How can a candidate in a political race win the majority of votes yet lose the election? How can two competing candidates interpret the same statistic as being in their favor? How can the geometry of the voting district disenfranchise entire groups of voters? Can we quantify the power the President of the United States has? In this course, we will look at the mathematics behind these and related questions that arise in politics. We will study topics such as fairness, voting paradoxes, social choice, game theory, apportionment, gerrymandering, and data interpretation. The goal of the class will be to illustrate the importance of rigorous reasoning in various social and political processes while providing an introduction to some fascinating mathematics.

Does education in the United States encourage social mobility or help to reproduce socioeconomic inequality? What is the hidden curriculum—the ideas, values, and skills that students learn at school that are not in the textbook? Who determines what gets taught in school? How do schools in the US compare to school systems in other countries?  What makes school reform so hard? Questions like these drive this course which offers students an introduction to the sociology of education including topics such as schools and communities; student-centered pedagogies; the role of teachers, students, parents, mentors, and peers in producing and addressing educational inequalities (including tracking and measures of achievement); school violence, school reform, and knowledge production. We also look comparatively at education systems across the world.

In this course students will engage with a spectrum of historic and contemporary school reform efforts across different contexts in the United States. Making use of a diverse array of texts from articles to podcasts and videos, students will struggle with both the promise of education as a tool for remedying race- and class-based inequalities and the stubborn reality that too often schools reflect and reproduce injustice. The structure of the course session and activities prompts students to learn about and experience alternative educational possibilities. Working in groups, pairs, and as individuals, students will explore scholarship and cases in educational anthropology, sociology, history, and critical theory, while questioning the purposes, processes, and products of schooling. Central to the course is the community students create with the instructor for mutual learning support and debate. All members of the course are engaged in a learning stance that centers a discipline of hope and engages with the proposition that communities can organize their own struggle to define and demand a humanizing and liberatory education. Students also have multiple opportunities to explore their own educational experiences and design their own research or educational initiatives to act on their learning.

The course will examine epidemics and pandemics and how they shape society and culture. It will explore catastrophic disease events such as the 4th century BC Ancient Greek plague, the Black Death of Medieval Europe, the European infectious diseases that killed native populations of the Americas, the Spanish flu of 1918, the AIDS/HIV epidemic in the late 20th century, and the present-day coronavirus pandemic. Key questions that will guide the course are: 1. Who holds the bio-political power to guide the population through the danger of widespread morbidity, and how is this power used and/or abused? 2. What kind of socioeconomic, gender, ethnic ,and racial disparities are perpetuated and constructed in times of disease? 3. How do individual political entities cooperate and coordinate in their efforts to curtail disease? 4. How is the rhetoric of “war” employed to describe epidemic and pandemic diseases? 5. What are the effects of actual war, violence, and genocide that often follow epidemics? 6. What are the uses and the limitations of international public health organizations in addressing pandemics?

This course will introduce students to core readings in the fields of urban studies and urban policy with a focus on Boston. We begin with an overview of theories of urban development and change. We look at the history of Boston and how it has changed over time. We then shift our focus to a range of urban problems, combining academic research with real-life challenges, such as housing, poverty, economic development, transportation, culture, immigration, and criminal justice. Our semester concludes with a comparative look at the urban experience in Asia, Africa, and Latin America and debates about “global cities.” Students are encouraged to do fieldwork in Boston and to get to know its many neighborhoods.

A quarter century ago the Institute of Medicine defined the work of public health as "what we as a society do collectively to assure the conditions in which people can be healthy." Historically rooted in a commitment to social justice, U.S. public health is now renewing this commitment through 1) an epidemiological shift to examine the social, economic, and political inequities that create disparate health and disease patterns by gender, class, race, sexual identity, citizenship, etc., and 2) a corresponding health equity movement in public health practice. This broad-ranging course examines the debates shaping the above as well as the moral and legal groundings of public health, basic epidemiology, and the roles of public and private actors. Highlighted health topics vary year to year.

One of democracy’s greatest strengths is that it gives political power to the people. But what happens when “the people” is a diverse group with identities, interests, and desires that pull in many directions? Does democracy function best when everyone is treated the same? As if there are no differences among them? But what if some people are marginalized, subordinated, or stigmatized? Could pretending these stratifications don't exist actually weaken democracy? This course explores how democracy grapples with differences through texts in contemporary Western political theory. We will begin with liberal theories of democracy. Then we will study feminist, critical-race, queer, and other theorists to understand democracy from the perspectives of marginalized, subordinated, or stigmatized groups. We will not search for definitive answers or hard-and-fast conclusions about when democracy functions best. Rather, we are interested in getting a better sense of democracy’s many dimensions and tensions.

Four decades ago, the Institutes of Medicine defined public health as "what we as a society do collectively to assure the conditions in which people can be healthy." Some in U.S. public health understand the field to be historically rooted in a commitment to social equality, and in recent years have been leading a movement in epidemiology to examine the social, economic, and political inequities that create disparate health and disease patterns by gender, class, race, sexual identity, citizenship, etc., and in practice to pursue health equity. Yet these commitments do not exist without tension. This broad-ranging course examines the context and key debates shaping the knowledge, laws, ethics, and practice of public health in the U.S.