A survey of cultural and ethnographic approaches to money and finance. Topics of investigation include “primitive money,” the uses of money in religious and ritual practices, social and cultural meanings of numbers, mobile money, crypto-currency and other alternative currency systems, and the politics of central banking. Prerequisite: None
Discussion-based analysis of cutting edge research on the microbes associated with the human body and their impacts on health. Consideration of historical, social, and political influences on observed patterns.
In this course, we examine the relationship between science and society, via close study of three socio-cultural practices: detection; investigation; and diagnosis. Specifically, we will be posing questions about: how various forms of scientific knowledge are produced and legitimated; the regimes of evidence guiding these practices; how expertise and experts emerge; and how "facts" and "truth" are adjudicated. In so doing, we will learn about how scientific knowledge shapes and reflects our social relations, material conditions, and subjectivities. Throughout the course, we will reflect upon the value of anthropological methods and theories for studying scientific practice.
People who understand communication are uniquely positioned to solve health related problems, and their services are increasingly in demand. As such, this course is designed to familiarize you with the theory and research on communication in health and illness contexts, focusing on how messages from interpersonal, organizational, cultural, and media sources affect health beliefs and behaviors. We will explore communication in health care delivery, health care organizations, as well as health promotion and disease prevention. By taking this course, you will become a more mindful, educated, and effective health communicator.
This class satisfies the CS394 requirement for the undergraduate major. CS394 seminars bring together a small group of students and an instructor in a seminar format, with the goal of each student completing a longer written project or equivalent. In our seminar, we will look for and write about contemporary issues, ideas, and representations of climate change.
Economic change in sub-Saharan Africa, emphasizing current issues and policies in their historical contexts. Agriculture and rural development, industrialization, and international economic relations. Prerequisites: ECON 281-0, ECON 310-1, ECON 310-2, ECON 326-0.
Analysis of gender differences in employment, earnings and division of labor in the household. Family, labor market, discrimination, segregation, historical and international conditions, and antidiscrimination legislation. Prerequisites: 281, 310-1,2.
Evaluation of economics models and public policy concerning natural resources such as farming, fisheries, forests, minerals, ores and fossil fuels. Prerequisites: ECON 281-0, ECON 310-1, ECON 310-2. (Students may not receive credit for both ECON 370-0 and ECON 373-0.)
English 381-0 Contagious Narratives, Literature & Medicine
In her monograph Contagious, Priscilla Wald writes, "Disease emergence ineluctably evinces human interconnections on global scale, but the stories of disease emergence fashion the terms in which those connections make sense" (270). For Wald, and for others, understanding the narratives of contagion can help us understand the cultural and social work that diseases do in the world. In this independent study, we will investigate how authors imagine the lifeworlds of those in the grip of contagious outbreak. The course will move in three sections. Beginning with HIV/AIDS epidemic, we will examine Tony Kushner's masterwork, Angels in America. In the second section, we will extracts from some of the most famous nonfiction writing on disease outbreak, including the work of John Barry, Laurie Garrett, and Richard Preston. In the final section of the course, we will examine fictions of virality unmoored from the real world, including Colson Whitehead's novel Zone One, Francis Lawrence's film I am Legend, and Junot Diaz's "Monstro." Throughout, we will engage with important secondary literature from scholars including Priscilla Wald, Ramzi Fawaz, Neel Ahuja, Adia Benton, and others. We will be especially attentive to how race, gender, and sexuality relate to notions of susceptibility to disease, how these categories organize government response, and how solidarity within and between these communities has reorganized political and cultural responses to contagion.
