Column one has the course number and section. Other columns show the course title, days offered, instructor's name, room number, if the course is cross-referenced with another program, and a option to view additional course information in a pop-up window.
Course # (Section)
Title
Day/Times
Instructor
Room
PosTag(s)
Info
AS.190.673 (01)
Abolition and Global Political Thought
M 3:00PM - 5:00PM
Shilliam, Robert (Robbie)
Mergenthaler 366
POLI-IR
Abolition and Global Political Thought AS.190.673 (01)
"Abolition” has re-emerged in recent years as a concept that has guided a set of movements in their struggle for social justice against racist institutions, especially those relating to criminal justice and border control. This course takes a deep dive into the concept, investigating the various permutations of agency, structure and ethics that abolition thinking has given rise to. Attentive also to the different uses of the concept across time and space and also within contemporaneous struggles, the course attempts to sketch out a counter-archive of abolition as global political thought.
Credits: 0.00
Level: Graduate
Days/Times: M 3:00PM - 5:00PM
Instructor: Shilliam, Robert (Robbie)
Room: Mergenthaler 366
Status: Open
Seats Available: 15/15
PosTag(s): POLI-IR
AS.190.601 (01)
Qualitative Research
Th 10:30AM - 12:30PM
Parkinson, Sarah
Mergenthaler 366
Qualitative Research AS.190.601 (01)
This class is designed to introduce students to qualitative methodology. Practically, students will gain first hand experience with qualitative research methods via research design, ethics review, in-depth interviewing, participant observation, and archival/primary source research. They will learn to deploy analytical techniques such as discourse analysis and process tracing. Students will also be asked to consider the merits of qualitative approaches more generally, and discuss the relative advantages of qualitative, experimental, and quantitative approaches. Questions that we will discuss include: What place should qualitative research have in a research design? Can qualitative research test hypotheses, or only generate them? Can qualitative research explain social phenomena, or only interpret them? What are the disadvantages and advantages of qualitative approaches compared to quantitative approaches? For what kinds of research questions are ethnographic techniques best suited? Is replicability possible for ethnographic field research? What criteria of evidence and analytical rigor apply on this terrain?
Credits: 0.00
Level: Graduate
Days/Times: Th 10:30AM - 12:30PM
Instructor: Parkinson, Sarah
Room: Mergenthaler 366
Status: Open
Seats Available: 15/15
PosTag(s): n/a
AS.190.630 (01)
Interpretation and Critique of Political Ideas
T 2:00PM - 4:00PM
Simon, Joshua David (Josh)
Mergenthaler 366
POLI-PT, POLI-CP
Interpretation and Critique of Political Ideas AS.190.630 (01)
This is a graduate seminar on the interpretive and critical problems that arise when political theorists read and write about texts from long, long ago or far, far away. The first part of the course will consider approaches to the history of European political thought influenced by Marx, Foucault, Strauss, Skinner, and Arendt, amongst others. Readings will include both major methodological statements and examples of interpretive and critical scholarship undertaken by proponents of these different schools of thought. In the second part of the course, we will ask whether and how methods developed to analyze and learn from the history of political thought can be applied to the study of political thinkers who lived and wrote outside western Europe and North America. Major questions for consideration in both parts of the course include: Can old ideas help us solve problems arising in contemporary politics and political theory? What can we learn from intellectual traditions unconnected to our own? What do we have to do in order to understand the ideas contained within a given text? Do we have to understand a text for it to be useful to us?
Credits: 0.00
Level: Graduate
Days/Times: T 2:00PM - 4:00PM
Instructor: Simon, Joshua David (Josh)
Room: Mergenthaler 366
Status: Open
Seats Available: 15/15
PosTag(s): POLI-PT, POLI-CP
AS.190.639 (01)
Elections and Democracy
W 11:00AM - 1:00PM
Katz, Richard Stephen
Mergenthaler 366
POLI-CP, POLI-AP
Elections and Democracy AS.190.639 (01)
This seminar will explore the connection between democracy and elections from three inter-related perspectives. First, what is the role of elections in democratic theory? What do various democratic theorists expect of elections? Second, how should elections be evaluated from the perspective of domestic or international law? Third, how do actual electoral systems work, both in practical, empirical, terms and with regard to the normative standards suggested by the first two perspectives.
Credits: 0.00
Level: Graduate
Days/Times: W 11:00AM - 1:00PM
Instructor: Katz, Richard Stephen
Room: Mergenthaler 366
Status: Open
Seats Available: 15/15
PosTag(s): POLI-CP, POLI-AP
AS.190.647 (01)
Community and Its Disconcents
F 1:00PM - 3:00PM
Culbert, Jennifer
Mergenthaler 366
POLI-PT
Community and Its Disconcents AS.190.647 (01)
This course is inspired by Hannah Arendt’s claim that the calamity of stateless people is “not that they are deprived of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” but that “they no longer belong to any community whatsoever.” Rather than attempt to verify or disprove this claim, the course will use this claim as a provocation. How do we understand, experience, and imagine “community”? What does it mean to “belong” to a community? Is it possible not to belong to any community? Why is the language of community so ubiquitous? To help us consider these questions, we will read among others, Anderson, Freud, Harney and Moten, Joseph, LeGuin, McMillan, and Rousseau. A final paper of 20-30 pages is required.
Credits: 0.00
Level: Graduate
Days/Times: F 1:00PM - 3:00PM
Instructor: Culbert, Jennifer
Room: Mergenthaler 366
Status: Open
Seats Available: 10/10
PosTag(s): POLI-PT
AS.190.674 (01)
Lucretius
Th 1:30PM - 4:00PM
Bennett, Jane, Butler, Michael Shane (Shane)
Gilman 108
Lucretius AS.190.674 (01)
A study of Lucretius’s De Rerum Natura as a work that mingles physics, metaphysics, and poetry. We will also consider how Lucretius (and by extension Epicureanism) has been taken up by political theorists, classicists, and literary scholars.
