Issues, Institutions, Ideas: Introduction to American Politics

Professor: Simon Gilhooley  

Course Number: PS 102

CRN Number: 10209

Class cap: 22

Credits: 4

Schedule/Location:

Mon  Wed     3:30 PM - 4:50 PM Olin 204

Distributional Area:

SA  Social Analysis   

Crosslists: American & Indigenous Studies

(PS core course ) This course introduces students to the basic institutions and processes of American government. The class is meant to provide students with a grasp of the fundamental dynamics of American politics and the skills to be an effective participant in and critic of the political process. During the semester, we will examine how the government works, interpret current political developments and debates, and consider how to influence the government at various levels.

Authority, Equality, Freedom: Introduction to Political Theory

Professor: Lucas Guimaraes Pinheiro  

Course Number: PS 103

CRN Number: 10210

Class cap: 22

Credits: 4

Schedule/Location:

Mon  Wed     11:50 AM - 1:10 PM Olin 205

Distributional Area:

SA  Social Analysis   

Crosslists: Human Rights; Philosophy

(PS Core Course) This course offers a survey of how political thinkers have understood authority, equality, and freedom in their attempts to make sense of political society and the experiences of its subjects. We will study a plurality of theories about how authority has been—and continues to be—exercised in political societies, as well as a diverse array of ideas for critiquing and confronting authority in our collective quest for equality and freedom. Students will read, discuss, and write about texts by early modern, modern, and contemporary political thinkers who developed theories of authority, equality, and freedom, including Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Alexis de Tocqueville, John Stuart Mill, Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Simone de Beauvoir. These thinkers will invite us to explore how authority operates within political societies and what must be done to legitimately overcome authority whenever it becomes a threat to equality and freedom. In so doing, we will examine the meaning of such values and ideas as progress, property, morality, rights, liberty, truth, justice, and domination while also considering how these values and ideas have shaped—and continue to shape—political life and society. This course is one of the core courses required for moderating in Politics. 

Civic Engagement and Social Action

Professor: Jonathan Becker and Erin Cannan

Course Number: PS 209

CRN Number: 10413

Class cap: 22

Credits: 4

Schedule/Location:

 Tue  Thurs    10:00 AM - 11:20 AM OSUN online class

Distributional Area:

SA  Social Analysis  D+J Difference and Justice

Crosslists: Human Rights

What does it mean to be engaged with your community? What can students participating in civic engagement projects learn from others in universities in places like Haiti, Ghana, Kyrgyzstan, Bangladesh and the United States? This course will examine historical, philosophical and practical elements of civic engagement while exploring the underlying question of what it means to be civically engaged in the early 21st century. Together, students will explore issues related to political participation, civil society, associational life, social justice, and personal responsibility, as well as how issues like race and socio-economic status impact civic participation. The class reflects a balance between study and the practice of engagement, which includes interrogating theoretical notions of civic life, while also empowering students to be active participants in the communities in which they are situated. The culminating project asks students to propose a civic engagement project in their home or local community. This course will feature workshops, lectures and seminar discussions. Special class visits will incorporate experiences of civic leaders, local officials, global not-for-profit leaders, and volunteers from communities proximate to participating OSUN campuses.  This course uniquely combines three types of course offerings into one.  It is an OSUN Network Collaborative Course, an OSUN Online course (meaning it will be primarily offered online) and an Engaged Liberal Arts and Science (ELAS) course.  This means that there are multiple ways we engage with ideas and people. The course is also a core course for OSUN's Certificate in Civic Engagement. There will be additional in-person meetings for students in Bard Annandale.

Coalition and the Politics of Listening

Professor: Mie Inouye  

Course Number: PS 217

CRN Number: 10634

Class cap: 22

Credits: 4

Schedule/Location:

 Tue  Thurs    11:50 AM - 1:10 PM Olin 201

Distributional Area:

SA  Social Analysis  D+J Difference and Justice

Crosslists: American & Indigenous Studies; Human Rights

How have anti-imperialist organizers invoked the “third world” and the “fourth world” as the basis for coalitional organizing between oppressed peoples who are differently-situated vis-à-vis global capitalism and empire? What were the advantages and limitations of these concepts in past anti-imperialist struggles, and what—if any—is their relevance today? What is the role of both listening and pushing in efforts to build political relationships across differently-situated social groups? This course will explore these questions through three case studies of twentieth-century Marxist-Leninist-inspired anti-imperialist social movements: the U.S.-based Rainbow Coalition, the North-America-based Red Power movement, and the Palestinian Revolution of the 1960s and 1970s and its U.S. reverberations. Students will develop and write an original research paper on a coalitional social movement of their choice. Readings by Jodi Dean, Vijay Prashad, V.I. Lenin, Mao Zedong, Johanna Fernández, Jakobi Williams, Vine Deloria, Jr., Glenn Couldhardt, George Manuel and Michael Posluns, Michael Fischbach, and Ghassan Kanafani.

