The Klau Institute for Civil & Human Rights

This course will introduce students to major theories, topics, debates and cutting edge research in the field of race and ethnicity. During this semester we will engage with important issues in the field, such as the utility of race and ethnicity as concepts; how racial and ethnic ‘groupness’ is formed, classified and inhabited; and explaining persisting racial and ethnic inequality. We will also explore how immigrations continues to (re)shape race and ethnic relations writ large. While the course’s main focus is to examine how the study of race and ethnicity has evolved in the United States, readings on other countries will also be drawn on to illuminate how different institutional environments give rise to specific understandings of race and ethnicity. This class will also bring a critical lens to the field of sociology, and the ways in which race has played a defining role in the discipline over time.

Many have claimed that the American educational system is the "great equalizer." In other words, the educational system gives everyone a chance to prosper in American society regardless of their social origins. In this course, we will explore the validity of this claim. We will consider questions such as: 1) Does our educational system promote social mobility or social reproduction? 2) How has the relationship between race/ethnicity and educational performance changed in the last few decades? 3) How do social class and gender shape the kinds of educational experiences students have? 4) How does educational policy influence the kinds of experiences kids have in school? Can policy reduce inequality?

In 2007, after decades of organizing on the part of indigenous activists, the United Nations issued a Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. The Declaration was the result of years of work by people from particular communities--each with its own history, culture, language, and home--who decided to call themselves, and work together as, Indigenous people. This creative step allowed indigenous peoples to work collectively for justice on a global scale, rather than individually and in confrontation with single states. This class explores the concept, and reality, of Indigeneity in both historical and contemporary perspective: we will consider the many shared struggles and opportunities of indigenous peoples around the globe today and the ways that similar (or distinct) histories have led to similar (or distinct) present realities.

This course examines the origins and development of contemporary opinions and policies concerning migrations and migrants. It does so by looking backward to the age when transoceanic mobility became more frequent and increasingly more accessible before moving forward to our own times. It is the central claim of this course that it is impossible to understand what drives policy today without first surveying the changing ideas of migration and the movement of people over time. It will therefore take students through the history of migration in the modern world, as well as studying the migrant journey, connections to home, the process and difficulties of assimilation and community creation, and the problems or opportunities that could arise for migrants from characteristics like race, religion, ethnicity, or language. Also considered will be the complex relationship between colonization and migration. In the process, Migrants and Mobility will also examine how different societies place value judgments upon migrants and analyze how and why migration/migrants have been categorized as “good” or “bad” over time. Students will also encounter and consider the effects of growing urbanization and industrialization, changing demography and global trade patterns, and, more recently, the impact of climate change. Migrants and Mobility will be primarily seminar based, placing a premium on participation and analytical discussion.

This introductory course examines the current theory and practice informing the institutional and legal design of State reparations issued by local, regional, and international courts and other quasi-adjudicative tribunals to address serious violations of human rights (civil, political, economic, social, cultural, environmental, labor, among others). We will explore emerging developments in reparations design (in environmental courts, investment arbitration, ad hoc multi-Stakeholder arbitration under the Bangladesh Accord, cultural heritage and restitution arbitral mechanisms), landmark reparations claims that still remain unaddressed after the twentieth century (such as the trans-Atlantic slave trade, human trafficking, colonization), and reparative innovations required to respond to complex human rights challenges such as climate change, digital rights, and cross-border migration.

Contemporary human rights activists argue that human beings share a set of fundamental rights. But what happens when the seemingly universal concept of "human rights" is translated across different social, historical, and cultural contexts? In this class, we will look at how claims about human rights take shape as people engage tensions between universal models of the human and the diverse realities of everyday lives. When people advocate for social justice in terms of human rights, what arguments do they make about what it means to be human? What visions of justice do they produce? Such questions are central if we want to understand the potential of human rights projects to build a better world. Drawing on research from scholars in anthropology, history, and political theory, this course explores how human rights take shape within social and historical contexts.

Does international human rights law address inequality, diversity, and fairness in the human condition? This course examines the treaties, jurisprudence, and crystallized State and non-State practices on the codification, formation, interpretation, and implementation of international economic, social, and cultural rights (ESC rights) around the world, scrutinizing how "progressive realization", "non-retrogression", and "non-discrimination" principles affect the interpretive meaning and evolution of ESC rights' operational implementation in discrete cases. The course will weave analysis of jurisprudential, operational, programmatic, as well as dispute resolution developments on ESC rights, beginning with the 1966 International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights (ICESCR), to its nexus with the rest of the nine fundamental human rights treaties [e.g. Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD), International Convention on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and their Families (ICMW)], conventions under the International Labour Organization (ILO), the 1970 UNESCO Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export, and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property, as well as regional human rights instruments (the American Convention on Human Rights, the European Convention on Human Rights, and the European Social Charter). By exploring deficits in the evolving institutions and interpretive practices to respect, protect, fulfill, and remedy ESC rights, the course aims to introduce university students to challenges in the global, regional, and local implementation of ESC rights, and to provoke collaborative thinking on future directions for effective ESC rights realization and protection.

This course explores topics in American constitutional law related to civil liberties and civil rights. The course employs a variety of instructional methods including Socratic method lectures, class debates, and moot court exercises in which students play the role of lawyers and justices arguing a Supreme Court case. Students will explore the social and political struggles that have shaped freedom and equality in the United States, including debates over protest, hate speech, pornography, religious freedom, gun control, abortion, race, gender, and homosexuality.

In 2020, the United States is commemorating the centennial of the 19th Amendment, which prohibited the denial of voting rights on the basis of sex. In this course, we will take the occasion of the centennial to explore the place of women's suffrage in the development of American democracy and the political empowerment of women. We will examine such topics as the meaning of citizenship, the place of voting in the American democratic system, the woman suffrage movement and other feminist movements, the anti-suffrage movement and other conservative movements, and the participation of women in various political roles, including as candidates and office-holders. We will approach these topics with an explicitly intersectional lens, exploring the ways in which gender, race/ethnicity, and class, in particular, shape politics and power in the United States. Students in this course will also participate in a DPAC Learning Beyond the Classics film course (4-6 weeks) on women/s suffrage.

This course introduces students to the dynamics of the social and historical construction of race and ethnicity in American political life. The course explores the following core questions: What are race and ethnicity? What are the best ways to think about the impact of race and ethnicity on American citizens? What is the history of racial and ethnic formation in American political life? How do race and ethnicity link up with other identities animating political actions like gender and class? What role do American political institutions the Congress, presidency, judiciary, state and local governments, etc. play in constructing and maintaining these identity categories? Can these institutions ever be used to overcome the points of division in American society?

Under what conditions do governments comply with international norms? How can international courts secure respect for their orders? Because international courts lack effective means of enforcement, governments often defy their rulings. We will analyze why governments adhere to court orders and how international bodies can become more effective. We will also introduce advanced methodological tools to analyze and predict compliance. Students in the seminar will have the opportunity to participate in research projects integrated to the Notre Dame Reparations Design and Compliance Lab (NDRL). Participants will be able to use the tools acquired in the course to analyze compliance with the rulings of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, the World Bank Inspection Panel, and other international bodies.

What role does international law have in the advancement of human rights, and how does human rights, in turn, advance international law? This course introduces university students to the general system of modern international law (e.g. its norm-generating framework involving States and non-State actors; the roles of many State and non-State authoritative decision-makers in shaping expectations of peaceful, just, and responsible behavior in the international system; its varied constellation of dispute settlement courts and tribunals, alongside the prospects and limits of enforcing State compliance with international decisions), specifically viewed from the lens of historic global, regional, and domestic challenges to human dignity that influenced the first global codification of human rights norms under the United Nations' 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, up to the present development of the current international system of protection for human rights. The course situates the framework of modern international law and civil, political, economic, social, and cultural human rights, using five examples of the historic, defining, and 'constitutionalizing moments' for the international system: 1) the international abolition of slavery; 2) the evolution from classical to modern international law in dismantling colonial empires to enshrine the self-determination of all peoples and the equality of sovereignty of all nations; 3) the outlawing of the aggressive use of force since 1929, towards the peaceful settlement of maritime and territorial disputes and the humanitarian rules applicable to armed conflict situations; 4) the establishment of international accountability of individuals and States for genocide, crimes against humanity and other human rights atrocities; and 5) the global regulation for sustainable use, shared protection, and intergenerational responsibility over natural resources (land, oceans, atmosphere, outer space).

We are living through a watershed moment in United States history. Structural racism is at the forefront of the national discourse. Yet, the threat that racism holds on our nation's most cherished ideals of democracy and justice is hardly new. Generations of activists, scholars, and everyday people have fought and persevered to bring about social, cultural, and policy change. This course engages deeply with topics relevant to the national discourse on racial and ethnic relations in the U.S. The first part of the course examines key concepts, focusing on the social construction of race and ethnicity, prejudice, and discrimination. The second part reviews the historical experiences of Native Americans, Latinos, Asian Americans, and African Americans. The third and final part of the course centers on four critical issues that are especially relevant in 2020: (1) immigration; (2) political disenfranchisement; (3) racial and ethnic disparities in health; and (4) racism in the criminal justice system.

