(Offered as SWAG 346 and POSC 343)  In this course, we study the political visions of four major twentieth-century theorists: Simone de Beauvoir, Frantz Fanon, Herbert Marcuse, and Michel Foucault. What forms of power did each of these thinkers surface? What social transformations did they call for? How did they imagine that transformation could be achieved?

A growing number of International Relations (IR) scholars and foreign policy experts have begun to characterize current Great Power relations as having many fundamental features of a “New Cold War” while other IR scholars and policy experts insist that this Cold War label is a distortion of reality. This course will analyze today’s Great Power relations and review the explanatory value of this Cold War analogy.

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.

What is the European Union? How and why did it start? Where is it headed? Will it become stronger and grow into a full-fledged United States of Europe? Will it become weaker and join the ranks of typical international organizations, following the various crises it has confronted on several dimensions: economic, migration, political - in particular, concerning its impact on sovereignty, democracy, identity, and legitimacy?

This course will examine the conflict over Historic Palestine/The Land of Israel from the late nineteenth century through the present day. It will be framed through a "relational" approach that focuses on the coevolution and interactions of the Zionist and Palestinian national movements.

This interdisciplinary course studies the idea that the way people care for themselves is materially inseparable from how they care for everyone and everything else, including the planet. In a 2019 interview, philosopher and eco-feminist Donna Haraway observed that “the established disorder of our present era is not necessary.” Are there ways to imagine the world without this disorder? What encounters between place-based lives and climate change are necessary? How can we speak truth to power in a post-truth era?

The course offers a comprehensive understanding of the intricate relationship between politics and the global economy. It explores why some states receive benefits from globalization while others do not. We begin by examining key political economic theories and institutions that facilitated globalization's evolution and delve into the reasons behind the rise of economic nationalism in the Western world and beyond.

This course examines the politics of the contemporary Right in the United States. We will explore historical shifts in ideologies of the Democratic and Republican parties, political conflicts in such arenas as race, gender and class; the politics of immigration; abortion rights; immigration policies; religious freedom; and foreign policy.

This course will address the politics of gun ownership, as well as the meanings of guns in American civic life. Focusing on the philosophical, social, legal, institutional, cultural, and economic lenses through which Americans have made sense of the role of firearms in American politics, this course will use firearms policy to explore a range of questions: how has our understanding of self-protection changed or not over time? What was the role of the Second Amendment in the making of the Constitution?

(Offered as POSC 145 and EDST 145) This course will explore the role of work in the context of American politics and society. We will study how work has been understood in political and social theory. We will also consider ethnographic studies that explore how workers experience their lives inside organizations and how workplaces transform in response to changing legal regulations. These theoretical and empirical explorations will provide a foundation for reflections about how work structures opportunities in democratic societies and how re-imagining work might unleash human potential.