williams college political science course catalog

But what do we mean when we claim to want freedom? We will do so by investigating the different kinds of institutions that mediate risks throughout the lifecycle, from parental leave to old age pensions, and by comparing these institutions between different countries. Can public policy reverse these trends? Senior Seminar in Political Theory: Rethinking the Political. How are international organizations and domestic governments regulating this level of unprecedented global mobility in destination countries as well as countries of origin? However, throughout the twentieth century, African/Asian solidarity and alliances existed in political movements and literary and cultural productions. In this tutorial, students will examine the origins of the Silicon Valley model and other countries' attempts to emulate it. What types of institutions, dynamics, and processes animate American political life in the twenty-first century? The readings will begin with claims that democracy consists of government by elites, that the democratic component consists of elections that amount to choosing between rival slates of elites, and that agreements among elites set the boundaries for permissible democratic decision making. What distinguishes that kind of life from others? We will explore conflicts over how "the people" are defined in different moments, and we will examine how these conflicts connect to the exercise of state power in areas including territorial expansion, census taking, public health, immigration, social welfare, and policing. Every week we explore a different component of South Asian politics. Protests against cultural insensitivity on campuses. [more], Impeachments. We will focus on the role of political parties in democratization; the emergence of political dynasties; changes in the characteristics of the political elite; investigate claims of democratic deepening; and examine the effect of inter-state wars, land disputes, and insurgencies on democratic stability in the region. Similarly frustrated that the National Union of South African Students was dominated by white liberals, in 1968 Bantu Steve Biko helped form the black-only South Africa Students' Organization and, four years later, was the key figure in founding of the Black People's Convention, created to promote black consciousness ideas within the broader South African population. Many worry that the United States is threatened by anti-democratic actors intent on consolidating white nationalist power and corporate rule. Among the topics we will cover are: the structures of urban political power; housing and employment discrimination; the War on Crime and the War on Drugs (and their consequence, mass incarceration); education; and gentrification. How has that particular aspect of political life changed in the recent past? We will apply our learning on many of these topics to the ongoing 2022 midterm elections. When government policy is decided by politics, does that mean the policy is necessarily bad? And how do institutions such as the media and campaigns encourage or discourage it? Treating the visual as a site of power and struggle, order and change, we will examine not only how political institutions and conflicts shape what images people see and how they make sense of them but also how the political field itself is visually constructed. This course begins with an examination of the general phenomena of nationalism and national identity and their historical development in East Asia. What kinds of alternatives are considered as solutions to these problems? Readings will be drawn from such authors as Adorno, Allen, Arendt, Berlant, Brown, Butler, Connolly, Dean, Foucault, Galli, Honig, Latour, Moten, Rancire, Rawls, Sen, and Sexton. Does it reflect a polity divided by racial and ethnic tensions with different visions of the nation's past and future? Individual countries have always sought to change others, and following wars, countries have often collectively enforced peace terms. Acute observers have long seen the U.S. as a harbinger of the promise and peril of modern democracies. This class begins with the Republic's cave and other key Platonic discussions of appearances, visual representation, and (literal and metaphoric) seeing, asking how Plato's approaches to image, politics, and theory/philosophy shape each other. [more], It is hard to overstate the enduring influence of George Orwell on political discourse in the 20th century and beyond. Requirements for the Major - Political Science The course extends over one semester and the winter study period. The second half of the course will look at leaders in action, charting the efforts of politicians, intellectuals, and grassroots activists to shape the worlds in which they live. We will take notice of the erasure of waste in traditional political theory and work together to fill these gaps. With authority? For instance, do the claims of individual freedom conflict with those of community? Its political system, however, is little changed. that used to be the prerogative of human actors. Is "religion" good or necessary for democratic societies? Political theory addresses questions such as these as it investigates the fundamental problems of how people can, do, and ought to live together. Our focus is both contemporary and comparative, organized thematically around common political experiences and attributes across the region. One of the key questions we will seek to answer is why Kennan and Kissinger disagreed on so many important issues, ranging from the Vietnam War to the role of nuclear weapons, despite their shared intellectual commitment to Realism. It then considers how nationalism is manifest in the contemporary politics and foreign relations of China, Japan, South Korea, North Korea and Taiwan. Readings may include excerpts from ancient and modern theorists, but our primary focus will be contemporary and will bring political theory into conversation with other fields, particularly art history and visual studies but also film and media studies, psychoanalysis, neuroscience, and STS. Others, whose ambitions and initiatives arguably undermined progress toward American ideals, were not recognized as dangerous at the time. Or should feminists reject objectivity as a myth told by the powerful about their own knowledge-claims and develop an alternative approach to knowledge? Compromise? Ideological polarization that regularly brings