Human Rights Courses

Immigration is quickly becoming one of the defining controversies of our age, and it is increasingly common for states to restrict the movement of people across borders. But should we say that nation states have the right to exclude non-members in the first place? If so, what is the basis of that right? If not, should we say that immigration controls of any kind are at odds with justice? And is there a compelling case for the exclusion of immigrants that depends on a commitment to preserving national culture or managing the demographics of a national population? As we'll see, these questions touch on fundamental issues in political philosophy: the nature of citizenship and its relationship to culture, the source of legitimate authority, the justifiability of state coercion, the content and justification of rights. Readings will be drawn from the contemporary philosophical literature on immigration.

This course is part of a 2-part sequence and satisfies a civilizations sequence requirement. If not used to satisfy that requirement, the course may be used to satisfy Human Rights Major Requirements as an elective in any stream.

The first quarter begins with a set of conceptual problems and optics designed to introduce students to the critical study of human rights, opening up questions of the universal, human dignity, and the political along with the practices of witness and testimony. It is followed by two thematic clusters. "Anti-Slavery, Humanitarianism, and Rights" focuses on the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries to historicize notions of dignity, sympathy, and witness. "Declarations as a Human Rights Genre" examines revolutionary eighteenth-century rights declarations in France, the United States, and Haiti against the aspirations of the 1948 UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

This course examines basic human rights norms and concepts - and mechanisms of protection and enforcement - through the lens of selected contemporary human rights cases.  We focus primarily (but not exclusively) on the U.S. experience and place it in a global context. Students will have an opportunity to meet with experienced human rights “practitioners” during the course from the arts, journalism, medicine, and law. Learning about the reality of human rights “practice” is a core element of this course. The course will address contemporary human rights concerns, focusing on U.S. examples within the frame of international human rights, including whether non-citizens in the U.S. have full rights.  We will look at the persistence of racism, torture, and police abuse, and how international human rights can protect (or not) voting rights, economic, and social rights. Cross-cutting themes of the course include the universalism of human rights, impunity and accountability, notions of “exceptionalism,” the precarity of the “rule of law,” and the adaptability of the human rights regime to meet new challenges.

This course investigates what justice requires in terms of collective decision-making institutions beyond state borders. Should international or transnational political, economic, and military decisions be made more democratically? What would that mean? Would that be objectionably "neo-colonial"? Should institutions be constrained to satisfy principles of national self-determination? Do states have obligations to sacrifice their own interests to support more inclusive transnational decision-making? Or does international conflict make political integration too dangerous? We will explore theoretical frameworks in contemporary political philosophy to address these questions, and study applied problems of global political justice including anti-imperialism, humanitarian intervention, and global constitutionalism.
 

What makes reproduction queer, and how do queers reproduce? In some senses, more people than ever before have access to reproductive technologies and to family building resources. People of all genders and sexualities utilize tools to combat infertility such as in vitro fertilization, gamete donation, surrogacy, and adoption, sometimes reproducing the normative family form and other times expanding it. Kinship categories, from "diblings" (donor siblings) to house mothers, can be artifacts both of culture and of science, and reflect ways of understanding what constitutes a family and what relationships become considered family. This course asks after the many mechanisms which can be taken to foster or hinder queer reproduction, thinking through the tools for managing social and biological infertility alongside cultural anxieties about queer reproduction more broadly, as enacted through bans on queer representation in classrooms and other policies. We will consider how specific technologies emerge and are utilized among groups who identity as queer and those who do not, ask after the legacy of queerness and its association with non-procreative forms of intimacy, and map the ways that the figure of the child is always bound up with some vision of the future (of the family, the nation, or humanity itself).

Is the labor movement a proper subject for political philosophy? What would it be to develop a political philosophy of labor unions? In this course, we will explore the relationship of unions to class interests, to ideas of justice and solidarity, and to the critique capitalism. We will consider the contradictions that arise from the fact that unions are institutions embedded in capitalist relations of production, while simultaneously being part of a movement that contests and challenges the terms of those very relations. We will explore the idea that under certain conditions, unions can be conceived of as agents of change involved in political projects oriented to overcoming injustices related to class. Time permitting, we will also explore the complex relationship of class-based political projects to injustices of race and gender. This course will be offered in conjunction with a Neubauer Collegium conference, What Force on Earth: Theorizing the Labor Movement that brings together academics with union organizers to think about the past, present, and future of the labor movement from October 10th to 11th. Participation in the course also makes one eligible to apply for an internship opportunity with the Emergency Workers’ Organizing Committee (EWOC).
 

