Fall 2007 & Spring 2008 Courses

Course descriptions are immediately following. There may be periodic changes and additions, particularly to Spring 2007 courses, so please check back frequently.

To view courses for 2006-07, click here.

The Department of Political Science emphasizes theoretically and historically informed approaches to contemporary political issues. Research interests of faculty and students include political theory in all its diversity, political institutions in comparative and historical perspective, democracy and its challenges, identities and politics, and the international dimensions of contemporary politics.
 

DEMOCRACIES IN THEORY AND PRACTICE

GSOC 5046
Civil Society and Democratic Life in the Post-Colonial World: A Tocquevillian Perspective
Spring 2008. Three credits.
Carlos Forment
See Sociology for course description.

GPOL 5330
Conceptions of Democracy: History, Theory, Comparison
Fall 2007. Three credits.
Sanjay Ruparelia
This course analyses the origins, spread and record of modern representative democracies in historical, theoretical, and comparative fashion. The first part examines formative moments in the conception of modern representative democracy in revolutionary England, America, and France; its subsequent extension in the advanced industrialized West; and its vicissitudes in the postcolonial South. The second part of the course assesses the success and failure of various democratic regimes, and modern democratic politics in general, in securing greater political stability, personal liberty, economic development, social equality, and cultural recognition for their citizenries. The final part examines the possibilities and limits of transforming the practices of modern representative democracy in an era of globalization. The readings include a variety of authors in the traditions of classical political theory (such as Madison, Tocqueville, Marx), comparative politics (Fukuyama, Przeworski, Dahl), and historical sociology (Moore, Rueschemeyer, Mann).

GPOL 6428
Democracy and the Mass Media
Fall 2007. Three credits.
Philip Green
“It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being,” Marx wrote, “but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness.” In modern capitalist societies, what is the role of the creators of commodities for the mass media of communication (television, the press, cinema) in consciousness formation? How did the predominant mode of production of cultural commodities come about, what are its social effects, and can we conceive of alternatives to it that might be more congruent with our notions of democratic political equality? Primary topics of discussion will include the concepts of ideology and representation. To call a production or communication “ideological” is to suggest that it is in some sense not a complete representation of the truth: is “truth” in fact a viable category today? If not, what are the implications of rejecting the very notion of its reality? Should there be, and are there in fact, serious distinctions between the spheres of “information” and “entertainment?” Who shapes the content of these spheres, the owners of the means of communication, professional communications elites, or mass audiences? Who “represents” and who is “represented” in the production of images and texts for the mass audience? Reading and, especially, viewing of commercial cultural commodities are an integral feature of the seminar. Assigned texts include Marcuse, Habermas, Chomsky, Pierre Bourdieu, Louis Althusser, Umberto Eco, Raymond Williams, Stuart Hall, John Fiske, and others.
 

POLITICAL THOUGHT AND ITS HISTORY

GPOL 6127
Modernity and Its Discontents (A)
Fall 2007. Three credits.
James Miller
This seminar brings new students together to explore a variety of themes and texts that epitomize some of the critical concerns of our age. Among the issues discussed are freedom and the problem of progress; the end of slavery and the implications of European world domination; new views of human nature; the idea of the avant-garde; and the moral implications of modern war and totalitarianism. Among the authors read are Rousseau, Kant, Goethe, Robespierre, Condorcet, Olaudah Equiano, Hegel, Marx, Dostoevsky, Joseph Conrad, Freud, Darwin, Ernst Jünger, Georg Lukács, Marinetti, André Breton, Tadeusz Borowski, Walter Benjamin, Hannah Arendt, and Michel Foucault.

GPOL 6334
The Political Thought of Carl Schmitt
Spring 2008. Three credits.
Andreas Kalyvas
The seminar discusses Carl Schmitt’s political thought from his earlier texts in the Weimar Republic to the post-World War II period. Particular attention is given to his break from political Catholicism, his concepts of the political, sovereignty, the exception, constituent power, and representation, his critique of liberalism, as well as his post-Weimar work on international law and empire, and his reflections on partisan and guerilla warfare. Through a close reading of primary sources, the seminar explores the promises and limitations of Schmitt’s political theory and assess its relevance for democratic theory. We evaluate its critical implications for contemporary debates on legitimacy and legality, pluralism and agonism, power and authority, deliberation and decision, reason and will, constitutionalism, political theology, and the crisis of state sovereignty and globalization. Finally, the seminar discusses several critics, old and new, and ponder on the possibility and/or desirability for a Left appropriation of Schmitt in the direction of a radical and insurgent politics of popular sovereignty. In addition to Schmitt, we read Otto Kirchheimer, Franz Neumann, Hans Blumenberg, Leo Strauss, Jacques Derrida, Jürgen Habermas, Chantal Mouffe, Giorgio Agamben, and Slavoj Žižek.

