Winter 2026

In recent decades, the community field has come to be viewed as a multiple-paradigm field in which each of the basic models - social planning and research, social-action community organizing, and community development - has been pushed and pulled in various directions. The first part of this course traces the evolving focus of these models, understanding them both as historical responses to the particular conditions of the American city and as strategic approaches that continue to inform contemporary forms of community action.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.