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The goal of this seminar is to provide an introduction to animal cognition. We will examine cognitive abilities in a variety of species, from invertebrates to nonhuman primates. Major topics to be discussed include: perception and attention, learning and memory, spatial representation, social cognition, tool-use, imitation and culture, communication and language, theory of mind, and the evolution of cognition.

This graduate seminar centers around the project of theorizing eros. The erotic has been a rich site of queer feminist thinking about the epistemic and material costs of the imposition of sexuality as an interpretive grid for making sense of human nature. The course will begin with the study of sexuality as a knowledge system, with a focus on racial and colonial histories of sexuality, while most of the rest of the semester will be devoted to queer feminist considerations of the erotic as a site of ethics and politics. Michele Foucault famously distinguished between ?scientia sexualis?

Civil Rights leader, Dolores Herta, is famous for saying, "The only way Democracy can work is if people participate." With this in mind, class participants will take a deep dive into Massachusetts state government to explore the legislative and budget processes focusing on where people - as individuals and as part of social movements - are powerful. This course will start with the basics and move on to the intersection of inside and outside strategy and organizing.

How have bodies become both the site and the vehicle for new forms of labor, consumption, production and reproduction? What does the commercialization of the body and embodied exchanges reveal about interconnections between personal, local, national and global contexts? This course will examine enactments of body labor in locations and processes ranging from nail salons, beauty pageants, cosmetic surgery, surrogacy, medical tourism to frontline healthcare work within the pandemic.

Food systems, sovereignty, and security remain major issues of concern for producers, consumers, and policymakers at the dawn of the 21st Century, despite significant advances in transportation and technology. This course addresses these concerns by approaching food, the environment, and sustainability from an environmental anthropology perspective - critically examining the relationship between what we eat and who we are. Over the course of the semester, we will compare past, present, and future food systems in the United States with those in other parts of the world.

Examines information technology from a business enterprise perspective. Topics include: the components and development of business information technology systems, their use in enhancing and facilitating management practices and decision making and their impact on management decisions.

Examines information technology from a business enterprise perspective. Topics include: the components and development of business information technology systems, their use in enhancing and facilitating management practices and decision making and their impact on management decisions.

The nature of causality and techniques for making valid causal inferences have been the subject of intense recent discussion in the social sciences. These topics are also increasingly relevant in government, business, and non-profit sectors amid the growing popularity of evidence-based approaches. Rooted in the potential outcomes framework, this course will discuss various conceptualizations of causality, explore the statistics of causal inference and provide deep coverage of methods for design- and model-based causal inference with experimental and observational data.

This course is a reading and research-intensive course that covers selected topics in comparative political behavior research in a reading group style format while practicing research relevant professional skills: assessing and summarizing articles, replicating or extending research using the appropriate method, and writing and revising for publication.