This course is intended to help students make progress on their dissertation prospectus and dissertation. To do this, we will discuss formulating a dissertation topic, assembling a dissertation committee, drafting and defending a prospectus, writing and researching a dissertation, and finding and applying for both internal and external grants and fellowships. The course will regularly feature visits from faculty members from across the Department who will share their insights into this process.

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Description not available at this time

What does it mean to study politics from below? How does immersion of the researcher in the research world contribute to the study of power? What are the promises, and perils, of social research that invites the unruly minutiae of lived experience to converse with, and contest, abstract disciplinary theories and categories? In this practice-intensive seminar, we explore ethnographic and other qualitative fieldwork methods with specific attention to their potential to subvert, generate, and extend understandings of politics and power.

As a core course in the proposed Grad Certificate in Decolonial Global Studies, this course will serve as an advanced introduction to political and social theories of coloniality and decolonization. Reading key texts within an enlarged conception of what constitutes postcolonial and decolonial thought, the seminar will address some of the most fundamental questions in social, political, and cultural theory (e.g. patriarchy, globalization, the state, racial capitalism, subjectivity, knowledge production, democracy, nationalism) from a transdisciplinary lens.

By any measure, and at all levels, American politics is deeply polarized along partisan lines, often asymmetrically so. This tribal division along partisan lines has changed the tone of political discourse, impacted the ability of our government to function, spread into apolitical facets of American life, led to political violence, and now poses a significant threat to democratic norms and institutions. This class will delve into the origins, psychology, and social dynamics of this hyper-polarization.

This course will build on students' previous foundations in probability, statistical inference, and linear regression. An introduction to generalized linear models (GLMs) and multilevel (mixed effects/hierarchical) models will be followed by additional advanced topics at the discretion of the instructor. These will include special cases of GLMs and multilevel models and may also consider measurement of latent variables (e.g. factor analysis, IRT).

This course examines the critical role that the Supreme Court has played in shaping the landscape of rights and liberties in the United States over time. We begin with a discussion about the power and potential of textual rights protections. Then, we examine the historic rise of an organizational structure that supported legal mobilization to protect individual rights in the United States, and learn about why certain rights were protected before others.