Faculty of Arts & Sciences

This course offers an introduction to the classic texts of social theory of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Our focus will be on the rise of democratic, capitalist societies and the concomitant development of modern moral, political, and economic ideas. Authors we will examine include Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Adam Smith, Alexis de Tocqueville, John Stuart Mill, and Karl Marx.

This class continues the introduction to the classic texts of social theory begun in Social Studies 10a through the twentieth century. Authors include Friedrich Nietzsche, Max Weber, Emile Durkheim, Sigmund Freud, and Michel Foucault.

This course integrates research methods with an investigation of the philosophical foundations of the social sciences. Topics covered include causal explanation, interpretation, rational choice and irrationality, relativism, collective action, and social choice.

Individual work in Social Studies on a topic not covered by regular courses of instruction. Permission of the Director of Studies required.

Science, in its many guises, is a crucial force in the modern world. How has its growing authority reshaped American democracy since the late nineteenth century? Our readings will address that question in theoretical and practical terms by exploring science's changing roles in academia, political ideology, social thought, popular culture, public education, state administration, and law, as well as its complex ties to religion, secularism, and technological innovation.

What assumptions about human beings underlie the conviction that development and modernization constitute progress, that the developed West points the way for the rest of the world? Does economic growth involve a package that necessarily changes the society, the polity, and the culture along with the economy? This tutorial provides a framework for thinking about these questions, both in the context of the West, and in the context of the Third World.

Examines law as a defining force in American culture and society in four dimensions: as it establishes individual rights, liberties, and limits of toleration; as it attempts to resolve differences among competing constituencies; as it sets out terms of punishment and social control, and as a source of informing images and ideological consistency.

The course explores various approaches to the study of culture, drawing on studies in anthropology, history, philosophy, sociology, literature, and photography. Among the questions addressed are: How is historical memory constructed, and what are the competing forces that shape it? How do advertisements, photography, and film document cultural change? How is culture tied to power, domination, and resistance?

Making democracy work requires an "organized" citizenry with power to assert its interests effectively. Yet US political participation declines, growing more unequal, as new democracies struggle to make citizen participation possible. Students learn to address public problems by organizing: developing leadership, building community, and mobilizing power. Our pedagogy links sociological, political science, and social psychology theory with democratic practice.

Debates today rage about whether democracy is really possible in places like China or the Middle East. This tutorial asks whether there are, in fact, any preconditions for or impediments to the establishment and consolidation of democracy. Among the factors we will consider: mass culture, elite norms, religion, economic development, ethnic pluralism, and associational life.

Social movements are often considered a driving force behind political, social, and cultural change. This course explores the major theoretical and empirical approaches used in the social sciences to understand the emergence, endurance, and outcomes of social movement activism. The course will examine a range of case studies including movements dealing with environmental justice, health, citizenship, and racial inclusion taken from a range of national (including the U.S.) and transnational contexts.

This seminar examines national identities, international solidarities, and struggles for social justice in the modern world from gendered perspectives. We take an historical approach, informed by ethnography and social theory. We first explore how gendered ideals and relations shaped colonial and anti-colonial projects in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. We then analyze how gender has shaped transnational movements since the Second World War, emphasizing international development projects and 'Third World' and 'Global South' alliances.

This course places the politics of health care in the context of economic development. Although health care and social programs are often considered secondary to economic growth, they have come to play an increasingly central role in development policy. This course explores the interaction between development and health through a survey of different theoretical approaches to development, combined with empirical research on public health, AIDS, family planning, and development programs.

Global scientific communities now widely regard climate change as one of the most pressing challenges to our present and future. This course draws upon interdisciplinary debates to examine the ways in which global climate change generates complications for notions of environmental governance, political community, sovereignty, economic development, demographic stability, eco-sociality, cultural vitality, and sustainability. The course also examines broader legal, political, and policy discussions, along with signal agreements that have surfaced on the global stage. Throughout our discussions, we will attend to geopolitical stakes, strategic economic interests, and various visions for alternative political and environmental futures for global society.

