure and vulnerability as well as wide variations in response and resilience. All these variations teach us much about inequalities in global and community health, but they also highlight new opportunities for addressing injustice and restoring health as a shared human right. By treating the pandemic this way as portal for the re-imagination and remaking of global and community health, the course focuses on moving systematically from evidence about disease, its inequalities, and policy responses to ideas about improving health outcomes both locally and globally.
General Education Code
PE-H
Examines how to strengthen health systems by developing and practicing lessons from global health policy studies to compare, contrast, and communicate opportunities for community health worker integration and intervention. The key politics questions running through the course concern whether and how community health work can be integrated with the policies and practices of global health agencies, national health programs, public health administration, and public health systems more generally, including "health in all policies" approaches to local government.
Explores diverse strategies to generate popular consent developed by actors and groups aiming to promote their understanding of the world and acquire political power since the beginning of the 20th century. Traces a genealogy of political communication from the birth of marketing and propaganda to the advent of a public sphere shaped by infotainment and big data. In so doing, it reflects on the impact of increasingly sophisticated forms of political communication and advertising on the public's trust. Course also introduces different notions that serve to explain the current state of public debates in liberal representative regimes (manufacture of consent, cultural hegemony, public sphere, simulacrum, etc.).
Examines how enmity, the state, and war serve as limits for political conceptions of who we are, tensions between commitments to diversity and to peace, and liberal and humanitarian efforts to address these tensions. Students examine works written prior to the liberal period (Hobbes), in response to it (Hegel and Schmitt) and finally a 20th-century liberal revival (Rawls), and discuss rights, conscience, political obligation, war, and the state.
Instructor
Yasmeen Daifallah
How do postcolonial thinkers conceive of freedom and equality in the wake of a colonialism that irreversibly reshaped their modes of life? Course closely reads central works of postcolonial theory to examine how they address this question. (Formerly Humanitarian Action in World Politics.)
Instructor
Yasmeen Daifallah
Studies in 19th- and early 20th-century anarchist and socialist thought. Themes covered include property, labor, marriage, and the state. Readings drawn from Bakunin, Goldman, Fourier, Kropotkin, Perkins-Gilman, Proudhon, and Stirner.
Explores the role of new media in political protest; whether and how new media technologies such as social networking, text messaging, Twitter, and YouTube have changed the way opposition movements develop.
Instructor
Roger Schoenman
Cities are at the frontlines of complex global issues including climate change, international terrorism, and transnational migration. Course situates cities in the dynamics of world politics, and explores the possibilities and prospects of global urban/urban global governance in the 21st Century.
Explores theory and reality of international law; how it determines or governs or modifies policies of government. Emphasis on contemporary political and economic forces and international law in nuclear age, competing areas for new law, law of seas, human rights, new international economic issues, the environment.
What is democracy? How can we identify it? How do we understand and identify political participation? What are the factors behind it? What role does protest have in democratic politics? These and similar questions are addressed in this course that focuses on topics of democratic politics in the United States and abroad.
Instructor
Eleonora Pasotti
Considers causes and consequences of inequality in modern societies. Emphasizes empirical analysis of contemporary forms of class, racial, and gender inequality and examination of normative theories of distributive justice. Major restrictions lifted during open enrollment.
Examines theoretical, historical, and contemporary sources of poverty policies in the United States. Explores competing theories of the causes of poverty and the consequences of social provision. Focuses on successive historical reform efforts and contemporary dilemmas of race and urban poverty, gender and family poverty, work, and the politics of welfare reform.
State governments affect the lives of Americans every day. This course examines an array of issues pertaining to state politics, such as the foundations of American federalism, institutional organization, elections, political parties, direct democracy, and policy-making.
Instructor
Melanie Springer
Examines problems and potential solutions to issues in U.S. politics, such as presidential power, partisan polarization, money in elections, foreign and security policy, civil rights and liberties, and taxation and spending.
