Political Economy

Sophomore and Above, Seminar—Fall

This course will explore issues of identity and difference, locality and community, through the lens of space and place. Engaging with recent scholarly work in the fields of sociocultural anthropology, migration studies, ethnic studies, sociology, geography, architecture, and literature, we will seek to decode sociospatial arrangements to understand structures and processes of exclusion and marginalization. At the same time, we will observe how material realities and linguistic discourse shape people’s navigations through space, and how efforts at placemaking create sites of collective identity, resistance, belonging, and recognition. We will ask questions such as: how should we understand notions of displacement, transborder identifications, or longings for homeland as they play out for Sierra Leonean Muslims in Washington, DC, Ecuadorian immigrants in Italy, or Indigenous Latin American migrants in California and Wyoming? How does “talk of crime” instantiate racial segregation in a Brazilian favela? What boundaries are created by gated communities in places like San Antonio, Texas and Mumbai, India? How does public policy police green spaces to restrict access by people who are unhoused in San Diego? What should we make of “placeless” spaces or states, such as those instantiated through technologies like social media, radio, or meditative practice? Posed in a wide range of ethnographic contexts, our efforts to puzzle through these issues will require attention to the ways in which space and place are spoken, embodied, gendered, racialized, and (il)legalized. We will likewise attend to the politics and ethics of decolonizing scholarship on space and place and to the meanings of an engaged anthropology that leans towards social justice.

Faculty

• Deanna Barenboim

Sophomore and Above, Seminar—Fall

As Empires expanded in the 18th-20th centuries, Europe witnessed a massive rise in collecting, measuring, counting, and describing myriad phenomena across the world, be they land masses, waterways, fossils, plants, animals, or human beings. And, domestically, there was deepening interest in the constitution and characteristics of different populations and the spaces they inhabited. In this seminar, we will examine a series of times and spaces in which gazes were focused, information gathered, and interpretations surmised in the context of Empire. Along the way we will see how some social sciences, primarily anthropology, geography, sociology, and selected area studies, have come to be formed in a variety of social and political contexts. The times and places we will study are diverse and will include, in no particular order: the rise of what we now know as scientific racism in France and Germany in the 19th century; the role of the Royal Engineers (the British military) in surveying and mapping vast territories of the British Empire; Charles Booth’s studies of the working class in 19th-century London, and Arthur Munby’s contemporary scopophilic obsession with working women. A century later, it was the Black population of Britain that was under the scrutiny of researchers from various institutions; and we will examine the myriad ways in which those communities resisted being studied. We will also look at the contradictory careers of several individuals including anthropologist Bronisław Malinowski, who tried to show how deploying anthropological knowledge would permit colonial officers to administer the empires more efficiently. And, on the other hand, Jomo Kenyatta, a Kenyan anti-colonial activist who taught Kiswahili to colonial officers and studied anthropology during his time in London to bolster his case for Kenyan independence. We will also explore the work of anthropologists from the Manchester School in colonized Central Africa, including their activism supporting local miners unions. And we will learn about the significant contributions of African “research assistants,” and their contributions to social science. Our texts include writings and visual imagery from a broad array of sources including, scholarly readings, biographies, history, ethnography, and maps.

Faculty

• Mary A. Porter

First-Year Studies—Year

We live in the world of monopoly capitalism—a market economy dominated by big rent-seeking corporations with immense political and economic power domestically and internationally. What economic methods and theories are suited for understanding the historical development, current turbulence, and future tendencies of monopoly capitalism? We will engage in a series of critical conversations about various schools of economics and their logics of economic policy-making, in order to gain a well-rounded and holistic understanding of the business of global monopoly capitalism and its economic, social, and political ills. How did the financial market get so big? Why do artificial intelligence and manufacturing robots have to replace human work? How will global monopoly capitalism evolve socially, economically, and politically? And many other questions. Students will encounter not only the so-called “standard” economics and business thinking, but also a plurality of classical political economists such as Smith; Ricardo and Mill and their descendants; feminist economists; critical management scholars; the old and new institutionalists; the Marxian and Keynesian challengers; contemporary behavioral economists; and so on. Biweekly in fall, students will alternate between individual conferences with the instructor and small-group activities. Biweekly in spring, students will meet with the instructor for individual conferences. 