Through a close examination of twelve historical events, we will study African-American resistance in the United States from the 17th century through the 20th century. We will employ a case-study method and seek to categorize and characterize the wide variety of African-American resistance. Our study will include the politics of confrontation and civil disobedience, polarization of arts, transformation of race relations, the tragedies and triumphs of Reconstruction, interracial violence, black political and institutional responses to racism and violence, the Harlem Renaissance, jazz, blues, and the civil rights and black power movements. Students will be confronted with conflicting bodies of evidence and challenged to analyze these issues and arrive at conclusions. Music and film will supplement classroom discussions.

In June 2020, prompted by the horrific killings of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, and Breonna Taylor, our nation awakened to the brutality of institutional racism and the violence to human dignity it has wrought in communities of color throughout America's history. The movement for racial justice was renewed in vigor with nationwide protests and calls for action. Although the protests of 2020 have largely been a response to a crisis surrounding police violence, the calls to action have focused attention on the breadth of systemic racism in all facets of American life. In this course, students will engage weekly with a single event or concept, drawn from a variety of disciplines, necessary to understand and dismantle systemic racism. The course centers around a weekly guest-lecture series featuring authors, public intellectuals, faith leaders, and external and internal members of the academy. In each class period, the guest expert provides a sophisticated introduction to a discrete racial justice topic. Some lectures address historical events not widely known (e.g., the Tulsa massacre or the arrival of the first slave ship in the Americas in 1619); others address current racial inequities (e.g., the wealth gap, health outcomes, criminal justice, voter suppression); still others examine broad concepts (e.g., intersectionality, Catholic teaching on racism). Specific topics to be determined by expert availability. Students prepare for the sessions by researching the speaker or topic and preparing thoughtful questions to be posed during the guest's visit. Students also participate in at least two small group discussions and, at the conclusion of the semester, are required to produce a short reflective writing piece. The entire course will be offered via zoom for all participants.

This course will focus on the writings of Black political thinkers in the Americas, Africa, and Europe. Through critical examination of the conditions against, and contexts within, which the political theories of these thinkers are situated, this course hopes to arrive at some understanding of the principles, goals and strategies developed to contest and redefine notions/concepts of citizenship (vis-a-vis the imperatives of race/racism and the global colonial formations), humanity, justice, equality, development, democracy, and freedom.

What is the relationship between development projects, which often pursue universal goals and scalable approaches, and cultural difference? How does culture shape the impact of development projects? How are development practitioners themselves shaped by culture? In this course, we use materials from anthropology, sociology, and history to explore how development processes shape, and are shaped by, culture. Approaching culture in terms of the meanings, values, practices, and norms that shape social life in both overt and subtle ways, we will focus on how different actors in the development world create and communicate knowledge about social issues and their potential solutions. Along the way, we will draw on different theories about culture, power, and inequality to analyze mainstream development approaches to data, expertise, and social transformation.

Poisoned Kremlin critic Alexey Navalny, currently lying in a Berlin hospital for treatment, provides only the latest image of the nexus of Germany and Russia in matters relating to authoritarian oppression of minorities and opposition groups. Yet their intertwined history of racism, authoritarianism, and persecution of ethnic minorities has been the object of intellectual study for decades: Hannah Arendt, Ernst Nolte, Jurgen Habermas, and more recently, Timothy Snyder are some of the leading scholars who have elucidated the ways in which these cultures intersect in both promoting and confronting mono-ethnic authoritarianism. Part cautionary tale, part success story, this course examines select case studies from the polities of Russia and Germany (with shorter units on Poland, Hungary, and Belarus) in their ongoing struggles with authoritarian, racist, and anti-democratic legacies. Given notorious histories of oppression and persecution of ethnic, religious, and other minorities--haunting images of Soviet gulags, German concentration camps, and of the KGB and the Gestapo spring all too readily to mind--these countries provide potentially valuable lessons in thinking about racism and police brutality in our own time. In the postwar and post-Unification/post-Soviet periods, these countries continue to face these issues in stark and sometimes creative ways--with varying degrees of success. We will be concerned to respect both the historical and cultural particularity of these cultures, and to draw upon this material to enrich our thinking about anti-racist reform in the contemporary world. We draw upon a variety of materials: historical documents, constitutional studies, film and television, literature, political and sociological data, journalistic interventions, including social media.

Are human rights modern inventions or are they as old as humankind? Are they universal or culturally specific? How much progress, if any, has transnational human rights advocacy achieved? How and to what extent should human rights influence foreign policy? What are the advantages and disadvantages of encoding human rights in international law? By examining these and similar questions, this course initiates students in the study of international human rights. In addition to informative readings, intriguing podcasts, and interactive lectures the course features in-class debates on the most pressing human rights problems.

Kinship on the Margins: Encountering Poverty and the Catholic Social Tradition is a three-credit letter-graded fall semester course within the Poverty Studies Interdisciplinary Minor (PSIM). The course is restricted to students currently participating in the Summer Service Learning Program (SSLP). Students enroll in the course for the fall semester following the SSLP, but coursework is distributed before, during, and after the summer immersion concluding in September. Kinship on the Margins: Encountering Poverty and the Catholic Social Tradition provides students with an introduction to an interdisciplinary approach to understanding and responding to poverty, with lectures from experts in History, Political Science, Gender Studies, Poverty Studies, Theology, and Sociology. Students in this course will gain skills and resources for the demanding work of providing direct services to individuals living in poverty, while also developing capacity to critically analyze contemporary social issues. While the course will equip stuents to identify causes and symptoms of inequality and poverty, Kinship on the Margins: Encountering Poverty and the Catholic Social Tradition endeavors to provide students with a Catholic moral framework for evaluating competing notions of justice and to be able to propose and defend cogent moral arguments for constructive courses of action to alleviate suffering and injustice. The weekly themes of the course are drawn from the Catholic social tradition, such as human dignity, solidarity, the common good, and the preferential option for the poor. The course examines these concepts from within the religious context of Catholic thought by way of weekly readings of foundational Scripture passages, papal social encyclicals such as Laudato Si' and Solicitudo rei socialis, and contemporary Catholic theologians. Weekly assignments ask students not merely to factually relate Catholic tenets, but to inhabit the moral perspective of Catholic social tradition and to offer first-person arguments for how members of society ought to respond in the face of human suffering and inequality.

While there is a wealth of academic work on race, racism, and anti-racism in the domestic realm, there is less attention to them in the international context. This is unfortunate, because they cannot be domestically confined. United Nations resolutions against racism, debates about whether the International Criminal Court is racially biased, and the global wave of anti-racist protests in 2020 are a few examples. This course examines race in the international context, exploring how it affects, is affected by, and is intertwined with central topics in international relations, including human rights, war and peace, foreign policy, international law and international organizations.

This seminar will provide an overview of and framework to understand the global refugee crisis. We will trace the evolution of international refugee law and policy dealing with this ever-growing population. Central are the ethical challenges that refugees pose for the international community. What is the nature of our collective obligation to refugees? What determines the extent of this obligation? Through a series of legal and sociological case studies, students will also grapple with the social, legal , political and ethical challenges posed by humanitarian intervention on behalf of refugees and the often unintended consequences of such policies. How do the different models for dealing with refugee resettlement affect the life chances of refugees? This project-based course will pair students with a refugee community to address a pressing social concern.

The course will examine U.S. policies and practices to combat human trafficking including how U.S. policies advance the prevention of trafficking in persons, the protection of victims and survivors and the punishment of perpetrators as a foreign policy objective of the U.S. Students will develop a basic understanding of the various aspects of and perspectives in human trafficking including domestic and international law; foreign nationals and United States Citizens; victim services, survivor aftercare and law enforcement and sex and labor trafficking. Students will also analyze international trafficking prohibitions under the various international conventions and identify current trafficking issues in the United States, with a particular focus on commercial sexual exploitation and forced labor and involuntary servitude and the range of remedies available when rights have been violated. Finally, students will identify gaps in existing remedies and formulate policies to address them.

This course will review decisions of the U.S. Supreme court regarding the constitutional rights of homosexuals. It will assess the Court's decisions in light of (1) background theories of constitutional interpretation; (2) the principles of the American Founding; and (3) present day moral arguments for and against gay rights. Readings will consist of Supreme Court cases, selections from the Ratification debate and the philosophic writings that influenced the Founding, and the writings of present-day moral philosophers on both sides of the issues. Grades will be based on mid-term and final exams, with an optional term paper for one quarter of the course grade.