GPOL 6352
Sovereignty and Its Critics
Fall 2007. Three credits.
Ayse Banu Bargu
What is the promise of sovereignty? What are its theoretical sources, internal paradoxes, and political implications? In this course, we will inquire into the concept of sovereignty and its relationship to different thematics: state and law, violence and resistance, ideology and history. We trace its course in Western political theory, from early modern to contemporary, and examine its significance for recent debates and events in politics. We engage with how sovereignty has been problematized by its critics, theoretical and practical. We question its centrality to our political imaginary from the lens of alternative conceptualizations of the political, highlighting the tensions and dilemmas around the concept and their implications for emancipatory political agendas. Through close readings of a range of theorists, including Machiavelli, Hobbes, Rousseau, Godwin, Paine, Marx, Bakunin, Kropotkin, Schmitt, Althusser, Foucault, Negri, and Agamben, we explore both the appeal of sovereignty and that of its critics.

GPOL 6431
Critical Theory Today: Habermas and Beyond
Fall 2007. Three credits.
Nancy Fraser
Offered in conjunction with the November/December 2007 Hannah Arendt symposium, which bears the same name, this seminar examines the state of critical theory today and assess its future prospects, asking “ what is living and what is dead in critical theory?” We begin by revisiting Habermas’s reconstruction of its normative and social-theoretical foundations. Then, aiming to explore possible “post-Habermassian” futures for critical theory, we survey work by the invited Arendt symposium speakers: Etienne Balibar, Luc Boltanski, Judith Butler, Dipesh Chakrabarty, and Axel Honneth. Key issues include the relations among political philosophy, social theory, and cultural critique; the relative weight of Kantian, Hegelian, and Nietzschean moments; the relation of the theory to its addressees; the role of moral psychology versus discourse theory in establishing the theory’s normative underpinnings; the possibility/desirability of a “grand” totalizing theory versus a “modest” disciplinary division of labor; and the challenges of feminism, postmodernism, post-structuralism, postcolonialism and globalization theory.

GPOL 6466
Parallel Lives: Emerson and Nietzsche
Spring 2008. Three credits.
James E. Miller
By comparing and contrasting the two most prominent prophets of modern self-reliance—one a democrat honored in his day, the other an aristocrat consecrated only after he had descended into madness—this seminar will follow in detail how each forged his own strong style, after suffering through a crisis over what path in life to take. Emerson resigned a job as one of Boston’s most promising young ministers in 1832, in order to become an itinerant exponent of a new philosophy of life. A little over a generation later, Friedrich Nietzsche, a kindred spirit inspired in part by Emerson’s essays, resigned his professorship in philology at the University of Basel in 1879, in order to become a essayist and self-reliant philosopher. The course will begin with a survey of Emerson’s early journals and letters, a reading of the public lectures that first won him fame, and then a study of his first book, Nature, followed by a close reading of selected early Essays. The rest of the course will track Nietzsche’s development from 1872, when he first thought about resigning from his teaching job, to 1884; we will focus first on early notebooks and some unpublished essays, and then read seriatim the published works that followed—Untimely Meditations; Human, All Too Human; Daybreak; the first four books of The Gay Science; and the first three parts of Thus Spoke Zarathustra.
 

IDENTITIES, CULTURE, AND POLITICS

GPOL 5020
Radicalism and Its Discontents: The 1960s–Present
Fall 2007. Three credits.
Eli Zaretsky
A history of the Left since the 1960s, including the women’s movement, gay liberation, ecology, European social democracy, Solidarity and the Samizdat, anti globalization, global feminism, Mideast democracy movements and the Chinese “new left.”

GHIS 5233
Gender, Politics, and History
Spring 2008. Three credits.
Elaine Abelson
The construction of gender is shaped by concrete historical, social, and cultural factors, and the goal of this course is to integrate history and theory in order to more fully understand the social construction of knowledge and “truth,” as well as the categories that govern our understanding of gender. The course approaches the history of women from the vantage point of feminist scholarship and theories about gender. We examine the social, economic, and political positions of women (and men) in the 19th and 20th centuries in order to explore and evaluate structures of inequality, racial categories, and debates about the nature and role of women in the United States.