Faculty

• An Li

First-Year Studies—Year

The 2024 Presidential Election result will have far-reaching implications for economic, social, and environmental policies. It will also be significant in terms of the future of American democracy and social wellbeing. In this course, we will situate current economic and political challenges in a theoretical and historical context by drawing on insights from difference schools of thought in economics as well as other disciplines such as law, politics, sociology, and history. Some of the key questions to be addressed are as follows: How can the central debates in political economy help us understand some of the unprecedented challenges we face, such as new gilded age style wealth concentration and power, economic insecurity, and the climate crisis? Why is the study of history a central methodological priority for many economists and why not so for others? Why do people distinguish between “regulation” and laissez-faire and is this a false dichotomy? What is the history of industrial and social policy in the United States and other countries? How do we understand the relationship between political and corporate power and the “rule of law” with regard to market outcomes? What is Project 2025 and how can we understand its theoretical basis and implications? These and others will be some of the questions that we will be tackling throughout the course of the year, thereby ensuring that students develop a solid foundation to the fundamental debates in economic theory and policy and understand the key role of methodology in the study of political economy. Finally, the goal is to ensure that students develop the ability to critically engage scholarly work in economics. In fall until mid-semester, students will meet weekly with the instructor for individual conferences; thereafter through spring, individual conferences will be biweekly.

Faculty

• Jamee Moudud

Sophomore and Above, Seminar—Fall

Feminist economics arose as a critique of the androcentric and Eurocentric assumptions underlying mainstream, neoclassical economics. But over the past 30 years, feminist economics has developed into a coherent economic perspective that acknowledges and investigates power differentials in both the home and the market on the basis of race/ethnicity, gender, class, sexual orientation, nation, and disability status. Feminist economics takes seriously the crucial economic impact of caring labor, both paid and unpaid, in the home and the broader community. And it proposes alternate measures of economic success that emphasize bodily integrity, human agency, sustainability, and human rights. We will begin this course with a brief exploration of the historical context for the development of feminist economics; i.e., the rise of feminist movements in both the developed world and the Global South. We will then examine the differences between feminist and mainstream neoclassical economics by examining questions such as: What do we mean by “the economy”? Do transactions and activities have to be monetized to be “economic”? How is caring labor, both paid and unpaid, conceptualized in economics and how does the performance of this labor impact one's status in both the labor market and the household? The answers to these and similar questions will help us to reconceptualize economics to take account of all of the labor necessary to reproduce both individuals and social/economic structures. Finally, we will apply this reconceptualized, feminist vision of economics to questions of economic policy. We will examine a number of case studies including: a) the persistence of occupational segregation and wage differentials by gender and race and policies to mitigate these inequalities; b) the impact of domestic violence and other forms of non-market coercion on economic outcomes; c) the impact of reproductive control (or the lack thereof) on the economic trajectories of both individuals and societies; d) the (re)conceptualization and measurement of economic development and growth. In addition to class participation, requirements for the seminar will include frequent short papers on the readings, leading class discussions (in pairs), and participation in group presentations. In lieu of a traditional conference project, students may choose a service-learning project and an accompanying placement journal. Possible service-learning placement sites include a domestic violence shelter, a local LGBT support and advocacy organization, a reproductive rights group, and an organization advocating for the rights of domestic workers.

Faculty

• Kim Christensen

Intermediate, Seminar—Fall

Modern capitalist institutions are dynamic, complex, and unstable economic, political, and cultural systems that are constantly evolving. In this course, students will learn a new behavioral approach to microeconomics and how it can be applied to understanding today’s economic, financial, political, and environmental challenges and crises. We will depart from traditional microeconomics, which revolves around finding and analyzing a theoretically perfectly efficient steady state, but treats all unexpected economic disturbances and turbulence as anomalies caused by external shocks. Instead, we will target real-world, complex, open-ended situations in which interactions among heterogeneous people and social groups create internal shocks that can destabilize economic, business, and financial systems and drive them towards different pathways, including post-capitalist possibilities.

Faculty

• An Li

Open, Small Lecture—Year

This course on business history will situate business in its social and political contexts. At the core of the course is the argument that the economy is embedded in the political society and is thus subject to historical change. The study of business cannot be separated from politics and political struggle, which determine how society is legally constructed in any given moment in history. Thus, what is of often called “private enterprise” sits on a contextually determined set of power relations which shape and are in turn shaped by current legal institutions. Challenging the idea, common to conventional discourse, that economies can be more or less regulated, this course will focus on the politics of business regulation, which in some contexts has produced socially progressive outcomes and in others regressive ones. Regulation is ubiquitous and subject to variation given changed circumstances due say to an economic crisis, new technologies, global competition, socio-political pressures etc. In this course, the nature and politics of business regulation will be studied in different national and historical contexts, involving countries in the Global South (e.g. Mauritius, Chile, Brazil, the Indian state of Kerala, South Africa etc.) and the Global North (e.g. United States, Sweden, Germany, etc.). It will address a wide range of topics that include: (a) slavery, cotton, banking, and property rights in early American industrialization; (b) legal struggles between corporations and society over constitutional rights (e.g. what brought about the landmark Supreme Court case, Citizens United v. FEC (2010)?); (c) corporations and colonialism (e.g. the British East India Company, the Virginia Company, etc.); (d) business regulation during the post-Civil War Reconstruction Period; (e) late industrialization and social well being; (f) using the United States and Sweden as case studies, the construction of welfare states and workers’ attempts to secure social and economic rights; and (g) the history of the relationship between business associations and anti-democratic politics, including the links between Silicon Valley technolibertarians and digital capitalism (i.e. artificial intelligence and crypto currencies). At a theoretical level, the study of business history will be grounded in debates in microeconomics, theories of business investment and pricing, and the relationship between law, politics, history, and economics. This course will be of interest to students who wish to understand contemporary social and political challenges in a theoretically and historically informed way.

