Graduate

POLI 200A Political and Social Thought Core Seminar

Draws on history of political thought, contemporary social and critical theory, and the contributions of legal and institutional analysis of various kinds to engage in critical study of political practices that are experienced or understood as in some way limiting, oppressive, or wrong; to transform our understanding of these practices; to see their contingent conditions; and to articulate possibilities of governing ourselves differently.

Credits

5

Requirements

Enrollment is restricted to graduate students.

POLI 200B Social Forces and Political Change Core Seminar

Concerns transformation of social forces into political ones. Focuses on formation, articulation, mobilization, and organization of political interests and identities, their mutual interaction, and their effects on state structures and practices and vice versa. Major themes are 1) social bases of political action: class, gender, race, and other determinants of social division and political identity and 2) relevant forms of political agency and action, including development of political consciousness and representation of interests and identities in the public sphere.

Credits

5

Requirements

Enrollment is restricted to graduate students.

POLI 200C States and Political Institutions Core Seminar

Introduces study of political institutions as instruments of collective decision making and action. Explores alternative theoretical approaches to development of political institutions, state and political economy, and security dilemmas.

Credits

5

Requirements

Enrollment is restricted to graduate students.

POLI 200D Political Economy Core Seminar

Introduction to the theories and methodologies of political economy. Focuses on the relationship between states and markets and considers the politics of economic choices and institutions germane to both national and global political institutions. Addresses origins and development of markets and capitalism; historical evolution of states and their economies; relationship between labor, capital, production, and consumption; regulation of production; macroeconomics and management of economies; and issues of national and global social welfare.

Credits

5

Requirements

Enrollment is restricted to graduate students.

POLI 201 Logics of Inquiry

Investigates approaches to study of politics and to enterprise of social science in general. Works from positivist, interpretive, historical, and critical approaches provide examples held up to critical and epistemological reflection.

Credits

5

Instructor

Anjuli Verma

Requirements

Enrollment is restricted to graduate students.

POLI 202 Fundamentals of Political Research

Gives students practical tools to transform research questions into viable and well-crafted research designs. Introduces conceptual development, various forms of data, and rules for case selection. The goal is to train students in a range of specific methods, including interviewing, ethnography, and archival work.

Credits

5

Instructor

Mark Massoud

Requirements

Enrollment is restricted to graduate students.

POLI 203 Making of the Modern

Introduces, at the graduate level, some of the central conceptual categories and material implications that underwrite the world of the modern. Explores concepts including the individual, historicism, contract, and objectivity.

Credits

5

Instructor

Vanita Seth

Requirements

Enrollment is restricted to graduate students.

POLI 204 Bodies in History

The human body has been productive of a wide range of varied and competing discourses. Among the themes covered are sexuality, hygiene, the grotesque, and criminality.

Credits

5

Instructor

Vanita Seth

Requirements

Enrollment is restricted to graduate students.

POLI 205 Critical Perspectives on Classical Political Economy

Explores seminal works in classical political economy, particularly its consolidation at the moment that industrial society emerged from commercial society, as demonstrated in the writings of Bernard Mandeville, Adam Smith, and Thomas Malthus.

Credits

5

Instructor

Dean Mathiowetz

Requirements

Enrollment is restricted to graduate students.

POLI 206 Power and Pleasure

Graduate seminar exploring connections between the body politic and human bodies, particularly as they relate to the sensory dimension of political and personal experience. The myriad ways these connections have been drawn, from antiquity to the present, belie the aspiration of philosophy to organize political life around reason. These connections also offer us ways in to consider the materiality of social life, and commercial life in particular, generating perspectives on capitalism and late modernity. Engagements with these materials also provide opportunities to explore the relationship between sensual materialism and affect theory.

Credits

5

Instructor

Dean Mathiowetz

Requirements

Enrollment is restricted to graduate students.

POLI 207 Political Economies of Affect

Explores the potential in philosophical precursors to recent affect theory, alongside classical political economy and its critics, to develop an alternative epistemology for political economy. Readings include: Aristotle, Spinoza, Deleuze, Hume, Negri, Hardt, Smith, Bergson, and Marx.

Credits

5

Instructor

Dean Mathiowetz

Requirements

Enrollment is restricted to graduate students.