Envr Pol 340 Global Environments and World History
Environmental problems have become part and parcel of popular consciousness: resources are being depleted at a record pace, human population levels just crossed the seven billion threshold, extreme poverty defines the majority of people's daily lives, toxic contaminants affect all ecosystems, increasing numbers of species face extinction, consumerism and the commodification of nature show no signs of abating, climate changes are wreaking havoc in different places every year, and weapons and energy systems continue to proliferate that risk the planet's viability. This introductory lecture course is designed to help students understand the relatively recent origins of many of these problems, focusing especially on the last one hundred and fifty years. Students will have an opportunity to learn about the environmental effects of urbanization, industrialization, population growth, market economies, empire-building, intercontinental warfare, energy extraction, and new technologies. They will also explore different environmental philosophies and analytic frameworks that help us make sense of historical change, including political ecology, environmental history, science studies, and world history. Finally, the course will examine a range of transnational organizations, social movements, and state policies that have attempted to address and resolve environmental problems. This year, we will also explore questions of environmental health, disease ecologies, spillover events, and Covid-19.
Climate change is the keystone environmental issue of this generation, and most likely for many generations to come. It now appears inevitable that temperatures will increase this century by more than 2?C, and perhaps by substantially more than 3?C, with the inertia of the system ensuring that temperatures will continue to increase for centuries thereafter even under scenarios of total decarbonization. Climate change is already posing serious risks for both human institutions and natural ecosystems. These risks will seriously escalate throughout this century, especially if the world community fails to substantially increase its commitment to addressing greenhouse emissions, inadequately allocates resources to adaptation, or, perhaps, fails to commit itself to technological approaches to remove carbon from the atmosphere.
As the earth's climate changes, maple trees and the maple syrup industry in the U.S. and Canada are being affected, in both good and bad ways. The class will cover these effects, their impact on Native American and non-Native communities, the maple syrup industry, and maple species themselves through articles and readings.
Envr Pol 390-26 Archaeologies of Sustainability and Collapse
This course is a seminar that uses archaeological case studies from the past to interrogate human-environment relationships across time and space, including the present and the future. The emphasis here will not be on learning environmental archaeology methods. Instead, we will be focusing on how archaeologists think about key environmental concepts, including climate change, sustainability, and resilience. We will discuss examples of "failure" and "success" in the long history of human-environment interactions, and see if there's room for nuance along the way. We will also use this course as an opportunity to consider how archaeology can contribute to environmental sustainability and environmental justice efforts. Prior coursework in archaeology is not required to appreciate this class or do well, but would be helpful.
The year 2020 has witnessed a series of crises in which protest has been both effectively and creatively used and also, at times, demonized. This class examines themes in the visual language of protest in the United States since the 1960s, with particular emphasis on recent political movements and topics that will include climate change and global climate justice and responses to police violence, prisons, and antiblackness, and may also include Indigenous sovereignty, antifascism, disability and trans rights, activism around Covid19, and other efforts. We will bear in mind relationships to more traditional forms of art like painting and sculpture as well as print media and social media; we will also discuss theories of collective action and questions of force and violence as well as nonviolence, but the main focus is on modes of creativity connected to protest. The organizing principle will be specific tropes and media of protest: for example, tree-sitting, tents and occupations; the megaphone, sound, and music; bicycles, automobiles, pushcarts, floats, and other vehicles; the mask; giant puppets; parties and pleasure; coffins, memorials, and the Grim Reaper; stenciling, graffiti, murals, and mark-making; video and social media; and other modes of performance and strategies for producing visibility. Class will be held remotely; if possible, we may have one or two optional socially distanced field trips. Following a short sequence of introductory readings, students in small groups will participate in researching imagery and themes that they will present to the class as a whole for group discussion. The final project will involve small groups each making contributions to the curating of a collective "guidebook" of protest imagery, format to be determined. Work will be assessed both collectively and individually.