GPOL 5311
Immigration and Racial Politics
Fall 2007. Three credits.
Victoria Hattam
We are living through the third great immigration wave in American history. How are demographic changes over the last forty years affecting the contours of cultural and political life? How do immigrants position themselves in terms of race? How does the state classify immigrants groups? What are the future possibilities of forging robust political alliances between immigrants and African-Americans? Drawing on recent work across the social sciences as well as extensive primary sources, the course examines the politics of immigrant and racial difference in 20th- and 21st-century United States. Special attention will be given to Jewish immigration in the early twentieth century and Mexican immigration across the 20th century.

GPOL 5315
Visual Politics
Spring 2008. Three credits.
Victoria Hattam
Scholars have argued for decades that appearances of order and coherence are themselves ruses of power masking the heterogeneity that persists within all social formations. This course explores how otherwise incongruous political elements have been sutured together visually. Readings are drawn from across the social sciences and humanities. We begin by recapping critiques of order and then move to the visual. Emphasis is on everyday visuality, but graffiti, cartoons, photographs are also considered. Particular attention is given to moments of visual reconfiguration as moments of change. Students write two papers; one reflecting on the course readings, the other analyzing a contemporary site of visual politics.

GLIB 5514
“The Dialectics of Women and Enlightenment”
Fall 2007. Three credits.
Gina Walker
In this course, we study the intersection of revolution, gender, and genre in late Enlightenment and early Romantic thought to reveal women’s challenges to enlightened discourse that helped shape the project of Enlightenment. We interrupt the conversation among “canonical male forefathers” (Mary Wollstonecraft’s phrase) to consider alternative contemporaneous theories of rights and responsibilities. We examine the dialogue between texts by women and men to interrogate the modern construction of knowledge, including the precincts of “natural philosophy,” “Science,” “Self,” “Sex,” and “Race.” Beginning at the end of the 17th century, we trace the gendered diffusion of Newtonianism and the Christian Enlightenment, the complex influence of Rousseau, and the radical deployment of the Cult of Sensibility by intellectuals in England, Europe, and America. We investigate the politics of fiction and life-writing as practiced by reformers and their critics in the print war of the 1790s that culminate in the works of Jane Austen. We read Descartes, Poullain de la Barre, and Anna Maria van Schurman; Mary Astell, Damaris Masham, and John Locke; Voltaire and marquise Du Châtelet; Phillis Wheatley, David Hume, and Thomas Paine; Catharine Macaulay and Edmund Burke; Diderot, Condorcet, Olympe de Gouges, and Marie Madeleine Jodin; William Godwin, Wollstonecraft, Mary Hays, Mary Robinson, Elizabeth Hamilton, Austen—and, of course, Rousseau. We also track changes in the historiography and critical representations of Enlightenment feminisms from their time to ours.

GHIS 5153
Politics, Religion, and Society: The Islamic World, 1800–1900
Spring 2008. Three credits.
Neguin Yavari
This course, a modern history of the Islamic world, traces the evolution of Islamic societies. The rule of the caliphs, along with the legal and theological affiliations that had served as primary markers of identity since the 10th century, had ended with the Mongol invasions of the 13th century. In the 16th century, the Islamic world was decidedly polar in its formation, with Sunnism and Shi‘ism emerging as umbrella institutions appropriating virtually all types of ideological as well as intellectual dissent. Sufi orders gave birth to powerful kingdoms, Turkic rulers prevailed over the Arabs, Iran became Shi‘i, and religious and ethnic identities were conflated with political and national ones. Against this backdrop, Western encroachment, the genesis of resistance to the colonial order, and the primacy of sovereign states subsumed Islamic politics in the 19th and 20th centuries. Topics include understanding the political culture of Islam in the temporal context of modernism, and the Islamic public’s response to the social and economic changes that ushered in the modern world; how secularism found expression in the political vocabulary of the Islamic societies, and what it meant; how Islamic modernists challenged their ancien regime, and more broadly, how modern Islam appropriated its past; the influence of modern Islamic movements on social mores and political expectations, on such issues as identity, gender, and civic and political engagement. Cross-listed as LHIS 4503.
 