Explores how civic groups and social movements have confronted and shaped constitutional rights, equality, and power. Examines a range of U.S. movements from the 18th Century to the 21st Century-era of Marriage Equality, Tea Party, and Dreamer movements. (Formerly Constitutional Meanings and Movements: Exploring the Ideas, Laws, and Politics in Social Change.)
Instructor
Katharine Beaumont
Examines how we came, by the late 19th century, to classify humanity into racial categories. In an effort to trace emergence of this very modern phenomenon, explores historical shifts that informed Europe's representation of cultural difference from the writings of ancient Greeks to the social Darwinism of 19th-century Britain.
Introduces central categories and material implications that underwrite discourses on modernity since the late 18th century. Students read across the disciplines in fields such as political theory, postcolonialism, history, science studies, anthropology, and feminist criticism.
Interdisciplinary investigation into functions of law across political, historical, and cultural contexts. Examines the international and comparative turn in public law scholarship and the role of law-based strategies in state building. Reviews literature in law, political science and legal anthropology.
Cross Listed Courses
LGST 190R
Students read recent books on East Asian countries that engage the long-standing themes of state power and societal resistance.
Focuses on the causes and consequences of state capacity in the global south, asking why states are much stronger in some countries than others and how their relative strength affects important substantive outcomes, including democracy, development, and security. (Formerly Problems in Latin American Politics.)
Examines how Latin American governments function and what major challenges countries in the region are facing. Focuses on democracy, economic development, gender and indigenous politics, social policies, poverty, and inequality.
Instructor
Sara Niedzwiecki
Examines the U.S. as a political empire, an imperial project, rather than—or in addition to being—a constitutional republic. Analyzes selected episodes in national and global expansion from the founding to the present, with an emphasis on the politics of empire and its relationship to American democracy and constitutionalism.
Examination of selected issues, controversies, and theories relevant to security between and among nations. Topics vary, but may include: war, peace, nuclear proliferation, arms control, military and foreign policies, alternative conceptions of security.
Individual studies undertaken off campus with direct faculty supervision. Students submit petition to sponsoring agency.
Quarter offered
Fall, Winter, Spring
Provides a means for a small group of students to study a particular topic in consultation with a faculty sponsor. Various topics to be announced before each quarter. Students submit petition to sponsoring agency.
Quarter offered
Fall, Winter, Spring
Provides a means for a small group of students to study a particular topic in consultation with a faculty sponsor. Various topics to be announced before each quarter. Students submit petition to sponsoring agency.
Quarter offered
Fall, Winter, Spring
Preparation of a senior thesis over two or three quarters, beginning in any quarter. The grade and evaluation submitted for the final quarter apply to each of the previous quarters. Students submit petition to sponsoring agency.
Quarter offered
Fall, Winter, Spring
Preparation of a senior thesis over two or three quarters, beginning in any quarter. The grade and evaluation submitted for the final quarter apply to each of the previous quarters. Students submit petition to sponsoring agency.
Quarter offered
Fall, Winter, Spring
Preparation of a senior thesis over two or three quarters, beginning in any quarter. The grade and evaluation submitted for the final quarter apply to each of the previous quarters. Students submit petition to sponsoring agency.
Quarter offered
Fall, Winter, Spring
Individual studies undertaken off-campus for which faculty supervision is not in person (e.g. supervision is by correspondence). Students submit petition to sponsoring agency.
Quarter offered
Fall, Winter, Spring
Individual studies undertaken off-campus for which faculty supervision is not in person, but by correspondence. Students submit petition to sponsoring agency.
Quarter offered
Fall, Winter, Spring
A student normally approaches a member of the staff and proposes to take a POLI 199 on a subject he or she has chosen which is not offered in other politics courses. Students submit petition to sponsoring agency.
Quarter offered
Fall, Winter, Spring
A student normally approaches a member of the faculty and proposes to take a POLI 199 on a subject he or she has chosen which is not offered in other politics courses. Students submit petition to sponsoring agency.