POLI 208 Race

Considers the subject of race and racism from a political and historical perspective appealing to literatures from history, anthropology, science, and literary studies.

Credits

5

Instructor

Vanita Seth

Requirements

Enrollment is restricted to graduate students.

POLI 209 Radical Political Thought

Focuses on early 19th- through early 20th-century socialist and anarchist thought, excluding Marx. Theorists studied include Saint-Simon, Fourier, Proudhon, Stirner, Bakunin, Kropotkin, Perkins Gilman, and Goldman. Some secondary literature and related contemporary theory is also treated.

Credits

5

Instructor

Megan Thomas

Requirements

Enrollment is restricted to graduate students.

POLI 210 Problems of Democracy in Comparative Perspective

Democracy is an essential political concept, and a fundamentally contested one. Since the 1980s, scholars of comparative politics have attempted to explain why and when countries transition from authoritarianism to democratic institutions. However, regime change at the national level only sets the stage, leaving deeper questions about what democracy means in practice--how it plays out (or is undermined) throughout the state and at subnational levels; whom it includes and excludes; what options it opens; and what possibilities it forecloses. Such questions relate debates about the potential and the limitations of democracy in general.

Credits

5

Instructor

Benjamin Read

Requirements

Enrollment is restricted to graduate students.

POLI 211 Making and Unmaking Sovereignty

Focuses on questions of sovereignty. Of what does sovereignty consist? How is it secured, proclaimed, and perpetuated? How is it insecure, contingent, and subject to contestation? How is the idea of individual sovereignty related to the idea of the sovereignty of the state? Our aim is less to answer these questions definitively than to explore them and understand how theorists (historical and contemporary) have explored them, and how different historical episodes illuminate them.

Credits

5

Instructor

Thomas Serres

Requirements

Enrollment is restricted to graduate students.

POLI 213 Who Governs the Globe? Exploring Agency and Authority in Contemporary World Politics

Addresses the role of non- and sub-state actors in global governance. Explores the concept of agency in world politics, and the conditions under which these actors acquire global agency in contemporary world politics. Introduces various theoretical perspectives with which to identify and evaluate agency, with a focus on alternative sources of authority, identity, and power.

Credits

5

Instructor

Dave Gordon

Requirements

Enrollment is restricted to graduate students.

POLI 214 Thinking Green: Politics, Ethics, Political Economy

Green political thought, philosophy, debates, and practices; history of ecological thought and comparative study of competing ideas and proposals. Critical examination of neo-liberal environmentalism.

Credits

5

Requirements

Enrollment is restricted to graduate students.

POLI 216 Theorizing Politics Beyond the State

Explores some of the major ways the modern nation-state has been theorized by political theorists, political scientists, and sociologists before moving on to examine some alternate modalities of organizing collective life from Anglophone and Francophone Africa, the Caribbean, India, China, Indigenous Hawaii and North America, and the Muslim world.

Credits

5

Instructor

Yasmeen Daifallah

Requirements

Enrollment is restricted to graduate students.

POLI 217 Besieged Polities...

Introduction to the study of transnational security apparatuses and politically sensitive forms of mobility, with a focus on borders, their political significance, and those who monitor, cross and challenge them. Discussion includes recent monographs published in the fields of critical security studies, critical border studies, and new mobilities. Also studies these works in conversation with more traditional approaches in the field (notably realist, constructivist and neo-functionalist) that they aim to problematize. In addition, students reflect on the tools provided by different disciplinary approaches (international relations, cultural anthropology, critical theory, history) to think about these issues.

Credits

5

Instructor

Thomas Serres

Requirements

Enrollment is restricted to graduate studies.

POLI 218 Law and/Vs. Justice: The Rule of Law and Problems of (In)Justice

Explores major debates on the role and rule of law in society, with attention to efforts to use law to seek justice or respond to injustice. This includes engaging in three overlapping sets of conversations: What is law—its sources and functions—and how, where, and on whom does it operate? What is the "rule of law"—what is it for and whom does/can it serve and how? What are different ways that people and groups grapple with or respond to the role of law in injustice—including "the Nazi problem," "the slavery problem," the colonialism/imperialism problem, the Jim Crow/apartheid problem, etc—and what are the possibilities, challenges, and limits? Theoretical perspectives on the sources/origins and role of law in society will be considered as well as case studies and concrete examples that show how this tool is applied to particular challenges.