INTERNATIONAL POLITICS

GPOL 5170
Transnationalism
Spring 2008. Three credits.
Riva Kastoryano
A flourishing literature in social sciences with regard to the settlement of postwar immigrants emphasizes the intensification of transborder relations, and the social and political socialization and mobilizations beyond boundaries. Such transnational practices of social relations lead individuals and groups settled in different national societies to interact with each other in a new global space where cultural and political characteristic of national societies are combined with emerging multilevel and multinational activities. Transnationalism is a global phenomenon. It takes into account the context of globalization and economic uncertainty that facilitates the construction of worldwide networks. Its institutionalization requires a coordination of activities based most of the time on common references—objective or subjective—and common interest among members; a coordination of resources, information, technology, and sites of social power across national borders for political, cultural, economic purposes. It therefore becomes a new space of participation beyond territorially delimited nation-states challenging the single allegiance required by membership to a political community represented by one nation and consolidated by one state; it brings to light multiple membership and multiple loyalties leading to a confusion between rights and identity, culture and politics, states and nations, citizenship, and territoriality. Transnationalism can take different forms: from simple transborder social relations to a new understanding of nationalism. It creates new expressions of belonging and political engagement as well as a “de-territorialized” understanding of “nation.” It transforms territory into a space, produces new identifications—de facto transnational—creates a civil society beyond borders, and generates an unbounded public sphere. It fashions new power relationships with states which are concurrently engaging the process of globalization through economy and culture. Many questions with regard to membership, allegiances and affiliations arise from these developments. The main question is how transnationalism gives new strength to the national question and becomes a stake of legitimacy in the international system. This interdisciplinary course tries to answer these questions from empirical, theoretical, and normative perspectives. The discussions will focus on identity politics and its effects on the identification of groups and people beyond borders, on the relationship with states, on international politics.

GPOL 6447
Borders
Spring 2008. Three credits.
Ross Poole
The modern state has claimed for itself a number of exclusive rights (law making and enforcement, taxation, administration and surveillance) over a clearly demarcated territory. It claimed the right to defend the boundaries of that territory against the incursions of other states and to control the movement of people, its own citizens and others, across those boundaries. Those from outside its borders—foreigners—may become residents only with the permission of the state, and that permission is not always easily given. The relationship between state power and territorial boundaries has been more often taken for granted than defended. The most influential arguments in favor of boundaries have been based on nationalist considerations: because a community has a traditional attachment to a “homeland,” it also has the right to exercise political power in that territory. While this argument has not been widely accepted by political theorists, only a few—though these include Kant and Marx—have explicitly argued for more universalistic conceptions of politics. Most have tacitly assumed that the boundaries of the state defined the locus of political theory. What lay outside—“international relations”—was of marginal interest. This assumption, always dubious, is now unsupportable. Transnational economic relations have implicated states in matters of law and politics well outside their territorial boundaries. State borders have become increasingly porous, zones of hybridity, not lines of exclusion. In some countries, cultural minorities have rediscovered their nationalist roots, and seek to redraw state boundaries to recognize their independence. Wealthy citizens have chosen a different route to a not dissimilar end: they have used the rights of private property to created gated communities to isolate their lives from the contamination, not just of aliens, but also of their fellow citizens. And where territorial boundaries are not easily drawn, groups have drawn other borders (culture, language, life style) to affirm their difference or privilege. In this course, we look at the imperatives and technologies (economic, political, administrative, military, cartographic, etc.) that made the modern conception of borders possible; and at recent developments that threaten them. However, our main concern will be with questions about the legitimacy of borders. We examine assumptions about the territorial nature of politics and look at a number of related questions about movement across borders, immigration, the claims of refugees, and our responsibilities to strangers. While Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Kant and Hegel all make appearances, our major focus is on recent debates.

GPOL 6476
Theories of Imperialism
Spring 2008. Three credits.
Nancy Fraser
We survey classical and contemporary theories of modern imperialism. Key issues include the relation between imperialism, capitalism, and stateforms; colonial and post-colonial imperialist domination; hegemony and imperialism with and without a center; and varieties of anti-imperialist resistance. Readings by such as thinkers as Marx, Lenin, Luxemburg, Kautsky, Schumpeter, Gunder Frank, Hobsbawm, Fanon, Mies, Wallerstein, Hardt and Negri, Doyle, Bobbitt, and Ellen M. Wood.