Civil Rights in the US is a living tradition that students can both understand and engage with. This course traces the non-linear, contested and ongoing history of Civil Rights in the US from the founding period to the present. It employs the perspectives of a lawyer and historian to illustrate how: the Civil War and the end of slavery made Civil Rights in the US possible, international human rights and Civil Rights in the US have interacted over time; the complicated relationship between the definition of Civil Rights and the realization of these rights played out over time, and the tensions between the federal government and the states continue to shape Civil Rights down to the present. The course is structured around three key historical periods in which Civil Rights in the US developed and the divisive legacy of these periods of possibility: The Founding and Constitutional period 1776-1790, Civil War and Reconstruction, 1863-1883 and the Civil Rights Era 1945-1991. Through an examination of social movements, Supreme Court cases, and congressional action the course illustrates how the meaning of citizenship and civil rights, who constituted a citizen, and what institutions—state and local government, private individuals, and so on—posed the biggest threat to equal treatment under the law changed over time. Finally, the course provides opportunities for students to actively participate in the US Civil Rights tradition.

This course provides an introduction to the history of American slavery. After examining the origins and transformation of Atlantic world slavery, the course focuses particularly on slavery in the United States. Between the American Revolution and the Civil War, the United States grew into the largest slaveholding society in the modern world. U.S. slavery's growth was driven forward by massive global economic transformations and territorial conquest. Yet, in the face of unprecedented violence, enslaved people themselves brought about the end of slavery and transformed the meaning of freedom in the United States. This course focuses on this history from the perspective of enslaved people themselves with particular attention to struggles for freedom. Through an examination of this history and its legacies, the course will introduce students to histories of resistance.

Although advances in science and technology have made tremendous gains in promoting health and longevity, these achievements have not been experienced evenly. Instead, devastating health and disability-based inequities persist, such as environmental racism and disability-based discrimination. As a result, social movement groups and organizations are fighting to protect vulnerable communities and promote civil rights. This class will therefore address how social movements have impacted the health and human rights of vulnerable social groups in the US and beyond today. To do so, we will (1) use a sociological perspective to investigate the structural determinants of health and the social construction of disabilities, and (2) investigate how advocates, activists, and organizations fight for good health and disability justice. This course will require participation in a daylong multi-fieldsite visit, weekly readings, presentations, and a final paper.

America is the richest country in the world and yet roughly three million American children now grow up in families surviving on just $2 a day. As America's richest 0.1% have seen their incomes more than quadruple over the last forty years, the incomes for 90% of Americans have barely changed. These financial disparities reflect deeper inequities in educational opportunity, incarceration rates, social status and more. In this course, we will examine the nature and consequences of American inequality. Through close reading and spirited discussion, we will address such questions as: What is the meaning of meritocracy in an age of profound inequality? What is the lived experience of American poverty and American privilege? How are race and gender inequalities (re)produced throughout the life course? And, finally, how do all of these issues manifest in the successes and struggles of students at Notre Dame?

More than a century before African slaves were trafficked to the Virginia colony in 1619, Christopher Columbus transported captured indigenous peoples to Spain from the New World. The dispossession and enslavement of non-Europeans in the colonization of the Americas was justified by Christians but also condemned by Christians with different economic and political interests. This development course in theology introduces students to the challenging intersection of faith, slavery, and freedom by exploring key figures, events, and movements that have shaped the complex historical legacy of Christianity in the Americas, a hemispheric past that remains ever bound together. In addition to Christianity's role in colonial expansion and racial ideology, the course especially considers how lived faith in God provided a catalyst for the empowerment and resistance of the oppressed and their advocates in shared struggles to attain greater social justice, racial equality, and political autonomy. From the "Protector of the Indians" Bartolomé de las Casas to César Chávez, and the "Black Moses" Harriet Tubman to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., the course explores these and other extraordinary figures of hope in the Americas who gave their lives to protest social violence and promote authentic expressions of faith. In the course, students will engage this turbulent past through a contextual approach to theology that examines idolatry, migration, land, liberty, poverty, social sin, nonviolence, and solidarity as normative categories relevant for addressing contemporary social crises afflicting our nation and earth.

Racial Justice in America is focused on the historic and current impact of racial injustice and the urgency of the work of racial justice today. Racial Justice in America will invite course participants to consider how the stories of the struggle for racial justice in the United States shapes our imaginations for the work of racial justice today. The centerpiece of this course is a required spring break immersion to major civil rights locations in the South. Additionally, students will read/reflect on how we tell the stories of racism in the United States and will create their own narrative/reflective account of their experience with racism and the civil rights movement sites.

This course examines representations of race, ethnicity, and ideology in the American cinema through a sociological lens. We will focus on understanding how film reflects and directs prevailing cultural norms and attitudes surrounding racial and ethnic relations. One goal is to uncover how racial and ethnic relations are reified on the silver screen through storytelling techniques such as narrative, style, aesthetics, and mise en scène. We will analyze the sociological context of each film to better understand the evolution of cinematic representations of race and ethnicity and what they mean for race relations and inequality in the broader society. This course will cover the American cinematic treatment of Native Americans, Blacks, Latinos, Asians, and Italian Americans through feature length screenings and clips of particularly poignant scenes.

This course will examine the opportunities and challenges facing Latino communities today as they simultaneously transform and are transformed by their continuing growth in U.S. society. Through a careful examination of the biographies of leaders in Latino communities, we will examine what role they have each played in empowering Latino communities to advance in business, arts, education, community organizing, entertainment, medicine, religion, law, academia, politics, and other areas. The course will coincide with the Transformative Latino Leadership Speaker Series sponsored by the Arthur Foundation through the Institute for Latino Studies. Students in the class will have the opportunity to interact with invited leaders in several setting including the classroom, meals, receptions, and university-wide events. The primary course requirement is a research essay about the life and career of a chosen leader.

Gender has been fundamental to the organization of nearly all human societies, but what gender has meant in terms of identity, opportunity, and economic activity has varied widely across time and space. This course will explore gender at work in US history, taking a chronological approach to show gender's evolution and ongoing intersections with class, race, age, religion, region, and sexuality from 1776 to the near present. The term "gender at work" expresses a double meaning here -- first, it connotes that this is a labor history course, with an emphasis on the ways gender has operated at the workplace; second, it suggests the ubiquity of gender in shaping Americans' lives, experiences, and imaginations not only at the workplace, but also in formal politics, informal communities, and every space in between. By exploring the ways gender has been both omnipresent and contingent throughout US history, students should better understand -- and perhaps act upon -- seemingly intractable contemporary conundrums involving questions of equal opportunity and pay, household division of labor, work-life balance, and the proper relationships among employers, workers, households, and government.

This course will devote the first part of the semester to establishing an account of the historical roots of the current affordable housing crisis in the United States, paying particular attention to the local Michiana context. It will also introduce students to the housing “continuum of care” in the City of South Bend, noting the various institutional and governmental agencies currently involved in addressing housing needs as well as the gaps in coverage, e.g. the need for a permanent low-barrier intake center. The second part of the course will involve community engagement as students begin to pursue specific research projects. Students will have the opportunity to network with area housing agencies and local government entities and research best practices in other urban areas. During this segment of the course, students will engage with experts in the field, both virtually and in person. This work will lead into their own constructive proposals for a concrete contribution to meeting the current low-income and supportive housing needs locally, regionally, and/or nationally. All these signs of the times will be held in conversation with Catholic social teaching, exploring the concept of housing as a human right and duty in service of the common good.

Disability has long been constructed as the opposite of higher education. Universities are places that valorize, even demand, physical and intellectual ability. Disability, in turn, is often seen as something that does not fit within a university context, a problem that must be fixed. This antithetical relationship between disability and the university is rooted in history—eugenical curriculums, research programs that study disabled people—but it continues today. Despite a growing focus on diversity in university admissions and populations, disabled students enter higher education at a lower rate than non-disabled students and are less likely to graduate. In addition, universities perpetuate cultures of ableism in both faculty and students by prioritizing ability, perfection, and achievement. This course interrogates the relationship between disability and higher education with a special focus on our university, Notre Dame. Students will be introduced to fundamental principles in disability studies; explore the place of disability in higher education; and, drawing on scholarship in critical university studies, consider intersections between ableism, racism, and sexism in university contexts. Students will also think and learn about what inclusive and accessible education might look like. The course will conclude with a student-driven project designed to increase access, inclusiveness, and awareness about ableism and disability at Notre Dame.

Food access, equity and justice should be of great importance to everyone. Consistently there has been political, economic, geographic and flawed distribution supply chains within the domestic food system. This interdisciplinary course will utilize digital humanities tools and platforms for students to express their research interests. We will analyze the impact that human actions have on foodways, or the social, cultural, and economic practices of producing and consuming food in relation to race, equity and access, historically and currently. We will explore alternative courses of action toward viable, ethical, and antiracist solutions to questions about sustainable farming, global economic inequality, and hunger. Throughout the semester, participants will use the lens of race and ethnicity to study and discuss how these two concepts affect access to agricultural land, foodstuffs/foodways, environmental justice and nature.

In 2023, it is difficult to avoid the language of antiracism, and harder still to discern its politics. Is racism a matter of structure or intention? Culture or economics? What does racial justice look like? And what exactly are those structures anyways? Moving from the civil rights movement of the 1960s to the George Floyd Uprisings of 2020, this course introduces students to the history behind a freighted term. We will read classic and contemporary texts of antiracism, tracking how American activists, politicians, artists, and scholars wrestled with these questions in the twilight years of the welfare state, mass industry, and securely waged employment.