Free Speech

Professor: Pinar Kemerli  

Course Number: PS 218

CRN Number: 10631

Class cap: 22

Credits: 4

Schedule/Location:

Mon  Wed     10:10 AM - 11:30 AM Olin 205

Distributional Area:

SA  Social Analysis  D+J Difference and Justice

Crosslists: Human Rights

(Human Rights Core Course) “Free speech” is seen as a core liberal freedom and democratic right, but its exercise and reach is often meticulously controlled. Indeed, “which” speech, and “whose” speech, is protected as “free speech” can be a major source of political controversy. In this course, we examine “free speech” and contemporary debates around it as a site of ideological struggle and political confrontation. Beginning with a survey of the historical roots and evolution of “free speech” as a political right, the course will move to analyze how the exercise of this right has been controlled, curtailed, and at times all together repressed on the basis of case studies selected from across the world. We will address, for instance, the controversies around the Charlie Hebdo case in France, repressions of debates on Armenian genocide in Turkey, attacks on Critical Race Theory and the BDS movement in the U.S., and recent concerns about a “Palestine exceptionalism” to free speech. Theorists and activists covered will include John Stuart Mill, Eugene Debs, Emma Goldman, Hannah Arendt, Jeremy Waldron, Michel Foucault, Edward Said, Talal Asad, Judith Butler, and Noura Erakat.

Feminist Foreign Policy

Professor: Elmira Bayrasli  

Course Number: PS 258

CRN Number: 10278

Class cap: 18

Credits: 2

Schedule/Location:

 Tues     10:10 AM - 11:30 AM Olin 101

Distributional Area:

SA  Social Analysis   

Crosslists: Human Rights

Sweden introduced “feminist foreign policy” in 2014. This policy puts women and girls at the center of every policy decision, with the ultimate aim of advancing gender equality around the world. Since then, several other countries have adopted a “feminist foreign policy”: Canada, Mexico, France, Germany, Netherlands. There is a movement in the United States to adopt a feminist foreign policy. This class will explore the role of women in foreign policy making and the role of gender in foreign policy. It will work to answer these questions: How do we define a feminist foreign policy? How can that be achieved? Can the US adopt a feminist foreign policy? If so, what does that look like?

Power, Diplomacy, and Warfare in Global Affairs

Professor: Frederic Hof  

Course Number: PS 273

CRN Number: 10279

Class cap: 18

Credits: 4

Schedule/Location:

Mon  Wed     10:10 AM - 11:30 AM Olin 307

Distributional Area:

HA  Historical Analysis   

Crosslists: Global & International Studies; Historical Studies

This course explores the evolving nature of state power in the 21st century, the history, complexity, and changing nature of diplomacy in the projection of state power, and the evolution of warfare from the time of Napoleon to the present, with emphasis on the utility of military force as an instrument of state power projection.  The objective is to illuminate the relationship between force and statecraft in the modern (post-Napoleonic) era, focusing on the uses and limitations of military force.  Students will emerge from this course with a solid grasp of “hard”, “soft,” and “smart” power as defined principally by Joseph Nye, an understanding of the goals, history, constraints and structures of diplomacy, and a firm grasp of the state-people-army revolution introduced by Napoleon, its doctrinal codification by Clausewitz, its application in the American Civil War and the Franco-Prussian War, and the catastrophic results of total industrial warfare in two world wars.  Students will likewise become familiar with what General Sir Rupert Smith labels “war among the people,” the prevailing form of armed conflict since 1945 and the principal challenge to the utility of military force.

American Anthropocenes and the Politics of Nature

Professor: Bill Dixon  

Course Number: PS 286

CRN Number: 10275

Class cap: 22

Credits: 4

Schedule/Location:

 Tue  Thurs    10:10 AM - 11:30 AM Olin 205

Distributional Area:

SA  Social Analysis   

Crosslists: Environmental Studies; Environmental & Urban Studies; Philosophy; Science, Technology, Society

This course will reconsider the politics of climate change by way of an inquiry into ancient, early modern, and contemporary conceptions of “nature.” In the first part of the course, we will rethink the nature/politics relationship in conversation with some canonical texts and thinkers, including Genesis, Prometheus Bound, Aristotle, Lucretius, Saint Paul, Baruch Spinoza, Immanuel Kant, Friedrich Nietzsche, Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, and Emma Goldman, among others. In the second part of the course, we will consider three contemporary accounts of politics and nature – cosmopolitanism (Martha Nussbaum), post-secularism (Jacques Derrida), and “the new materialism” (Jane Bennett and Bruno Latour) – and focus on their respective understandings of democracy and the ethical status of nonhuman animals. In the final part of the course, we will shift our attention to the present-day United States and critically examine how various social movements, zoos, corporations, religions, digital media, films, and several American Presidents have imagined themselves to be agents for - and against – climate policy. We will ask what difference the idea of nature – situated as a philosophically, religiously, and politically contested concept – might make to the lived experience of citizenship in the US, as both climate change and climate politics are accelerating and globalizing. 