MCCi 6093
Globalization, Immigration, and Transnationalization
Spring 2008. Three credits.
Tatiana Wah
This course offers students an opportunity to explore and understand the global nature of contemporary social, economic, cultural, and political change. The course is divided into three parts that closely examine globalization, immigration, and transnationalization. The first part introduces students to globalization theories and trends as well as to its processes and institutional structures. The second part focuses on international migration, covering the growth of immigrant communities in the developed world, particularly in the United States and Europe. The third part examines theories of transnationalization, looking at the meaning of the changing conceptions of identity, citizenship, national sovereignty, and community. It considers the emerging role and activities of transnational migrants and immigrant NGOs. The course pays attention to the relationship between globalization and inequality, the fate of cultural diversity (ethnic multiculturalism and pluralism) in a globalized world, and issues affecting developing countries and immigrant communities. There is a field experience during spring break that uses the Dominican Republic as a case study for understanding globalization, immigration, and transnationalism.
 

POLITICAL DEVELOPMENT IN HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE

GHIS 5115
Historical Roots of a “Fiasco”: Iraq
Spring 2008. Three credits.
Eli Zaretsky
The American invasion of Iraq has been described as a fiasco. In Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq, Thomas E. Rick supports this view by characterizing the administration’s actions as the errors or bad intentions of the political right: e.g., the neoconservatives and the cabal around Bush. By contrast, this course explores the weaknesses and failures of American liberalism and the political left in providing the opening for the Bush presidency. The model for this approach is Marx’s explanation (in his Eighteenth Brumaire) of Louis Napoleon’s coup d’etat in 1851. Other readings include both long-term critiques of American liberalism, such as those by Richard Slotkin and Patricia Seed, and more focused studies of the post-1989 period. Cross-listed as LHIS 4568 and GSOC 5044.

GHIS 5120
The History of Race and Slavery in the New World
Spring 2008. Three credits.
Robin Blackburn
This course furnishes an overview of successive forms of racial oppression in the history of the Americas, with special focus on the rise and fall of African slavery in the New World, covering all parts of the hemisphere, and the whole period 1492–1888. It looks at the ideologies that inspired colonial conquests and settlement in the New World and at the shape of early colonial society. It seeks to explain why Europeans brought African captives to the Americas, and explores the dynamic of the slave plantations and their link to the development of capitalism. It also looks at the growth of a new social world in the wake of the Atlantic boom of the 18th century and the revolutionary struggles to which this gave rise in Haiti and elsewhere. Special consideration is given to the ethnic identities that emerged in the later colonial period and at the relationship of newly independent American states to slavery and race. Slavery was destroyed in the course of a momentous series of wars and revolutions whose course and connections are be considered. Black anti-slavery and white abolitionism became significant and innovative social forces. The experience of slavery itself gave rise to powerful African-American cultural legacies, but the course also seeks to explain why the suppression of slavery was succeeded by new forms of racial oppression. Cross-listed as LHIS 4565.

GPOL 5021
Immigration in the American Experience, Then and Now
Spring 2008. Three credits.
Aristide Zolberg
This course deals largely with social change and will cover population history, with an emphasis on the contribution of immigration to population change, starting with the slave trade in colonial times and British colonial policies. It will then turn to post-independence American immigration policy, changing notions of citizenship and membership, and changing strategies of integration. Lastly, it will deal with ongoing normative and policy debates on immigration.

GHIS 5125
America’s Empires: The Historical Perspectives
Spring 2008. Three credits.
Oz Frankel
Empire is a keyword of our time. It has been in frequent use since the American invasion of Afghanistan and then Iraq—either to celebrate or to castigate U.S. foreign policy—but even before 9/11, thinking of the United States in terms of empire informed the study of American history. This seminar addresses the utility and feasibility of empire as a term of analysis in U.S. history. It takes an expansive view of empire that includes diverse systems of domination and inequality, inside and outside the formal boundaries of the US, and aspects of private well as public lives. The emphasis is the social, cultural, and daily dimensions of imperial power rather than diplomacy and strategy. Examples, from the conclusion of the 18th century to the middle of the 20th, include western expansion, post Civil War Reconstruction, race and domesticity, and the global process of “Americanization,” in other words, the transnational presence of the United States as a model for social relations, political structures, and popular culture. Cross-listed as HLIS 4567.