Credits

5

Instructor

Katherine Beaumont

Requirements

Enrollment is restricted to graduate students.

POLI 220 Un(Doing) History

Engages the politics of history through multiple frames: subject matter, interpretation, and the epistemological precepts that underwrite history as a discipline. Introduces students to a wide range of interdisciplinary literatures that include different historical methodologies, feminist theory, political theory, queer studies, postcolonial theory, and critical race studies.

Credits

5

Instructor

Vanita Seth

Requirements

Enrollment is restricted to graduate students.

POLI 222 Conflict and Change in American Politics and Policy

Explores the dynamic and contested interaction between politics and policy in the U.S. context, through examining the historical development of key contemporary policy debates and political conflicts. Introduces recent scholarship, drawing on history, sociology, and political economy that has challenged traditional behavioralist approaches to understanding American politics and policy development.

Credits

5

Instructor

Daniel Wirls

Requirements

Enrollment is restricted to graduate students.

POLI 223 Topics in American Political Development

Explores several important topics that have emerged from the renewed interest in political development, and are visible within its scholarship in American Political Development; for example, state-building, institutional change, representation, culture, participation, political identity, and economic and social transformations.

Credits

5

Instructor

Melanie Springer

Requirements

Enrollment is restricted to graduate students.

POLI 232 United States Political History

Covers several important themes and sets of readings from the literature on American political development. Topics include the origins and development of American political institutions, the evolution of democratic mechanisms, the rise and fall of social movements, and debates about the sources of policy regimes and political change.

Credits

5

Instructor

Eva Bertram

Requirements

Enrollment is restricted to graduate students.

POLI 241 Foundations and Frontiers in Comparative Politics

Overview of the major theoretical approaches to the study of comparative politics. This includes diverse literatures such as institutions and political economy, authoritarianism and democracy, and civil society and social movements. Case material is drawn from Latin America, Africa, Europe, North America, Asia and the Pacific.

Credits

5

Instructor

Sara Niedzwiecki

Requirements

Enrollment is restricted to graduate students.

POLI 243 Comparative Methods

Introduces the comparative method in social science. Trains students in the use of this method by examining how scholars have used it to compare across national governments, subnational units, public policies, organizations, social movements, and transnational collective action.

Credits

5

Cross Listed Courses

LALS 243

Instructor

Kent Eaton

Requirements

Enrollment is restricted to graduate students.

POLI 245 Latin American Politics

Surveys the Latin American political literature by studying: 1) critical moments in political development (e.g., state formation, democratization); 2) important political institutions (e.g., presidentialism, party, and electoral systems); and 3) influential political actors (e.g., unions, business associations, social movements).

Credits

5

Instructor

Sara Niedzwiecki

Requirements

Enrollment is restricted to graduate students.

POLI 247 Comparative Urban Politics

Focuses on local government structures and the relationships with other levels of government. Examines institutions and administration; urban political economy (fiscal strain, poverty, inequality, and the efforts to attract economic investment); political machines; race and ethnicity.

Credits

5

Instructor

Eleonora Pasotti

Requirements

Enrollment is restricted to graduate students.

POLI 248 On Property

Reviews the literatures on property connected to the state, personhood, gender, and legal systems. These conversations take place at the intersection of sociology, jurisprudence, history, economics, and politics in comparative perspective. Course starts with a birds-eye view and progressively hones in on the relation between political economy and family law. Students explore in class discussions and in their research papers closely related issues, including but not limited to intersectionality with race and ethnicity, sexual orientations, different family/household types, in these and other cultural contexts and legal traditions.

Credits

5

Instructor

Eleonora Pasotti

Requirements

Enrollment is restricted to graduate students.

POLI 249 Politics of Protest

Explores topics related to protest and political participation from theoretical and empirical perspectives.

Credits

5

Instructor

Eleonora Pasotti

Requirements

Enrollment is restricted to graduate students.

POLI 255 Comparative Anti-Colonialisms

Political thought of anti-colonial movements in comparative, historical perspective, including 18th- to 20th-Century European colonies of America and Asia. Focuses both on the contemporary political thought of these movements as well as on historiographical approaches of secondary literature.

