Defining moments in girlhood and youth like fashioning different hairstyles and clothing are oftentimes inextricably linked to turning points in the development of one's political consciousness. This course explores the ways girls and women of color theorize the development of their political consciousness through these seemingly apolitical coming of age moments in the U.S. since 1920.

The next U.S. president will face a world dramatically transformed from that encountered by Barack Obama when he first assumed office in 2009. China and Russia have become far more assertive in their respective zones of interest, the civil war in Syria has claimed nearly a half-million lives and triggered a devastating refugee crisis in Europe, ISIS has spread terror and violence in numerous countries, and climate change has begun to alter the planet in terrifying ways.

Social exclusion is a defining feature of contemporary cities. This course will explore the processes of urbanization and exclusion concerning the recent trends such as globalization, neoliberalism, and migration. The extent of urban inequalities, segregation, and social exclusion will be explored by using examples from selected cities particularly but not exclusively from the Middle East such as Cairo, Dubai, Beirut, Istanbul and New York.

This interactive seminar for students selected to work as peer mentors with Hampshire's Transformative Speaking Program will provide an opportunity to help shape the work of a new discipline immerging at the intersections of education, politics, communications, philosophy, anthropology, and critical social thought: peer mentoring in speaking.

This course is a comparative study of the Black Power Movement and Palestinian Liberation Movement and their artistic counterparts:Black Arts Movement and Palestinian Poetry of Resistance of the 1960s and 1970s. This study is interdisciplinary in nature and seeks to engage these movements on multiple levels: history, politics, ideology and aesthetics in order to highlight the multiple levels of their shared characteristics. The course is not only concerned with the shared roots of Black and Palestinian radical tradition forged at the time, but also their political and artistic legacies.

Spring semester of this yearlong course will be a project-based semester with students working in collaborative interdisciplinary teams (with the fall course as a prerequisite) to develop research-based design proposals across multiple scales.

The Uprisings that swept the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region have had a profound impact on the political economy of authoritarian regimes within the region as well as academic frameworks used to explain them. This course examines the economics of the MENA region and asks the following questions: Do the uprisings represent failures of the developmental state, neo-liberalism, or authoritarian regimes? How does human development within MENA compare to other regions in the developing world? To what extent does either religion or oil explain economic outcomes?

The central goal of this course is to track the ways in which Western economic thought has developed historically both as a response to inadequacies of previous theory and as a reflection of new economic problems that emerge as economies and societies evolve over time. The focus will be on (a) classical political economy and its critiques; (b) the marginalist revolution; (c) institutionalist economics; (d) the Keynesian revolution and (e) contemporary theory.

Racial reparations have been and continue to be one of the most explosive contemporary issues. Some argue that U.S. history of enslavement renders some form of reparations necessary to the quest for social justice; that understanding reparations is central to honest conversations about race and racism. Others argue that reparations for past injustices such as slavery are unfair. Still others refuse to discuss the topic altogether.

This course explores the history and politics of gender and sexuality in relation to the racial politics of prisons and the police. By engaging recent work in queer studies, feminist studies, transgender studies, and critical prison studies, we will consider how prisons and police have shaped the making and remaking of race, gender, and sexuality from slavery and conquest to the contemporary period. We will examine how police and prisons have regulated the body, identity, and populations, and how larger social, political, and cultural changes connect to these processes.