GPOL 6005
Globalization and Anticapitalism in Historical Perspective
Spring 2008. Three credits.
Robin Blackburn
This course presents an account of the origins and development of globalization, of the social and political traditions that have contested capitalism, and of the new forms of collectivism in the modern world. The legacy and debates of 19th- and 20th-century socialism, liberalism, and anarchism are reconsidered in the light of the experience of the 20th century. The ideas of Marx and Proudhon, Engels and Bakunin, Kautsky and Lenin, Bauer and Bernstein, Trotsky and Luxemburg, the Fabians and the syndicalists, Mao and Fidel Castro, Keynes and Beveridge, Polanyi and Bookchin, and Fanon and C.L.R. James are scrutinized and shown to have continued bearing on the new forms of capitalism and collectivism in the 21st century. The calculation debate of the thirties and forties, which pitted Mises and Hayek against Oskar Lange and Maurice Dobb, are reexamined. The legacy of struggles for universal social security in the advanced countries are presented for the light it can shed on inequality and insecurity in the modern world. The question is posed as to how today’s new social movements and anticapitalism measure up to new forms of corporate and financial power. The role of money managers and institutional funds in globalization is explored. The potential of consumers’ campaigns, cultural contestation, social trade unionism, environmentalism, and pension fund activism are assessed in terms of their capacity to strengthen democracy and mount an effective challenge to capitalist power. Cross-listed as GHIS 6155, GSOC 5032.

GPOL 6422
Theories of Fascism and Totalitarianism (Latin America and Europe)
Fall 2007. Three credits.
Federico Finchelstein
This seminar examines theories of fascism and totalitarianism from a historical perspective. We study the history of these theories in their relation to major historical ruptures, including the Holocaust, the Spanish Civil War, and fascist imperialism. The approach of this seminar is topical and transnational rather than national or regional; however, we do emphasize specific cases that include Soviet communism, Italian fascism, Nazism, and French fascism. The seminar emphasizes differences and similarities among these historical cases in terms of their past, their recent past, and their present. Other topics to be studied include Latin American fascism and Populism, political religions, ideology and violence, and the aesthetization of politics. The seminar stresses the use of primary sources (particularly some major political texts by fascist and anti-fascist intellectuals), as well as the most recent analytical studies on these questions. Cross-listed as GHIS 6487.
 

POLITICS IN ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL CONTEXT

GPOL 6488
Political Economy and Development
Spring 2008. Three credits.
Sanjay Ruparelia
This course offers a critical survey of key concepts, theories and paradigms in the political economy of development since 1945. It seeks to provide an intellectual history of the field as well as an assessment of the power and limitations of rival explanatory approaches. The first section examines classical paradigms: modernization, planning and late-late industrialization; dependency and world systems theories; the neoclassical counterrevolution; “governmentality,” high modernism and post-development; and developmental states. The second part of the course analyzes various attempts to reconfigure state-society relations through participation, decentralization and “good governance.” The final section recasts the frame by examining the long-term impact of physical geographies, colonial legacies and economic globalization on the prospects of development. Although primarily analytical, the course seeks to assess rival theoretical frameworks vis-à-vis specific cases in Asia, sub-Saharan Africa, and Latin America.

GPOL 6499
Gender Politics: State, Economy, and Family
Spring 2008. Three credits.
Mala Htun
Gender is a social position occupied by men and women and an attribute of social structures including the sexual division of labor, normative heterosexuality, and war and militarism. In this course, we will explore these institutions and ideologies of gender and how they vary across societies. The focus will be primarily on how the state and labor market interact with family roles and relationships to uphold the sexual division of labor. We’ll study these processes in advanced welfare states such as the United States and Japan, socialist societies such as Cuba and China, and developing countries such as Brazil and Mexico. Some experience with gender or feminist theory is desirable but not required.
 

DEPARTMENTAL COURSES

GPOL 5340
The Interpretive Turn in Contemporary Social Science
Fall 2007. Three credits.
Carlos Forment
This course fulfills the Qualitative Methods requirement for political science, which is usually covered in GPOL 6195 Qualitative Methods. The aim of this seminar is to introduce graduate students to the “interpretive turn” that is currently sweeping the human sciences. We will examine some of the most recent and influential approaches within this tradition: Intentionalism (as exemplified in the work of Quentin Skinner); Language Games (L. Wittgenstein); Universal Pragmatics (Jurgen Habermas); Critical Hermeneutics (Paul Ricouer); Discursive Strategies (Michel Foucault); and Symbolic Practices (Pierre Bourdieu). In the first part of the course (weeks 1–2), we will read some broad-minded accounts of the spread of scientism in the human sciences, as well as some of the reasons that scholars in the interpretive turn have resisted this approach. In the second part of the course (weeks 3–14), we will try to make sense of the various interpretive approaches and its relevance for practicing sociologists, political scientists, historians and anthropologists by proposing and developing practical and realistic approaches that combine general ideas and empirical analysis. In the last part of the course (week 15), we evaluate some of the suggestions put forward by scholars in the interpretive turn in relation to social science, and how each of us can contribute to altering the intellectual terms of the debate in our respective disciplines.

