Spring 2025 Courses
AFRI 1111 Systemic Racism and Modes of Resilience - Tricia Rose and Andre Willis
This course will use the lens of “systemic racism” to explore the interconnections between policies and practices that create a network of devastating forms of racial discrimination and disadvantage; conditions that have shifted over time and have made it difficult for black communities to flourish.
AFRI 1441 Caribbean and Latin American Migration: Race, Gender, Community - Patsy Lewis
This course explores key issues in migration, especially as they relate to Latin America and the Caribbean. Viewing migration through multidisciplinary lenses, it explores the historic and contemporary forces behind the movement of people across the region; global and regional Migration regimes and their limitations; the implications of gender, race, ethnicity and class on migrant experience; the social effects of migration, especially on families; migrant survival strategies; and migrants contributions to their adopted countries, among others. The course draws from literature, film alongside academic texts representing a wide range of disciplinary perspectives to illustrate the varied approaches to think about migration and the people at the center of this phenomenon.
AFRI 2010 Black Transnational Feminism - Keisha Blain
This graduate seminar brings together methodological and theoretical approaches to interpreting the significance of race, gender, sexuality and nation in the rich literature on Black transnationalism. The course will explore how Black feminist thought has infomed the development of the field.
ANTH 0301 Gender and Politics - Alex Wolff
This course focuses on ideologies of gender and sexuality cross-culturally and how they influence peoples' involvement in political processes. We begin with a broad working definition of politics-power dynamics and arrangements whereby groups are affected by one another. The course looks at the circumstances under which peoples' gender and sexual identities are mobilized into social movements, and the conditions and social consequences of public visibility. Our broader aim is to understand ways in which gendered inequalities produce--and are produced by--forms of political exclusion, as well as innovative ways in which people transform existing structures of power.
ANTH 1301 Anthropology of Homelessness - Irene Glasser
Homelessness emerged as a public concern in the United States and in other industrialized countries in the late 1970s as people began encountering people living on the streets, a way of life formerly confined to the skid rows of large cities. In this course, through readings, readings, discussion, and hands on experiences with individuals and families experiencing homelessness, we will uncover the causes, conditions, and responses to homelessness. Each student will spend at least two hours per week in a local homeless-serving community partners in order to gain face to face experiences. The field placements will be facilitated by the professor.
ANTH 1310 Global Health: Anthropological Perspectives - TBD
This course explores the distinctive contribution that a critical approach—primarily that of medical anthropology—can make to the rapidly changing field of global health. The course takes a problem-based approach and focuses on “grand challenges," such as those posed by global pandemics, humanitarian crisis, or the limited reach of child and maternal health programs in “resource-poor” locations. Through ethnographic case studies, we will examine how the concepts and practices associated with global health interventions travel to different parts of the world and interact with local agendas.
EDUC 0100 Controversies in Educational Inequality - David Rangel
Educational inequality has become an increasingly common topic of public, academic, and journalistic debate. This course introduces students to ongoing social scientific debates about the sources and consequences of educational inequality such as: Do charter school provide educational access and opportunities or do they divert resources away from public schools? Does Teach for America improve student outcomes or does it exacerbate problems? Are schools the great equalizer do they amplify larger social inequalities? Each unit and class will involve significant student participation though spirited class discussion and debate.
EDUC 2390 Race and Democracy in Urban Education Policy - Jacques Lesure
This course will provide a broad introduction to contemporary education policy centered on issues of race/ethnicity and ideas of democracy. Students will begin by engaging theories of democracy and theories of race.
ENVS 0715 Political Ecology - Leslie Acton
Political ecology asks how power mediates human-environment relationships. How do we, as society, understand “the environment,” environmental problems, our role in them, and potential solutions? How have human-environment interactions reproduced inequity related to class, race, gender, and worldview; how does inequity, in turn, relate to environmental realities? Whose environmental “truth” counts, whose doesn’t, and why? Are better futures possible (and who defines “better futures”)? In this course, we will consider these questions and more. We will examine how knowledge production and socio-economic structures and processes relate to environmental change across economic, political, social, and ecological contexts. The first part of the course will introduce political ecology’s roots and major arguments. We will use this foundation to analyze real-world cases and consider the opportunities, or “openings,” for different environmental futures.
ETHN 1750A Immigrant Social Movements: Bridging Theory and Practice - Kevin Escudero
In this course we will examine the undocumented immigrant movement in the US today through readings and guest lectures from local immigrant rights activists. Students will be partnered with local community based organizations where they will complete a semester-long internship.
ETHN 1751F Race in U.S. Cities and Suburbs - Shelley Lee
This undergraduate seminar explores U.S. urban and suburban histories during the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, through the concerns of race and ethnicity. We seek to understand how dilemmas over and struggles for belonging and equality have played out.