For the past 50 years, Latin America has been gripped by a cycle of dictatorships, authoritarian governments masquerading as democracies, and armed conflicts. These have facilitated the commission of atrocity crimes.  In most cases, perpetrators have evaded accountability. However, thanks to the tireless efforts of victims, civil society organizations, and the international community, a measure of justice has been achieved through various truth-seeking processes and accountability mechanisms. This course will delve into the human rights crises in Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Guatemala, Peru, and Mexico, exploring how they led to the commission of atrocity crimes - large-scale and systematic human rights abuses, genocide, and war crimes.  We will examine the political, legal, and social strategies employed by human rights organizations and victims' movements to break the cycle of impunity.  We will also explore the crucial role of the United Nations and the Organization of American States, highlighting the importance of intergovernmental cooperation in transforming policies and practices for the improvement of human rights on the ground.  Note: this course is taught by José Antonio Guevara Bermúdez, an Autumn 2025 visiting professor.

How is the queer enemy politically constructed? And what are the uses and effects of this enemy in contemporary politics? This course investigates queer sexuality as a specific kind of threat and homophobia as a specific mode of political antagonism. Key to understanding this specificity is the examination of other kinds of political enemies. Across categories of gender, sexuality, race, religion, and empire, the course theorizes the queer enemy in a comparative perspective. Engaging scholars like Monique Wittig, Simone de Beauvoir, Frantz Fanon, and Jean Paul Sartre, we compare homophobia with other forms of political enmity like misogyny, anti-Black racism, and anti-Semitism. After investigating antagonism across categories of political difference, we delve into the specificities of homophobic antagonism in the second half of the course. Here, we explore how the queer threat is framed: through metaphors of civilizational destruction but also through anti-sodomy and anti-disclosure laws. We also trace how the normalization of the queer enemy has produced new enemies. Through notions of "Pinkwashing" and the "Gay International," we further examine how queer liberation is made to stand in for colonial domination. But we also read critiques of the "gay=colonialism" equation, asking how homophobia mediates anti-colonial politics. Finally, we conclude the course with Michel Foucault's seminal essay and relate the question of the queer enemy to the threat of new human relations

This course explores social mobilization through legal channels. Activists consistently use law and legal institutions to influence public policy, as seen in contemporary examples such as climate change litigation, Black Lives Matter's push for police reform, and the LGBTQ+ community's advocacy for marriage equality. We will examine this dynamic relationship between law and social change. We will tackle questions like: What potential does the law have for bringing about transformative social change? Are there certain areas of the law that are more effective in achieving meaningful change than others? How does the legal system influence the strategies of those seeking to make a difference? What does institutionalizing rights really mean for us? Can we see legal mobilization happening outside of the courtroom? We will also pay special attention to how the pursuit of social change through legal avenues invites a diverse range of stakeholders and participants, not just the aggrieved groups or individuals, but also those who play supportive roles in legal litigation. Additionally, we will examine how various legal systems-whether local, state, federal, religious, or indigenous-interact with each other, sometimes in harmony and other times in conflict, and how this influences legal mobilization.

This workshop is for Human Rights Majors who are either writing a BA Thesis or doing a Capstone Project. It is informally scheduled and meets roughly every other week in Autumn and Winter Quarters. Participants will receive training in scholarly and other skill sets needed to complete their projects; they will workshop their theses and projects with one another and their praeceptor, receiving critical feedback; and they will collectively problem solve. The workshop is intended as a supportive environment, the function of which is to help students realize their vision and push their scholarly limits. It is 0 credits in the Autumn Quarter and 100 credits in the Winter Quarter. 
 
This is a required course for 4th-year Human Rights Majors, unless they are writing a human rights related BA Thesis in another major that has its own workshop. 

The city of Chicago has welcomed over 45,000 migrants and asylum-seekers from Latin America over the past few years and has witnessed efforts to effect a welcoming and sanctuary city through government, non-profit, mutual aid network and individual volunteer work. Students in this course will conduct in-person field research with migrants and service networks to explore the ways that Chicagoans both new and established imagine and attempt to create a sanctuary or welcoming city. Through field research practice, students will gain experience with ethnographic methods of participant-observation, taking fieldnotes, conducting interviews and ethnographic writing. Accompanying course readings will guide us through ethnographic methods, the root causes of migration, migration pathways and infrastructure, refugee and migrant reception and sanctuary city concepts and policies.