GPOL 6133
Historiography and Historical Practice
Fall 2007. Three credits.
Oz Frankel
This course focuses on U.S. history to examine current permutations of historiographical interests, practices, and methodologies. Over the last few decades, U.S. history has been a particularly fertile ground for rethinking the historical, although many of these topics are applicable to the study of other nations and societies. American history has been largely rewritten by a generation of scholars who experienced the 1960s and its aftermath and have viewed America’s past as a field of inquiry and contest of great political urgency. Identity politics, the culture wars, and other forms of organization and debate have also endowed history with unprecedented public resonance in a culture that has been notoriously amnesiac. We explore major trends and controversies in American historiography, the multicultural moment in historical studies, the emergence of race and gender as cardinal categories of historical analysis, the enormous preoccupation with popular culture, the impact of memory studies on historical thinking, and the recurrent agonizing over American exceptionalism and consequent recent attempts to break the nation-state mold and to globalize American history. Another focus will be the intersection of analytical strategies borrowed from the social sciences and literary studies with methods and epistemologies of historicization that originated from the historical profession. Cross-listed as GHIS 6133, GSOC 6054.

GPOL 6134
Historical Methods and Sources: Latin American History
Fall 2007 and Spring 2008. Three credits.
Paul Ross
Historical Methods and Sources consists of a pair of linked seminars designed to orient students to historical inquiry and equip them to undertake the writing of an MA thesis on a historical topic. Historical Methods and Sources I aims toward three specific learning outcomes: to develop fluency in several current models of historical practice; to develop the practical skills necessary for locating and interpreting primary historical sources; and to compose a proposal for an MA thesis that will be completed during the second semester of the two semester sequence. With these goals in mind, the midterm assignment is a 10 page “document collection” essay requiring students to collect, paraphrase, and contextualize five historical documents gathered from New York City libraries or archives. The final paper is a thesis proposal—a 15 page document sketching out the student’s topic and preliminary hypothesis, as well as the student’s sources and their locations. Weekly readings from the instructor’s area of expertise (Latin American history) are chosen to illustrate essential genres of historical writing (e.g. cultural, social, political, diplomatic, women’s history) and theoretical perspectives (e.g. Habermasian histories of public spheres, Foucaultian histories of crime and punishment). The course is not intended to be a survey of the historiography of Latin America, but to provide a sampling of important trends in the recent historiography of Latin America. Please note: the written work in this class deals with topics from students’ own areas of interest, and do not correspond to the thematic emphasis on Latin America. This course is the first of a pair of seminars (with a single course number) meant to be taken during a student’s second year in the Historical Studies MA program. This course is also a requirement for PhD students who enter the joint doctoral program in Historical Studies without having been in a master’s program at The New School for Social Research. Students register for the Fall and Spring sections of the course separately. The Fall section of the course is a prerequisite for the Spring section.

GPOL 6195
Qualitative Methods
Not offered 2007–08. Three credits.
Victoria Hattam
See GPOL 5340 under Departmental Courses.

GPOL 6300
MA Seminar: Politics and Political Science
Fall 2007. Three credits.
David Plotke
This course provides a critical introduction to the study of politics and to political science as a discipline. We first consider different conceptions of the aims of studying politics. Should political knowledge be regarded as valuable mainly for its role in forming an active political and civic life? Should it be viewed as a crucial means to achieve desired political and social ends? Of should political knowledge emerge from a professional and scientific project that helps to sustain a democratic political and civic culture? We consider the development of political science as an extended debate about the nature and purposes of knowledge about politics. We also examine political science as a distinctive discipline, combining institutional and normative elements. Much of the course focuses on two key concepts and their relations: power and state. These concepts are important for contemporary politics. They offer a good point of entry into major ongoing controversies in Political Science. Debates about the meaning, relations, and value of these concepts provide a lens through which to view and assess a range of subfields and methods, from American politics to international relations. Readings include major works from the history of political thought as well as more recent theoretical and empirical studies. Readings include works by Arendt, Dahl, Foucault, Gramsci, Hobbes, Lenin, Madison, Marx, Waltz, and Weber.