This course studies the growth of populations and their interactions in ecological communities. Topics include: the ecological niche; projections of population growth, including the history of human growth, harvesting populations, and population viability analysis of endangered species; interactions among species, including competition, predation, and disease transmission; measuring the diversity of ecological communities; the effects of diversity on energy flow. More advanced topics will also be addressed, including the biodiversity-stability relationship, the economic values of biodiversity and ecosystem function, and the biology and management of metapopulations in fragmented habitats. Recommended Background: MATH 220
Gbl Hlth 301-0 Intro to International Public Health
This course introduces students to pressing disease and health care problems worldwide and examines efforts currently underway to address them. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, the course identifies the main actors, institutions, practices and forms of knowledge production characteristic of what we call "global health" today, and explores the environmental, social, political and economic factors that shape patterns and experiences of illness and healthcare across societies. We will scrutinize the value systems that underpin specific paradigms in the policy and science of global health and place present-day developments in historical perspective. Key topics will include: policies and approaches to global health governance and interventions, global economies and their impacts on public health, medical humanitarianism, global mental health, maternal and child health, pandemics (HIV/AIDS, Ebola, H1N1, Swine Flu), malaria, food insecurity, health and human rights, and global health ethics.
Global health is a popular field of work and study for Americans, with an increasing number of medical trainees and practitioners, as well as people without medical training, going abroad to volunteer in areas where there are few health care practitioners or resources. In addition, college undergraduates, as well as medical trainees and practitioners, are going abroad in increasing numbers to conduct research in areas with few health care resources. But all of these endeavors, though often entered into with the best of intentions, are beset with ethical questions, concerns, and dilemmas, and can have unintended consequences. In this course, students will assess these ethical challenges. In so doing, students will examine core ethical codes, guidelines, and principals - such as solidarity, social justice, and humility - so they will be able to ethically assess global health practices in a way that places an emphasis on the core goal of global health: reducing health inequities and disparities.
Gbl Hlth 322-0-1 The Social Determinants of Health
This upper-level seminar in medical anthropology examines the role of social markers of difference including race, class, nationality, gender, sexuality, age and religion in current debates and challenges in the theory and practice of global health. We will explore contemporary illness experiences and therapeutic interventions in sociocultural and historical context through case studies from the US, Brazil, and South Africa. Students will be introduced to key concepts such as embodiment, medicalization, structural violence, the social determinants of health, and biopolitics. Central questions of the seminar include: How do social categories of difference determine disease and health in individuals and collectivities? How is medical science influenced by economic and political institutions and by patient mobilization? How does social and economic inclusion/exclusion govern access to treatment as well as care of the self and others? The course will provide advanced instruction in anthropological and related social scientific research methods as they apply to questions of social inequality and public health policy in both the United States and in emerging economic powers. The course draws from historical accounts, contemporary ethnographies, public health literature, media reports, and films.
The history of reproduction is a large subject, and during this course we will touch on many, but by no means all, of what can be considered as part of this history. Our focus will be on human reproduction, considering the vantage points of both healthcare practitioners and lay women and men. We will look at ideas concerning fertility, conception, pregnancy, miscarriage, childbirth, birth control, abortion, and assisted reproduction. Because, at a fundamental level, reproduction is about power - as historian Amy Kaler (but by no means only Kaler), pointed out, "[c]ontrol over human reproduction is eternally contested, in zones ranging from the comparative privacy of the conjugal bedroom to the political platform and programs of national polities" - we will pay attention to power in reproductive health. And, since the distribution of power in matters of reproduction has often been uneven and unequal - between men and women, between colonizing and Indigenous populations, between clinicians and lay people, between those in upper socioeconomic classes and those in lower socioeconomic classes - we will pay particular attention during this class to struggles over matters of reproduction as we explore historical changes and continuities in reproduction globally since 1900.
Gbl Hlth 390-0-20 Native American Health Research and Prevention
Native nations in what is currently the United States are continuously seeking to understanding and undertake the best approaches to research and prevention with their communities. This course introduces students to the benefits and barriers to various approaches to addressing negative health outcomes and harnessing positive social determinants of health influencing broader health status. Important concepts to guide our understanding of these issues will include settler colonialism, colonialism, sovereignty, social determinants of health, asset-based perspectives, and decolonizing research. Students will engage in a reading-intensive, discussion-based seminar, drawing upon research and scholarship from a variety of disciplines including public health, Native American and Indigenous Studies, anthropology, sociology, history, nursing, and medicine.
