Courses tagged with "Kadenze" (166)

What is race? What is ethnicity? How can communication and relationships between men and women be improved? What causes segregation in our society? How do stereotypes develop and why do they persist? How do an individual's racial, ethnic, and sexual identities form and develop? This course explores these topics and more.

This course focuses on cyberspace and its implications for private and public, sub-national, national, and international actors and entities.

This course focuses on cyberspace and its implications for private and public, sub-national, national, and international actors and entities.

This course focuses on the institutional relationships that affect the raising, maintenance and use of military forces in the United States. It is about civil/military, government/industry, military/science and military service/military service relations.

The course examines how politicians, defense contractors, and military officers determine the military might of the United States. It analyzes the military strategies of the nation and the bureaucratic strategies of the armed services, contractors, and defense scientists. It offers a combination of military sociology, organizational politics, and the political economy of defense.

This course examines the functioning of democracy in the U.S. beginning with the theoretical foundations of democratic representation. It explores how the views of the public influence policy making. It also examines factors, such as malapportionment, that lead to non-majoritarian outcomes. Evidence on how well policy outcomes reflect public opinion is reviewed, and whether certain groups are over or under-represented in the policy process. Also discussed are reforms that might make our democracy more responsive to the American public.

Recent years have seen an astonishing spread of democracy to many African, Asian, and Latin American countries. What caused these dramatic political transitions? What challenges do democratizing countries in the Third World face? Will these new democracies endure? We will take up these questions using film, fiction, and popular journalism, as well as scholarly research. We will also focus on a small number of countries (Brazil, India, Mexico, Nigeria, Senegal, Singapore, and Sri Lanka) in order to explore in greater depth some of the most important political challenges faced by developing countries. Although the class focuses on the developing world, many of the lessons should "travel" to democratizing countries in other regions.

This seminar facilitates the design and construction of installations and other community projects in conjunction with and beyond MIT's celebration of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

During the first half of the class, MIT and Wellesley students develop in-depth understanding of the history of US racial issues as well as past and present domestic and international political struggles. In the second half, the students work as a group to complete the installations and projects which serve as models for connecting academics with real life problems and struggle.

This seminar is offered during the Independent Activities Period (IAP), which is a special 4-week term at MIT that runs from the first week of January until the end of the month.

"Environmental Politics & Policy" explores the workings of environmental policymaking in the United States.

• What are the big issues facing environmental policy?
• How did we end up with the policies we have today?
• Why does it take a crisis to move environmental policy forward?
• Why do political factors - economic interests, social and political values, bureaucratic styles, ideologies, elections, etc. - always seem to overwhelm sound scientific and engineering judgment in determining policy outcomes?

Case studies ranging from cleaning up toxic waste pollution to endangered species protection probe the clashes between science and politics at local, state, and federal levels.

This course is designed to provide students with a broad overview of the major theories on the relationship between ethnicity and politics. The course is divided into three sections. The first covers general theory and discusses the social construction of ethnicity as well as the limits of construction. The second section discusses ethnicity as a dependent variable. This section studies the forces that shape the development of ethnic identities and their motivating power. The third section addresses ethnicity as an independent variable. In other words, it focuses on how ethnicity operates to affect important political and economic outcomes.

This course is the first semester of a year-long sequence on ethnic politics. However, each semester is self-contained and students may take the course in either or both semesters. Ethnic Politics I aims for breadth over depth. It covers many works in the “canon” of texts on ethnic politics as well as addressing many major topics (modernization, entrepreneurship, prejudice, ethnic party formation, etc.) in one week sessions. Ethnic Politics II covers some of these topics in greater depth and also requires a major research paper.

This course is designed mainly for political science graduate students conducting or considering conducting research on identity politics. While 17.504 Ethnic Politics I is designed as a primarily theoretical course, Ethnic Politics II switches the focus to methods. It aims to familiarize the student with the current conventional approaches as well as major challenges to them. The course discusses definition and measurement issues as well as briefly addressing survey techniques and modeling.

Discerning the ethnic and racial dimensions of politics is considered by some indispensable to understanding contemporary world politics. This course seeks to answer fundamental questions about racial and ethnic politics. To begin, what are the bases of ethnic and racial identities? What accounts for political mobilization based upon such identities? What are the political claims and goals of such mobilization and is conflict between groups and/or with government forces inevitable? How do ethnic and racial identities intersect with other identities, such as gender and class, which are themselves the sources of social, political, and economic cleavages? Finally, how are domestic ethnic/racial politics connected to international human rights? To answer these questions, the course begins with an introduction to dominant theoretical approaches to racial and ethnic identity. The course then considers these approaches in light of current events in Africa, Asia, Latin America, Europe, and the United States.

This course examines the organization of political power and the dynamics of political change in Britain, France, Germany, and Italy. In particular, it focuses on the structure of political power within the state, and on important institutions that form the link between state and society, especially political parties and interest organizations.

This course focuses on a range of theories of gender in modern life. In recent years feminist scholars in a range of disciplines have challenged previously accepted notions of political theory such as the distinctions between public and private, the definitions of politics itself, the nature of citizenship, and the roles of women in civil society. In this course we will examine different aspects of women's lives through the life cycle as seen from the vantage point of political theory. In addition we will consider different ways of looking at power and political culture in modern societies, issues of race and class, poverty and welfare, sexuality and morality.