GPOL 6302
Field Seminar in Political Theory: Paradigms of Contemporary Political Theorizing
Fall 2007. Three credits.
Nancy Fraser
This field seminar in Political Theory is required of all students in the Theory track. It introduces students to four or five major paradigms of contemporary political theorizing: for example, (neo-Hegelian) communitarianism, (neo-Kantian) liberalism, neo-Marxian Critical Theory, (neo-Nietzschean) genealogy, and (neo-Heideggerian) deconstruction. The focus is on assessing the respective strengths and weaknesses of the paradigms. In each case, we begin by examining a major text that serves as an exemplar of the paradigm. Then we consider the most important critiques of its underlying assumptions and the most compelling appropriations of its signature concepts. Because proponents of each paradigm have commented critically on the others, the course effectively reconstructs a multi-layered conversation among many of the leading voices in contemporary political theory.

GPOL 6332
Field Seminar in American Politics
Spring 2008. Three credits.
David Plotke
This course surveys and critically assesses the field of American politics. How have political scientists analyzed politics in the United States? How should we assess their accounts? We look at major contributions by political scientists (most, but not all of them, from the United States) and examine the political processes they have attempted to explain. The course focuses on four main topics: political culture in the United States, how power is organized and distributed, the shape of political institutions and relations among them, and the character and extent of political participation. In each area, we focus on a central question or set of questions. In what sense and to what extent should American political culture be regarded as liberal? Are observed inequalities in the distribution of power compatible with a normatively acceptable model of democracy? What, if anything, produces sufficient order within and across political institutions to sustain a constitutional regime? How do we understand the simultaneously low rates of voting in the United States and robust forms of civic engagement and interest group and movement activity?

GPOL 6349
Field Seminar in Comparative Politics
Fall 2007. Three credits.
Mala Htun, Courtney Jung
The course is an advanced survey of the field of comparative politics. We analyze important scholarly works on politics and government in advanced democracies, developing countries, and dictatorships, among others. Each week of the course focuses on a specific topic and/or theoretical approach. The course is intended for PhD students who plan to write dissertations in comparative politics and for students preparing for qualifying exams.

GPOL 6990
Independent Study
Fall 2007, Spring 2008. One, two, or three credits.
This student-initiated course gives students the opportunity to pursue advanced research on a specific topic with the guidance of a faculty member. Prerequisite: permission of the instructor.

GPOL 6992
Practical Curricular Training/Professional Internship
Fall 2007, Spring 2008. One-half credit.
This course provides the opportunity to receive credit for professional training related to the degree. Students are expected to engage in such training for at least five hours per week. Training should take the form of teaching, research, or other work relevant to the student’s program of study. It may take place at institutions of higher learning, with government agencies, or at other sites as appropriate. Students meet regularly with an advisor and submit a written report at the end of the internship. Grading is pass/fail.

GPOL 7300
PhD Seminar
Fall 2007, Spring 2008. One and one-half credits.
The dissertation is simultaneously the capstone of graduate education and the prelude to an academic career. With this in mind, the seminar is designed to assist advanced students in formulating a researchable project that also holds the promise of carving out a distinctive niche in political science. It combines the reading of exemplary literature with writing practice. It considers how to select appropriate methods and aims to help students form the critical support networks that are indispensable to success. The seminar extends over the entire year; each semester students will write one critical paper on an exemplary work in their own field as well as prepare a draft of their proposal for discussion by the group as a whole. Admission to this seminar normally requires that the student has passed at least one field exam and that the student provide a statement from a dissertation advisor saying that he or she is working seriously on a dissertation proposal.

GPOL 7991
Directed Dissertation Study
Fall 2007, Spring 2008.
One and one-half to three credits per semester. All students in the PhD program are required to take three credits of Directed Dissertation Study, aimed at preparing the prospectus for the dissertation. This course, which is taken with the prospective dissertation chair, should occur after all other coursework is complete or during a student’s last semester of coursework. It should be taken after at least one qualifying examination has been completed. Students in the PhD program may take up to six additional credits of Directed Dissertation Study, consisting of research and writing supervised by the dissertation chair.
 

OTHER RECOMMENDED COURSES

GANT 6051
Critical Foundations of Social Theory

GANT 6077
Cities and Globalization Racial Disparities: Causes and Consequences

GPOL 6005
Globalization and Anticapitalism in Historical Perspective Historiography and Historical Practice

GHIS 6155
Globalization and Anticapitalism in Historical Perspective

GHIS 6242
Chapters in the History of the Book

GHIS 6826
Revolution and Empire

This page was last updated October 30, 2007.