Credits: 0.00
Level: Graduate
Days/Times: Th 1:30PM - 4:00PM
Instructor: Bennett, Jane, Butler, Michael Shane (Shane)
Room: Gilman 108
Status: Open
Seats Available: 15/15
PosTag(s): n/a
AS.190.677 (01)
Rethinking the History of Western Thought
W 2:00PM - 4:00PM
Connolly, William E
Mergenthaler 366
POLI-PT
Rethinking the History of Western Thought AS.190.677 (01)
The history of Euro-American Political Thought has been aptly criticized for its prejudices with respect to race, gender, class, the subject, capitalism, colonialism, sociocentrism, and humanist exceptionalism. How deeply are those themes ensconced in early Christian traditions, secular orientations to the earth, later practices of capitalism, and contemporary images of “the political”? Is exposure enough? The seminar starts with readings of Hesiod’s Theogony and the Book of Job. It then explores how Augustine consolidates sharp shifts in these orientations to faith, divinity, nature, gender, discipline, time and the earth. You might call him an agent of the first conquest of Europe. Key chapters from The City of God: Against the Pagans and On Christian Doctrine will be engaged. We will also rummage through Foucault’s newly translated book, Confessions of The Flesh. Then we turn to what might be called the second Christian/imperial conquest, this time launched during the 15th century Spanish invasion of the Americas. How did that conquest re-enact and differ from the first? A key text here will be Todorov’s The Conquest of America. We then sample short essays by Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, Marx, Arendt, and Heidegger, to see how they consolidate some Augustinian priorities and challenge others. The seminar finally addresses the thought of Dipesh Chakrabarty, as he provincializes Europe. In his new book, The climate of history in a planetary age. Chakrabarty both criticizes currents in Euro-centered thought (“the political”, the earth as background to politics, racism, exceptionalism, etc) and some currents in post-colonial thought.
Credits: 0.00
Level: Graduate
Days/Times: W 2:00PM - 4:00PM
Instructor: Connolly, William E
Room: Mergenthaler 366
Status: Open
Seats Available: 15/15
PosTag(s): POLI-PT
AS.190.681 (01)
Race and Politics of Punishment in the U.S.
F 10:30AM - 12:30PM
Weaver, Vesla
Mergenthaler 366
Race and Politics of Punishment in the U.S. AS.190.681 (01)
Contact with criminal justice has become a primary way that many Americans see and experience government, particularly those from race-class subjugated communities. Yet, our field has been slow to appreciate the development of the carceral state or to consider its manifold impacts for citizenship. In this graduate seminar, we will survey key debates around punishment, state violence, and surveillance, with a particular focus on research that takes institutional development, history, and racial orders seriously. Why did the carceral state expand in “fits and starts” and with what consequence for state-building? We explore its (racialized and gendered) relationship to other key systems: foster care, social provision, labor relations and the labor market, and immigration enforcement. A core preoccupation of this course will be to understand the ways in which the criminal justice system “makes race” and how debates about crime and punishment were often debates about black inclusion and equality. How does exposure to criminal justice interventions shape political learning, democratic habits, and racial lifeworlds? In addition to policy, political discourse, and racial politics, we will employ works from a range of fields – history, sociology, law, and criminology – and a range of methods (ethnography, historical analysis, quantitative and qualitative). Required books include: Khalil Muhammad’s Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America, Elizabeth Hinton’s From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime, David Oshinsky’s Worse than Slavery: Parchman Farm and the Ordeal of Jim Crow Justice, Bruce Western’s Punishment and Inequality in America, and Michael Fortner’s Black Silent Majority: The Rockefeller Drug Laws and the Politics of Punishment.
Credits: 0.00
Level: Graduate
Days/Times: F 10:30AM - 12:30PM
Instructor: Weaver, Vesla
Room: Mergenthaler 366
Status: Open
Seats Available: 15/15
PosTag(s): n/a
AS.190.682 (01)
Regulatory Politics
T 10:00AM - 12:00PM
Yasuda, John Kojiro
Mergenthaler 366
POLI-CP
Regulatory Politics AS.190.682 (01)
This graduate seminar considers regulatory politics in both the developing and developed world. Topics will explore the role of independent agencies, soft paternalism, co-regulation, regulatory failure, and other topics, across a host of sectors.
Credits: 0.00
Level: Graduate
Days/Times: T 10:00AM - 12:00PM
Instructor: Yasuda, John Kojiro
Room: Mergenthaler 366
Status: Open
Seats Available: 12/12
PosTag(s): POLI-CP
AS.190.692 (01)
Planetary Geopolitics and Republicanism
T 4:00PM - 6:30PM
Deudney, Daniel Horace (Daniel)
Mergenthaler 366
POLI-IR
Planetary Geopolitics and Republicanism AS.190.692 (01)
As an exercise in constructive planetary political science, political theory and IR theory, this course explores the relevance of republican political forms for contemporary practical political planetary problem-solving. Two weeks overview republican political forms and thought in relation to geographical and technological material contexts. Two weeks overview contemporary planetary material and human social patterns, trends and problems. Six weeks of case studies of the contours of liberal democratic governance and restraint architectures for (3 of 6): 1) large-scale violence, 2) macro-infrastructures, 3) climate change, 4) cyberspace, 5) artificial intelligence, and 6) genetic engineering of humans. Two weeks of synthesis.