Gndr St 322-0-21 Health, Activism, Gender, Sexuality and Health
How do conceptions of "health" relate to ideological assumptions about gender, sexuality, and race? In this course we will explore these questions through a close examination of historic and current activist movements that have attempted to challenge contemporaneous conceptions of health and models of disease. Case studies will include the 1970s-era Women's Health Movement(s), including an examination of its relationship to the 19th century Birth Control Movement and its transformation with the emergence of a Reproductive Justice Movement in the 1990s; AIDS activismfrom beginning of the AIDS crisis and the formation of ACT UP to present activist campaigns that contest both the inequitable distribution of medical knowledge and resources and the (bio)medicalization of "sexual health"; the several strands of breast cancer activism that emerged in the 1990s and the increasing overlap between breast cancer activismand current environmental activism; mental health activism and its evolution in response to the rise of psychopharmacology; and current trans activism which critiques both the diagnostic categories and medical protocols that institutionalize the gender binary and the production of what Dean Spade refers to as "an inequitable distribution of life chances." In each case, we will consider how activists frame the problem, the tactics they use to mobilize a diverse group of social actors around the problem, and their success in creating a social movement that challenges contemporary medical models and the ideological assumptions that inform them. The course also introduces students to recent interdisciplinary scholarship on social movements.
Gndr St 374-0-20 Imagining the Internet: Fiction, Film, Theory
Much recent fiction, film and theory are concerned with representing the internet and the World Wide Web. Sometimes cyberspace is depicted as a continuation of previous media such as television, cinema or telephone, but often it is envisioned as a new frontier. This course will examine the ways in which virtual media appears in cultural discourses. We consider how technological objects and tools participate in shaping elements of our culture that may appear natural, logical, or timeless. Our guiding questions will include the following: In what ways are these narratives shaping collective perceptions of the internet? How have virtual technologies challenged experiences of language, gender, community and identity? We will focus on social networking, gaming, artificial intelligence, and literary and filmic representations of these. Following a Cultural Studies model for inquiry, this course will be project-based and experiential. Your attendance and participation are mandatory. No experience needed, only a willingness to take risks and share work.
Hist 102-6-20 Parks and Pipelines: An Indigenous Environmental History
From the building of dams and pipelines to the creation of National Parks and wilderness areas, the environmental history of the United States is deeply tied to its history of colonialism. This seminar explores how the relationship between the United States and Indigenous people has shaped the environments, ecosystems, and physical landscapes we live in today. We will learn how the environment of what is now the United States was managed by Indigenous people before and throughout colonization, how Indigenous people have been impacted by the environmental policies of the United States, and how Indigenous resistance and activism have shaped both the environmental movement in the U.S. as well as contemporary Indigenous political thought. In discussion, we will break down the politics, economics, and ethics of this history, challenging ourselves to think critically about the land we live on and its future.
From the changing seasons, to frigid ice ages, to violent cyclones, to global warming, the phenomena of weather and climate have been crucial sites of interaction between humans and our environments. In this first-year seminar, we will ask: how have climatic changes across space and time shaped human societies, politics, and histories? And how have our ways of explaining and predicting the weather reflected changing approaches to nature's uncertainties? Moving from antiquity to the present, we will study the evolution of meteorological science from the study of meteors' to variable weather,' alongside the conceptual shift from a globe of many 'climates' to a singular, 'global climate.' Using a range of case studies from the Caribbean, Europe, and Asia, and sources including almanacs and weather proverbs, we will explore how in different ways across geographies and cultures, climate functioned both as a force of history and as an object of scientific fascination. By the end of the course, students will be able to situate the current climate crisis in an age many scholars call the Anthropocene, within a centuries-long history of adaptations and negotiations with our planet's atmosphere, and with one another.