Sociologists who study social movements and activism typically address questions about how disadvantaged groups are able to organize and engage in sustained protest in hopes of bringing about progressive change. In recent years, however, we have witnessed the growth of many organizations that aim to prevent change with hopes of preserving benefits that they enjoy. To understand this form of organized resistance to change, we need to closely examine how power operates in society to understand conditions that give rise to activism that resists progressive change. We consider the extent to which theories designed to explain progressive activism fail to account for conservative activism. The ultimate goal for the course is to provide you with the tools needed to formulate your own research questions and to engage with the academic literature to theorize your questions in a way that could lead to publishable research.

Given the dramatic rise in mass incarceration over the last 50 years, understanding the spillover consequences of this uniquely American phenomenon has become increasingly important as a growing number of families now have direct experience with imprisonment. This course will provide a broad overview of the ripple effects of mass imprisonment on family life and how it shapes opportunity and structures disadvantage for communities, families, and especially children. This will be done through 1) exposure to mixed-media portrayals of imprisonment’s effects on family and community life and 2) the close analysis of empirical research on the spillover and intergenerational consequences of incarceration across a range of outcomes. With the concentration of imprisonment falling among poor, minority families, much of the readings in this course will focus on family life in urban communities of color, however, we will spend a little time exploring broader accounts, including those of rural communities and encourage students to consider impacts for families exposed to incarceration due to white-collar crimes.

This course examines the socio-histories, movement, and settlement patterns of racial minorities in the U.S. The course will focus on how race and racial imaginaries shape the movement and settlement of racial minorities. It will include deep examinations of these mobility patterns and how they are constructed and articulated through laws, policies, and social arrangements. Special attention will be paid to the racialization of the United States, American-ness as whiteness, and the consequences for the social and physical landscape. And finally, the course will consider how the racial construction of the U.S. is manifested and buttressed through the built environment and the consequences.

Millions of people around the world have been forced from their homes by interlinked factors including persecution, armed conflict, natural disasters, development projects and socio-economic deprivation. Resolving large-scale displacement represents a critical challenge for contemporary peacebuilding and development processes. This course is designed to introduce students to various theoretical and methodological frameworks that inform and shape forced migration laws, policies and practice. Specifically students will: (i) examine international, regional, national and local responses to the problem of forced migration; (ii) investigate the obstacles to effective protection and assistance for refugees and displaced persons; (iii) explore the challenge of resolving displacement crises, and (iv) discuss some of the moral dilemmas raised by forced migration.

Scholars and activists use the concept of the "carceral state" to describe the official, government use of criminalization, surveillance, and mass imprisonment to exercise control over society. This course examines the histories, cultures, politics, and economics of the US carceral state. Reading feminist scholarship from across the disciplines, we will study its genealogy — beginning with the surveillance embedded in the earliest practices of slavery and settler colonialism, tracing its development through the 19th and early 20th centuries, and concluding with the rise of the modern prison industrial complex. We will then focus on contemporary case studies including the "war on drugs," immigrant detention, sex-crime regulation, and police violence. Finally, we will consider alternatives to prisons and policing, as we learn about academic research and activist movements working to end state violence, abolish prisons, defund police, and build opportunities for restorative justice. We will ask and address such questions as: How does the US carceral state function as a tool for social control? What histories, policies, and ideologies underlie the carceral state? How have individuals and organizations worked to reform, transform, or abolish the carceral state? How have media and the arts been used to normalize and/or critique the carceral state? And can we imagine a world without prisons or police?

The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimate that 26% of Americans (about 61 million people) have a disability—a physical, intellectual, sensory, or self-care impediment that affects major life activities. This course considers this population, their stories and experiences, as well as how disability—as a social, cultural, legal, and political construct—has shaped the nation and its history. A particular focus of the course will be on disability and social justice. Throughout American history, and still today, disabled people have been excluded from basic civil rights, such as voting, marrying, holding property, and living independently. This course will examine how these restrictions developed and changed over time as well as how disabled people have fought for greater access and equality. Coursework may include response papers, primary source analysis, and a final project.

This class will survey the various historical and contemporary dimensions of Asian American experiences including immigration & integration, family & community dynamics, ethnic/gender/class identity, as well as transnational and diasporic experiences. We will explore contemporary and historical issues of racism, the model minority myth, inter-generational relationships, and the educational experiences of Asian Americans. To accomplish this, our class will pose such questions as: Who is Asian American? How did racism create Chinatown? Is there an Asian advantage? Coursework includes essays based on topics of your choice, presentations, and a creative narrative.

While it is a notoriously difficult concept to define, “race” is undoubtedly a powerful signifier in American life. Focusing on the twentieth century to the present, this course examines the ways in which racial ideas and knowledges are formed, negotiated, circulated, and resisted in the arenas of American popular culture. From Jack Johnson becoming the first Black heavyweight champion of the world on December 28, 1908, to contemporary cultural politics of performance and appropriation, this course will ask how popular culture actively shapes—rather than merely reflects—American ideas about race and ethnicity. A key aim of the class is to go beyond looking for “good” and “bad” pop culture texts to explore the structural, organizational, and systematic underpinning ideologies of racism and antiracism. By closely engaging with a diverse set of theoretical, historical, and primary texts, students will learn to approach and analyze popular culture with a critical and reflective eye.

Nearly one in four people is an immigrant or child of immigrants in the United States. This course critically examines what it means to be an immigrant or child of immigrants through interdisciplinary sources, including memoirs, blogs, art, and popular journalism. Since the liberalization of immigration policy in 1965, immigrants from Latin America and Asia are becoming an increasing and emergent demographic of American society. In major American cities such as Los Angeles and New York, they comprise over 50% of the population. This course focuses on how immigrants and the children of immigrants experience the United States. How are immigrants changing the US racial and ethnic structure? How do their experiences differ, given varying legal statuses? How is the second generation becoming American? We will explore these questions through family, media representation, religion, education, dating, and sexuality. Students will participate in a service-learning opportunity related to migration and social justice and learn skills in quantitative and qualitative methodologies. Service learning will be 2-3 hours outside of class each week.

Global health is an area of study, research and practice that focuses on achieving equity in health for all people worldwide. The health status of individuals and populations arise from a myriad of complex biological, social, economic, political, and environmental factors that operate synergistically. Through a social justice lens, we will examine how these factors shape health outcomes and how interventions must be developed that include addressing the root causes of inequity. We will use a case-based approach, focusing on specific health problems in several countries, including the United States. Cases will include a variety of themes including health disparities arising from stress-associated racial discrimination, the epidemiological transition from infectious to non-communicable diseases, and how the health effects of climate change disproportionately affect the most vulnerable

What is race? How do concepts of race change according to social, political, and historical context? Do Asian understandings of race differ from those in the West? How are concepts like "blackness" and "white privilege" interpreted in Asia? In this class, we will grapple with this set of questions by looking at how competing definitions of race and nationhood emerged in conjunction with the rise of the Japanese empire (1910-1945), and American military occupation in Asia during the Cold War. Students will investigate how this historical context has continued to affect the ways more contemporary flows of migrants from Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and Africa are racialized in Asia, by analyzing sociological, anthropological, and historical texts of everyday life. No prior knowledge about Asian languages or topics is required.

When Columbus stepped ashore in the Caribbean in 1492, he set in motion a process that led to the creation of wealthy Spanish and Portuguese empires in the Americas, the genocide of countless numbers of indigenous men and women, the enslavement of millions of African men and women, and the eventual formation of a variety of independent states competing in the world economy. In this semester-long survey, we will examine topics in this history that will allow us to consider how history is produced as well as what happened in the past, from various perspectives, from elite colonial administrators and merchants to indigenous peasants and formerly enslaved men and women.

This course explores how ideas about race and racism have been intertwined with scientific, medical, and technological developments, shaping society since the 18th century. While recognizing that race is fundamentally a social construct, the course delves into scientific efforts to quantify, measure, and categorize individuals by race from early anthropometry to contemporary developments like the Human Genome Project and artificial intelligence. By critically analyzing scientific theories that produced and built upon ideas of racial hierarchy, students will develop a deep understanding of how race, racism, and racial inequality have been embedded into scientific knowledge, and thus, societal understanding. Students will also examine the historical context of racial disparities in healthcare, including the development of racialized medical theories, and will explore the role of technology in reinforcing or challenging racial biases, from the early days of photography to modern AI and surveillance technologies. This course is tailored for students with interests in the history of science and the production of scientific knowledge, as well as those curious about the origins of scientific racism and racial inequality.

This course will examine the global field of Indigenous Cinema. This class will utilize screenings of Indigenous film along with accompanying lecture, reading, and discussion, to examine the ways in which Indigenous filmmakers, actors, and communities are subverting genre and decolonizing the industry to tell and reclaim Indigenous stories and make room for Indigenous futures.

