One full course. This course is open only to seniors majors who have been accepted in the Political Science Honors program and have departmental approval.

Fall semester. The Department.

How to handle overenrollment: null

Students who enroll in this course will likely encounter and be expected to engage in the following intellectual skills, modes of learning, and assessment: Independent research, written work, and oral presentations.

Independent reading course.

Fall and spring semesters. The Department.

How to handle overenrollment: null

Students who enroll in this course will likely encounter and be expected to engage in the following intellectual skills, modes of learning, and assessment: Independent research, written work, and oral presentations.

This course will explore how autism as both a medical diagnosis and a social category has gained significance over the past forty years. The course will situate the study of autism in the broader framework of the disability rights movement. We will consider the evidence for its characterization as an “epidemic” and how medical experts, parents, and autistic individuals have challenged and collaborated with each other.

(Offered as SWAG 400 and POSC 407) The topic will vary from year to year. This seminar explores when and how women and LGBTQ communities resist domination across racial, class, and national divides. We will examine varied and changing expressions of agency and modes of activism—through art, poetry, literature, cinema, and electoral politics. We will devote particular attention to how the growth of right-wing nationalisms globally influences the character of resistance. Which modes of protest challenge dominant narratives of the nation? What alternative imaginaries do they offer?

This course will examine the foreign policy of the Russian Federation of the past twenty years. As a successor state Russia has inherited both the Soviet Union's clout (nuclear arms, a permanent seat on the U.N. Security Council) and Soviet debts—monetary, psychological, and historical. What are the conceptual foundations of Russian diplomacy? Can we deconstruct Russian nationalism so as to examine its different trends and their impact on foreign policy? Do Russian exports of oil and gas define Russian diplomacy, as it is often claimed?

This seminar examines how the digital age (the third industrial revolution) has transformed politics around the world, in democratic and non-democratic contexts. Information and communication technologies (ICTs) change how people, states, and non-state actors interact. Technology creates new access points and vulnerabilities, new windows of opportunity and new politically salient actors, new political behaviors and types of participation.

Nuclear activity is ridden with contradictions: nuclear power is one of the most environmentally friendly sources of energy, yet nuclear waste presents considerable health dangers. While nuclear energy is badly needed by many states for economic development, it can lay the foundations for the acquisition of the most powerful weapons in the world. Few countries embody the contradictions of nuclear power to the degree to which the United States does. The first country to detonate a nuclear device (and the only one to have used it in conflict), the U.S.

This course is a study of aspects of the canon of American political thought. While examining the roots of American thought in Puritanism and Quakerism, the primary focus will be on American transcendentalism and its impact on subsequent thought. Among those whose works we are likely to consider are Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, Walt Whitman, W.E.B. DuBois, William James, Jane Addams, John Dewey, Martin Luther King, Hannah Arendt, Richard Rorty, and Stanley Cavell.

Not open to first-year students. Fall semester. Professor Dumm.

Nationalist fervor seemed likely to diminish once so-called Third World nations achieved independence. However, the past few years have witnessed the resurgence and transformation of nationalism in the post-colonial world. Where anti-colonial nationalist movements appeared to be progressive forces of social change, many contemporary forms of nationalism appear to be reactionary. Did nationalist leaders and theoreticians fail to identify the exclusionary qualities of earlier incarnations of nationalism? Were they blind to its chauvinism? Or has nationalism become increasingly intolerant?

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.