Credits

5

Instructor

Yasmeen Daifallah

Requirements

Enrollment is restricted to graduate students.

POLI 257 Women Interpret Islam

Examines how prominent female Muslim thinkers have interpreted the Islamic tradition since the early 20th century. It surveys how thinkers who belonged to different intellectual traditions (liberal, Marxist, Islamist, feminist, etc.) engaged Islamic exegetical, legal, philosophical, theological and mystical traditions to find answers to the questions raised by their historical and sociopolitical contexts. These questions included: What is/are the Islamic understanding(s) of the purpose of individual and collective lives? What does freewill mean in Islam, and what is its relationship to responsibility towards oneself and one's community? Is there an Islamic notion of justice, and how does it relate to the way justice is defined by other intellectual traditions? What are the legitimate ways of exercising social and political authority to establish the Islamic vision(s) of the good life? How is establishing that vision related to the notion of jihad (striving in the path of God)? What implications does that vision, and its concomitant notions of justice and freewill, have on developing an Islamic understanding of the relationship between different genders, classes, and human groups?

Credits

5

Requirements

Enrollment is restricted to graduate students.

POLI 261 Key Issues in Contemporary Chinese Politics

Addresses topics ranging from the core institutions of the party-state to local politics, economic governance, and state-society interactions in multiple realms. Considers China in its own terms while evaluating the relevance of theoretical concepts from various fields in the social sciences. Aims to identify opportunities for new research projects.

Credits

5

Instructor

Benjamin Read

Requirements

Enrollment is restricted to graduate students.

POLI 270 Advanced Topics in Global Environmental Governance: Agency Beyond the State

Explores if, how, and under what conditions agency and power are diffusing away from the state to non-state actors such as, NGOs/civil society, corporations, and international organizations.

Credits

5

Requirements

Enrollment is restricted to graduate students.

POLI 271 Global Politics and Geo-Politics

Explores global politics in relation to geo-political formations that are developing in concert with contemporary crises in capitalist globalization, but which are also shaped by a wide range of intersecting racial, sexual, environmental, national, and neocolonial politics as well.

Credits

5

Instructor

Matthew Sparke

Requirements

Enrollment is restricted to graduate students.

POLI 272 Critical Interventions in IR Theory and Global Political Economy

Seminar examines selections from the canonical literature in international relations theory and global political economy through a number of critical lenses, including constructivist, feminist, historical materialist, and subaltern approaches.

Credits

5

Requirements

Enrollment is restricted to graduate students.

POLI 275 Contemporary Capitalism

Examines genesis of new institutions within the force of social ties and networks. Studies how social and organizational relationships achieve individual or group goals in political and economic life, and influence institutional design. Considers when and what ties contribute to governance and economic performance, and when informal and formal organizations constitute an obstacle.

Credits

5

Instructor

Roger Schoenman

Requirements

Enrollment is restricted to graduate students.

POLI 291 Teaching Assistant Seminar

Two-hour weekly seminar required of teaching assistants in which pedagogic and substantive issues will be considered. The experience of performing teaching assistant duties constitutes subject matter for discussion. Students submit petition to sponsoring agency.

Credits

2

Repeatable for credit

Yes

POLI 292 Professional Development

Primarily for first- and second-year graduate students. Students learn the norms and expectations of graduate school and a variety of professional roles. Students develop a plan for their graduate career and for establishing a professional network of mentors and peer audiences for their work.

Credits

2

Instructor

Dean Mathiowetz

Requirements

Enrollment is restricted to graduate students.

POLI 293 Field Study

Individual study undertaken off campus with direct faculty supervision. Students submit petition to sponsoring agency.

Credits

5

Repeatable for credit

Yes

POLI 295A Research Colloquium

Weekly venue for Ph.D. students to present current research, exchange information on sources and resources, discuss and critique epistemologies and methods, and to formulate topics for QE field statements and the dissertation. There are no assigned readings. May be repeated for credit twice.

Credits

2

Requirements

Enrollment is restricted to graduate students.

Repeatable for credit

Yes

POLI 295B Advanced Research Seminar

Weekly seminar for Ph.D. students in which to develop and write extended research papers on selected topics, to present current work, to discuss methods, data sources, and fieldwork, and to receive critiques and assessments from fellow students. May be repeated for credit twice.