Hist 322-2-20 Development of the Modern American City: 1880-Present
This is the second half of a two-quarter course dealing with urbanization and urban communities in America. The second quarter deals with the period from 1870 onward. Topics include the role of cities in the formation of an industrial society, the influence of immigration and rural-urban migration, racial discrimination, political machines, professional planning, the automobile, electronic media, and the expansion of the federal role in city government. History 322-1 is NOT a prerequisite for 322-2.
We are currently living through a technological revolution that is radically reshaping every aspect of our social world. Yet Americans have long defined themselves and their nation through the material things they own, make, design, and use. This class examines the two-century debate over what America is and should be by studying its technology. Each lecture is organized around the history of a single "representative" technology. The core assignment of the course, guided by a series of workshop sections, is for students to write an original research paper on the social history of an artifact of their choice.... From the telegraph to social media, from the bicycle to the Apollo mission, from the teapot to the Internet of Things, Americans have identified technology as central to their personal and national destiny. We will consider the perspectives of engineers, consumers, managers, factory workers, enslaved people, housewives, and hackers, among others. We will consider the way technology has been shaped by the rise of managerial capitalism, global trade, and intellectual property law. And we will develop a set of tools for analyzing technological change: systems theory, network analysis, evolutionary theory, social construction, and technological determinism. This class treats technology as an expression of social values, and it guides students as they undertake a research project of their own design.
Hist 376-0-20 Global Environments and World History
Environmental problems have become part and parcel of popular consciousness: resources are being depleted at a record pace, human population levels just crossed the seven billion threshold, extreme poverty defines the majority of people's daily lives, toxic contaminants affect all ecosystems, increasing numbers of species face extinction, consumerism and the commodification of nature show no signs of abating, climate changes are wreaking havoc in different places every year, and weapons and energy systems continue to proliferate that risk the planet's viability. This introductory lecture course is designed to help students understand the relatively recent origins of many of these problems, focusing especially on the last one hundred and fifty years. Students will have an opportunity to learn about the environmental effects of urbanization, industrialization, population growth, market economies, empire-building, intercontinental warfare, energy extraction, and new technologies. They will also explore different environmental philosophies and analytic frameworks that help us make sense of historical change, including political ecology, environmental history, science studies, and world history. Finally, the course will examine a range of transnational organizations, social movements, and state policies that have attempted to address and resolve environmental problems. This year, we will also explore questions of environmental health, disease ecologies, spillover events, and Covid-19.
Hist 392-0-26 The Black Death and Historical Plagues
From the Plague of Athens to the final major outbreak of bubonic plague in Marseille in 1720, infectious disease had a profound impact on preindustrial Europe. This course offers an introduction to the study of disease in human history. While it focuses primarily on the cultural, economic, and religious effects of the Black Death and subsequent outbreaks of plague, this course will also cover the plagues of classical antiquity. Specific topics include the biological and environmental conditions which facilitated the spread of plague, the impact of plague on medicine and public health, and the development of new rituals and practices designed to promote community resilience. Throughout this course, there will be a strong emphasis on primary sources and the various ways in which historians have used these to shed light on the impact of disease. We will also discuss how contemporary observers have used these historical events to discuss the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.
ISEN 230-0-20 Climate Change and Sustainability: Ethnical Dimensions
This course is about our ethical responsibilities in the face of anthropogenic climate change. The course begins with an introduction to philosophical ethics, the scientific evidence in support of an anthropogenic role in climate change, and some advanced technological approaches to mitigating the effects of climate change. After these introductory sessions the class is split into two parts. We will begin with an exploration of how far reaching our ethical responsibilities are by questioning which things matter morally: are future-human beings, non-human animals, and ecosystems morally important? How do they compare morally to humans alive today? In the second part of the course we will focus on how individually specific our ethical responsibilities are. We will focus on a range of common behaviors relevant to climate change and ask whether and how we can ethically justify our individual participation or lack of participation in these behaviors. We will conclude the course by asking how our moral responsibilities with respect to climate change fit with our other moral responsibilities.