This writing and reading course will allow us to explore the city of Chicago and many approaches to studying it and responding to it in prose both fictional and nonfictional. We'll think about issues like crises in housing, asylum, incarceration; about art and space in photographs, public murals, sculpture, architecture; and about plants, animals, and waterways. Students will write shorter exercises, keep a Chicago notebook, and write a longer piece for workshop. Readings may include Eve Ewing, Lori Waxman, Frank London Brown, Gwendolyn Brooks, Rosalyn LaPier, Stuart Dybek, Saul Bellow, Sandra Cisneros, Aleksandar Hemon, Jeanne Gang, Rebecca Zorach, Studs Terkel and more.

This interdisciplinary course explores aesthetics, environmental racism, and a human rights approach to the Commons to inform our perspective on the politics and aesthetics of water from the local to the global. The course will look at issues of scarcity and abundance through the lenses of art and human rights. The course will incorporate work by artist Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle, who will visit the class. Students will consider works by other artists including Mel Chin, Allan Kaprow, LaToya Ruby Frazier, and Fazal Sheikh, to understand how art can confront the 21st century's environmental challenges. Readings will include Susan Sontag's Regarding the Pain of Others, and Fred Moten & Stefano Harney's The Undercommons. The course will include visits to site specific installations by artists Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle and Mel Chin, and visits to Chicago-area natural sites such as the Big Marsh and Lake Michigan. This course is an extension of a collaborative project at the Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry with human rights lawyer Susan Gzesh, artist Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle, and curator Abigail Winograd.

This course will introduce students to the field of human rights through two specific lenses. First, the course will emphasize human rights practices, demonstrating how human rights-in-action relates to and diverges from the ideals and discourses of human rights as laid out in documents like the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Second, the course will view human rights from the perspective of affected communities, centering the experiences and critiques of those on the front lines of human rights crises. Through these two lenses, we will study the three most significant contemporary challenges to human rights in the world today: security regimes emerging from the post-9/11 paradigm of the global war on terror; escalating refugee crises; and climate change.

This course will introduce students to the legal architecture of international human rights law. Whilst the legal framing of rights emphasizes universality and the common good, its application reflects the historical compromises and political uncertainties of the times. This course will explore the tensions that are produced when politics meets 'the law' and examine the issues, actors, doctrines and practices that make up the human rights project. As human rights law is evolutive, we will look at how the human rights project has changed and evolved in connection to historical movements and post-colonial politics and has developed in order to address state violence, 'terrorism', minority rights, women's rights, gender and sexuality, transitional justice, health, and responsibility to protect, to name but a few. We will draw on case studies, including the United States, in order to examine the complicated role of the state as both perpetrator and protector and promoter of human rights. Students will be encouraged to think critically about the human rights project; how does it confront the underlying issues of injustice and abuse, as well as the inherent conceptual and structural limitations of supranational human rights mechanisms in addressing and providing remedies for the problems facing the world today.

The rights of persons with disabilities have become a new frontier of human rights across the world. This course introduces recent developments in concepts, tools, and practices of disability rights both internationally and in different regions/countries. We will pay specific attention to the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, including its principles, provisions on key topics (e.g., institutionalization, education, employment, and political participation), and the role of state and non-state actors in its implementation. We will also consider the implications of disability rights on global social development and humanitarian work. Moreover, we will critically examine barriers and concerns in realizing disability rights, areas where dominant understandings of disability rights fall short, and alternative approaches to conceptualizing and promoting justice for persons with disabilities. The course will consist of reading and critique of literature, large and small group discussions, guest lectures by practitioners, case studies, and student presentations. Students will develop skills to analyze disability policies or design/evaluate disability inclusive development projects in international settings.

Documentary Video Production focuses on the making of independent documentary video. Examples of various modes of documentary production will be screened and discussed. Issues embedded in the genre, such as the ethics, the politics of representation, and the shifting lines between "the real" and "fiction," will be explored. Story development, pre-production strategies, and production techniques will be our focus, in particular-research, relationships, the camera, interviews and sound recording, shooting in available light, working in crews, and post-production editing. Students will work in crews and be expected to purchase a portable hard drive. A five-minute string-out/rough-cut will be screened at the end of the quarter. Students are strongly encouraged to take CMST 23931 Documentary Production II to complete their work. Consent of instructor is required to enroll.