HIST 0150C Locked Up: A Global History of Prison and Captivity - Amy Remensnyder
A long history lies behind the millions of men and women locked up today as prisoners, captives and hostages. Beginning in antiquity and ending in the present, this course draws on materials from a variety of cultures across the world to explore incarceration's centuries-old past. In examining the experience and meaning of imprisonment, whether as judicial punishment, political repression, or the fallout of war, the class will ask fundamental questions about liberty as well. History 150 courses introduce students to methods of historical analysis, interpretation and argumentation. This course presumes no previous history courses.
HIST 0285A Modern Genocide and Other Crimes against Humanity - Omer Bartov
This lecture course explores genocide and other crimes against humanity across the world during the 20th century. We will discuss the origins of modern genocide in the transition to modernity and subsequent conceptualizations of this phenomenon; review examples of colonial, imperial, racial, communist, anti-communist, and post-colonial genocides; discuss war crimes and other mass crimes perpetrated by authoritarian regimes; and consider policies of mass deportation and ethnic cleansing. This course will conclude with a discussion of attempts by the international community to prevent and punish genocide along with various ways in which genocide has been commemorated or denied.
HIST 1970G Captive Voices: Atlantic Slavery in the Digital Age - Linford Fisher
The digital revolution is transforming the study of history. But is it allowing us to better recover the voices and lived experiences of people in the past? This course considers the possibilities and pitfalls of using digital tools to understand the lives of enslaved men and women in the Americas between 1500 and 1800. Each session considers a different digital humanities project, supplemented by primary sources and recent books. For their final project, students will contribute to the Database of Indigenous Slavery in the Americas, which is hosted here at Brown. There are no prerequisites for this course.
HIST 2971P Diaspora, Displacement, Transnationalism - Evelyn Hu-Dehart
This reading seminar is designed to familiarize students with theories on these three transhistorical terms that capture the global phenomenon of human mobility. Related concepts include migration, emigration and immigration; exile, expulsion, repatriation and deterritorialization.
HIST 2972D Graduate Readings in Native American and Indigenous Histories: Decolonization and Methodologies
This PhD-level readings seminar explores the recent literature of Native American and Indigenous History, including monographs and articles. It also engages the question of methods and epistemologies through Indigenous scholarship.
IAPA 1702C Inequality and Social Mobility in America - TBD
In this junior seminar, we will examine the economic and political, and ideological factors that have contributed to this historical moment, learn about how Americans experience living in an unequal society, and consider the future of equality and social mobility in the United States.
IAPA 1804M Overcoming Threats to Human Security - David Polatty
This course provides students with a comprehensive introduction to exploring challenges and opportunities related to global challenges from both a human and national security perspective – with a special focus on putting people and communities, as opposed to national interests, at the center of attention. Students will gain a deep understanding of key issues including humanitarian crises caused by natural disasters, and the impacts of climate change, food and water security, urbanization, mass migration, and infectious disease/pandemics on vulnerable people around the world.
IAPA 1810 Democratization and Autocratization - Claudia Elliott
Since the 1970s studies of democratization have shifted from a "global resurgence of democracy" to an "authoritarian resurgence." This course explores these developments, paying attention to the assumptions, biases, knowledge structures, and inferences produced by language and imagery.
PHIL 0991T What Is Structural Injustice? - David Estlund
In recent decades the ideas of structural racism, structural sexism, and structural injustice have come to be common in political thought and discussion. Are these meant to be wrongs of some kind, perhaps moral wrongs? If so, are they wrongs somehow in the social structure itself rather than wrongs by individual agents—in which case, for example, a society can be racist even without any racist individuals? On that view, how are we to understand that idea of a wrong that no one commits? Or, instead, are structural injustices merely certain patterns of wrongs by individuals—in which case the racism of a society would disappear with its last racist? The idea of structural injustice has only been around for about 50 years, and so the philosophical literature is young, and active, and will be the subject matter for this course.
PHP 1101 World of Food: Personal to Global Perspectives on Nutrition, Agriculture and Policy - Patricia Risica
This course explores food and nutrition in the US and around the world through the lens of public health, economics, and agriculture. The hybrid setting requires students to engage in and learn about the local Providence community and their own community at home from perspectives likely not previously noticed. Students will read from many sources; will review documentary films; and will write for several audiences.