the government to a standstill and periodically threatens financial ruin. This course will read leading conservative political thinkers with a view to identifying their central tenets, both negative and positive. What is it and how might it work? A similar story can be told for most other developed countries. The course first briefly reviews Venezuelan post-Independence history, with an emphasis on the post-1958 democratic settlement. What is our individual and collective responsibility for creating and disposing of waste? How does international war leave its mark on domestic politics? Which are more and less promising? To that end, the course will discuss the origins, logic, and meaning of liberalism and capitalism and the relationships between them. By the end of the course, students will develop their ability to think about foreign policy issues, improving their ability to participate in public life as engaged citizens. DuBois, Frantz Fanon, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, and Ella Baker and contemporary theorists like Saidiya Hartman, Charles Mills, bell hooks, and Frank Wilderson--among others. The specific disputes under these rubrics range from secession to impeachment, gun control to child labor, waging war to spurring commerce; the historical periods to be covered include the Marshall and Taney Court years, the Civil War and Reconstruction, the Progressive Era, the New Deal, the Warren Court, and the contemporary conservative ascendancy. Finally we will entertain right-wing populism as both a cause and a symptom of a crisis in liberal democracy. Political Theory and Comparative Politics. The very effort to define "waste" raises thorny political questions: What (or who) is disposable? Complicating things further, the nature of democratic competition is such that those vying for power have incentive to portray the opposition's leadership as dangerous. Are cyberweapons that target critical infrastructure similar to nuclear weapons, or is that comparison fundamentally flawed? The specific disputes under these rubrics range from abortion to affirmative action, hate speech to capital punishment, school prayer to same-sex marriage; the historical periods to be covered include the early republic, the ante-bellum era, the Civil War and Reconstruction, World Wars I and II, the Warren Court, and contemporary America. The course will show how Muslims were constructed as subjects in history, politics, and society from the very beginning of the making of Europe and the Americas to the end of the Cold War to the post-9/11 era. By thrusting students into the "problem space" of Black Political Thought, students will examine the historical and structural conditions, normative arguments, theories of action, ideological conflicts, and conceptual evolutions that help define African American political imagination. To examine this claim, the readings will address two fundamental issues. Those whose proposals are accepted by a committee of faculty chosen by the department will continue on as thesis students, under the supervision of an advisor to be assigned by the department, for the remainder of the academic year; those whose proposals are not accepted will complete an abridged version of their project as an independent study in Winter Study but not continue in the honors program in the spring semester. We will also explore the current implications of Wynter's thought for Africana political theory, Afro-futurism, social justice, human rights, and critiques of liberal humanism. This revolution was the most successful revolt of the enslaved in recorded history. As a final assignment, students will write an 18-20 page research paper on a topic of their choice related to the core themes of the course. Senior Seminar in American Politics: Polarized America. [more], "Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, Ted Cruz, Bernie Sanders. It seeks to challenge the widespread image of African politics as universally and inexplicably lawless, violent, and anarchic. In this tutorial, we will investigate what Arendt's vision of politics stands to offer to those struggling to comprehend and transform the darkest aspects of the contemporary political world. We will assess traditional theories about the weakness of the American state in light of arguments about the state as: regulator of family and "private" life, adjudicator of relations between racial and ethnic groups, manager of economic inequalities, insurer of security, and arbiter of the acceptable uses of violence and surveillance. Or knowledge? sell! However, with the election of Donald Trump, the American presidency is now in the hands of someone who proudly claims the America first mantle. Fortunately, in recent decades philosophers have made significant progress in theorizing causation. Hence, this seminar will put two very different bodies of theory in conversation: critical theory about power and philosophy of science about cause and effect. In most other respects, it is the same: it protects the status quo, including the unequal distribution of power among its members; it spells out legitimate and illegitimate ways of resolving conflicts of interest; it is biased toward the powerful and legitimates their interests; it tells its members how to act to coordinate their interests and minimize direct conflict; some of it is purely aspirational, some of it necessary for survival. [more], American politics are in upheaval, and most Americans believe the country to be headed down "the wrong track." And if the aim is not to provide a historically accurate account, what exactly is at stake in constructing or demythologizing theories of the origins of the state? Migration Governance: A Global Perspective, international migrants live in a country different from where they were born, about 1 out of every 30 humans in the world and a population that has roughly doubled since 1990. Hamer, Shirley Chisholm, Safiya Bukhari, Erica Garner, Greta Thunberg, Malala Yousafzai, Marielle Franco, Winnie Mandela. Does the structure of the international system necessarily cause conflict? Students will learn to evaluate the decisions that US leaders have made on a wide range of difficult foreign policy issues, including: rising Chinese power; Russian moves in Ukraine; nuclear proliferation to Iran; terrorist threats; humanitarian disasters in Syria and Libya; and long-term challenges like climate change.

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