Despite globalization, the nation is still a major actor in today's world. This course tries to understand why this is so by examining the role that nationalism plays in peoples' identities and the effects of globalization on nations and nationalism. Examples from the United States, Western Europe, Latin America, India, and the Middle East.

This course inquires into the conditions of protests, self-immolations, and rioting by examining cultural, social, and political difference to look at violence as phenomena. We examine cases such as discord in Sri Lanka; communal violence in South Asia; ethnic wars in Burma (Myanmar); discord and protest in China; ethno-religious violence in Indonesia; or Muslim 'insurgency' in southern Thailand. The course will bring critical attention to the issues of ethnicity, religion, conflict, and protest while analyzing violence as an anthropological category in order to situate current social and political events.

Today we find ourselves in a remarkable historical moment, attempting to make sense of a nation beset by racial contradictions and paradoxes. Astounding racial progress has been documented at the individual level while, at the social level, racial inequality remains entrenched. Racial dynamics continue to permeate contemporary American life, and they bring with them new uncertainties in interpersonal life, workplace relations, and public policy. This course investigates race in America today, examining advances toward racial tolerance, entrenched racial inequality, and theoretical arguments plumbing the ends and means of racial democracy.

Liberalism is a political theory about the limitation of state power based on constitutional rights that guarantee freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom to elect our representatives, private property and due process and equal protection. These institutional mechanisms have been justified on a liberal philosophical outlook. This course examines the central values of the liberal worldview including freedom, equality, toleration, individualism, secularism, pluralism, constitutionalism and the public and private divide. The purpose of this conceptual analysis is to understand the justificatory basis of liberalism and eventually assess its achievements and limitations.

In this course, we will examine how and why people migrate from one location to another, focusing both on the theoretical paradigms scholars use to explain migration processes as well as on the individual experiences of migrants. Topics include transnationalism, diaspora, identity formation, integration and assimilation, citizenship claims, and the feminization of migration. Ethnographic readings focus primarily on migration to the US, but also include cases from other world areas, most notably Asia.

The ghetto is among the most complex and troubling of all American institutions. This course analyzes the American ghetto in historical and contemporary perspective, exploring topics such as racial segregation, urban poverty, inner-city schools, the underground economy, and the prison boom. Along with engaging with several classic and contemporary texts, we will carry out ethnographic fieldwork in some of Boston's low-income neighborhoods.

The United States is currently experiencing high levels of income and wealth inequality and comparatively low levels of social mobility. This course will ask why this is and what, if anything, should be done about it. We will consider both social and individual explanations for inequality and social mobility, and we will examine efforts to increase mobility through educational and legal means.

This course examines economic aspects of education issues, using quantitative research. We will examine several of the major proposed strategies for improving schools including increasing school resources, enhancing school accountability, improving teacher selection and training, and creating school choice through vouchers and charter schools. We will also discuss how to write a quantitative research paper.

This tutorial examines the problem of national reconciliation after mass violence. How does a nation sundered by genocide, civil war, or political repression reestablish the social trust and civic consciousness required of individual and collective healing? What makes some reconciliations successful, others less so? The course will engage these and other questions from historical and contemporary perspectives, exploring the legacy of mass violence going back centuries, while comparing reconciliation projects across cultures, countries, and continents.

Martin Heidegger was perhaps the most important and influential philosopher in the Continental tradition in the 20th century, yet the source of his influence has not been fully explored. To that end, we shall trace the development of his thought from his recently published lectures on Aristotle to Being and Time and his later works. Thus, we shall rediscover Heidegger as he appeared to young undergraduates in the early 1920s who would go on to develop some of the most powerful currents of contemporary social thought.