Phil 254-0-20 Introduction to the Philosophy of Natural Science
The course will introduce students to deep philosophical issues raised by modern natural science of metaphysical and epistemological nature. From a reflection on methodological questions, it will approach the question of realism. We will be guided by nested "what does it take"-questions. For example: What does it take for a system of sentences to count as a good scientific theory? What does it take for a scientific theory to be testable by observational and experimental data (and, by the way: what does it take for certain series of experiences to count as data or observations?)? What does it take for a given theory to be better supported by the available evidence than its competitors? What does it take for a given theory to explain the known phenomena in an area of knowledge? What does it take for an explanatory scientific theory to be credited with reference to underlying structures of reality? We will begin with a brief overview of the scientific revolution of the 16th and 17 th century, and then turn to the treatment of certain problems in the contemporary literature, like the problem of induction, the problem of the underdetermination of theory choice by the available data, the problem of rationality and conceptual change, the problem of realism.
This course is an analysis of ethical and political issues that arise in medicine, with particular attention to questions posed by developments in biotechnology. Topics to be considered include human research, abortion, euthanasia, genetic engineering, and the allocation of medical resources.
This course offers an overview of the work of one of the most influential late-twentieth-century French philosophers, Michel Foucault. Focusing on his studies of madness, sex, the medical gaze, prisons and other disciplinary institutions, the search for truth, knowledge, and liberation, students will gain an understanding of Foucault's most important concepts - concepts that over the last four decades have become central categories of inquiry and critique in the arts, humanities, and social sciences. These include archaeology, discipline, biopolitics, power-knowledge, resistance, governmentality, and genealogy. The course is reading intensive. In addition to weekly excerpts, you should plan to read two of Foucault's major texts throughout the quarter.
That is what Americans are experiencing as a result of the corporate media mergers that took place in the closing years of the last century. Today there are six major companies that control much of what people read, hear and see. Those firms are AOL-Time Warner, General Electric, Walt Disney, News Corporation, Viacom/CBS, and Bertelsman. This course will examine the monetary forces that are driving the industry away from its primary mission of information. Critics contend that the drive for higher ratings, circulation and web page clicks is coming at the expense of the quality of news on television, radio, newspapers, magazines, and the Internet. Charges of Fake News combined with the ever-diminishing number of news providers is threatening democracy by limiting the number of voices that can be heard in our society.
Technologies that rely on data science and the internet are rapidly re-shaping our world. In this seminar, students will investigate the range of normative political issues raised by this complex, fast-changing situation characterized by social media, e-commerce, big data, artificial intelligence and the internet of things. Topics may include how we think about and experience personhood, citizenship, free speech, participation, inclusion, bias and inequality as well as the rise of issues such as data rights and disinformation. Synchronous class meetings will include discussion of common materials (readings and viewing) and student progress reports on their projects. Final projects can be submitted in the form of 2500-word research report, expository writing enhanced with links and illustrations, or a video or audio essay.
Pol Sci 395-0-28 The Coronavirus Pandemic & the Question of Sovereignty
The Coronavirus knows no political boundaries. Humanity's efforts to defend itself against the virus, by contrast, are contained and constrained by the boundaries that humanity has inflicted upon itself in order to assure the political autonomy of its various national communities. These communities are, by law and by normative understanding, "sovereign." "Sovereignty" is a good thing, and is portrayed as a good thing, to the extent that it provides each community with the autonomy and freedom to forge its own destiny. But it is, arguably, a bad thing when it causes humanity to trip over itself while trying to address urgent global threats. The current pandemic is one of these, but only the first of many - the "first act" in the drama that has already begun to unfold of humanity's disorder and disarray as it confronts global perils that are placing its very survival in question. In this seminar we do three things. First, we read several theoretical works on the concept of sovereignty: what is it, why do we have it, and can we imagine a world without it? Second, we read narratives about pandemics in other places and times. Comparisons are always informative. Third, students do individual research on our current Covid-19 pandemic and how sovereignty has affected its development. Students report back to the class weekly on their findings. Students draw on all three elements - conceptual definition, comparison, and research - to write a 5000-word research paper related to the pandemic and the question of sovereignty.
