Fall 2025

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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?

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?

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.

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?