In this course we will explore two main questions, which are central to both contemporary political theory and political discourse: (1) how different concepts and conceptions of freedom ground different theories of social justice and political legitimacy and (2) how to understand the relationship between justice and legitimacy. To what extent are justice and legitimacy separate ideas? Does legitimacy require justice? Are just states necessarily legitimate? We will critically analyze and normatively assess how different contemporary theories have answered, whether explicitly or implicitly, such questions. The course will focus on five major contemporary theories: liberal-egalitarianism as represented by the work of John Rawls; libertarianism, as represented by the work of Robert Nozick, neo-Lockean theories as represented by the work of John Simmons, neo-republicanism as represented by the work of Philip Pettit, and neo-Kantian theories as represented by the work of Arthur Ripstein.

Four thematic clusters structure the second quarter. "Migration, Minorities, and Refugees" examines minority rights, the evolution of legal norms around refugees, and human trafficking. "Late Twentieth Century Human Rights Talk" explores the contestations between rights claims in the political-civil and socio-economic spheres, calls for sexual rights, and cultural representations of human rights abuses. "Global Justice" considers forms of international criminal law, transitional justice, and distributive justice. "Indigenous Rights as Human Rights" takes up the relatively new domain of the rights of indigenous peoples and how they relate to contemporary human rights practice.

Medical disciplines from psychiatry to surgery have all attempted to identify and to treat gendered misalignment, while queer theory and feminisms have simultaneously tried to understand if and how trans- theories should be integrated into their respective intellectual projects. This course looks at the logics of the medical treatment of transgender (and trans- more broadly) in order to consider the mutual entanglement of clinical processes with theoretical ones. Over the quarter we will read ethnographic accounts and theoretical essays, listen to oral histories, discuss the intersections of race and ability with gender, and interrogate concepts like "material bodies" and "objective science". Primary course questions include: 1. How is "trans-" conceptualized, experienced, and lived? How has trans-studies distinguished itself from feminisms and queer theories? 2. What are the objects, processes, and problematics trans- medicine identifies and treats? How is "trans-" understood and operationalized through medical practices? 3. What meanings of health, power, knowledge, gender, and the body are utilized or defined by our authors? What relations can we draw between them

Posters, publications, social media graphics, handbills, and other graphic materials have long played a role in sustaining and shaping social movements. In this course, which is part studio class and part discussion, we will discuss the role of graphic design in building collective identity for social movements, with a particular focus on the labor movement. Students will identify artifacts from contemporary or past social movements and use them as the basis for writing and designing a small publication.

Globalizing and local forces are generating a new politics in the United States and around the world. This course explores this new politics by mapping its emerging elements: the rise of social issues, ethno-religious and regional attachments, environmentalism, gender and life-style identity issues, new social movements, transformed political parties and organized groups, and new efforts to mobilize individual citizens

This course attempts to define health and health care in the context of human rights theory and practice. Does a "right to health" include a "right to health care"? We delineate health care financing in the United States and compare these systems with those of other nations. We explore specific issues of health and medical practice as they interface in areas of global conflict: torture, landmines, and poverty. Readings and discussions explore social determinants of health: housing, educational institutions, employment, and the fraying of social safety nets. We study vulnerable populations: foster children, refugees, and the mentally ill. Lastly, does a right to health include a right to pharmaceuticals? What does the big business of drug research and marketing mean for our own country and the world?

Global climate change, the increase in authoritarian government worldwide, disruptions of global supply chains, and growing problems of debt have fallen with particular ferocity on the postcolonial Global South. In countries with poor public health infrastructures and millions of people already vulnerable and insecure at or below the poverty line, the pandemic has set back many of the improvements in human development of the previous decade. In addition to loss of life, millions have been thrown into abject poverty. This course addresses these and related questions of poverty in the Global South from the particular vantage point of social justice and human rights. The course is built around a set of substantive issues - what one can describe as struggles over systems of livelihood associated with access to control over key resources such as land, forests, minerals, water, food - drawing upon case studies from Latin America, South Asia and sub Saharan Africa in particular. This course seeks to understand the sorts of conflicts and struggles over these sorts of resources in postcolonial settings against a wider backdrop of the political economy of contemporary development.