Faculty

• Jamee Moudud

Open, Seminar—Year

This seminar will explore the history of the US labor movement from its beginnings in the colonial society of the 1600s to the “globalized” cities of the 2020s. Beginning with the involuntary labor arrangements that structured the continent’s economy from the 1600s to the Civil War, we will focus on the international workers' movement against slavery: abolitionism. The abolitionist struggle will take us from the first rebellions of involuntary workers to the Civil War and the Reconstruction era. From there, we will consider the strikes, uprisings, and organizations of the late 19th- and 20th-century industrial labor movement, beginning with the Great Upheaval of 1877 and ending with the postindustrial urban uprisings of 1967. We will consider the peak of “big labor” during the mid-20th century, alongside the peak in Cold War-era US imperialism that structured the economy during that time. In spring, we will begin by thoroughly considering the major structural shifts in the US economy that began in the 1970s, generally referred to as a combination of “globalization” and “neoliberalism.” These shifts degraded job quality and worker power, relegating the working class to service positions in the “global city” structure. In responding to these shifts, we will consider numerous autonomous unions and “worker centers” that have had 38 economic scholars sprung up to address the new issues of this new economy in the past 20 years. We will also focus on broader 21st-century people’s struggles—such as the anti-globalization movement, Occupy Wall Street, and Black Lives Matter—and how these movements relate to the ongoing workers’ movement. Requirements for the course include discussion posts, short papers, and a group presentation. For the course’s major project, students will have two options. The first is to write two connected final essays, one for each semester. The second is to engage in a yearlong research project, which can be focused on service learning and field placements with local worker centers and unions, if students choose. Students will meet with the instructor biweekly for individual conferences, depending on the student’s needs and the progress of their conference projects. Required texts may include: Strike! by Jeremy Brecher, The Many-Headed Hydra by Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, An African American and Latinx History of the United States by Paul Ortiz, The Global City by Saskia Sassen, New Labor in New York by Ruth Milkman and Ed Ott, and Labor Law for the Rank and Filer by Staughton Lynd and Daniel Gross.

Faculty

• Noah Shuster

Sophomore and Above, Seminar—Spring

In this course, we will explore the economic, political, and cultural factors that have contributed to the rise of authoritarianism in the United States and abroad. We will begin with a detailed examination of the current economic context; i.e., the crisis of neoliberal, globalized capitalism and its impact on various strata of the United States population. Next, we will examine several political economic perspectives on the rise of authoritarianism, including works by such theorists as Hobsbawm, Poulantzas, Gramsci, Paxton, and Gessen. We will examine Ehrenreich and Foer’s theories of the “professional managerial class” and recent reporting on techno-radicals to explore the class interests and adversaries of the current U.S. regime. We will discuss the contributions of patriarchal ideologies and institutions to the reproduction of hierarchical, gendered practices within homes and public institutions. We will examine the contributions of discriminatory immigration law and the histories of institutionalized racism to current immigration policies. Finally, using the works of, among others, McAlevey and Nakagawa, we will discuss ways to defend democratic communities and resist authoritarianism. Requirements will include frequent, short papers on the readings and co-leading class discussions. In lieu of individual conference papers, students will be asked to form small groups to investigate, write, and present on the rise of authoritarianism in another country or the history of an authoritarian movement (such as the KKK) within the United States. Possibilities may also exist for service-learning placements.

Faculty

• Kim Christensen

Intermediate, Seminar—Spring

When Keynes published The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money in 1936, he proposed a new, non-laissez-faire, realistic macroeconomic framework to stabilize the economy, control inflation, and promote full employment. However, since the 1970s, macroeconomics has experienced “decades of intellectual regress” and the current “post-real macroeconomics” says things that are “inconsistent with the facts.” In this course, we will depart from this “post-real macroeconomics.” We will learn a post-Keynesian approach that takes structural inequality, risk, uncertainty, and human irrationality seriously. We will learn how the post-Keynesian approach is better suited for understanding real economic tendencies and financial troubles under the current stage of monopoly capitalism, such as uncontrollable inflation, wage stagnation, financialization, economic polarization, growing indebtedness, and so on.