Credits

5

Requirements

Enrollment is restricted to graduate students.

Repeatable for credit

Yes

POLI 297A Indep Study

A student approaches a member of the staff and proposes to take POLI 297 on a subject he or she has chosen that is not covered in other politics graduate courses or plans a graduate independent study that includes an undergraduate course. Students submit petition to sponsoring agency.

Credits

5

Repeatable for credit

Yes

POLI 297B Indep Study

A student approaches a member of the staff and proposes to take POLI 297 on a subject he or she has chosen that is not covered in other politics graduate courses or plans a graduate independent study that includes an undergraduate course. Students submit petition to sponsoring agency.

Credits

10

Repeatable for credit

Yes

POLI 297C Indep Study

A student approaches a member of the staff and proposes to take POLI 297 on a subject he or she has chosen that is not covered in other politics graduate courses or plans a graduate independent study that includes an undergraduate course. Students submit petition to sponsoring agency.

Credits

15

Repeatable for credit

Yes

POLI 299A Thesis Research

Enrollment restricted to graduate students and permission of instructor. Students submit petition to sponsoring agency.

Credits

5

Repeatable for credit

Yes

POLI 299B Thesis Research

Enrollment restricted to graduate students and permission of instructor. Students submit petition to sponsoring agency.

Credits

10

Repeatable for credit

Yes

POLI 299C Thesis Research

Enrollment restricted to gradaute students and permission of instructor. Students submit petition to sponsoring agency.

Credits

15

Repeatable for credit

Yes

Cross-listed courses that are managed by another department are listed at the bottom.

Cross-listed Courses

ENVS 144 Global Climate Change Politics

Explores the central political questions surrounding global governance of climate change. Focuses on how climate change is governed within the United Nations system, and, in particular, explores issues of equity and justice in terms of how we address climate change.

Credits

5

Cross Listed Courses

POLI 179

Requirements

Prerequisite(s): Environmental Studies students, previous or concurrent enrollment in courses ENVS 100 and ENVS 100L, or by permission of instructor.

ENVS 152 International Environmental Politics

Examines international law and politics through the lens of cooperation on transboundary environmental problems, ranging from acid rain to toxic chemicals to biodiversity loss and climate change, which have become pressing political concerns in our increasingly globalized economy.

Credits

5

Cross Listed Courses

POLI 170

Requirements

Prerequisite(s): previous or concurrent enrollment in courses ENVS 100 and ENVS 100L, or by permission of instructor.

FMST 112 Women and the Law

Interdisciplinary approach to study of law in its relation to category women and production of gender. Considers various materials including critical race theory, domestic case law and international instruments, representations of law, and writings by and on behalf of women living under different forms of legal control. Examines how law structures rights, offers protections, produces hierarchies, and sexualizes power relations in both public and intimate life.

Credits

5

Cross Listed Courses

POLI 112

Requirements

Enrollment is restricted to feminist studies, politics, legal studies, and Latin American and Latino studies/politics combined majors during first and second pass enrollment.

HIS 149F Southeast Asian Histories, Societies and Politics in Nine Tasty Foods

Examines political, cultural, and historical dynamics in Southeast Asia from the early modern period to the present. Students explore canonical reading and some of the most influential theories of Southeast Asian studies through animal and plant life that have gastronomically served the region for centuries. This approach leads students to recognize the utility of interdisciplinary investigation and to consider how fields such as ecology, zoology, and maritime studies have been impacted by methodologically creative work in the humanities and social sciences on the region.

Credits

5

Cross Listed Courses

ANTH 130Z, POLI 149F

Instructor

Kathleen Gutierrez

LGST 158 Law and Politics of Memory

Examines why we choose to memorialize some aspects of our history, but not others. What impact do those choices have on our contemporary politics and society? How may memorials help create a stronger democracy?

Credits

5

Cross Listed Courses

POLI 158

General Education Code

CC

LGST 173 Disability, Law, & Politics

Introduction to how individuals, societies, and states answer fundamental questions about disability, including what is or is not a disability, what causes disability, and what the proper responses to the existence of disabilities are.

Credits

5

Cross Listed Courses

POLI 173

Instructor

Jacqueline Gehring

General Education Code

PE-H