Under what conditions do governments comply with international norms? How can international courts secure respect for their orders? Because international courts lack effective means of enforcement, governments often defy their rulings. We will analyze why governments adhere to court orders and how international bodies can become more effective. We will also introduce advanced methodological tools to analyze and predict compliance. Students in the seminar will have the opportunity to participate in research projects integrated to the Notre Dame Reparations Design and Compliance Lab (NDRL). Participants will be able to use the tools acquired in the course to analyze compliance with the rulings of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, the World Bank Inspection Panel, and other international bodies.

The purpose of this course is to introduce students to major themes in the global history of slavery with a specific focus on the location of slavery in the making of the modern world bringing together histories from the Atlantic, Indian, and Pacific Ocean worlds. The course will focus upon these themes through literature, economics, and politics. In addition, the course will also introduce students to recent museum exhibitions, art exhibitions, digital history projects, films, and documentary compilations that all together have transformed how the global history of slavery is understood.

This course offers an interdisciplinary survey of African-American and other African descendant women’s indigenous knowledge, development and maintenance of social structures, cultural preservation and spiritual engagement within their respective communities. Unfortunately and unconscionably Black women have been derogatorily referred to as “the mules of the world”. Valued for their work, and often not much else. They are venerated for their fertility and their central role they occupy as strong mothers and caregivers in the domestic sphere. Yet, concurrently they are often denied opportunity outside of the home. “Crossing over” occupying a position in more than one realm, much as Sister Rosetta Tharpe moved between secular and sanctified music often became the modus for survival. Maligned as jezebels, or sapphires, lazy and usury, as witches, or relegated to menial, semi-skilled labor. This course aims to interrogate and dispel some of the tropes and caricatures, by utilizing womanist and feminist theory to look closely at the role of Black women as agentive, sage and entrepreneurial. Alice Walker coined the term womanist in the 1980s. As Walker outlines it, a womanist is a person who prefers to side with the oppressed: with women, with people of color, with the poor. These are women who occupy several subject positions in society. By harnessing their “intersectionality” of race, gender, sexuality, class, and transnational identity we can interrogate the historicity and cultural specificity that they have faced in and outside of their communities. With particular emphasis placed upon the subordination that Black women face; and the effects of racism, colonialism, unequal forms of economic development, and globalization on Black Communities, the course aims to see and illustrate where and how Black women have risen above the limitations imposed upon them. To do this, students will engage in critical reading of a range of diverse texts—from memoir, essay, fiction, prose, cultural criticism and sociopolitical analysis. We will look historically and currently at black women’s roles in the home, their religious institutions and in some of the workplaces they occupy as sole proprietors, cottage industrialists, and street vendors. For an undergraduate student body this course will pull excerpts from several core texts that would tend to be read in full if offered on the graduate level.

How do we define decolonization and/or decoloniality? What is the nature of the colonial condition these concepts seek to remedy? Decolonization and decoloniality have become a metaphor for decentering the hegemonic structure of Eurocentrism and re-positioning normative epistemologies and ontologies to include subaltern and marginalized ways of knowing, being, and doing. This course is a critical interrogation of the theories, philosophies, processes, and accounts of colonialism/coloniality and decolonization/decoloniality. The aim is to chart critical paths to rethinking the meaning and impact of these concepts. By interrogating how normative concepts, ideas, theories, and philosophies affirming the legitimacy of colonialism were employed and deployed to subjugate, exploit, and dominate colonized subjects, the course affirms a critical practice that opens new spaces for rethinking the meaning of decolonization. In this course, we will survey the core texts that have spurred decolonial theories and movements in Africa and the Americas. However, given that decolonial discourse now touches on nearly every aspect of society — past, present, and future — the topics covered in this course will by no means be exhaustive, but are designed to open intellectual space for renewed debates about the meaning and conceptual boundaries of decolonial theories.

Research is structured thinking and doing that begins with a question or a problem. We learn research by doing it again and again alongside an experienced researcher. Doing research is most fun and rewarding when the questions and answers matter for the communities we live in. This seminar offers Notre Dame undergraduates the opportunity to do mentored social science and legal research in response to research challenges confronting South Bend School Corporation Board members and administrators in the area of educational opportunity.

This major-level course is designed to provide students with a substantive overview of Latina/o immigration and community formation in Chicago during the twentieth century, and how it became one of the largest Latino cities in the United States. The Windy City's rise in the nineteenth century as an industrial metropolis transformed it as a magnet for capital, culture, and labor. A series of key events around the turn of the century and into the early decades of the twentieth century - the Spanish-American War of 1898, the Mexican Revolution of 1910-1920, the rise of economic production during World War I (1914-1918), and the Immigration Act of 1924 that greatly reduced Eastern and Southern European immigration - would come to shape the patterns, processes, and terms of Latina/o migration into Chicago, particularly those of Mexicans and Puerto Ricans. Mexicans and other Latin Americans joined the Great Migrations of African Americans and ethnic whites to look for better opportunities in the north, and since then, Latino Chicagoans have forged communities as they have also negotiated the broader social, cultural, and political currents of American history throughout the twentieth century. This course will introduce students to these broader patterns as explored through recent scholarship on Latinos/as in Chicago. Students will also read key primary sources in the field and consider the historiographical debates about retelling this aspect of Chicago's history.

Throughout much of American history, individuals have organized and acted collectively to advance interests based on a common racial or ethnic identity. In some instances, groups have organized in an attempt to overcome discrimination and to stake a claim to rights and privileges enjoyed by majority group members. In other cases, members of the majority group have organized to restrict opportunities for the minority and to protect an advantaged position. We will consider the causes and consequences of both progressive and conservative social movements--such as the civil rights movement, the Ku Klux Klan, and the contemporary alt-right—giving particular attention to how theories of social movements help us to understand episodes of race-based collective action.

This course examines why some individuals decide to become immigrants through a cost benefit analysis, viewing migration as an investment in human capital. It addresses the selection among immigrants and how they integrate and assimilate in the destination country. Primary focus is given to the labor market, wages in particular, both of immigrants and of natives in the host country. A distinction is made between economic migrants and refugees and discrimination in its varied forms is also studied. The fiscal impact of immigration is discussed along with immigration policy in a global context. Statistics recommended but not required.

This course investigates modern genocide. We will consider several cases: Armenia, the Jewish Holocaust, Cambodia, Rwanda, and possibly Darfur and/or Gaza, and examine the conditions that lead to genocidal violence. We will also examine the uses of humanitarian interventions, trials, and strategies of societal reconciliation, and relevant conceptions of justice, guilt, forgiveness and moral responsibility.

This course will examine the comparative institutional design of criminal justice institutions, such as the police, prosecution offices, and the judiciary, and how those institutions are variedly implemented worldwide, with a particular focus on the Global South. We will explore how those institutions deal with issues such as large-scale criminal violence, the militarization of public safety, or femicides. Additionally, the course will critically analyze how those institutions affect the fulfillment of human rights, such as the prohibition of torture, the right of access to justice for victims, or the prohibition of discrimination. We will study how international human rights and humanitarian law for criminal justice institutions are used to deal with the obstacles and challenges of accessing justice amongst impunity. Last, we will look at forms of criminality management beyond the regular criminal justice system, such as restorative justice, indigenous legal systems, and transitional justice.

This course examines the "Global Sixties" (c.1956-c.1976) with particular attention to politics, culture and religion in the United States, Western Europe, and Latin America. The emphasis will be placed primarily on the topics of youth activism and state repression from the perspective (and influence) of the "Global South." The main goal of the course is to provide an opportunity for extensive reading in the Global Sixties historiography. For this, it pays particular attention to influential primary texts, ideas, interpretations, ideological currents, and repercussions of the period with emphasis on the broader context of the Cold War. Additional and more specific goals include: (1) exploring the different approaches and methods that historians have used to interpret the history of the Global Sixties; and (2) providing methodological background and advice that will aid students to write original research papers.

This research lab will employ an interdisciplinary approach to research on a range of issues related to mass incarceration. Collaborating with faculty, scholars, activists, practitioners, those impacted by systems of incarceration, and other classmates, students will develop, refine and implement a research project which contributes to the overall body of scholarship on incarceration. Students will be able to design projects (exploring moral, normative, and/or empirical etc. dimensions of incarceration) which connect their own academic and intellectual interests to emerging research questions at the Institute for Social Concerns. This research lab is open to students in all disciplines.