Faculty

• An Li

First-Year Studies—Year

President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal transformed American citizenship, introducing “social citizenship” with economic entitlements alongside traditional political rights. FDR’s Four Freedoms included freedom from want. Social citizenship was supposed to announce a new balance between market price and social justice; however, tragically, there was a howling gap between the New Deal for White America and the Raw Deal for the Other America. Of course, the history of poverty and public policy did not begin with President Roosevelt’s New Deal or with President Johnson’s War on Poverty. Before the Great Depression, the public policy toward urban poverty began with the humiliating and punitive institution of the poorhouse. The persistent shaming and detention of the poor is “in the shadow of the poorhouse,” including mass incarceration. One tradition of poverty experts are obsessed with is social control over poor people. A second tradition is engaged with dividing the poor into two categories: the deserving poor and the undeserving poor. Unfortunately, most experts are preoccupied with “improving” the morality of poor people rather than ending economic poverty amid the American bounty. Finally, there is another tradition, one of social justice movements that demand an end to savage inequalities, including poor people’s movements. This course will also examine how poor people at the Grassroots organized themselves against poverty. Thus, consider the burning question: What is the price of citizenship? In fall until mid-semester, students will meet weekly with the instructor for individual conferences; thereafter through spring, individual conferences will be biweekly. 

Faculty

• Komozi Woodard

Open, Seminar—Fall

Wars of the 19th and 20th centuries shaped Europe’s borders and societies. Ideas of the privileges of citizenship grew in tandem with the responsibilities of military service. Colonial expansion allowed militaries to test out new technologies and forms of rule, while expanding their empires. Armies were used to keep diverse empires together, not only through force, but also by creating a common sense of purpose and co-opting elites. Battles were a legitimate, legal way to decide territorial disputes, until they were not. In the course of the 20th century, wars of unimaginable destruction reshaped societies and expanded the boundaries of what was imaginable, including the destruction of all life on Earth. This course will examine the interplay of military and society from the early 19th century to the present. We will examine the relationship between citizenship and military service, war as politics, Europe’s colonial wars, mobilization and demobilization, the World Wars, Cold War, and the current crises in Europe. We will look at radical attempts to reimagine the place of the military by communists and fascists, the most destructive wars in recorded history, the long period of relative peace in Europe, the end of the Cold War and its aftermath.

Faculty

• Brandon Schechter

Open, Seminar—Spring

Despite a growing awareness of the ways that slavery and its legacies continue to shape contemporary forms of inequality, slavery seems like an aberration from our twenty-first century perspective. Yet for much of the last 500 years, enslaved labor was broadly accepted and widely deployed throughout the Atlantic World. While it is clear that New World slavery grew and expanded simultaneously with the rise of democratic politics, independent nation-states, and capitalist economic systems in the West, slavery’s role in shaping these developments continues to be a matter of controversy and debate. This course will offer a comparative analysis of slavery and antislavery in the development of political institutions and ideologies in the Early Modern Atlantic World, while examining slavery’s links to empire, commerce, and capitalism in the Atlantic basin and beyond. While our primary focus will be on the United States and the colonies of British North America, this course will compare the rise and spread of slavery and antislavery in these regions with related developments in Brazil, the Caribbean, and Latin America. Throughout the semester, we will examine how slavery and the various forms of resistance to it impacted revolutions, independence movements, civil wars, and the formation of the modern nation states and political ideologies that we are familiar with today.

Faculty

• Sean Griffin

Open, Lecture—Spring

The 20th century revealed the potential for humans to destroy each other in new and shocking ways and also a variety of projects to create better people and governments. Europe was ground zero for both these disasters and attempts to mitigate them. It was the primary battlefield of both world wars, the laboratory of both fascism and communism, rebuilt by both capitalists and communists. In the latter half of the century, it formed a Union, moving beyond the nationalism that had defined much of its past. Europe was also a central stage of the Cold War, the point of contact between the capitalist and communist worlds, until—seemingly miraculously—the communist world imploded. Throughout the "short 20th century"—the period between the Great War and the fall of communism in Europe, a term coined by historian Eric Hobsbawm—and to this day, this space is haunted, another subject of this course. This lecture will cover major events and trends in Europe from the eve of the Great War to the fall of the Berlin Wall (with an epilogue). It will examine the major cultural and political events of the bloodiest century in recorded history. Among topics covered will be the World Wars, rise of dictatorships, Cold War, emergence of the European Union, the “end of history” and historical memory. Our readings will be divided between scholarship interpreting these events, primary sources, and films. We will continually ask what defines “Europe,” what its borders are, and think about the future of its past.

