What is the carceral state? What do girls, women, and transgender individuals’ experiences of policing and punishment in 21st century America reveal about its shifting dimensions? Despite public concerns about mass incarceration in the United States and calls for criminal justice reform, mainstream commentators rarely account for the gendered, racialized, and class dimensions of punishment, nor address the growing ranks of girls, women, poor and gender nonconforming individuals that experience carceral control and oversight. Interdisciplinary in scope, this course critically examines how race, gender, sexuality and class intersect and shape people’s experience with systems of punishment and control. It further explores the economic, social, and political factors that have influenced the development of the contemporary American carceral state and scholarly, activist, and artistic responses to it.

This course explores the role of written and cinematic narratives along with photography in response to traumatic historic events, focusing on select regions of Africa and on African Diaspora societies in the U.S. and Caribbean. We’ll explore the roles of (and relationships between) narrator, witness, audience and victim, both historically and in light of new social media, and discuss how these relationships give rise to particular representations of perpetrators, victims and saviors. Topics to be considered in relation to such narratives might include: colonization, genocide, apartheid, the  continuing impact of the trans-Atlantic slave trade and systemic racism on African-American and Caribbean societies. Works might include Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness; Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart or No Longer at Ease; Chimamanda Adiche, Half of a Yellow Sun; Toni Morrison, Beloved; Junot Diaz, The Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao; short fiction of the Apartheid Era; short fiction/essays by James Baldwin; Films: Fruitvale Station, 13th, Kinyarwanda, Lumumba.  Students will be introduced to postcolonial literary theory and trauma narrative theory.

A wide-ranging study of nonviolent direct action, in theory and in practice, as a technique and as a way of life. It begins with discussion of some classic and modern theories of nonviolent direct action but also some modern critiques of it. It then turns to a selection of classic case studies, among them labor movements, women's rights movements, India and Gandhi, the American Civil Rights Movement, campaigns in Europe and Latin America against authoritarian regimes. It then expands its range, looking at how nonviolent direct action has been deployed in campaigns of environmental justice and economic justice, and making space to consider whatever campaigns of nonviolent direct action are going on at the moment at which the course is being taught (e.g., in the United States today the work of Black Lives Matter).

Human rights are an important issue in countries around the world and in international politics. But what are human rights? Is there a universal definition, or do human rights vary across time and space? Who decides when human rights are violated? When is outside action to stop such violations justified? These questions aren’t just philosophical; they’re deeply political. How political communities answer them shapes domestic and international policies on issues such as state violence, humanitarian aid, citizenship and migration, (neo)colonialism, global capital, and efforts of various kinds to promote human freedom. This course will use texts in contemporary political theory and historical and contemporary case studies to explore the intuitively important, yet vaguely understood, concept of human rights. Case studies will examine human rights in the United States (for example, interrogation torture policy, Black Lives Matter, or sanctuary cities) and the international context (for example, the Holocaust, ethnic cleansing during the Balkan Wars of the 1990s, or the 2003 invasion of Iraq).

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.

Should you sell your house at an auction where the highest bidder gets the house, but only pays the second-highest bid? Should the U.S. government institute a policy of never negotiating with terrorists? The effects of decisions in such situations often depend on how others react to them. This course introduces some basic concepts and insights from the theory of games that can be used to understand any situation in which strategic decisions are made. The course will emphasize applications rather than formal theory. Extensive use is made of in-class experiments, examples, and cases drawn from business, economics, politics, movies, and current events.

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.

This course explores the intersections between social justice, conflict, and engineering using an interdisciplinary, hands-on, case study approach. We will explore four technologies (drones, cell phones, cookstoves and water pumps), exploring in each case both the embodied engineering concepts and the ethical and political implications of using the technology. The case studies will inform our discussions of the following big ideas: technology is directly linked to social justice and can have both highly beneficial and​ highly problematic results for the development and transformation of conflicts; understanding technology at a deeper level is critical to understanding the justice impact on communities and people; media communication about technology and technological innovations' benefits can be hyperbolic and requires a critical lens. Peace and Justice Studies majors must register for PEAC 305. Students in other majors may register for either PEAC 305 or ENGR 305 depending on their preparation.

Truth Commissions (TCs) have been a mechanism to uncover, document, and recognize human rights violations and to honor victims at moments of transition from dictatorships to democracies, and from wars to post-war contexts. TCs vary in their mandates, composition, and tasks, and have mixed records of success, despite the frequently high expectations. They often stand as acts of reparation, catalysts of larger processes of peacebuilding and dignification of victims. We will investigate the background and rationale provided for their creation, their mandate and scope, composition and structure, and analyze their work and post-report reception. We will pay attention to issues such as intersectional approaches of gender and ethnicity, the participation of victims and responsible ones, the complementarity of commissions with other forms of transitional justice, and the management and access to their archives.