Course Listings

Lowenstein International Human Rights Clinic (30173). 4 units. Students will work on a variety of human rights projects, generally in support of advocacy efforts of human rights organizations. Projects are designed to give students practical experience with the range of activities in which lawyers engage to promote respect for human rights; to help students build the knowledge and skills necessary to be effective human rights advocates; and to integrate the theory and practice of human rights.

Reconfiguring refugees as fluid subjects and sites of social, political, and cultural critiques. Departing from dominant understandings of refugees as victims, consideration instead of refugees as complex historical actors, made visible through processes of colonization, imperialism, war, displacement, state violence, and globalization, as well as ethical, social, legal, and political transformations. Focus on second-half of the twentieth century.

This seminar reviews how the United States has responded to weakening states and unrest in the MENA region. Each session examines a particular policy challenge, examining dynamics on the ground, what Washington understood to be its national security interest, and how it developed its policies in terms of strategies and tactics to achieve the perceived national interest. The seminar ranges from the 2013 coup d’état in Egypt to American approaches to political Islam to wars in Yemen, Libya, and Syria.

This graduate reading seminar examines the construction of notions of “Europeanness” during the twentieth century by exploring the histories of various communities that European society has marked as “other” in some way.  We will consider the shifting places that Jewish, Muslim, Black, Queer, migrant, refugee, and guest worker communities have occupied in Europe over the past century and a half; the ways they have been denied full membership in legal and civil society; how they have battled those exclusions; and the contributions these communities have made to modern European society.

Since the 1960s, social scientists have analyzed how the scientific ideas about mental illness, mental health policies, institutions, healing practices, and popular discourses surrounding mental health have been influenced by the social and cultural contexts. This course introduces students to the debates and questions guiding the history of mental health since the Civil Rights and the Psychiatric Survivor Movements in the 1960s, especially those that relate to Critical Race Theory.

This course surveys current development issues in Latin America and the Caribbean. Students gain significant knowledge and practical understanding of the Region’s socioeconomic situation as well as relevant political issues that impact development. The course focuses on key regional issues in Central America, South America, and the Caribbean, with particular attention to “hot spot” countries like Venezuela, Colombia, Haiti, and Cuba.

Facets of contemporary economic globalization, including trade, investment, and migration. Challenges and threats of globalization: inclusion and inequality, emerging global players, global governance, climate change, and nuclear weapons proliferation.

Prerequisite: background in international economics and data analysis. Preference to seniors majoring in Economics or EP&E.

In the decade since the 2011 Arab uprisings, the challenges facing the Middle East have been profound. They include various forms of war and displacement, political and economic instability, social upheaval and societal rupture. Indeed, by 2015, millions of Middle Eastern men, women, and children had been driven from their homes by conflict. This advanced undergraduate/graduate seminar is designed to explore some of the most important contemporary cultural and political shifts that are shaping life across the Middle East and North Africa (MENA).

The Korean War, though often narrated as a “forgotten war” and a “police action,” marks a crucial period in the US imperial expansion into Asia. This course proceeds from the recognition that the Korean War remains ongoing, and asks how to “remember” the violent and unresolved legacies of the “hot” wars that have constituted the cold war in Asia. How have the Korean War and its legacies shaped the relationship between militarism and empire? How has warfare conditioned the movements and lives of the Korean diaspora?

Migration and human mobility across North America, with a focus on 1994 to the present. Critical and thematic readings examine Central America, Mexico, and the United States as  integrated spaces of migration, governance, and cultural and social exchange. Migrant social movements, indigenous migration, gender and sexual dynamics of migration, human trafficking, crime and social violence, deportation and detention, immigration policing, and militarized security.

An overview of some basic demographic methods such as the life table and age-standardized rates, followed by consideration of the core topics in economic demography: fertility, mortality, and migration, along with their connections to the economy and economic development. The course is largely based on reading and discussion of journal articles.

Is health care a human right? Can health advocacy shape health policy? What does it mean to be a health “activist” and to demand change of medicine? Health care in America has always been political. In this seminar students explore the rich history of health activism and health advocacy in the modern United States, focusing primarily on the postwar period through the present day. Each week we encounter new varieties of grassroots organizing, individual activists, and advocacy organizations that have made political claims about health care and pushed for its reform.

This course considers the relationship between literature and politics in Turkey, Iran, and the Arab world since the late 19th century. We read novels, short stories, poetry, essays, play scripts, and comics, and watch movies, while situating them in their artistic and political contexts. This course considers the ways that an artwork can intervene in the political debates of its time, while taking seriously the distinctive modes of political thought that are possible only through art.

Advanced International Refugee Assistance Project (30171). 2 or 3 units. A fieldwork option. Students may enroll for 2 units (the default) for fieldwork only without a seminar and not for experiential credit or for 3 units with a required seminar and experiential credit. Prerequisite: International Refugee Assistance Project. Open only to JD and MSL students. Permission of the instructors required. S. Poellot, M. Prabhu and A. Majeed. 