Faculty

• Brandon Schechter

Intermediate, Seminar—Spring

Markets, profits, and exploitation seem to define capitalism; but exchanges, markets, and exploitation of the powerful over the powerless have existed long before the word “capitalism” even entered the English language. So, what defines capitalism? How has that meaning changed over time? Does capitalism change across time and space? What changes has capitalism brought to economic life? What aspects of economic life transcend capitalism? Who are the advocates of capitalism? Who are its critics, and why? This seminar will seek to address these questions through a study of the transformations in economic life before, during, and after capitalism. The course will examine the historicity of concepts such as markets, prices, wages, and profits—and the debates around the origins of capitalism. It will trace the economic, social, political, and cultural transformations generated through the expansion and resistance to capitalism in the 19th and 20th centuries. The course will be organized chronologically but also thematically. Some of the topics covered include gender, race and slavery, nationalism and war, socialism, anarchism, Cold War politics, Third Worldism, and neoliberalism. Aside from mandatory attendance and active participation, the requirements for the course include an individual exam, a collaborative research conference project, weekly responses, and oral presentations. 

Faculty

• Margarita Fajardo

Open, Small Lecture—Spring

Calculus is the mathematical gift that keeps on giving—thank you, Newton and company! In this course, students will expand their knowledge of limits, derivatives, and integrals with concepts and techniques that will enable them to solve many important problems in mathematics and the sciences. Topics will include differentiation review, integration review, integration with non-polynomial functions, applications of integration (finding area, volume, length, center of mass, moment of inertia, probability), advanced techniques for integration (substitution, integration-by-parts, partial fractions), infinite sequences, infinite series, convergent and divergent sums, power series, differential equations and modeling dynamical systems, and, time permitting, parametric equations of a curve and polar coordinates. Weekly group conferences will be conducted in hands-on workshop mode. This course is intended for students interested in advanced study in mathematics or sciences, students preparing for careers in the health sciences or engineering, and any student wishing to broaden and enrich the life of the mind.

Faculty

• Melvin Irizarry-Gelpi

Open, Small Lecture—Year

Many of us are struck by the growing irrationality of contemporary democratic politics to the point where we despair of our capacity to address problems like global climate change or pandemics that could pose existential threats to our species, to fashion constructive foreign policy as wars rage, or to face a whole range of urgent but more mundane policy issues. In this course, we will seek to understand disturbing trends like populism, polarization, disinformation, and self-injuring or -defeating politics, as well as the resurfacing of nativism, xenophobia, and racism in contemporary politics—in part on their own terms but also by asking whether they are deeply rooted in human nature, at least on our current best understandings of ourselves. More specifically, democracy seems to rely on at least a minimum degree of rationality, learning, openness to argument and difference, and self-control on the part of the citizens whose votes and opinions guide government policy. But is this reliance foolhardy in light of what recent history, psychology, evolutionary theory, philosophy, and cognitive science teach? Do aspects of our current social and technological circumstances make us less able to manifest these qualities of character today than our Enlightenment progenitors hoped in the era of democratic revolutions—the era from which many of the ideas and institutions that continue to inform our politics today emerged? In this course, we will survey aspects of the political history of recent centuries, as well as our own historical moment, to ask if they should temper confidence in the power of reason in politics. We will also examine recent research in cognitive science, psychology, and philosophy that conclude that it is hard to sustain a model of human behavior that places reason and rationality in the driver’s seat. What alternative accounts of human nature are emerging from recent research? And what are their political implications, especially for democratic societies? By bringing together political science, history, and theory with cognitive science, psychology, and philosophy, we should be able to occupy the intersection of distinct but equally relevant disciplines to ask whether the Enlightenment’s faith in democracy was misplaced. Or, instead, are there reasons to believe that democracy can maintain its claim to legitimacy, even after reason has been demoted in our understandings of human nature? To address this final question, we will also examine proposals for 21st-century democratic reforms that either seek to adjust downward the expectations on the capacity of citizens to engage in deliberative politics or to refashion political institutions to better summon the better angels of our nature. 

