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Course Criteria
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3.00 Credits
Is it true that the U.S. remains the most powerful country in the world due to the combination of noble values that its citizens hold dear? What does "American Freedom" mean at a time when the U.S. has the highest rate of incarceration in the world? This course is designed to introduce students to different theories of "power" and how it functions in the contemporary world, using the United States as a case study. Beginning at the domestic level, we will explore how the U.S. has remained relatively politically stable despite deep racial divisions and polarizations of wealth. Are residents simply satisfied with their lives? Are they intimidated or physically prevented from seeking change? Or is control maintained in more subtle ways having to do with how we view ourselves and interpret the world? Moving to the international scale, we will analyze whether the United States should be deemed an empire, ways in which the country's economic and military influence has been justified, and how its position in the global economy and system of states is changing. Throughout, we will question how these forms of domestic and international power may be linked. The course will pair challenging theoretical texts with accessible accounts of historical events or processes that exemplify the forms of power under examination. Using texts drawn from history, political science, philosophy, and American Studies, students will develop an understanding of key terms such as class, racial projects, hegemony, governmentality, citizen-subjects, colonialism, the world-system, and transnational states.
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3.00 Credits
This course offers students an introduction to global cyberpolitics. The overarching focus is how internetworking, new media, and communications technologies alter norms, institutions, and global interactions among individuals, states, and non-state actors. Particular attention will be given to information and security, information technology and power, as well as technological dependence and freedom. Throughout the course we will grapple with whether or not the advent and exponential growth in global usage of information and communications technologies (ICTs) by individuals, states, and non-state actors is a panacea for what ails the global body politic. That is, are we witnessing the dawn of a global public square where democratic dialogue, deliberation, and cultural understanding, enabled by ICTs, foster conditions for global peace or are we subtly slipping towards political despotism, social control, and conflict enabled by the same technologies?
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3.00 Credits
This seminar draws on the last four decades of international efforts to regulate the environmental commons. The process of negotiating and implementing international environmental treaties will be a core focus of the course, yet emphasis will also be placed on emerging non-state means of addressing global environmental challenges. A variety of challenges faced in global environmental policymaking (compliance, participation by civil society and industry, incorporation of science, efficiency.) will be examined through the study of several international regimes, including on climate change, endangered species, biodiversity, biosafety and chemicals management.
Prerequisite:
ENVI 101 or permission of instructor
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3.00 Credits
If the classical imperative was to "know thyself," then the modern one is simply to "be yourself." The call to authenticity can be heard not only in popular culture, but also in many of the new social movements such as feminism, ethnic consciousness movements, and anti-colonial movements. Is there an essential way of being that underpins distinct ethnic, national, or gender identities? And what exactly constitutes this "self" that one is asked, quite simply, to be? Course readings critically examine the idea of authenticity, casting it in light of philosophical debates on existence, the nature of being, the idea of the self, and the role of individual experience in generating identities and subjectivities. We will begin with Kierkegaard's account of the singularity of one's own existence and the dimensions of individuality that cannot be captured by traditional ethics and philosophical categories. We will then move on to discuss other conceptions of being-with-oneself and with others, reading such thinkers as Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, Frantz Fanon, Albert Memmi and Simone de Beauvoir. These thinkers prompt us to think not only about our existence, but also about the political, social, and economic relations that condition our being and becoming.
Prerequisite:
At least one course in political theory or philosophy or permission of the instructor
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3.00 Credits
This course examines discourses on terror, wonder and awe from the Enlightenment to the present, using the idea of the sublime to rethink important events like the French Revolution and the recent War on Terror. The sublime has meant different things to a great number of thinkers in the Western philosophical tradition, going back to a treatise attributed to Longinus, a 1st century Greek rhetoretician. Longinus was concerned with the power of great poets to "elevate" their audiences, transporting them beyond the limits of their comprehension through mixtures of terror, wonder and awe. How did this old text focusing on experiences beyond the rational come to hold such fascination for philosophers and political thinkers during the Age of Enlightenment? What is the relationship between current events in politics and public culture and the recent revival of scholarly interest in the sublime? Beyond revolution and war, course readings will explore the limits of human comprehension and apprehension in environmental politics, debates over fetal rights, and the fear of confronting people different from ourselves. Though we will regularly take up examples drawn from the worlds of art, literature, politics, and the mass media, our central focus will be on the careful reading of philosophical and critical texts, including Kant's Critique of Judgment and writings from among the following authors: Edmund Burke, Friedrich Schiller, G.F.W. Hegel, Slavoj Zizek, Hannah Arendt, Bonnie Mann, Christine Battersby, and Jean-Francois Lyotard.