At the completion of this course, students will:
• Describe how nutrients are consumed through foods
• Explore food consumption in the US and abroad
• Describe US agricultural production techniques
• Propose policy changes to the current food system
PHP 1680U Intersectionality and Health Inequities - Madine Agénor
This interdisciplinary seminar course examines health inequities in the US using an intersectional lens. Intersectionality addresses how multiple power relations and systems of oppression impact the lived experiences of multiply marginalized groups in historical and social context. During this course, we will discuss the historical and theoretical underpinnings of intersectionality and its conceptual and methodological applications to public health. We will also examine how multiple forms of discrimination – including racism, sexism, classism, heterosexism, cisgenderism, xenophobia, and ableism – shape health inequities among diverse multiply marginalized groups in differential and compounding ways. This course will also address how multiply marginalized communities have resisted oppression and discrimination and promoted their own health and well-being through community organizing efforts and social movements. Finally, we will identify the implications of using an intersectional approach to addressing health inequities for research, policy, and practice.
PHP 1681 Reproductive Health, Rights and Justice - Liz Tobin-Tyler
This course will explore how reproductive health, healthcare and freedom are regulated in the United States. The course will apply an reproductive justice framework that investigates laws, policies and practices affecting reproductive rights and bodily autonomy, but that also applies an intersectional lens to consider how race, gender, sexuality, class, ability, and immigration status affect reproduction and parenting for marginalized communities. We will also explore how religion and ideas of morality shape laws, policies and practices implicating reproductive health, bodily autonomy and notions of reproductive justice. Topics will include: eugenics, sterilization, contraception, abortion, criminal fetal endangerment laws, substance use during pregnancy, reproductive rights of incarcerated populations, access to reproductive healthcare, assisted reproduction, surrogacy, maternal health disparities, the child welfare system, and policies related to parenting and family health. Readings will include public health, law and policy analysis and landmark legal opinions.
POBS 2500N Got Rights? Human Rights and Contemporary Brazilian Literature - Leila Lehnen
Portuguese sociologist Boaventura de Sousa Santos states that nowadays, there is a “global hegemony of human rights as a discourse of human dignity” (2015: 22). Nonetheless, Sousa Santos observes that this hegemony is challenged by a reality of widespread human rights abuses. What then, is the value of human rights and what role does literature play in the discursive construction and the praxis of human rights? This course examines how contemporary Brazilian literature conceptualizes human rights through topics such as authoritarianism, class, race, urban space. The course also establishes connections between human rights in Brazilian and select Spanish American texts.
POLS 1820D Civil Liberties: Moral, Political and Legal Approaches - Corey Brettschneider
This course will examine major constitutional controversies within the context of wider debates in political and legal theory. Readings from Supreme Court cases and prominent texts in political/legal theory. Topics include free speech, privacy, abortion, takings and capital punishment. Prior course work in political theory or philosophy recommended. Enrollment limited to 20 juniors and seniors concentrating in Political Science.
POLS 1823Z Gender and Public Policy - Wendy Schiller
How do political institutions, political communication, and policy making processes operate in gendered ways? What kinds of gendered disparities emerge in education, health, employment, and social policies? This course examines how gender combines with sexuality, race and ethnicity, social class, immigration status, and ideology to yield disparate political and policy experiences. It also considers pathways forward to address these disparities. The course focuses on the U.S., and looks to other countries for models.
POLS 1824S The Politics of Migration - Gemma Dipoppa
Managing migration waves is one of the big challenges of our time as climate change, conflicts, and economic inequality continue pushing people to move. We will discuss the political debate on migration and critically evaluate each argument based on scientific knowledge.
SOC 0300Y Gender at Work: The Past and Future of Gender Inequality - Ananda Martin-Caughey
In this first-year seminar, we will analyze the intricate ways in which gender permeates the world of work (paid and unpaid) and fuels inequality. The course explores intersections of gender, race, and class, with a focus on the 20th and 21st century United States. We will cover a range of topics from segregation and discrimination to care work and emotional labor, and decode how policy and labor movements are shaping the future of work. This course invites students to engage with a variety of theories and methods, paving the way for a deeper understanding of gender and stratification.
SOC 1116 Criminal Courts and the Law in an Era of Mass Incarceration - Nicole Gonzalez Van Cleve
This course provides a comprehensive introduction to America’s criminal court system and all its institutional stakeholders. We will examine America’s criminal court system from myriad of different perspectives: courts as organizations, courts as social arrangements of professionals, courts as providers of social services and courts as consumer institutions – providing the experience of justice to victims, witnesses, defendants and jurors. We will focus on state courts as well as the federal system.
SOC 1270 Race, Class, and Ethnicity in the Modern World - Jose Itzigsohn
Applies sociological analysis to understand present and historical cases of ethnic and race relations and conflicts. Topics addressed are the social construction of race and ethnicity; historical processes of racialization; ethnic conflict and the nation state, and more.