Faculty

• David Peritz

First-Year Studies—Year

Over the last 50 years, the reputation of the political system we refer to as (modern representative constitutional) democracy has been on a roller-coaster ride from immense popularity to internal revolt and decay, sometimes ending in competitive autocracy or even authoritarianism. One way to understand this deep ambivalence about “the worst form of government (except for all the others)” is that the values it enshrines—freedom, equality, autonomy, reciprocity, popular sovereignty, the rule of law, deliberation, tolerance—retain an unrivaled appeal, but the practice of democracy so seldom resembles these values that its failures generate anger, resentment, and an appetite for an alternative. Or, barring that, an urge to punish those who give lip service to these values while governing in ways that look, in turn, inept and self-serving. In this course, we will develop this understanding by exploring: (a) the normative foundations of modern democratic theory in 17th-, 18th-, and 19th-century philosophical texts that inspired the revolutions and institutions that continue to structure the political lives and aspirations of many today; (b) the multi-faceted failures of the institutions, politics and policies of self-proclaimed democracy in the 21st century (with a special though not exclusive focus on the United States and the discipline of political science); and (c) proposals for repairing 21st century democracy so that it more fully realizes its potential. In the process, we will also examine some of the 21st century social forces that challenge earlier formulations of democratic theory and practice, including new attention paid to long-buried axes of difference and domination such as gender, race, class, and sexual orientation; the transformation of the public sphere and communication by new media and technology; and the globalization of the economy and the new kinds of power and inequality this has generated. Only a willingness to tackle long reading assignments with care and to work together to unpack texts dense in argument and analysis certainly is expected of interested students. This first-year studies course is intended to introduce all students with varied academic backgrounds to college level work, including sustained independent research (conference work) and participation in focused classroom dialogue in seminar. Biweekly in fall, students will alternate between individual conferences with the instructor and small-group activities. Biweekly in spring, students will meet with the instructor for individual conferences.

Faculty

• David Peritz

Open, Small Lecture—Year

Many of us are struck by the growing irrationality of contemporary democratic politics to the point where we despair of our capacity to address problems like global climate change or pandemics that could pose existential threats to our species, to fashion constructive foreign policy as wars rage, or to face a whole range of urgent but more mundane policy issues. In this course, we will seek to understand disturbing trends like populism, polarization, disinformation, and self-injuring or -defeating politics, as well as the resurfacing of nativism, xenophobia, and racism in contemporary politics—in part on their own terms but also by asking whether they are deeply rooted in human nature, at least on our current best understandings of ourselves. More specifically, democracy seems to rely on at least a minimum degree of rationality, learning, openness to argument and difference, and self-control on the part of the citizens whose votes and opinions guide government policy. But is this reliance foolhardy in light of what recent history, psychology, evolutionary theory, philosophy, and cognitive science teach? Do aspects of our current social and technological circumstances make us less able to manifest these qualities of character today than our Enlightenment progenitors hoped in the era of democratic revolutions—the era from which many of the ideas and institutions that continue to inform our politics today emerged? In this course, we will survey aspects of the political history of recent centuries, as well as our own historical moment, to ask if they should temper confidence in the power of reason in politics. We will also examine recent research in cognitive science, psychology, and philosophy that conclude that it is hard to sustain a model of human behavior that places reason and rationality in the driver’s seat. What alternative accounts of human nature are emerging from recent research? And what are their political implications, especially for democratic societies? By bringing together political science, history, and theory with cognitive science, psychology, and philosophy, we should be able to occupy the intersection of distinct but equally relevant disciplines to ask whether the Enlightenment’s faith in democracy was misplaced. Or, instead, are there reasons to believe that democracy can maintain its claim to legitimacy, even after reason has been demoted in our understandings of human nature? To address this final question, we will also examine proposals for 21st-century democratic reforms that either seek to adjust downward the expectations on the capacity of citizens to engage in deliberative politics or to refashion political institutions to better summon the better angels of our nature. 

Faculty

• David Peritz

Sophomore and Above, Seminar—Year

Despite frequent pleas for unity from United States presidents Donald Trump and Joe Biden, alongside the rise of groups such as BridgeUSA, Third Way, and No Labels to promote political centrism and compromise, the seemingly never-ending sociopolitical polarization appears to be the new norm in American political life—and it may not have reached its violent peak back in January 2021. To many politicians, pundits, and others alike, the social and political scene in the United States in the 21st century appears to be one of turmoil, disagreement, division, and instability. We regularly hear about a polarized and deadlocked political class; we read about increasing class and religious differences—from the alleged divides between Wall Street and Main Street to those who are secular and those who are religious; and we often see disturbing, dangerous, and violent images and actions from various politically-oriented groups. This seminar will look at the history of division in America and explore the puzzle of how to move on from this divided state. While the course will briefly examine the veracity of these recent impressions of the American sociopolitical scene, we will center our course on the question: Is policymaking forever deadlocked, or can real political progress be made? Moreover, what are the social and policy implications of polarization? How does the nation govern and function in the Trumpian political epoch, and are the political parties representing the will of the people? What about the impact of the 2024 elections? What are we to make of the frequent calls for change and for healing America’s divisions? In this seminar, we will examine these questions and deeper aspects of American political culture today. Covering a lot of ground from America’s founding to today, after reviewing some basics of the political economy, students will study American political cultures from a variety of vantage points with a number of different stories emerging. We will look at numerous aspects of American social and political life—from examining the masses, political elites, Congress, and policymaking communities to social movements, the media, and America’s position in a global community—all with a focus on policy and moving the country forward. This course will be driven by data, not dogma. We will use modern political-economy approaches based in logic and evidence to find answers to contemporary public-policy problems and questions of polarization. The material will be treated as social scientists, not as ideologues. Students should anticipate extensive reading. Comfort with data and statistics will be expected.