Islamic Political Thought

Professor: Pinar Kemerli  

Course Number: PS 3020

CRN Number: 10282

Class cap: 14

Credits: 4

Schedule/Location:

  Th     3:10 PM - 5:30 PM Olin 308

Distributional Area:

SA  Social Analysis  D+J Difference and Justice

Crosslists: Middle Eastern Studies; Philosophy; Study of Religions

Why did major Islamist theorists of the modern era find democracy and secular governance objectionable? What injustices did they associate with Western modernity and its impositions? And what alternative visions of justice, equality, dignity and political renewal did they advance to overcome what they understood to be their societies' decline and oppression? This course will examine these and related questions by studying 20th Century Islamic political thought as a modern experience of critique and resistance against imperialism, Western modernity and secularism. It will start with an overview of the historical and political conditions that have come to shape the political visions of Muslim thinkers and theorists of this era, and then move to examine the alternative political ideas and ideals that they offered to overcome these conditions. Our purpose is to understand, on the one hand, how these thinkers responded to colonial domination, capitalist exploitation, and the social change that secular modernity brought about, and to, on the other, explore the promises and limitations of the alternative political imaginaries that they thereby advanced. The final part of the course focuses on the reception of these Islamist thinkers and their theories in Euro-America today. We will in this context study the pressures of the Global War on Terror and new forms of imperial domination and Islamophobia, as well as intellectual efforts to integrate some of these thinkers within a more inclusive and global political theory "canon." Thinkers covered include Sayyid Qutb, Ali Shariati, Malcolm X, Edward Said, Ihsan Eliaçık, Eqbal Ahmad, Saba Mahmood, Roxanne Euben, Humeira Iqtidar. Jaspir K. Puar, and Tareq Baconi.

Labor and Democracy

Professor: Mie Inouye  

Course Number: PS 308

CRN Number: 10281

Class cap: 15

Credits: 4

Schedule/Location:

 Tue      3:10 PM - 5:30 PM Olin 308

Distributional Area:

SA  Social Analysis   

Crosslists: American & Indigenous Studies; Human Rights

Ongoing unionization efforts at Starbucks and Amazon, the United Auto Workers’ recent successful “stand up” strike, and a narrowly-averted strike by UPS workers last summer mark a period of historic resurgence in the U.S. labor movement. These efforts have been profoundly shaped by decades-long attempts by left-wing labor organizers to foment rank-and-file activism within the labor movement, even as they also illustrate the challenges workers face as they attempt to form and maintain internally democratic labor unions. What does democracy mean, and what can it look like within a labor union? And what is the relationship between the internal democracy of labor unions and their external effects? This seminar begins from these four sites of contemporary labor resurgence (Amazon, Starbucks, the UAW, and UPS) to trace the reform movements and theoretical traditions that helped shape them. We will also study scholarly accounts of the relationship between labor unions and democracy produced by political scientists and sociologists. This course is accompanied by a speaker series, which will give students the opportunity to discuss our guiding questions with experienced labor organizers and scholars. Authors include Robert Michels, Seymour Martin Lipset, Jake Grumbach and Paul Frymer, Bill Fletcher Jr., William Z. Foster, James Boggs, Jane McAlevey, and Kim Moody. 

"All Men Are Created Equal": Dissent and the Declaration of Independence

Professor: Simon Gilhooley  

Course Number: PS 329

CRN Number: 10280

Class cap: 15

Credits: 4

Schedule/Location:

    Fri   9:10 AM - 11:30 AM Reem Kayden Center 102

Distributional Area:

SA  Social Analysis   

Crosslists: American & Indigenous Studies; Historical Studies; Human Rights

Every year, on the Fourth of July, Americans celebrate the nation by dating its origin back to the Declaration of Independence. But as soon as it was published in the summer of 1776, the American Declaration of Independence became a method for highlighting the gaps between the rhetoric and practices of the United States and resisting the power structures it gave rise to. Abolitionists, suffragists, populists, and even conservatives had lauded the Declaration and used it to offer visions of an alternative United States, while others have critiqued the document for its celebration of values regarded as outdated and regressive. Undertaking an historical survey of these uses of Declaration by dissenting traditions within the United States, this course will interrogate the place of the Declaration within American politics and culture. We will begin by reflecting upon the context that gave rise to the document, and its reception by various audiences, before exploring the uses to which it has been put over the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. We will conclude our course by thinking about how, if at all, the Declaration remains relevant to contemporary life in the United States.

