Spring Quarter 2019

This seminar is designed to help you to engage critically and think systematically about crucial questions of international and global affairs. Through discussion of current events, student-directed research projects, and course readings, we will engage with a wide range of issues and problems that are international or global in scale. In so doing we will seek to identify and understand the nature and behavior of major actors in the international political arena of the 21st century. This is a research seminar with an applied approach that focuses on understanding and resolving pressing problems of foreign policy and international affairs.

Draft Syllabus

Gathering knowledge and learning the truth about the world around us is a fundamental part of human development and progress. While most of us take knowledge and truth for granted, the processes by which we understand our political, social, cultural, physical, biological environment has become particularly salient in the last year – and notably in the last several months – as we’ve been confronted with an ever-increasing post-fact and post-truth world.

Stephen Colbert coined the term “truthiness” to describe the tendency of people to “go with their gut” rather than facts and evidence in evaluating the world around them. We are all affected by biases that obstruct critical thinking; these biases influence how we hear and understand new information, whether we question assumptions, and how we disentangle opinion from fact.

Challenging these biases is essential to making rational, evidence-based argument and decisions. A primary concern underlying public discourse and policy making about issues such as climate change, organic food, fertilizers, Zika virus, school testing, Brexit, poverty, hunger, gun control, and so many other contemporary issues including the presidential election, is the availability – and the validity and reliability – of evidence to support arguments on one side or another.

This seminar is designed to develop skills required to be a critical observer of and contributor to our world through the use of evidence-based arguments. We will spend the next 11 weeks using critical thinking and argumentation skills to examine a research question related to the work of students’ internship organizations.

Draft Syllabus

This course will examine the fundamental theories of race and representation as it applies to the lived experiences and quest for freedom, justice, and equality on part of African Americans, Latinos, Asian Americans, Native Americans and other groups. Given the racial and ethnic demographic shifts over the past two decades, particular attention will focus on race, representation, and racial discrimination from President Obama to President Trump. Moreover, the election of the first black president has transformed the political landscape in ways that have challenged traditional notions of descriptive and substantive representation, while also bringing to the forefront of political science discourse a serious engagement of race and representation scholarship. Finally, the Trump administration has brought to the forefront the ways in which identity politics and white nationalism operate within the context of political inclusion and racial representation. This course will provide an analysis of the public policy and sociopolitical impact of both presidents as it relates to the racial and ethnic demographic shifts in the American polity.

Draft Syllabus

Gay marriage. The death penalty. Abortion. Health care. Cell phone privacy. The U.S. Supreme Court has heard cases on all of these topics in recent years, and its decisions ultimately touch the lives of all Americans. In this class we will study the Supreme Court's place in the U.S. legal system. Topics we will cover include: how a case gets to the court, the justices, the role of lawyers before the court, the purpose of oral argument, the court building and its symbolism, and media coverage of the court. At least once during the semester students will attend an oral argument, and cases currently before the court will be used as a reference point for class discussion. This class is geared not only toward anyone who is interested in the law or government service but also toward anyone interested in working on or being informed about the biggest issues of the day.