The most influential voices in the United States today—including those working in media outlets (i.e., CNN, FOX, MSNBC), the entertainment industry (i.e., Hollywood and Netflix), and the government (i.e., senators and governors)—overwhelmingly describe the countries of Central America and the Caribbean as “unruly”, “violent”, and unilaterally “impoverished.” Not too different from those given by their counterparts during the 19th century, these descriptions have been primarily framed in relation to the “tropics,” an “imagined region” of the world composed of “banana republics”, as we will discuss in this class, that always seemed to be far from the benefits of “modernity” and the advances of “Western civilization.” But in complicating these vague, misleading, and treacherous descriptions of the broader Latin American region, students will also be presented with the opportunity to explore a variety of challenges that ordinary Latin Americans face today, from a historical perspective. For example, in discussing the roots and long-term effects of modernization theory and military interventions, students will explore why Haitians and Hondurans, but not necessarily Costa Ricans, have left their respective countries in massive numbers. In comparative cases, they will also learn why ordinary people in El Salvador have welcomed a ruthless government of “law and order”; why their neighbors in Guatemala have instead looked for a populist leftist leader to demand justice and greater democracy; why Nicaragua has betrayed a once egalitarian revolution with a totalitarian regime; and why Puerto Rico has failed to protect its “citizens” from environmental and health disasters, and in comparison, why socialist Cuba has fared better in these regards, but has otherwise silenced those who criticize the ruling elite and has often been accused in international courts of violating human rights. Finally, as further points of contrast, students will learn why liberal and conservative politicians at times welcomed the presence of US foreign agents in their respective countries and why American politicians at times joined cautionary forces with their counterparts in Israel, France, and Argentina in combating the long Cold War in Central America and the Caribbean. In providing historical context to these and other questions (that I further detailed below), this course will introduce students to the ambivalent and often complicated relationship(s) between the United States and its neighbors in Central America and the Caribbean, from the early 19th century to the present.

This course seeks to explore connections between environment and culture change by introducing students to the diversity of cultures living in the Southwest. We begin by learning about indigenous people living in the Southwest today including the Pueblo peoples (e.g., Hopi, Zuni, Santa Clara, Cochiti, Acoma), Navajo, Ute, and Tohono O’odham using ethnography and contemporary native histories. We will then travel back in time to learn about the complex histories of these people, particularly the ancestral Pueblo, to places like Chaco Canyon, Mesa Verde, the Rio Grande, the Mimbres Valley, and the Phoenix Basin. Our explorations will cover from the earliest Paleoindians (11,500 years ago) to the 13th century Migrations to European contact, the establishment of Spanish Missions, and the Pueblo Revolt of 1680-1692. We will then bring this discussion full circle to today. Along the way, we will explore the impact of large-scale, long-term processes such as the adoption of agriculture, village formation, religious change, migration, and warfare on the rich historical landscape of the Southwest.

How and why do some of the roads taken by migrants (including refugees) lead to Rome and Italy? What are the challenges faced by migrants upon their arrival, and on their path to citizenship? How does civil society intervene to mitigate those challenges, and to facilitate mutual integration and engagement? What are the distinctive features of Roman lay and Catholic approaches to migration? The course addresses such questions, building on contemporary Rome both as a compelling case study and as a gateway to the causes, lived experiences, and consequences of global migrations. Students investigate how the experience of the city is at the same time the experience of globalization, embodied in older and new residents’ everyday life in the built environment; and they appreciate situated social engagement and its potentialities. The course builds on anthropology as a holistic social science, and it attends to migration- related aesthetics (e.g., art, movies) and Catholic Social Teachings that prove extremely salient in Rome. Attention to the realities of the host civil society is fundamental: migrants’ reception and integration happens at the local, neighborhood level and in interaction with residents and larger communities. This indispensable attention to Roman realities, together with scholarly accounts from regions of migrant origin and transit, enables students to ground their knowledge in local, Italian, historical, and Euro-Mediterranean contexts. Thus, the course does not impart a collection of facts about immigrants as insular entities, but provides entry points into some of the patterns accounting for global migrations; the lived experience of international borders; the interplay of sovereignty, democracy, citizenship, colonialism, decolonization, racialization, and human rights; the relationship between Islam, Catholicism, and the gendered public sphere; human smuggling; and the emotional, ethical, and embodied aspects of migration and of civic engagement.

A total of approximately 1.4 billion Catholics are found in virtually every country in the world. Since the 1960s their global religious community, the Roman Catholic Church, has embraced the mission of advancing integral human development as a comprehensive approach to Catholicism's commitment to upholding the God-given dignity of every person, regardless of race, religion, creed or any other marker of identity.

How do human rights intersect with trade in today’s globalized world? To answer this question, this course explores concrete, recent examples from Europe’s “fast-fashion-crazed” garment industry, which manufactures clothing, accessories, and home furnishings. Together we tackle key topics – such as living wages, workers’ right to organize, and forced overtime – and evaluate the root causes of endemic violations. How are these linked to the way global supply chains are structured? What steps have been taken so far to redress the power structures that undergird injustice in supply chains around the world? And what solutions are still needed, especially in light of increased climate change risks and automation? Through seminar discussions, workshops and guest lectures by practitioners from Europe, this course equips students with the tools to calculate the cost of human rights as part of a product’s price and to spot the differences between ‘greenwashing’ and authentic efforts for change.

Many approaches to policy, development, and governance emphasize universal goals and patterns. In practice, however, all policies and processes of social development unfold in specific places, at specific historical moments. In this course, we will explore a vibrant body of scholarship from multiple disciplines, called “critical policy studies,” that combines social and cultural analysis with policy studies. Students will learn how to analyze global policy interventions and outcomes as the products of specific communities, cultural contexts, and historical settings. We will examine the history of core categories in policy, like “poverty,” “growth,” “progress,” and even “development” itself. We will then use case studies to explore specific examples of how cultural and historical context shape policy interventions and outcomes. In so doing, students will learn the core methods of critical and interpretive policy studies, in order to develop valuable skills for analyzing how policies are shaped by, and act on, social life in unexpected ways.

The U.S. Census estimates there are over 55 million Latinos living in the U.S. today; and by 2060, that number is expected to double. In this course, we will explore the implications of these demographic trends for U.S. politics - past and present. Divided into three main sections, the course is designed to provide students with a broad overview of Latinos in American politics. Beginning with the question of who counts as "Latino," the first section addresses the history of Latino sub-groups in the United States, Latino identity, and shifts in the demographics of the U.S. Latino population over time. In the second section, we will focus on Latino political behavior - from public opinion to protest, voting to campaigning for elected office. In the third section, we will explore the consequences of political institutions. Here, we will explore the development of U.S. immigration policy and the militarization of immigration law enforcement, with particular focus on how the general public, activists, and policymakers are responding to these institutional processes.

Elections and social protest are the two most important means of political participation in Latin America today. Every year, millions of Latin Americans go to the ballot box to elect their representatives, but millions also march to their country's capitals to oust elected politicians or simply to demand public goods or policy changes. Are Latin American citizens taking to the streets to contest market-oriented reforms, as it is often portrayed? Or do they take to the streets because elections don't work in Latin America's dysfunctional democracies? Are Latin American voters electing leftist politicians to move the economies away from neoliberal policies? Do the rich vote for the Right and the poor for the Left? In this course we want to understand who votes, who protests, and why they do it. We also want to understand the relationship between elections and protest. The course first provides a general overview of democratization, economic reforms, electoral behavior and social protest in Latin America. We then analyze electoral and social dynamics in six countries: Mexico, Bolivia, Chile, Argentina, Venezuela, and Guatemala. The in-depth analysis of these countries will provide you with a solid understanding of markets, democracies, voters and protesters in Latin America and will give you skills on how to assess public opinion surveys.

Indigenous people often appear to be people without property. Whether it is outside observers who presume that they never had a "proper" economy of individual possessions, or whether it is indigenous representatives who define themselves as having lost their property¿their land, their traditions, their languages¿what and who is indigenous is defined by an absence. In contemporary contexts of globalization, however, indigenous traditional knowledge as intellectual property has become a lightning rod of political action. There has been a corresponding redefinition of the indigenous from the criterion of autochthony or priority to relations of dispossession or appropriation. Anthropology has continued comparative study of the variety of theories of, or knowledge about, property and its place in the construction of individuals and collectivities in indigenous societies. This course connects cultural categories of property with ethnographic scenes of its alienation to explore the emerging role of culture as emblem, itself a kind of property. We ask how indigenous appropriation of the culture concept and colonial appropriation of the environmental knowledge, art, language, and land of indigenous cultures furthers the cycle of symbolic and material exchange that defines indigeneity.

This lab is a research collaborative community of faculty, students and community member seeking evidence-based interventions to eradicate human trafficking. The lab will bring together legal, social scientific, technological and theological perspectives to address various dimensions of the $150 billion annual trade in person (children and adults) for forced labor or sex. Students from all fields and disciplines are welcome to participate in the project teams that will address different dimensions of this problem. Questions animating the lab may include: If AI is helping exacerbate child sex trafficking are the ways to use it to stem child sex trafficking? How can Catholic Social Teaching give us new insight into how to address this exploitation? What role might policing and legal interventions play? How can we best address the needs of survivors?

