Course Listings

This seminar examines the challenges that must be addressed when the fighting has stopped. Once a peace agreement is signed, real deal-making begins. Former rebels negotiate with their military commanders about relinquishing arms and working for a living; communities look for “peace dividends,” refugees weigh options to return home; Governments try to assert authority despite how weakened they have become or new to the role they are; compatriots who opposed the peace settlement relentlessly try to undermine it.

Immigration from Latin America is the one of the most important and controversial issues in the United States today. The family separation crisis, the infamous border wall, and the Dream Act dominate political debate. Latinos—numbering more than 60 million in the U.S.—are a large, heterogeneous, and growing group with a unique social, political, and cultural history.

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.

Introduction to American political and social issues from the 1940s to the present, including political economy, civil rights, class politics, and gender roles. Legacies of the New Deal as they played out after World War II; the origins, agenda, and ramifications of the Cold War; postwar suburbanization and its racial dimensions; migration and immigration; cultural changes; social movements of the Right and Left; Reaganism and its legacies; the United States and the global economy.

The World Circa 2000 is a global history of the present since ~ 1960. The course moves thematically to consider topics including, decolonization and nation building in the global south, crises of nationalism and recurrent authoritarianism, the politics of aid, humanitarianism and neo-liberalism, technophilia, environmentalism and networked societies, climate change and ‘free trade,’ new religious fundamentalisms and imagined solidarities, celebrity, individuality, and consumerism in China, the United States, and beyond. 

This course examines the history of Mexicans and Mexican Americans at the U.S.-Mexico border and their important contributions to U.S. politics and culture, from the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo to the present. By looking at specific historical case studies, students learn about the impact of U.S. imperial and migratory policies on border life, the tensions and solidarity bonds between Mexicans and Mexican Americans, the formation of a hybrid Mexican American culture, and the long history of popular resistance and activism.

The lives of women and men in the contemporary Middle East explored through a series of anthropological studies and documentary films. Competing discourses surrounding gender and politics, and the relation of such discourse to actual practices of everyday life. Feminism, Islamism, activism, and human rights; fertility, family, marriage, and sexuality.

What is Latin America? The large area we refer to as Latin America is not unified by a single language, history, religion, or type of government. Nor is it unified by a shared geography or by the prevalence of a common language or ethnic group. Yet Latin America does, obviously, exist. It is a region forged from the merging of diverse cultures, historical experiences, and processes of resistance. This course provides an overview of Latin America and the Caribbean from the 16th century up to the present.

This survey course provides a foundation in the constitutional principles and statutory framework governing the regulation and rights of noncitizens and the immigration admission and removal process. The course then explores selected legal and policy issues related to immigrants’ rights and immigration reform as well as the normative values informing the treatment of noncitizens.

A weekly seminar session only for returning students. Advanced Worker and Immigrant Rights Advocacy Clinic: Fieldwork is a co-requisite. Students enrolled in the seminar section must also be enrolled in the fieldwork section. Prerequisite: Worker and Immigrant Rights Advocacy Clinic. Permission of the instructors required.

Students will represent immigrants and low-wage workers in Connecticut in labor, immigration, and other civil rights areas, through litigation for individuals and non-litigation advocacy for community-based organizations. In litigation matters, students will handle cases at all stages of legal proceedings in Immigration Court, Board of Immigration Appeals, U.S. District Court, the Second Circuit, and state courts.

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.

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).

The World Circa 2000 is a global history of the present since ~ 1960. The course moves thematically to consider topics including, decolonization and nation building in the global south, crises of nationalism and recurrent authoritarianism, the politics of aid, humanitarianism and neo-liberalism, technophilia, environmentalism and networked societies, climate change and ‘free trade,’ new religious fundamentalisms and imagined solidarities, celebrity, individuality, and consumerism in China, the United States, and beyond.