Quarter offered
Fall, Winter, Spring
Draws on history of political thought, contemporary social and critical theory, and the contributions of legal and institutional analysis of various kinds to engage in critical study of political practices that are experienced or understood as in some way limiting, oppressive, or wrong; to transform our understanding of these practices; to see their contingent conditions; and to articulate possibilities of governing ourselves differently.
Instructor
Dean Mathiowetz
Concerns transformation of social forces into political ones. Focuses on formation, articulation, mobilization, and organization of political interests and identities, their mutual interaction, and their effects on state structures and practices and vice versa. Major themes are 1) social bases of political action: class, gender, race, and other determinants of social division and political identity and 2) relevant forms of political agency and action, including development of political consciousness and representation of interests and identities in the public sphere.
Instructor
Eleonora Pasotti
Introduces study of political institutions as instruments of collective decision making and action. Explores alternative theoretical approaches to development of political institutions, state and political economy, and security dilemmas.
Introduction to the theories and methodologies of political economy. Focuses on the relationship between states and markets and considers the politics of economic choices and institutions germane to both national and global political institutions. Addresses origins and development of markets and capitalism; historical evolution of states and their economies; relationship between labor, capital, production, and consumption; regulation of production; macroeconomics and management of economies; and issues of national and global social welfare.
Instructor
Roger Schoenman
Investigates approaches to study of politics and to enterprise of social science in general. Works from positivist, interpretive, historical, and critical approaches provide examples held up to critical and epistemological reflection.
Gives students practical tools to transform research questions into viable and well-crafted research designs. Introduces conceptual development, various forms of data, and rules for case selection. The goal is to train students in a range of specific methods, including interviewing, ethnography, and archival work.
Introduces, at the graduate level, some of the central conceptual categories and material implications that underwrite the world of the modern. Explores concepts including the individual, historicism, contract, and objectivity.
The human body has been productive of a wide range of varied and competing discourses. Among the themes covered are sexuality, hygiene, the grotesque, and criminality.
Explores seminal works in classical political economy, particularly its consolidation at the moment that industrial society emerged from commercial society, as demonstrated in the writings of Bernard Mandeville, Adam Smith, and Thomas Malthus.
Instructor
Dean Mathiowetz
Graduate seminar exploring connections between the body politic and human bodies, particularly as they relate to the sensory dimension of political and personal experience. The myriad ways these connections have been drawn, from antiquity to the present, belie the aspiration of philosophy to organize political life around reason. These connections also offer us ways in to consider the materiality of social life, and commercial life in particular, generating perspectives on capitalism and late modernity. Engagements with these materials also provide opportunities to explore the relationship between sensual materialism and affect theory.
Instructor
Dean Mathiowetz
Explores the potential in philosophical precursors to recent affect theory, alongside classical political economy and its critics, to develop an alternative epistemology for political economy. Readings include: Aristotle, Spinoza, Deleuze, Hume, Negri, Hardt, Smith, Bergson, and Marx.
Instructor
Dean Mathiowetz
Considers the subject of race and racism from a political and historical perspective appealing to literatures from history, anthropology, science, and literary studies.
Focuses on early 19th- through early 20th-century socialist and anarchist thought, excluding Marx. Theorists studied include Saint-Simon, Fourier, Proudhon, Stirner, Bakunin, Kropotkin, Perkins Gilman, and Goldman. Some secondary literature and related contemporary theory is also treated.
Democracy is an essential political concept, and a fundamentally contested one. Since the 1980s, scholars of comparative politics have attempted to explain why and when countries transition from authoritarianism to democratic institutions. However, regime change at the national level only sets the stage, leaving deeper questions about what democracy means in practice--how it plays out (or is undermined) throughout the state and at subnational levels; whom it includes and excludes; what options it opens; and what possibilities it forecloses. Such questions relate debates about the potential and the limitations of democracy in general.