Advanced Lowenstein International Human Rights Clinic (30174). 1 to 4 units, depending on project workload. Open only to students who have completed the Lowenstein International Human Rights Clinic. Permission of the instructors required. J.J. Silk, H.R. Metcalf, and K. Beckerle.

Sexuality, Gender, Health, and Human Rights (20568). 2 units. This course will explore the application of human rights perspectives and practices to issues in regard to sexuality, gender, and health. Through reading, interactive discussion, paper presentation, and occasional outside speakers, students will learn the tools and implications of applying rights and law to a range of sexuality and health-related topics.

The Russo-Ukrainian War (20837). 2 units. The course will examine the many legal aspects of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, providing students a comprehensive, integrated sense of whether and how national and international legal systems can address such challenges.

Worker and Immigrant Rights Advocacy Fieldwork (30128). 2 units, credit/fail, with a graded option. The clinical course and fieldwork must be taken simultaneously in both terms. M. Ahmad.

This course is the culminating seminar for Yale College seniors in the Multidisciplinary Academic Program in Human Rights (Human Rights Scholars). The goal of the colloquium is to help students conceive and produce a meaningful capstone project as a culmination of their work in the program. It is a singular opportunity for students to pursue in-depth research in human rights.

Open only to Human Rights Scholars in their senior year and a requirement for completing the program. 

This course serves as an introduction into the major themes and approaches to the study of border enforcement and the management of human mobility. We draw upon a diverse range of scholarship across the social sciences as well as history, architecture, and philosophy to better understand how we find ourselves in this present “age of walls” (Tim Marshall 2019).

This course is designed for Global Health Scholars in their senior year as they synthesize their academic studies and practical experiences during their time in the Global Health Studies MAP. In this weekly seminar, Global Health Scholars analyze central challenges in global health and discuss methodological approaches that have responded to these pressing global health concerns.

Four hundred and odd years after colonialism and racial capitalism brought twenty and odd people from Africa to the dispossessed indigenous land that would become the United States, the structures and systems that generate inequality and white supremacy persist. Our cities and their socioeconomic and built environments continue to exemplify difference. From housing and health to mobility and monuments, cities small and large, north and south, continue to demonstrate intractable disparities.

How law and economic theory define and conceptualize economic discrimination; whether economic models adequately describe behaviors of discriminators as documented in court cases and government hearings; the extent to which economic theory and econometric techniques aid our understanding of actual marketplace discrimination.

Prerequisites: introductory microeconomics and at least one additional course in Economics, African American Studies, Ethnicity, Race, and Migration, or Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies.

Readings, discussions, and research on imperialism and “green gold” and their consequences for the imperial powers and their colonies and neo-colonies. Spatially conceived as a world-system that enmeshes the planet and as earth’s latitudes that divide the temperate from the tropical zones, imperialism as discourse and material relations is this seminar’s focus together with its implantations—an empire of plants.

An examination of contemporary literature written by Caribbean writers who have migrated to, or who journey between, different countries around the Atlantic rim. Focus on literature written in English in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, both fiction and nonfiction. Writers include Caryl Phillips, Nalo Hopkinson, and Jamaica Kincaid.

This course examines contemporary and global issues in Asia in a historical and interdisciplinary context.  Topics include environmental studies, international law, policy debates, cultural issues, security, military history, media, science and technology, and cyber warfare.

Democracy, liberty, and the sustainable use of natural resources. Concepts include institutional analysis, democratic consent, property rights, market failure, and common pool resources. Topics of policy substance are related to human use of the environment and to U.S. and global political institutions.

In this course we apply microeconomic techniques, theoretical and empirical, to the analysis of internal violent conflict, including civil wars, terrorism and insurgencies, its causes and consequences. Topics include forced migration, ethnic conflict, long-term consequences of war and individual choices to participate in violence. Readings comprise frontier research papers and students will learn to critically engage with cutting-edge research designs.

Advanced Legal Assistance Clinic: Immigrant Rights: Fieldwork (30203). 1 to 4 units. Open only to students who have completed Legal Assistance: Immigrant Rights Clinic. Permission of the instructors required. B. Haldeman.

Course Bidding: Continuing students should list this course as their lowest priority among experiential course selections.

Advanced Worker and Immigrant Rights Advocacy Clinic: Fieldwork (30130). 1 to 4 units, graded or credit/fail at student option. Students may elect to take the fieldwork section without enrolling in the advanced seminar section.Prerequisite: Worker and Immigrant Rights Advocacy Clinic. Permission of the instructors required. M. Ahmad.

Legal Assistance: Immigrant Rights Clinic: Fieldwork (30195). 2 units. Students must enroll simultaneously in the seminar and fieldwork components of this clinic. Permission of the instructors required. Enrollment limited to six new students. B. Haldeman.

Lowenstein International Human Rights Clinic (30173). 4 units. Students will work on a variety of human rights projects, generally in support of advocacy efforts of human rights organizations. Projects are designed to give students practical experience with the range of activities in which lawyers engage to promote respect for human rights; to help students build the knowledge and skills necessary to be effective human rights advocates; and to integrate the theory and practice of human rights.