This course prepares students to relate the academic study of human rights to human rights practice. It will provide training in human rights monitoring, analysis, documentation (including the use of photography and videography), the use of public information and records, intervention and capacity building, trauma informed research, effective storytelling in human rights advocacy, effective interview techniques, stakeholder mapping, statistical analysis in R, mapping technologies and GIS. Importantly, this course will also address the 'ethics' side of field work, including principles of do no harm as well as self-care, which is so critical to human rights work.

This course explores the rise of a vernacular mode of forensic spectatorship through the relationship between two contradictory facets of contemporary visual culture. On the one hand, our screens are flooded with audio-visual documents of state violence, like livestreams of police killings and GoPro footage of Israeli soldiers in Gaza. We rely upon these images to hold perpetrators accountable and to make sense of the increasing complexity and abstraction of global capitalism. On the other hand, our so-called “post-truth” era and its attendant AI and deep fake anxieties has eroded the belief that these images can meaningfully reference a shared reality. While we urgently rely upon photographic images to make sense of the world, we also look at them with suspicion. From this tension arises an everyday fixation with image forensics, registered by cultural texts as wide ranging as true crime shows, conspiracy theory videos, investigative reporting, and popular documentaries. Surrounded with visual evidence, audiences have become forensic analysts. In this class we will explore this tension and mode of spectatorship, grounding both in debates across film and media theory surrounding the evidentiary value of photographic-based images. Through reading primary sources from the history of photography and film, and texts in film theory, documentary studies, critical theory, and forensic science, we will historicize and theorize this popular forensic gaze.

This course traces Indigenous Peoples' role in the emergence of human rights in Latin America, as well as the region’s contributions to universal human rights ideas. As issues of Indigenous, environmental, youth, migrant and gender rights receive more attention worldwide, this class asks students to center Latin America and Indigenous Peoples as they study the evolution of justice and solidarity, while also investigating long-term effects of colonialism, imperialism, authoritarianism, and neoliberalism in various territories. The course will follow a chronological approach starting with the colonial period, where students will explore texts concerned with the rights of Indigenous populations of the Americas, and move on to independence leader’s missives regarding freedom and sovereignty. It will then focus on the various demands and contributions related to political, economic and social rights that emerged during the struggles against military dictatorships in the twentieth century and that continue to this day via processes of transitional justice. The course will end by centering new voices of human rights, particularly the emergence of Indigenous populations in the human rights arena, going from subjects to actors in charge of their own empowerment.

What do people do with the notion of “human rights” in different sociopolitical contexts? In a world where political vocabularies are increasingly losing shared meaning, this undergraduate seminar explores the global circulation and use of human rights concepts through the lens of translation. Students will engage with diverse strands of social theory, linguistic anthropology, and ethnographic and historical work that help us explore various dimensions of translation—such as linguistic glossing, discourse circulation, mediation and mediatization, colonial knowledge practices and postcolonial critique, ethnographic representation, incommensurability, and regimes of (dis-)information. Special attention will be given to how these dynamics enable and circumscribe certain uses of human rights concepts, particularly the notion of freedom, in concrete and comparative situations. Through weekly reading responses, class discussions, and essays/presentations, students will identify real-world instances of translation and analyze their structures using the conceptual tools from the course readings. In doing so, they will develop critical skills in applying social theory to the political and ethical dimensions of contemporary life.

Law is everywhere within the social world. It shapes our everyday lives in countless ways by permitting, prohibiting, protecting and prosecuting native-born citizens and immigrants alike. This course reviews the major theoretical perspectives and sociological research on the relationship between law and society, with an empirical focus on immigrants in the United States, primarily from Mexico and Central America. To begin, we explore the permeation of law in everyday life, legal consciousness, and gap between "law on the books" and "law on the ground." The topic of immigration is introduced with readings on the socio-legal construction of immigration status, theories of international migration, and U.S. immigration law at the national and subnational levels. We continue to study the social impact of law on immigrants through the topics of liminal legality; children, families, and romantic partnerships; policing, profiling, and raids; detention and deportation; and immigrants' rights. This course adopts a "law in action" approach centered on the social, political, and cultural contexts of law as it relates to immigration and social change. It is designed to expose you to how social scientists study and think about law, and to give you the analytical skills to examine law, immigration, and social change relationally.

