This course is primarily concerned with the study of cities. A considerable amount of work has primarily been focused on cities of the Global North. While the course will initially investigate the cities of Paris, Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles, the course will shift its theoretical and methodological intentions toward cities of the Global South. Through a diverse set of case studies in cities such as Manila, Johannesburg, Rio de Janeiro, Dubai, Mexico City, and Shanghai, the course examines historical and contemporary patterns of urbanization and urbanism.

War crimes, torture and genocides demonstrate all too frequently that "never again" remains an elusive ideal. What role does the international system of human rights and humanitarian law play in deterring abuses of power? We examine the debates over the definition, adjudication and punishment of such acts, and evaluate how effective domestic and international legal and extra-legal strategies can be in preventing such crimes in the future, redressing those that do occur, and shaping collective memory and reconciliation after the fact, often called transitional justice.

This course will study sustainable agriculture or agroecology at a relatively advanced level with readings and discussions of the current literature, visiting and working on projects at the Hampshire College Farm, and class trips to other farms, gardens, and other production or research facilities. Some previous experience in farm/class/project work in agriculture or ecology is expected.

Rivers and streams wind through the landscape moving water, sediment and other materials. Riparian zones (the land areas along streams) link streams with upland terrestrial ecosystems and often are areas of high biological diversity. This class will explore the function of streams and their riparian zones, how they can become impacted or destroyed and current methods of restoration. Students will learn restoration design principles, explore the primary literature, visit local restoration sites and work in teams to collect field data and complete projects.

All life requires water to survive. Where do we get our water? Where does it go? Will there always be enough? How can we manage our water resources to ensure there is enough? What policies affect these decisions? This course explores these topics using a systems approach to gain an understanding of how our water resources are intimately tied with the surrounding ecosystem. Topics include the water cycle, hydrologic budgets, urban stormwater management and low impact development.

Standing as silent sentinels, trees in temperate regions record temperature, rainfall, amount of sunlight and response to disturbance in the width of their annual growth rings. We can use the patterns of these rings as surrogate climate records for years before people recorded weather data. In this project-based course, we will first learn the techniques of dendochronology, the science of reading tree rings, including collection and preparation of samples, data collections and analysis, and the biology of tree growth.

Recent advances in analytical chemistry and instrumentation play a major role in many interdisciplinary sciences, including environmental science, biology, agriculture, geology, and in many health science fields. This course will cover those advances in analytical atomic spectroscopy (inductively coupled plasma-mass and atomic emission spectroscopy -- ICP-MS, ICP-AES), analytical molecular spectroscopy (infrared, UV-visible), electrochemistry, and chromatographic techniques and associated instrumental methodologies.

The world we live in is an ever-growing financial market, in which governments, corporations and individuals engage in a wide variety of complex transactions. To be an effective investor, saver or borrower, one needs to understand the fundamental principles upon which all financial transactions are based. Central to these principles is the concept of interest. Thus, in this course we seek to learn how to be an effective investor, saver and/or borrower by developing an understanding of the mathematics underlying interest theory and its applications to personal and/or institutional finance.

This course is a broad introduction to the practices of sustainable agriculture and organic farming. It includes experience in the field, combined with study of the underlying science and technology of several key agricultural topics and methods, as well as some more economic/political aspects. We will focus on sustainable and/or organic methods that minimize the use of nonrenewable resources and the associated pros and cons.

This course develops the basic geometric, algebraic, and computational foundations of vector spaces and matrices and applies them to a wide range of problems and models. In addition to containing real finite dimensional vector spaces, linear independence, linear transformations and inner product spaces, the course will cover eigenvalues and eigenvectors, diagonalization, and linear programming theory with applications to graph theory, game theory, differential equations, Markov chains, and least squares approximation. Basic programming will be taught and used throughout the course.