We will ask: How have city leaders and social movements engaged with urban problems? PSCI 493 - 01 (F) SEM Sen Thesis: Political Science Division II. Where did Democratic and Republican foreign policy elites agree and disagree and what happened to proposals that were outside the elite consensus? The course is divided into three parts. To provide a broader context for Marcuse's critical theory, we will read a selection of his writings alongside related texts by Kant, Marx, Freud, and Davis. Students write weekly mini-reflection papers on assigned readings and collectively make analytical presentations. The course investigates family models in historical and comparative context; the family and the welfare state; the economics of sex, gender, marriage, and class inequality; the dramatic value and behavioral changes of Gen Z around sex, cohabitation, and parenthood; and state policies to encourage partnership/marriage and childbearing in both left-wing (Scandinavia) and right-wing (Central Europe) variants. Throughout the semester, our goal will be less to remember elaborate doctrinal rules and multi-part constitutional "tests" than to understand the changing nature of, and changing relationship between, constitutional power and constitutional meaning in American history. Environmental Studies 307 analyzes the transformation of environmental law from fringe enterprise to fundamental feature of modern political, economic and social life. What does it mean to be an American? What do left and right see when they survey the nation, and why is what they see so different? Political theory addresses questions such as these as it investigates the fundamental problems of how people can, do, and ought to live together. Can wars occur "by accident"? It deals with some of the most foundational questions that concern scholars of security studies: What accounts for great power conflict and cooperation? Complicating things further, the nature of democratic competition is such that those vying for power have incentive to portray the opposition's leadership as dangerous. empowerment, privilege, or oppression? It will help students in the social sciences to understand the nature of causation in the social world, and it will help students interested in political action to better understand the nature of power. Yet, in the face of these horrors, Arendt never lost her faith in political action as a way to express and renew what she called "love of the world." Does it matter? Jews had to decide where to pin their hopes. This course examines the complex political processes that led successive American presidents to get involved in a conflict that all of them desperately wanted to avoid. After familiarizing ourselves with what academic and policy literatures have to say about them, we then will read about the histories and contemporary politics in each society. Amidst bourgeoning national self-consciousness throughout the continent, despite the liberatory promises of the Enlightenment, Jews remained a vulnerable, segregated, and stigmatized minority population. The emergence of an international system of sovereign states--the core foundation of international relations--presumes the process of dismantling systems of domination, extraction, and exclusion ended long ago. The very effort to define "waste" raises thorny political questions: What (or who) is disposable? Can the strategies theorists propose and employ really aid in the advancement of racial equity? In this course we will look at how people in the United States and elsewhere have used their leaders' images to hash out larger political issues of national identity, purpose, and membership. Our primary questions will be these: Why is transformative leadership so difficult today? How closely do candidates resemble the constituencies they represent, and does it matter? Every week we explore a different component of South Asian politics. The class will be composed equally of nine Williams students and nine inmates and will be held at the jail. Two questions will anchor the tutorial: how is the nation defined and what, if any, class interests are folded into various definitions? The first part of the course focuses primarily on the Middle East's impact on the international system throughout the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, while the second part of the course examines contemporary issues. Our time and Arendt's are similarly darkened by the shadows of racism, xenophobia, inequality, terror, the mass displacement of refugees, and the mass dissemination of lies. Is it a capitalist strategy to divide the public in order to advance the interests of the wealthy corporate elite? While a fairly obscure and struggling author for much of his life, Orwell achieved worldwide fame after the Second World War with the publication of Animal Farm (1945) and 1984 (1949). climate change) are organized and mobilized. modernity and of politics offered by such thinkers as Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Marx, Mill, and Freud. [more], This course will help students understand the US role in the world. retreat!) [more], Impeachments. The title is inspired by C.L.R. [more], In Ta-Nehisi Coates' best-selling book Between the World and Me, he says that in the wake of the non-indictment of former police officer Darren Wilson in the death of Michael Brown "I did not tell [my son] that it would be okay, because I have never believed it would be okay." They contend that it legitimates a view of the status quo, in which such terrible things are bound to happen without real cause. We examine both traditional and revisionist explanations of the Cold War, as well as the new findings that have emerged from the partial opening of Soviet and Eastern European archives. Are there forms of unequal social power which are morally neutral or even good? Yet to rest on this is too simple as it is, in part, an artifact of historical construction. [more], The United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea gathered into one place what most countries considered in 1982 to be scattered ancient laws about piracy, transit through other countries' territorial waters, jurisdiction over ships, and so forth. one of the poorest in the world and lags in human development. This course addresses the controversies, drawing examples from struggles over such matters as racism, colonialism, revolution, political