Political Violence and Terrorism

Professor: Christopher McIntosh  

Course Number: PS 352

CRN Number: 10283

Class cap: 15

Credits: 4

Schedule/Location:

Mon       12:30 PM - 2:50 PM Olin 308

Distributional Area:

SA  Social Analysis   

Crosslists: Global & International Studies; Human Rights

The September 2001 terrorist attacks irrevocably changed US politics and foreign policy, giving rise to nearly two decades of war, expanded surveillance domestically and abroad, the use of torture and indefinite detention and a targeted killing policy conducted primarily via drone strikes around the globe. More recently, the January 6th attacks on the US Capitol evidenced what can happen when white nationalism, hate, and right wing ideologies are perpetuated by powerful political actors. While neither is a new phenomenon, it’s only relatively recently that terrorism and right wing violence have come to dominate the US national security agenda. Political violence, terrorism, and the propagation of hate-based ideologies have a long history in the United States This seminar will provide a theoretical and empirical examination of this type of violence as a political phenomenon. The first part of the course explores the conceptual and theoretical debates surrounding political violence within the United States and abroad typically characterized as terrorism. Topics discussed will include the distinctions between terrorism and other forms of political violence, individual and group motivations for using terrorism to achieve political goals, the role of religion and ideology in motivating terrorist groups, and the importance of state sponsorship in supporting terrorist activity and individual acts of violence like hate crimes. The second part of the course will address the challenges of government responses, including the strengths and weaknesses of counterterrorist tools such as military force, diplomacy, intelligence and law enforcement, the relationship between violence and democracy, and the role of the international community. In the final part of the course we will situate the contemporary US experience with terrorism, right wing violence and hate crimes in a comparative and historical perspective.

Keywords for Our Times: Understanding Israel/Palestine

Professor: Michelle Murray and Ziad Abu-Rish

Course Number: CC 120 A

CRN Number: 10629

Class cap: 30

Credits: 2

Schedule/Location:

 Tue  Thurs    1:30 PM - 2:50 PM Reem Kayden Center 103

Jan 29 – March 26

Distributional Area:

HA SA  Historical Analysis Social Analysis   

Crosslists: Global & International Studies; Human Rights; Jewish Studies; Middle Eastern Studies; Politics

Keywords for Our Times: Understanding Israel/Palestine

Professor: Michelle Murray and Ziad Abu-Rish  

Course Number: CC 120 B

CRN Number: 10630

Class cap: 20

Credits: 4

Schedule/Location:

 Tue  Thurs    1:30 PM - 2:50 PM Reem Kayden Center 103

Distributional Area:

HA SA  Historical Analysis Social Analysis   

Crosslists: Global & International Studies; Human Rights; Jewish Studies; Middle Eastern Studies; Politics

Game Theory

Course Number: ECON 203

CRN Number: 10185

Class cap: 22

Credits: 4

Professor:

Aniruddha Mitra

Schedule/Location:

Mon  Wed     11:50 AM - 1:10 PM Hegeman 204

Distributional Area:

MC  Mathematics and Computing   

Crosslists:

Economics & Finance; Environmental & Urban Studies; Environmental Studies; Global & International Studies; Politics

Student Protest and Youth Activism in Modern China

Course Number: HIST 239

CRN Number: 10309

Class cap: 22

Credits: 4

Professor:

Robert Culp

Schedule/Location:

Mon  Wed     11:50 AM - 1:10 PM Reem Kayden Center 102

Distributional Area:

HA  Historical Analysis   

Crosslists:

Asian Studies; Global & International Studies; Human Rights; Politics

Constitutional Law

Course Number: HR 243

CRN Number: 10300

Class cap: 30

Credits: 4

Professor:

Roger Berkowitz Peter Rosenblum

Schedule/Location:

Mon  Wed     3:30 PM - 4:50 PM Henderson Comp. Center 106

Distributional Area:

SA  Social Analysis   

Crosslists:

American & Indigenous Studies; Philosophy; Politics

Asylum

Course Number: HR 282

CRN Number: 10295

Class cap: 16

Credits: 4

Professor:

Peter Rosenblum Danielle Riou

Schedule/Location:

 Tue  Thurs    11:50 AM - 1:10 PM Olin 307

Distributional Area:

MBV  Meaning, Being, Value  D+J Difference and Justice

Crosslists:

Global & International Studies; Politics

Marx as Literature

Course Number: LIT 261

CRN Number: 10371

Class cap: 22

Credits: 4

Professor: Alys Moody  

Schedule/Location:

Mon  Wed     5:10 PM - 6:30 PM Olin 204

Distributional Area:

LA  Literary Analysis in English  D+J Difference and Justice

Crosslists: German Studies; Politics