Faculty

• Samuel Abrams

Intermediate, Seminar—Spring

Thomas Hobbes believed that the State, or what he called the Leviathan, was the necessary result of individuals trying to escape from a state of nature, where existence was “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” Charles Tilly compared states to racketeers; Vladimir Lenin, following the lead of Marx and Engels, wrote that the State exists to maintain the domination and oppression of one class by another. John F. Kennedy famously proclaimed, “Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country,” demanding Americans’ unquestioning, altruistic loyalty to the State. And for about two centuries, communists, socialists, anarchists, and social democrats have debated whether the State must be reformed, overthrown, or abolished in the name of democracy, equality, and popular sovereignty. These different and often contradictory approaches reveal that there is no common agreement on the nature or role of the State. So, what is the State? Where did it come from? What are the sources and limits of its power? Why does it have so much control over our lives? These are the questions that we will ask in this course. We will pay special attention to the relationship between the development of the modern state and capitalism; the rise of the welfare state, the epitome of modern state power; and state violence. We will discuss alternative visions of the State’s role and responsibility and ask: Do we need the State, and can we make the State work for us?

Faculty

• Yekaterina Oziashvili

Open, Seminar—Year

What kinds of social worlds emerge when people are expected to live temporarily for years or decades? Across the contemporary world, refugees, undocumented migrants, and other displaced populations inhabit spaces organized around waiting, in camps, detention regimes, asylum systems, informal settlements, and humanitarian infrastructures. Yet these are not only sites of crisis. They are places where families form, schools struggle to operate, economies stabilize, and political movements grow, even in environments designed to prevent permanence. This seminar will examine displacement not simply as movement across borders but as a reorganization of time, legality, belonging, and everyday coexistence. We will explore how people become categorized as “temporary”—asylum seekers, guest workers, foreign laborers, seasonal migrants—and what this status does to their lives, rights, and futures. The course will situate migration within broader global realities: more than a billion people move internally or internationally, while climate change, conflict, and economic restructuring continue to produce new forms of displacement and precariousness. We will ask how states manage mobility, why certain populations become national “problems,” and how migrants craft livable worlds within administrative uncertainty. Readings will introduce key theoretical approaches to citizenship, governance, and mobility, including Hannah Arendt on statelessness and the “right to have rights,” Giorgio Agamben on exception and camp rule, Michel Foucault on discipline and regulation, and Aihwa Ong on flexible citizenship and graduated sovereignty. Ethnographic and urban scholarship from Liisa Malkki, Didier Fassin, Miriam Ticktin, Peter Nyers, Asef Bayat, and Ananya Roy anchor these ideas in everyday practice, while literary and climate perspectives—including Amitav Ghosh’s The Great Derangement—push us to think beyond policy frameworks toward imagination, narrative, and planetary change. We will also examine how displacement is represented across media—photography, film, fiction, and interactive worlds—and how societies are responding to an era increasingly defined by hyper-diversity and permanent precarity. The seminar will be writing-intensive and research-oriented. Students will practice observation and analytic writing throughout the semester and develop a conference project based on an original research question related to migration, bordering practices, or urban coexistence. Students will be encouraged to experiment with unconventional forms of analysis and storytelling that grapple with vulnerability, temporariness, and being out-of-place in the contemporary world.

Faculty

• Parthiban Muniandy

Open, Seminar—Year

What does it mean to say the family is a political institution? This course will take up that question by examining the family as a key site where value is produced, distributed, and contested. At stake are questions of what and whom we value, including which families circulate wealth and security, which are rendered disposable or precarious, and how the reproductive practices of some populations are protected and encouraged while others are regulated, stigmatized, or denied. This seminar will introduce students to core sociological theories of race, family, and reproduction, beginning with Marx and Engels and moving through Black feminism, feminist political economy, queer and trans theory, disability studies, and contemporary debates over reproductive politics. We will examine how United States family ideals have been shaped through long histories of settler colonialism, racial capitalism, slavery, immigration control, and imperial power, and how family separation has functioned as a recurring political technology from enslavement and Native American boarding schools to contemporary practices at the United States border. We will supplement this history with sources ranging from science fiction films (Alien) and documentaries (No Más Bebés) to literature, poetry, and speculative fiction (Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Octavia Butler’s “Bloodchild”) to explore how the political family is imagined across genres. By the end of the year, students will have a substantive grounding in key sociological debates, using the family as a lens through which to understand how power operates in intimate life and how intimate life, in turn, shapes power. Coursework will involve creating kinship maps or family trees, tracing the histories of particular families across generations or institutions, and incorporating structured personal reflection into final projects.