Focuses on questions of sovereignty. Of what does sovereignty consist? How is it secured, proclaimed, and perpetuated? How is it insecure, contingent, and subject to contestation? How is the idea of individual sovereignty related to the idea of the sovereignty of the state? Our aim is less to answer these questions definitively than to explore them and understand how theorists (historical and contemporary) have explored them, and how different historical episodes illuminate them.
Addresses the role of non- and sub-state actors in global governance. Explores the concept of agency in world politics, and the conditions under which these actors acquire global agency in contemporary world politics. Introduces various theoretical perspectives with which to identify and evaluate agency, with a focus on alternative sources of authority, identity, and power.
Green political thought, philosophy, debates, and practices; history of ecological thought and comparative study of competing ideas and proposals. Critical examination of neo-liberal environmentalism.
Explores major debates on the role and rule of law in society, with attention to efforts to use law to seek justice or respond to injustice. This includes engaging in three overlapping sets of conversations: What is law—its sources and functions—and how, where, and on whom does it operate? What is the "rule of law"—what is it for and whom does/can it serve and how? What are different ways that people and groups grapple with or respond to the role of law in injustice—including "the Nazi problem," "the slavery problem," the colonialism/imperialism problem, the Jim Crow/apartheid problem, etc—and what are the possibilities, challenges, and limits? Theoretical perspectives on the sources/origins and role of law in society will be considered as well as case studies and concrete examples that show how this tool is applied to particular challenges.
Instructor
Katherine Beaumont
Engages the politics of history through multiple frames: subject matter, interpretation, and the epistemological precepts that underwrite history as a discipline. Introduces students to a wide range of interdisciplinary literatures that include different historical methodologies, feminist theory, political theory, queer studies, postcolonial theory, and critical race studies.
Explores the dynamic and contested interaction between politics and policy in the U.S. context, through examining the historical development of key contemporary policy debates and political conflicts. Introduces recent scholarship, drawing on history, sociology, and political economy that has challenged traditional behavioralist approaches to understanding American politics and policy development.
Explores several important topics that have emerged from the renewed interest in political development, and are visible within its scholarship in American Political Development; for example, state-building, institutional change, representation, culture, participation, political identity, and economic and social transformations.
Instructor
Melanie Springer
Covers several important themes and sets of readings from the literature on American political development. Topics include the origins and development of American political institutions, the evolution of democratic mechanisms, the rise and fall of social movements, and debates about the sources of policy regimes and political change.
Overview of the major theoretical approaches to the study of comparative politics. This includes diverse literatures such as institutions and political economy, authoritarianism and democracy, and civil society and social movements. Case material is drawn from Latin America, Africa, Europe, North America, Asia and the Pacific.
Instructor
Sara Niedzwiecki
Introduces the comparative method in social science. Trains students in the use of this method by examining how scholars have used it to compare across national governments, subnational units, public policies, organizations, social movements, and transnational collective action.
Cross Listed Courses
LALS 243
Surveys the Latin American political literature by studying: 1) critical moments in political development (e.g., state formation, democratization); 2) important political institutions (e.g., presidentialism, party, and electoral systems); and 3) influential political actors (e.g., unions, business associations, social movements).
Instructor
Sara Niedzwiecki
Focuses on local government structures and the relationships with other levels of government. Examines institutions and administration; urban political economy (fiscal strain, poverty, inequality, and the efforts to attract economic investment); political machines; race and ethnicity.
Instructor
Eleonora Pasotti
Explores topics related to protest and political participation from theoretical and empirical perspectives.
Instructor
Eleonora Pasotti
Political thought of anti-colonial movements in comparative, historical perspective, including 18th- to 20th-Century European colonies of America and Asia. Focuses both on the contemporary political thought of these movements as well as on historiographical approaches of secondary literature.
