Course:	ECON 227 The Right to Employment
Professor:	Pavlina Tcherneva
CRN:	15588		Schedule/Location:	Mon Wed 10:10 AM – 11:30 AM Campus Center WEIS
Distributional Area:		SA Social Analysis D+J Difference and Justice
Credits: 4					Class cap: 20
Crosslists: Africana Studies; American Studies; Environmental & Urban Studies; Human Rights; Sociology

In 1944, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt warned, “People who are hungry and out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made.” Today, the COVID-19 crisis and mass unemployment have once again exposed the pervasive pathologies in the economy, such as inequality, poverty, and discrimination that reproduce systemic racial, gender and environmental injustice. Roosevelt responded to the economic calamity of his time—the Great Depression—with far-reaching economic policies and an appeal for what he called a Second (Economic) Bill of Rights that led with the right to decent and remunerative employment. “Jobs for All” was a signature demand during the Civil Rights era, when Martin Luther King, Jr. and Coretta Scott King insisted that unemployment is a key force for racial subjugation. Today, the Job Guarantee has been called perhaps the most crucial component of the Green New Deal Resolution, a program that ensures a just transition for all workers and an antidote to systemic racial and gender discrimination that emerges from labor markets. This interdisciplinary course traces the history of the struggle to secure the right to employment for all. It will focus on the economic, legal, and policy developments in the United States, and will introduce students to some international policy initiatives and innovative programs. A key question for discussion is whether these proposals and concrete policies have advanced the goal of equity and economic justice. Students will read legislative documents, economic analyses, policy proposals, and program reviews. This course is part of the Racial Justice Initiative, an interdisciplinary collaboration among students and faculty to further the understanding of racial inequality and injustice in the United States and beyond.

Course:	LAIS 204 Latin American and Caribbean Revolutions
Professor:	Miles Rodriguez
CRN:	15663		Schedule/Location:	Tue Thurs 11:50 AM - 1:10 PM Olin 304
Distributional Area:		HA Historical Analysis D+J Difference and Justice
Credits: 4					Class cap: 15
Crosslists: American Studies; Global & International Studies; Historical Studies; Human Rights

Latin America is often considered a land of revolution. In fact, very few revolutions occurred in Latin America in the twentieth century, but there were many revolutionary movements. This class explores the major revolutions in twentieth-century Latin America and their results for other parts of Latin America, including the Mexican Revolution and the Cuban Revolution. It also examines the more common phenomenon of people’s movements and revolutionary movements in Latin America that did not participate in revolutions, especially in the parts of the Caribbean colonized by the Spanish Empire, including islands and parts of Central and South America. Using primary sources from the participants in the revolutionary processes and movements and recently published scholarship on them, the goals of the class are to understand why revolutions happened when they did, why they often did not happen, and how revolution as ideology, concept, and process mattered to the meanings of Latin America in the twentieth century. The two main countries that this class studies, Mexico and Cuba, were and are ethnically and racially diverse countries and the class deals with the different meanings and forms of diversity in their respective modern contexts. The revolutions the class studies also derived from conflicts over differences in class, geography, nationality, political affiliation, race, socio-economic background, and, inequality. This course is part of the Racial Justice Initiative, an interdisciplinary collaboration among students and faculty to further the understanding of racial inequality and injustice in the United States and beyond.