Global Arc

Examines selected aspects on conflict in Africa. The concept "conflict" is used to mean organized and/or collective political violence that causes the death of about 1,000 people per year. The course will focus on the following issues: analytical debates about conflicts in Africa; actors/participants such as guerrillas, warlords, and child soldiers; continental politics about conflict; the politics of humanitarian intervention; wars in the Great Lakes Region; the war and warlords of West Africa; the genocide in Rwanda, and the aftermath of wars, especially those of Southern Africa. One three-hour seminar.

Critical African Studies is a colloquium designed as a capstone course for African Studies Certificate students. The course is designed to introduce students to cutting-edge scholarship in African Studies. Students engage with African Studies scholars from Princeton University and beyond. In addition to attending the African Studies Lecture Series and Works-in-Progress series, students in Critical African Studies will workshop their junior or senior independent research. This capstone course is open to junior and senior certificate students and must be taken to fulfill the African Studies Certificate requirements.

This course looks at the ways in which digital technology shapes interactions and imaginations of Africa globally. Key themes that will be covered include societal transformations stemming out of the introduction and increasing use of the internet, mobile phones, and new media as well as gendered and racialized digital divides in relation to access to social services, such as health, education, housing, water, and sanitation. A particular attention will be given to the impact of the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) and the ways the digital space has been an arena on how Africans and their countries have responded to the pandemic.

This course will explore the theory and practice of rhetoric in ancient Greece and Rome and the ways in which classical rhetoric has been adapted in modern American verbal art. From Gorgias and Demosthenes to Lincoln and Douglass, to Ida B. Wells and Fannie Lou Hamer, we will consider what makes individual speeches noteworthy in their local, historical contexts, as well as placing them in a larger rhetorical tradition. Throughout, we will analyze the role of ideologies of gender, class, race, nationality, religion, and sexuality in the construction of the rhetorical subject.

With the resurgence in anti-racist activism and the COVID-19 pandemic came a growing attention to racial disparities in health and healthcare. What are we to make of these disparities? What role do injustices - past and present - play in generating these disparities? More generally, what constitutes racial (in)justice in clinical care and research? This course will explore these questions, as well as the ethical and social implications of contemporary interventions offered to resolve racial disparities in healthcare.

We now have unprecedented control over how we are born, live, and die. Parents can choose to have a girl or a boy, a deaf or a hearing child. Soon they will be able to choose to have a smarter, more athletic, more beautiful child. Should we allow parents to do this? New drugs enable trauma victims to dampen the memories of painful experiences. Is picking and choosing among our memories an unacceptable tampering with the self? Many people think it is okay to follow a living will in terminating a life that is in a permanent vegetative state. But what about a living will that requests euthanasia as soon as Alzheimer's develops?

The course will challenge students to examine their life from an ethical perspective. Should altruism guide our life? What is effective altruism? Should we share our wealth with people who will otherwise die from poverty-related causes? How should we live and act in an era in which human activity is changing the planet's climate? What ethical considerations are raised by eating meat and other animal products? We will also consider the Supreme Court's decision on abortion. Students will be encouraged to question their ethical beliefs and explore how reason and argument can play a role in everyday ethical decision-making.

This course will discuss policy issues relating to the environment, using several case studies to provide a deeper understanding of the science and values involved.

This course will examine issues at the intersection of ethics, policy, and public health, paying particular attention to the centuries-long tension between individual rights and the common good. Ethical arguments are increasingly visible in public health activities in the United States and worldwide, demonstrating the continued relevance of long-standing debates over the proper role of government in promoting the health of individuals and communities. The course will explore ethical, historical, and policy aspects of public health activities, and it will consider the relationship between public health ethics and bioethics.

This course will examine issues at the intersection of emotional attachment, ethics and agency theory. In particular, we will consider whether and how disordered attachment orientations might bear on questions concerning the moral agency and ethical treatment of members of certain clinical populations, including psychopaths and those who suffer from (certain forms of) addiction. In exploring these issues, we will engage with recent literature on moral responsibility, autonomous agency, and bioethical approaches to understanding the nature and treatment of the aforementioned pathologies.