In this course, we will explore how social life in contemporary East Asia is both influenced by and contributes to processes of globalization. Ethnographic readings on China, Korea, and Japan focus on migration, gender roles, consumption, media, and markets as we trace the role of the global in everyday life for rural and urban inhabitants of a variety of East Asian locations. For these individuals, engagement with the global structures how they make sense of the world and creates desires for future life change.

This course aims to provide a conceptual and methodological toolkit for studying the intersection of "culture," broadly understood, and politics in American society. Key questions to be addressed will include: How can "culture" help us understand American politics? What, if anything, is distinctive about American politics and society? And how does culture shape individual and societal approaches to particular political issues?

This course critically examines efforts to organize the poor in Latin America, with a focus on the bases of collective action. It covers early patterns of popular sector organization, such as corporatism and populism, revolutionary movements of the 1960s, contemporary parties, social movements, and transnational advocacy networks, and the persistence of clientelism and populism. Finally, the course examines the causes and consequences Latin America's recent turn to the left.

This course explores the social and cultural politics of healthcare in America, highlighting the ways in which "American Exceptionalism" has resulted in high costs, poor outcomes, and disparate access to care. We will discuss several case studies of controversy related to issues of cost, access, and equity, exploring how such issues have influenced strategies for reform. We will also compare the American healthcare system to systems in other industrialized nations.

This course explores moral and ethical questions concerning the provision of education in the United States. What kind of education is appropriate in a free society? What is a just distribution of educational resources? What rights do students (and parents) have? How should we settle conflicts over curricula? We will address these and related questions with help from classic and contemporary philosophers, political theorists, sociologists, legal scholars, educators, and policy analysts.

How and to what extent are human rights discussed, contested, and protected in Sub-Saharan Africa? This course considers answers to this question by taking seriously both variation and commonalities across Sub-Saharan African countries. Topics covered include slavery, apartheid, social and economic rights, LGBT rights, the International Criminal Court, and Kony 2012. The study of human rights in any context also requires some understanding of the configurations of power, state institutions and civil society in that context. We therefore also devote some time to considering colonial institutions, contemporary state-society relations, democratization, and social identity groups across SSA countries.

What constitutes the political and how does it relate to the religious? This course explores the relationship between recent religious resurgences and secular politics while paying particular attention to the mutually constitutive categories of the "secular" and the "religious." We start by exploring the classic secularization thesis and continue to examine its recent revisions. We will move beyond the assumption that secularism should be conceived in the singular to reflect on its global varieties, considering not only the Euro-American formations, but also debates around the place of religion in public life in China, India, Russia, Turkey and others.

This course explores individuals' and societies' responses to economic inequality in the context of democracy. Why is economic inequality met in some democracies and at some times with discontent and in other democracies and at other times with acceptance or even celebration? How do the sources and structure of economic inequality shape citizens' reactions to it? And do citizens' responses to inequality then actually shape politics and public policymaking in democracies? In investigating these questions, we examine research from political science, social psychology and economics conducted in Sub Saharan Africa, the United States, Western and Eastern Europe, and India.

How can the transition to a market economy be managed? What is the impact of globalization? What are the politics and policies that contribute to rapid economic growth? To answer these questions, this course starts by examining China's rapid economic growth in the last 35 years. The Chinese case is then placed in comparison to other post-communist countries, East Asian developmental states, and finally liberalizing countries in the developing world. Through these comparisons, the course covers the main theoretical debates about the economic development in the field of comparative politics.

This tutorial examines the major thinkers and themes associated with the Frankfurt School of critical theory. From its origins in the interwar crisis, critical theory has sought to diagnose the pathologies of the present in order to chart paths for future emancipation. The readings trace the development of the Frankfurt School through four generations of theorists, including Horkheimer, Adorno, Habermas, Honneth, Benhabib, Fraser, and Forst. The tutorial will conclude with a workshop examining the writings of contemporary critical theorists on the current crisis of democratic capitalism, as we will attempt to determine the continued relevance of the Frankfurt School.

Writing of senior honors essay.