Instructor
Yasmeen Daifallah
Examines how prominent female Muslim thinkers have interpreted the Islamic tradition since the early 20th century. It surveys how thinkers who belonged to different intellectual traditions (liberal, Marxist, Islamist, feminist, etc.) engaged Islamic exegetical, legal, philosophical, theological and mystical traditions to find answers to the questions raised by their historical and sociopolitical contexts. These questions included: What is/are the Islamic understanding(s) of the purpose of individual and collective lives? What does freewill mean in Islam, and what is its relationship to responsibility towards oneself and one's community? Is there an Islamic notion of justice, and how does it relate to the way justice is defined by other intellectual traditions? What are the legitimate ways of exercising social and political authority to establish the Islamic vision(s) of the good life? How is establishing that vision related to the notion of jihad (striving in the path of God)? What implications does that vision, and its concomitant notions of justice and freewill, have on developing an Islamic understanding of the relationship between different genders, classes, and human groups?
Addresses topics ranging from the core institutions of the party-state to local politics, economic governance, and state-society interactions in multiple realms. Considers China in its own terms while evaluating the relevance of theoretical concepts from various fields in the social sciences. Aims to identify opportunities for new research projects.
Explores if, how, and under what conditions agency and power are diffusing away from the state to non-state actors such as, NGOs/civil society, corporations, and international organizations.
Explores global politics in relation to geo-political formations that are developing in concert with contemporary crises in capitalist globalization, but which are also shaped by a wide range of intersecting racial, sexual, environmental, national, and neocolonial politics as well.
Instructor
Matthew Sparke
Seminar examines selections from the canonical literature in international relations theory and global political economy through a number of critical lenses, including constructivist, feminist, historical materialist, and subaltern approaches.
Instructor
Ronnie Lipschutz
Examines genesis of new institutions within the force of social ties and networks. Studies how social and organizational relationships achieve individual or group goals in political and economic life, and influence institutional design. Considers when and what ties contribute to governance and economic performance, and when informal and formal organizations constitute an obstacle.
Instructor
Roger Schoenman
Two-hour weekly seminar required of teaching assistants in which pedagogic and substantive issues will be considered. The experience of performing teaching assistant duties constitutes subject matter for discussion. Students submit petition to sponsoring agency.
Primarily for first- and second-year graduate students. Students learn the norms and expectations of graduate school and a variety of professional roles. Students develop a plan for their graduate career and for establishing a professional network of mentors and peer audiences for their work.
Instructor
Dean Mathiowetz
Individual study undertaken off campus with direct faculty supervision. Students submit petition to sponsoring agency.
Weekly venue for Ph.D. students to present current research, exchange information on sources and resources, discuss and critique epistemologies and methods, and to formulate topics for QE field statements and the dissertation. There are no assigned readings. May be repeated for credit twice.
Weekly seminar for Ph.D. students in which to develop and write extended research papers on selected topics, to present current work, to discuss methods, data sources, and fieldwork, and to receive critiques and assessments from fellow students. May be repeated for credit twice.
A student approaches a member of the staff and proposes to take POLI 297 on a subject he or she has chosen that is not covered in other politics graduate courses or plans a graduate independent study that includes an undergraduate course. Students submit petition to sponsoring agency.
A student approaches a member of the staff and proposes to take POLI 297 on a subject he or she has chosen that is not covered in other politics graduate courses or plans a graduate independent study that includes an undergraduate course. Students submit petition to sponsoring agency.
A student approaches a member of the staff and proposes to take POLI 297 on a subject he or she has chosen that is not covered in other politics graduate courses or plans a graduate independent study that includes an undergraduate course. Students submit petition to sponsoring agency.
Enrollment restricted to graduate students and permission of instructor. Students submit petition to sponsoring agency.
Enrollment restricted to graduate students and permission of instructor. Students submit petition to sponsoring agency.
Enrollment restricted to gradaute students and permission of instructor. Students submit petition to sponsoring agency.