Prerequisite:
At least one course in political theory or philosophy or permission of the instructor
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3.00 Credits
This course considers the origins of political violence and state failure at the end of the 20th century. It seeks to address why there was a resurgence of political violence at the dawn of the 21st century. Toward that end, we begin by considering competing explanations of political violence (ethnicity, democratization, natural-resource endowments, and predatory elites). We then move on to the empirical section of the course in which we cover case studies of state failure in parts of Eastern Europe, Africa and the Middle East.
Prerequisite:
One of the following: Political Science 201, 202, 203, 204, 229, 243, 250, 254 or the permission of instructor
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3.00 Credits
This course deals with the economic and political writings of four important economists--Adam Smith, John Maynard Keynes, Freidrich Hayek, and Milton Friedman. Although all are remembered primarily as economists, they also engaged in writing political theory. This course will examine the political assumptions and implications of their economic thought and where they agree and disagree, particularly the role they assign to the state in constructing and sustaining markets. How do they conceive of the origin of markets? What role does the state play in making, supervising, and maintaining markets? Do the economists conceive of the state in similar terms and, especially, do the more libertarian economists really proceed as if markets are self-generated and spontaneous? What is it that economic theorists have the state doing? What is their implicit theory of the state?
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3.00 Credits
This class will involve students in close reading of, and exegetical writing about, core texts of ancient Chinese political thought. The purpose is to gain an understanding of a number of different perspectives on politics and leadership, especially Confucianism, Legalism and Taoism. While the primary focus will be on the meaning of the texts in the context of their own times, contemporary applications of core concepts will also be considered. The class will begin with background readings, since no prior work in Chinese philosophy or history is assumed. Then the class will read significant portions of the following canonical works: The Analects, Mencius, the Daodejing, Zhuangzi, and Han Feizi.
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3.00 Credits
During and after the First World War, President Woodrow Wilson developed an approach to international relations that challenged the dominant assumptions of Realism. Instead of a world order marked by alliances, arms races, and wars, Wilson offered a vision of a peaceful world and the rule of international law. While America ultimately rejected the League of Nations, the Wilsonian tradition has continued to exert a powerful influence on scholars and policymakers. This tutorial will intensively examine Wilson's efforts to recast the nature of the international system, the American rejection of his vision after the First World War, and the reshaping of Wilsonianism after the Second World War. We will spend equal time in the tutorial on both the theoretical and historical dimensions of Wilsonianism.
Prerequisite:
PSCI 120, 202, or permission of instructor
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3.00 Credits
This course examines how U.S. leaders have conceived of their nation's place in the world and sought to use power to achieve national objectives. We will consider military affairs, economics, and diplomacy, but the class is mostly concerned with ideas. How have leaders from James Madison to George W. Bush thought about U.S. vulnerabilities, resources, and goals, and how have those ideas influenced foreign policy decisions? How did key leaders balance competing objectives and navigate difficult international circumstances? Which leaders were successful in managing U.S. statecraft, and which were not? Which leaders developed coherent grand strategies? What lessons might we derive for our own times from studying this history? The course will sweep across American history but will not attempt to be exhaustive in any way. Rather, it will focus on certain moments that highlight changing grand strategic thought. We will carefully consider, for example, the drafting of the U.S. Constitution, continental expansion in the Manifest Destiny period, the Civil War, overseas expansion in the late nineteenth century, the presidency of Woodrow Wilson, the Second World War, the Cold War, and the "War on Terror." Possible texts include Hamilton, Madison, and Jay, The Federalist Papers; Alfred Thayer Mahan, The Influence of Sea Power Upon History; George Kennan, American Diplomacy; Richard Immerman, Empire for Liberty; Henry Kissinger, Diplomacy; James McPherson, Tried by War: Abraham Lincoln as Commander in Chief; and a collection of primary sources.
Prerequisite:
PSCI 120 or PSCI 202 or permission of instructor
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