In 1900, the Swedish feminist sociologist, Ellen Key wrote a book called The Century of the Child, anticipating the age when "childhood" as a social construct would universally come under unprecedented legal, cultural and political scrutiny. Taking a cue from Key's work, this course explores how the "child" became the center of many social, cultural, religious and educational controversies in the history of modern South Asia. We will examine how "childhood" with an accompanying notion of "infantilization", was not only a potent concept in questions of empire, civilization and racial hierarchies, but also one that still gets invoked in contemporary conversations about "development" and "progress". Being a concept loaded with discourses of power, "childhood" lends itself to ideologically inconsistent formations. On one hand, we will see how colonial educational policies, nationalist reckonings and postcolonial reconstructions have variously positioned the "normative child" as the future of the nation, society and family. On the other hand, we will note how children, whose lives do not follow the normative codes, could be perceived as unchildlike, vis-à-vis their class, caste and gender identities. By centering the figure of the "child", we will examine how children's literature, textbooks, biographies, short stories, photographs, advertisements and comics could be important sources for rethinking institutions, social systems and cultural genres of South Asia.

This course is a follow-up to International Human Rights Law and Practice: Civil and Political Rights, offering students an opportunity to deepen their engagement with international human rights law through a focused examination of economic, social and cultural rights (ESCR). These rights—including access to health, housing, food, education, work, social security and cultural participation—are understood as universal and indivisible, yet their implementation raises complex questions of resources, political priorities and accountability. Students will engage with the legal architecture governing economic, social and cultural rights (ESCR), including the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, its Optional Protocol, and relevant regional systems. The course explores central doctrinal elements such as progressive realization, maximum available resources, and minimum core obligations. It will also consider the enforcement mechanisms available at domestic and international levels, noting the persistent challenges of justiciability, resource allocation, and evidentiary barriers that make the effective realization of ESCR particularly difficult in contemporary contexts.

This course will examine the role played by Marxist revolutions, revolutionary movements, and the right-wing dictatorships that have opposed them in shaping Latin American societies and political cultures since the end of World War II. Themes examined will include the relationship among Marxism, revolution, and nation building; the importance of charismatic leaders and icons; the popular authenticity and social content of Latin American revolutions; the role of foreign influences and interventions; the links between revolution and dictatorship; and the lasting legacies of political violence and military rule. Countries examined will include Guatemala, Cuba, Chile, Argentina, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Peru, Venezuela, Bolivia, and Mexico. Assignments: Weekly reading, a midterm exam or paper, a final paper, participation in discussion, and weekly responses or quizzes.

This advanced seminar examines the role of norms, ideas, and identities in world politics. The main goal is to help students understand academic and policy debates over the role of non-material factors in theories of international politics. Our emphasis will be on the tradition of constructivist scholarship in International Relations, its trajectory, and its critics. This course is intended for advanced undergraduates (political science majors and non-majors welcome) with prior coursework in International Relations.

This course focuses on the connections between law and society in modern America. It explores how legal doctrines and constitutional rules have defined individual rights and social relations in both the public and private spheres. It also examines political struggles that have transformed American law. Topics to be addressed include the meaning of rights; the regulation of property, work, race, and sexual relations; civil disobedience; and legal theory as cultural history. Readings include legal cases, judicial rulings, short stories, and legal and historical scholarship.

The right to flee persecution and seek international protection has been codified in international Human Rights and customary law. This course will examine the contemporary transnational refugee regime that has developed around and been informed by this particular rights discourse, particularly in the aftermath of WWII. We will examine various transnational conventions and bodies intended to protect the persecuted, proposed de jure and de facto durable solutions for refugees, and how individuals and communities experience these structures during and after displacement. We also investigate the ways that the transnational refugee regime and its partners (such as NGOs and civil society organizations) are deeply imbricated in broader global power structures and dynamics, creating protections "gaps" and potential rights violations. Specific refugee case studies from around the world will be surveyed in order to contextualize and ground these inquiries.

Coming to terms with diversity in an increasingly multicultural world has become one of the most pressing public policy projects for liberal democracies in the early 21st century. One way to come to terms with diversity is to try to understand the scope and limits of toleration for variety at different national sites where immigration from foreign lands has complicated the cultural landscape. This seminar examines a series of legal and moral questions about the proper response to norm conflict between mainstream populations and cultural minority groups (including old and new immigrants), with special reference to court cases that have arisen in the recent history of the United States.