This course will examine major utopian and dystopian texts in relation to social justice issues in the twentieth and twenty-first century, while following the stories of artists, organizers, and communities that have used speculative world-building to imagine livable, sustainable futures. We will focus on how feminist, anarchist, LGBTQ, and Afrofuturist art and activism have contributed to a substantial critical discourse on the intersections of science, technology, ecology, war, race, gender, sexuality, health, and ability. We will further examine how artists and activists have understood religion as both impediment and partner to social justice work, while alternatively embracing, subverting, and defying religious authority. We will attend to how religious myths and imagery are sampled and remixed by science fiction authors to plot an alternative course for world history.
Social theory provides a lens to understand how power operates in modern societies. It helps us examine not only the production of socio-economic and political inequalities but also the reproduction of social order, namely, how society holds together despite all the antagonisms such disparities create. In this course, we will study three strands of social theory, emancipatory, positivist, and critical. Emancipatory theorists, most notably Marx, "speak truth to power" to emancipate oppressed groups. They hope their theories will arm the oppressed against their oppressors in their struggles for freedom. Mainstream, positivist theorists, in contrast, take the point-of-view of the social planner and seek to use science to reform society. Finally, critical theorists, such as Frederic Nietzsche, Max Weber, and Michel Foucault, share positivists' skepticism toward emancipatory theorists. Yet, they do not try to base their authority on science, as they see science as just another way power operates. Moreover, they believe power to be intrinsic to social relations and think emancipation is simply not possible. Instead, they seek to reconfigure power relations to create more ethical social structures.
This course is a critical sociological look at education in the United States with a focus on contemporary debates and issues. The course will cover how sociologists have both theoretically and empirically looked at schooling practices, what students learn, and how schools fit into the larger society including how the educational system in the U.S. interacts with political, economic, familial, and cultural institutions. We will also spend much time examining how educational experiences and opportunities are shaped by multiple social statuses including gender, socioeconomic status, race and ethnicity. We will focus on K-12 and higher education including the transition to higher education. Throughout all of these issues and topics, we will consider how schools both challenge and support existing systems of inequality.
This course examines law in the context of recent trends which have increasingly integrated the world's social and economic systems. Globalization means greater interdependence and less national autonomy. It occurs as international flows of capital, goods, services, and people increase. Transactions, interactions and relationships that formerly occurred within national boundaries now occur across them. But transactions and relationships involving capital, goods, services and people are not self-sustaining. Rather, they are supported and regulated by an institutional foundation that typically centers on the legal system. As part of globalization, particular legal and institutional forms are also spreading throughout the world. Because the legal and institutional frameworks that support these transactions exist primarily at the level of the nation-state, a governance mismatch has emerged. Globalization means that more is going on between national jurisdictions than within them, and tensions arise between competing institutional models. Thus, globalization motivates both an extension of legal systems, and a confrontation between different legal systems that can be resolved conflictually or concordantly. Either outcome leads to institutional convergence. We consider a number of different kinds of law but focus especially on commercial law, quasi-legal trade agreements (e.g., WTO), and commercially-relevant quasi-legal institutions. We pay attention to legal developments in developing and transitional economies, and also consider how the international community deals with significant common problems like economic inequality and global climate change.
Sexuality shapes the cultural, economic, political, and social organization of the U.S. The ways we define and think about sexuality are deeply entangled in science and technology, regulation and governance, and social practices of exclusion and inclusion. This course examines the complex relationships between sexuality, technoscience, and the law?including those that guide sexuality-related identities, meanings, and interactions; sexual citizenship, feminist and queer health movements; investigating and controlling sexual crimes; digital expressions of sexuality, privacy, and algorithmic justice.
