This research seminar investigates the links between the material and political worlds in the U.S. and around the world. In particular, it tries to understand the way that technology and material objects have constrained and enabled the making of state power, while also being the product of policy choices.

(Offered as SWAG 400 and POSC 407) The topic will vary from year to year. A student may take this course more than once, providing only that the topic is not the same. The current iteration of this seminar will explore the consequences of neoliberalism, cultural conservatism, Islamophobia, and anti-immigrant sentiments for women of different social and economic strata as well as women’s divergent political responses.

(Offered as POSC 374 and LJST 374) This seminar explores the role of rights in addressing inequality, discrimination, and violence. This course will trace the evolution of rights focused legal strategies aimed at addressing injustice coupled with race, gender, disability, and citizenship status. We will evaluate how rights-based activism often creates a gap between expectation and realization. This evaluation will consider when and how rights are most efficacious in producing social change and the possibility of unintended consequences.

Ethnography is an immersive, interpretive research methodology that is ideally suited for studying culture and power. This course introduces students to works of political ethnography such as Evicted by Matthew Desmond, Every Twelve Seconds by Timothy Pachirat, and Strangers in Their Own Land by Arlie Hochschild. Students will learn techniques such as participant observation and ordinary language interviewing. We will also consider the principle of positionality and the ethics of ethnographic research.

Identity has emerged as a major theme of contemporary politics, although as we will learn, politics and identity have been entangled throughout history. We will explore the theoretical bases for identity politics in political psychology, political culture, and social movements. We will consider various critiques of identity politics from both the left and the right. In the second half of the semester, we will explore how identity politics have appeared in the United States, focusing on the LGBTQ+ movement, Black Lives Matter, and white nationalism.

This course seeks to give a comprehensive view of the historical evolution of international relations (IR) from 1919 to the present. Through extensive readings and numerous audio and video documentaries, students will be able to examine and analyze the main events that shaped and influenced world politics since the early twentieth century.

(Offered as POSC 336 and SPAN 336) This is an introduction to the study of modern Latin American politics. The overriding question is: why have democracy and self-sustained prosperity been so difficult to accomplish in the region We begin by examining different definitions of democracy. Thereafter, we discuss three democracy-related themes in Latin America.

Hegel once remarked that "To read the newspaper is the modern man's morning-prayer." What may be captured in this seemingly obvious observation is a proposition that political understanding of current events is difficult to sustain without daily reading of a newspaper; that reading itself is a dynamic activity, involving interpretation; that all interpretation is, in effect, translation because in any act of reading, the reader inevitably forms a judgment as to what the text is saying.

Russia was among the first nations in the world to face political terrorism when in the 1870s the leftist People's Will group launched the hunt for Tsar Alexander II. The terrorist trend continued into the twentieth century; in 1918, the Socialist Revolutionary Party attempted to assassinate Lenin. Eradicated by Stalin, terrorism resurfaced in the 1990s, when Russia found itself under attack by Chechen separatists.

The Affective Interface explores a range of issues concerning the technologized body—though none more urgent than the political implications surrounding life itself. The course considers the relationship of the mind and body to technology in contemporary culture between 1990 and 2020.