Senior Honors

The senior departmental honors seminar is a workshop that supports the first half of senior thesis work in economics.  Students learn research methods and engage with economic research via close reading, structured writing, empirical analysis, theoretical reasoning, and active participation in discussion.   Students develop and refine their own research proposals, so that by the end of the semester each student’s proposal clearly states a research question, places that question into context, and outlines a feasible approach.  By the end of the semester, students wi

Organizing the Unorganizeable

Recently, several states including New York, Massachusetts and California have passed Domestic Workers Bill of Rights legislation. This legislation establishes clear standards for defining the length of the workday, the right to sick days and maternity leave as well as appropriate rest and meal breaks. These recent victories bode well for future organizing efforts, but also draw inspiration from historical movements of domestic, laundry and hospital workers.

Peer Mentoring in Speaking

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.

German Colonialism Revisited

In 1884/85 German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck convened the notorious "Berlin Conference," marking Germany's entry into colonial politics and inaugurating a period of heightened colonial expansion by European powers. One legacy of this so called "Scramble for Africa" is the collections of artifacts, images, sounds, and human remains which were assembled for the Ethnological Museums in Berlin.

Intro to Economics

This course introduces students to the ways in which economists typically analyze issues, using models of how prices, output, profits, wages, and employment are determined. These models also help decide how the government can and should sometimes intervene-such as to reduce unemployment, or to use taxes or subsidies to encourage useful activities and discourage harmful ones (like pollution).

A Word on Relationships

This course will give an overview of two major psychological theories, attachment and psychoanalytic theories. These theories emphasize the development and derailment of relationships. We will use these theoretical perspectives to explore the interpersonal, intersubjective, and intrapsychic dimensions of our relational worlds. Historical and cross-cultural aspects of these psychological approaches will be integrated throughout our discussions.

Critical Youth Studies

In this advanced seminar we will critically examine ideas about children and youth through readings in childhood and youth studies, sociology of childhood, and critical developmental psychology. An important component of students' work in this course is to critically evaluate ideas, practices, and methodologies related to childhood and youth in their own academic studies, including areas not listed above such as anthropology, history, education, and the arts.

Youth/Poets

This seminar in social and literary studies of childhood will take up multiple perspectives on young people as writers of poetry. We will explore the work of recent scholars in childhood studies, literary studies, children's literature studies, and critical literacy studies who contemplate questions about young people as consumers and/or producers of culture; as potential poets in the future and/or actual poets in the present; as objects of adult teachers' pedagogical ideas and/or as subjects producing and performing their own ideas and artistry.

America & the World

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.

Black Power/Arts

This course will explore the history, ideas, voices and strategies African Americans employed in the struggle to secure rights and demand respect in the United States in the 1960s and 70s. This includes an exploration into the relationship between politics and the arts; the articulation of a black aesthetic; black performance politics; radical imaginaries; print culture through the seminal theorists and activists of the period.
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