This interdisciplinary course equips students in Strategic Human Rights Advocacy- an innovation driven approach to solve society’s most wicked problems. It gives students a blueprint to identify rights based issues with precision, contrast them with competing claims and propose creative solutions. The course journeys through multiple case studies of human rights violations that grew from local to international and thus equips students with the building blocks of advocacy. Taught in a workshop format, the course will focus on remedying the role of social media and artificial intelligence (AI) in child sex trafficking. Students will study and apply some of the most creative approaches to bring justice to victims. For instance, how did US consumers use ‘false advertising’ claims against chocolate companies to address child labor in Ghana? How can hotels’ usage of AI for bookings be curated to safeguard children? How did a viral rap on mercury poisoning lead to justice for the victims? Understanding these approaches, the course will culminate in recommendations for social media companies and an ‘implementation plan’ for online safety of children.

Democracies strive to hold governments accountable to their citizens. But how, in practice, can citizens influence political outcomes? And under what conditions do citizens help sustain or undermine democracy? This course explores the role of public opinion, electoral behavior, and elite responsiveness in shaping democratic accountability. In the first half, we examine how voters' preferences and behaviors influence political elites, drawing on comparative research and case studies from Europe, Latin America, and the United States. In the second half, we turn to the citizen-side of democratic stability: What kinds of attitudes and forms of engagement foster democratic resilience? What makes citizens withdraw support from, or remain loyal to, anti-democratic leaders? Throughout the class, students will engage with canonical and recent advances in social science, public-facing books and newspaper articles, as well as practitioners.

This course aims to challenge our assumptions about which education as an institution in the United States is predicated and ask some fundamental questions about the relationship between education and society. Why does everyone go to school? Why do some students seem to learn more and “get ahead” than others? What factors shape how schools are run and organized, and what curricular materials are taught? How do schools help to maintain our capitalist system, and how do the factors of race, class, and gender affect the educational experiences of students within schools and classrooms? How can schools become more effective? What interventions have worked to improve schools? These are among the questions we will consider this semester. A primary focus of this course will be on the effects of schools and classrooms on educational outcomes. We will cover topics in the sociology of education related to school effects, sector effects, tracking and ability grouping, and classroom and teacher effects. We will look at the structure, practices, content, and outcomes of schooling, primarily in the light of their relationships to the wider society in which schools are situated. As part of the course, we will also consider the social and organizational context of contemporary education reforms in the United States—particularly test-based accountability for schools, teachers, and students—and place these reforms in a more global perspective.

The ancestors interrelated with the environments we live in today and will interact with in the future. This course explores indigenous cultures and perspectives on the importance of traditional knowledge and the environment. In this seminar-style course, we will learn about how indigenous groups in the Americas, both past and present, think about the world around us and how their cultural livelihoods are threatened by climate change and ongoing development. The goal is to provide students with a strong foundation in indigenous environmental issues. We will cover a range of topics that intersect with traditional ecological knowledge, land use and perceptions, reciprocity, sense of place, memory-making, and environmental justice.

This course examines immigration status as a primary axis of stratification in the modern world, fundamentally shaping the "life chances" and civil rights of millions. We will analyze the evolution of U.S. immigration policy from the 19th-century era of mass migration to the present, exploring what these legal shifts reveal about evolving societal values, racial hierarchies, and national identity. Moving beyond policy alone, we will investigate the diverse drivers of human mobility—ranging from economic necessity and escape from state violence to the emerging crisis of climate refugees. By placing the U.S. experience in a global comparative framework, students will evaluate how different regimes respond to the causes and consequences of migration and the ethical implications for human rights in the 21st century.

This course examines the economic dimensions of violence in light of Catholic social teaching and Western political and economic thought. After an in-depth overview of Catholic social teaching in relation to alternative social theories, we bring them to bear on the issue of violence in three social spheres: the domestic (domestic abuse and sexual assault), the economic (sweatshops), and the international political (war). In each case we will examine Catholic responses to the problem.

For many, owning a single-family house in the suburbs is the epitome of the American Dream. How did that particular ideal come to be a popular aspiration? How did race shape who could realize this ideal? How did the popularization of this form of the American dream shape racial inequality? This course will investigate these and other questions as we examine the histories of real estate, property, and housing in the U.S. We will trace two intertwined stories. First, we will chart how the process and meaning of buying, selling, owning, and renting a home changed. We will look closely at the development of government policies, real estate practices, as well as cultural ideas. Second, the course will explore the ways that race shaped those histories of real estate, property, and housing. We will consider the evolution of forms of racial exclusion and segregation as well as the ways that people demanded and seized housing rights.

When Columbus stepped ashore in the Caribbean in 1492, he set in motion a process that led to the creation of wealthy Spanish and Portuguese empires in the Americas, the genocide of countless numbers of indigenous men and women, the enslavement of millions of African men and women, and the eventual formation of a variety of independent states competing in the world economy. In this semester-long survey, we will examine topics in this history that will allow us to consider how history is produced as well as what happened in the past, from various perspectives, from elite colonial administrators and merchants to indigenous peasants and formerly enslaved men and women.

This seminar provides an overview of scholarship on theories, methods, and research conducted on immigrant youth and their families from developmental perspectives. Topics will include a review of a number of developmental issues including youth's adjustment to immigration, adolescents' identity development, school experiences, cultural issues, family dynamics and well-being. The readings will largely focus on immigrants residing in the U.S.

Throughout this course, students will examine the social and cultural aspects of sport through an exploration of the unique ways that race and identity influence sport participation, access and engagement. This course will engage topics such as: Sport and Identity; Identity, "Success" and resilience; Media Imagery, Identity and Power; and, Race in American Sport.

This course provides students with a critical understanding of how South Korean society is organized, the major social issues that have dominated the contemporary era, and how systems of social inequality have changed since the postwar period. We will analyze in particular, three major periods of social change, including 1) the democratization movement of the 1970s and 1980s, 2) the Asian financial crisis and its impact on social inequality and poverty, and finally, 3) South Korea’s aging crisis and its implications for the future. No prior knowledge of Asian languages or topics is required.

The class begins by exploring the concepts of gender, politics, and power, and related concepts such as intersectionality, patriarchy, sexism, and stereotypes. With that foundation, we turn our attention to two arenas in which gender and politics interact in the US: social and political movements and women as political actors. We will examine how women negotiate movements and how gender shapes structure, tactics, and outcomes for both women's movements (e.g., suffrage, feminist, conservative, #metoo) and other movements (such as the Progressive and civil rights movements). Finally, we will consider the constraints, opportunities, and impact of women in political roles, such as voter, candidate, and office-holder, with special attention to the 2022 US midterm elections. While grounded in political science, the course engages substantially with philosophy, history, sociology, and economics as well.

This course will examine the U.S. Civil Rights Movement in global contexts. From the 1920s to the 1990s, Black Americans' activism, organizing, and political efforts shaped their relationship with the Black Diaspora and U.S. Foreign Affairs. This class will cover an array of topics and historical moments such as Communism and the Red Scare, WWII, the Cold War, the formation of the United Nations, African Independents Movements, and Apartheid. We will study various activists, scholars, celebrities, and Black travelers whose movements around the world transformed how they viewed the United States' treatment of its Black citizens. By the end of this semester, students will know how Black Americans understood civil and human rights on U.S. soil and abroad.

This course examines the histories, politics, and lived experiences of deportation and detention in the United States. Drawing on scholarship from ethnic studies, sociology, and law, the course explores how immigration enforcement and removal policies have been shaped by race, empire, and global migration from Chinese exclusion to the current moment. Particular attention is given to Asian American deportation experiences, including those involving communities from Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos, alongside Latine, African, and other migrant communities. The course also examines transnational lives after return, including family separation, health, labor integration, and community organizing across borders. Through analysis of memoir, oral histories, policy, film, and media, students will consider stories of resistance and abolition, as well as how deportation reshapes families, social mobility, and identities.

In the wake of the Holocaust, the German author Gunther Grass concluded that we now finally knew ourselves. The Holocaust changed everything. Nazi Germany murdered more than six million men, women, and children in a systematic effort to exterminate the Jews of Europe. Its shocking and spectacular barbarism shattered comfortable ideas about European civilization and called into question the essential goodness of humanity. It compelled scholars to search for new ideas about evil, new words like "genocide" simply to place and comprehend the scale of the slaughter and devastation. Politics, art, culture, and even religions would be fundamentally and irrevocably transformed by the Holocaust. This course will investigate why Nazi Germany attempted to systematically exterminate the Jews of Europe, explore why so many Germans either participated in or accepted this act of mass violence, and consider why other Europeans so often assisted them. It will investigate the legacies of the Holocaust; how survivors and their families attempted to rebuild their lives in the wake of horror, how Germans variously struggled to come to terms with what they, their countrymen, or their ancestors had done, and how various understandings of the Holocaust have shaped political, cultural, and social discourses around the world. Along the way, students will practice the skills of historical literacy. They will digest, analyze, and criticize scholarship (secondary literature). They will discern the relevance of particular interpretations for important debates. They will use sustained analysis of primary sources to develop, articulate, and defend their own historical interpretations and arguments.