founding, economic order, and the politics of sex and gender, while focusing on major works of ancient, modern, and contemporary theory by such authors as Plato, Aristotle, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Rousseau, Mill, Marx, Nietzsche, Beauvoir, Arendt, Fanon, Rawls, Foucault, and Young. What defines optimism, pessimism, enslavement, freedom, creativity, and being human? How should we respond to the fact that these unbearable beings persist in existing, despite our best efforts to eliminate them? Protests against cultural insensitivity on campuses. What does justice demand in an age of climate change? This class will involve students in close reading of, and exegetical writing about, core texts of ancient Chinese philosophy in English translation. The Sentinels Scholar may submit her/his essay for consideration for honors in Political Science. Struggle on? Are these conflicts related, and if so, how? Does the structure of the international system necessarily cause conflict? Our goal is to explain how and why welfare states vary and why there is so much inequality in the distribution of risk. We will consider military affairs, economics, and diplomacy, but the class is mostly concerned with ideas. Why probe modern notions of black and blackness? George Orwell: Capitalism, Socialism and Totalitarianism. It begins by weighing competing definitions of democracy focusing on two kinds of questions. We begin with examinations of these central notions and debates, and then move to investigations of the political thought of four key late modern Afro-Caribbean and African-American thinkers within the tradition: Walter Rodney, Sylvia Wynter, Cedric Robinson, and Angela Davis. We will also discuss changes in religion under the influence of capitalism including romanticism, Pentecostalism, moralistic therapeutic Deism, and the 'God gap' between largely theist Africa, South and West Asia, and the Americas on the one hand and largely atheist Europe and East Asia on the other. We conclude the course with a look toward the future of global capitalism and of the liberal world order. What would "politics as unusual" look like anyway? What types of institutions, dynamics, and processes animate American political life in the twenty-first century? This course examines the political dynamics of disputes in which disadvantaged interests push for major change. But there are other examples of treating the body as property that seem more ambiguous, or even benign: the employment contract in which bodily services are offered in exchange for payment; the feminist slogan "my body, my choice"; or even the every-day transfer of bodily properties into creative projects that then become part of the things people own --- chairs, tables, houses, music, art, and intellectual property. Then we will look at some important factors which shape how followers approach would-be leaders: inequality and economic precarity; identity and group consciousness; notions of membership, community, and hierarchy; and declining local institutions. The course goes back to the founding moments of an imagined white-Christian Europe and how the racialization of Muslim bodies was central to this project and how anti-Muslim racism continues to be relevant in our world today. Who might change it, and how? immigration, and the politics surrounding American immigration policy have intensified as a result. What is our individual and collective responsibility for creating and disposing of waste? [more], What is the role of race in American public opinion and voting? This course investigates the historical and contemporary relationship between culture and economics, religion and capitalism, in their most encompassing forms. We cover the history, structures and functions of international organizations using case studies. social media. Those whose proposals are accepted by a committee of faculty chosen by the department will continue on as thesis students, under the supervision of an advisor to be assigned by the department, for the remainder of the academic year; those whose proposals are not accepted will complete an abridged version of their project as an independent study in Winter Study but not continue in the honors program in the spring semester. Then, after a few discussion classes on migration, organized crime, political corruption, the COVID-19 pandemic, and other issues facing the current government of Andrs Manuel Lpez Obrador, we turn to a seminar-style discussion of student research projects. This course will examine the problems and paradoxes that attend the exercise of the most powerful political office in the world's oldest democracy: Can an executive office be constructed with sufficient energy to govern and also be democratically accountable? What makes American political leadership distinctive in international comparison? How has the relation between the governors and the governed changed over time, and what factors and events have shaped those relations? [more], Democratization has had both successes and failures in postcolonial South Asia. And what are their views on diversity, citizenship, and race, and how do heterodox leftists fit with conservative critiques of managerial liberalism? How does a state's nuclear posture affect basic political outcomes? What institutions and social conditions make political freedom possible? Despite this, national government has grown in scope and size for much of this history, including under both Democratic and Republican administrations. Materials include biographies, documentary films, short videos, economic data, and news reports. We will also investigate cases of right-wing populism including France's National Rally and the Eric Zemmour phenomenon, Sweden's Sweden Democrats, Hungary's Fidesz, Poland's Law and Justice Party, and Trumpism, the alt-right and QAnon. First, it will introduce students to Orwell's most important books and essays in the context of a turbulent political era marked by the Great Depression, the rise of totalitarianism, world war, and the emerging Cold War. Class will be driven primarily by discussion, typically introduced by a brief lecture. If the U.S. is a nation of immigrants, why is immigration reform so difficult to achieve? The primary objective of the course is for students to improve dramatically their understanding of the role of leaders and strategic choice in international relations.