Faculty

• Carlo Sariego

Intermediate/Advanced, Seminar—Year

Much of our lives are spent dealing with organizations in one fashion or another. They are a staple of our everyday lives, whether directly or indirectly: we rarely escape them. They include government and nongovernmental structures, ranging from government bureaucracies to schools, hospitals, religious spaces, and less formal entities such as nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). Because of their ubiquitousness—and the assumption that bureaucracies exemplify “modernity” and “value-free” systems—the study of organizations has been a key subfield not only within sociology, but also within the fields of public and business administration. This course is designed to address the veracity of the claims made on behalf of bureaucracies, as well as critiques directed at organizational theory and behavior. Our overarching objective is to examine the manner in which organizations have been conceptualized, as well as the processes and practices through which they operate and change, and their implications for those who are “subjected” to them. Starting with Max Weber, a seminal figure in the field, we will examine underlying assumptions regarding “objectivity” and “subjectivity,” the rule of law, bureaucratic activism and inertia, the relation between organizations and their larger political and economic milieu, as well as ongoing organizational struggles. In addition to Weber, we will read other classics such as Sloan Wilson’s novel, The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit, and William Whyte’s The Organization Man. These and more contemporary critiques of organizations—both written and visual—will enable us to go beyond simplistic and normative understandings of bureaucracies and classic sociological theories and texts to rethink historical and contemporary organizations—in order to analyze the functioning of power at an everyday and structural level, and its attendant outcomes. For conference, working in small groups, participants will undertake primary research on a specific aspect of organizational practice at Sarah Lawrence College. Possible topics include an examination of space and design, changes in the student body and/or curricular design, the shift from same sex to co-education at the College, workers’ struggles at the College, outsourcing of certain college offices/tasks, attendant processes of decision making, student and/or faculty governance and organization, the College board and donors, community partnerships and/or the relationship between the school and its environs. To facilitate research in the College archives, we will rely on and work with our College Archivist who will provide us with her knowledge and expertise. Other than historical research based on the College Archives, interviews with present and past faculty, administrators, donors, alums or some combination of these sources could also be drawn upon for conference work. Finally, students will be expected to tie their analyses to larger questions such as the political economy of education, institutional structures, social movements, and struggles for change.

Faculty

• Shahnaz Rouse

Advanced, Seminar—Year

In recent years, gender and nationalism have been at the center of local, national, and global politics and concerns in the United States, but also globally. Starting with the overturning of Roe v. Wade, attempts to overturn availability of contraception in numerous states in the United States, as well as at the national level, struggles over gender and/or heteronormativity continue to be ongoing. Overall, nationalism can be understood as a project simultaneously involving construction(s) of bodies, memory, history, and identity. In this seminar, we will identify the multiple and shifting dimensions of nationalism as a world historical phenomenon. Central to our focus will be the centrality and particular constructions of gender in different national projects. Attention will be paid to nationalism in its colonial and contemporary trajectories. Questions to be addressed will include the following: What is the relationship between nationalism and identity? Which symbols/languages are called upon to produce/evoke collective identity? What are the various inclusions, exclusions, and silences that particular historically-constituted nationalisms involve? Is nationalism necessarily a positive force? If not, under what circumstances, in what ways, and for whom does it pose problems? What is the relationship of nationalism(s) to socially and politically marginalized groups? How is pluralism and difference constructed and treated? How do the same issues, such as those regarding cultural authenticity and identity, take on a different meaning at diverse historical moments? How is the insider/outsider relationship conceptualized, and what shifts occur in different periods? Women have been interpellated and have participated within nationalist movements in a variety of ways. The dynamics and contradictions of such involvement will be analyzed closely. We will strive to explore the implications of these processes for women's and non-binary individuals' sense of self, citizenship, and belonging at specific periods and over time. In the spring semester, we will turn our attention more specifically to performances of nationalism through institutional and popular cultural arrangements. Under the former category, we will look at issues of migration, immigration, and exile; public policy and international relations; war and conflict. In the arena of popular culture, we will examine the production of nationalism(s) through the mass media, sports, film, museums and exhibitions, and tourism. Conference work can include an examination of a specific nationalist movement, theoretical issues pertaining to nationalism(s), memory, identity, performances of nationalism(s) in popular culture and the mass media, and the interplay between institutional and everyday constructions of nationalism in specific settings.

Faculty

• Shahnaz Rouse