What did shopping, tavern-keeping, and midwifery have in common in early America? They could all be considered legitimate forms of women's and girls' labors both inside and outside of the home. We will consider work that was skilled or unskilled, free or enslaved, and paid or unpaid, and how changing definitions of "women's work" helped to shape boundaries of race and class. Servants were restricted from marrying and procreating while the value of enslaved women resided in both their work and their reproductive potential. Hence this course will also consider the dual facets of women's labor in work and their laboring in childbirth.

This interdisciplinary research lab enlists students in the efforts of the Just Wage Initiative (JWI), a collaborative research and advocacy project of the Higgins Labor Program at the Institute for Social Concerns. Students will help develop, refine, and update the Just Wage Framework, a multistakeholder online tool designed to advance a more inclusive and equitable economy. Students will also undertake research projects connecting their own intellectual interests and disciplinary expertise to the JWI's foundational question: What makes any given wage just or unjust? In addition, students will collaborate with the instructor and local, national, and international practitioners to envision and execute collaborative research and advocacy campaigns to promote a just wage economy. Extended weekly class sessions will feature visits by scholars and activists, as well as facilitate interactive group discussions and collaborative experiments.

Spanning the fall and spring semester, this experiential-learning, Catholicism-Across-the-Disciplines-designation seminar about immigration issues-especially those related to the Mexico-U.S. border-has three distinct parts. In the fall (two credits), we will meet in class to read and discuss social scientific research about such topics as why migrants leave their home countries, what they encounter and experience when attempting to cross the border, the responses of U.S.-based citizen groups to unauthorized border crossings, and the effectiveness of current U.S. enforcement policies. We also evaluate normatively these responses and policies, particularly from a Catholic perspective (but also other faith, non-religious perspectives). In early January, we will travel to the Southern Arizona borderlands for our weeklong immersion trip. During this trip, we will, among other things, observe Operation Streamline legal proceedings, attend a humanitarian aid training, tour a Border Patrol facility, visit the border wall and learn about its environmental impact, hear from Catholic and other faith leaders about their social justice work along the border, visit Arivaca and Nogales to experience everyday life in a border community, and participate in a Samaritans' humanitarian desert trip. After our trip, we will again meet in class for the spring semester (two credits) to process, reflect on, and expand our immersion experience, including discussing what a uniquely Catholic border policy would look like, strategies to raise awareness about what is going in Southern Arizona, and migration issues and responses to them in other parts of the world.

American Education mirrors American society with myriad challenges, successes, and ideologies. This course will look at how political struggles over race, language, gender, and class have all played out in the battle over American schools, schools that ultimately hold the literal future of America. This course will explore the History of Education in American from the late 1865 to the present and will have special emphasis on segregated schools in the 19th century and today. The course will also look closely at the very best programs re-shaping American education such as The Alliance for Catholic Education and KIPP. The course will look at education from Kindergarten all the way through graduate programs as we study how our institutions have formed and how they form and transform our society.

What do terms like “structural,” “systemic,” or “institutional” racism mean? What are the structures, systems, and institutions that historically have contributed, and continue to contribute, to racial injustice in the United States? Most importantly, how can understanding these concepts help us dismantle the barriers to racial justice in America? This course will focus on the ways that the law and the legal system in the United States has been a tool to create and sustain racial inequity, as well as the reforms, both historic and ongoing, to redress them. Course materials will include cases and commentary. Together, we will examine legal structures in the areas of housing, education, banking and finance, voting, employment discrimination, criminal law, and environmental justice, among others. The course will draw from the Klau Institute’s archives in its five-year long Building and Anti-Racist Vocabulary lecture series featuring authors, public intellectuals, faith leaders, and external and internal members of the academy. Throughout the course of the semester, students will compose a variety of short papers, lead classroom discussions, and complete a final project incorporating independent research on related topics.

This five-week course will examine forced migration from the perspective of the beliefs, teachings, and programmatic commitments of faith communities. The first week will be devoted to identifying the causes of and global trends in forced migration, as well as the categories of forced migrants. It will also explore the “law of migration”; that is, the diverse legal systems that migrants must negotiate on their journeys and that religious actors use to assess migration policies. The second week will explore the teachings of diverse faith communities on forced migration, their understanding of this immense and growing phenomenon, and their programmatic and policy responses. The third week will segue to state-centered approaches to the governance and management of migration, with a focus on the concepts of sovereignty and the rule of law. It will also consider ideologies such as nativism and exclusionary nationalism that are in tension with the beliefs, policy positions, and programs of religious actors. The fourth week will be devoted to guest speakers and student presentations on situations of protracted displacement throughout the world. Persons in protracted displacement have lived in exile for at least five years and have no viable course out of their “long lasting and intractable status of limbo.” The fifth week will be devoted to US refugee protection trends and policies.

Is it possible to think of the 21st century as a post-racial, post-feminist world? In her provocative 2012 study, Body as Evidence: Mediating Race, Globalizing Gender, Janell Hobson suggests that rather than having been eradicated, millennial hopes that the historical difficulties represented by race and gender have lost their significance in the present day are as far, if not even further away from the mark as they have ever been. For Hobson, policing the body, whether that be in terms of its race, its gender, or its sexuality, has remained paramount. "[W]hile the early-twenty-first century discourse of 'postracial' and 'postfeminist' often declares the loss of meaning attached to race and gender," she argues, "..the global scope of our media-reliant information culture insists on perpetuating raced and gendered meanings that support ideologies of dominance, privilege, and power." In Hobson's view, the body and how it is imagined rests at the center of such ideologies, pointing also to a number of crucial questions that become particularly important when considering the significance of race and gender through the lens of modernity. How might a reconsideration of race point also to a rethinking of gender and vice-versa? What does race actually mean? How does/can it alter the way we understand gender? Is it possible to think race beyond the idea of race? What might a new conception of race actually look like, and how might this influence our thinking on gender? How are the problems of race and gender intertwined, and how is/has the body been imagined in and through them? What can such questions tell us about today's racial and gendered realities, both inside and outside the university, both in the past and the present? This course takes a step backward to investigate these and other like questions in the context of the utopic impulse and its emphasis on the imagination in several 19th-century American authors whose work may be viewed as participating in a broad yet under-acknowledged vision of race, gender and Atlantic modernity that seeks to interrogate hierarchies of race and gender as these have been constructed and maintained within dominant ideologies. Grounding our analysis in a number of 16th-, 17th- and 18th-century political philosophical texts on law and utopia and drawing on insights from critical race theory, gender studies, feminist theory, theories of law and literature, and utopian studies, our goal will be to gain a more nuanced understanding of our racialized past and its troubled link to questions of gender both then and now, so that we may better hope to imagine - and reimagine - the shape of our collective democratic future in the 21st century's global community. Course Texts: To be determined, but will most likely include some of the following, either in their entirety or in the form of relevant excerpts: Plato's Republic; Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince; Thomas More, Utopia; Francis Bacon, The New Atlantis; James Harrington,

Through a close examination of twelve historical events, we will study African-American resistance in the United States from the 17th century through the 20th century. We will employ a case-study method and seek to categorize and characterize the wide variety of African-American resistance. Our study will include the politics of confrontation and civil disobedience, polarization of arts, transformation of race relations, the tragedies and triumphs of Reconstruction, interracial violence, black political and institutional responses to racism and violence, the Harlem Renaissance, jazz, blues, and the civil rights and black power movements. Students will be confronted with conflicting bodies of evidence and challenged to analyze these issues and arrive at conclusions. Music and film will supplement classroom discussions.

Race is a social construct. So why have scientists spent centuries trying to quantify, measure, and categorize people by race? From early anthropometry to the Human Genome Project, this course examines the production and embedding of race into scientific knowledge since the 18th century. Designed for students interested in the history of science and the production of scientific knowledge or those curious about the origins of scientific racism and racial inequality, this course is also well-suited for students pursuing careers in the health professions. By focusing on historical discourses on the production and dissemination of scientific knowledge of race, students will be able to: Understand how race, racism, and racial inequality are embedded in scientific knowledge Outline the various methodologies different fields of science have used to group people into races Carefully evaluate scientific technologies for racial biases This is an upper level undergraduate and graduate seminar.

This course is designed for students who are completing the Supplementary Major in Global Affairs and is primarily intended to achieve three objectives: (1) give students an opportunity to conduct independent research; (2) provide students with guidance and support in completing their capstone research project; and (3) bring student research into dialogue with trends in the field of Global Affairs. Although each student will work on his/her/their own project, we will move, as a group, through the normal stages of a project and contribute in meaningful ways to each other's work.

This course examines the educational experiences and struggles of racial/ethnic minority students in US public schools. Students will study educational stratification by race/ethnicity, as well as how racial/ethnic minorities experience this stratification. We will explore legal, political, historical and social perspectives regarding educational policies and practices. Additionally, this course focuses on the potential of education as an agent for social justice and change for linguistically and culturally diverse groups.

Directed Readings are courses in which students meet with a faculty member to discuss, analyze, and interpret a set of agreed-upon texts in a given field of study. The proposed course or study may not duplicate or reflect content or regularly offered courses, and the work should reflect the intellectual challenge, intensity, and time commitment reflected in the number of credit hours awarded.