Global Arc

This course examines basic ethical controversies in public life. What rights do persons have at the beginning and end of life? Do people have moral claims to unequal economic rewards or is economic distribution properly subject to political design for the sake of social justice? Do we have significant moral obligations to distant others? Other possible topics include toleration (including the rights of religious and cultural minorities), racial and gender equity, and just war.

This course will explore how women's rights activists, lawyers, and legal scholars have considered legal institutions and law to be arenas and resources for transforming women's lives and gender norms, identities, and roles. Since the early 1970s, feminist legal scholars and lawyers have challenged traditional understandings of law and the core civic values of freedom, justice, and equality. Others have questioned whether litigation-centered approaches to reform have harmed more than helped advance the goal of women's equality and liberation.

This seminar begins with a rapid immersion in social scientific work on gender and health, followed by diverse areas in which gendered power relations - between men and women, but also between cis-and queer individuals - shape health. Students will develop a nuanced understanding of how gendered social processes, intersecting with other dimensions of social stratification, shape health at the population level, as well as how gender is reproduced or contested in public health. The overarching goal is to help students learn to think about gender and, by extension, about any form of social stratification, as a driver of population health.

For the last 60 years, the United States has been engaged in a near-constant effort to reform American schools. In this course, we will make sense of competing explanations of educational performance and evaluate the possibilities for and barriers to improving American public schools and for reducing educational disparities by family socioeconomic status, race, and gender. In doing so, we will grapple with the challenges that researchers and practitioners face in evaluating educational policies.

The Affordable Care Act, enacted by President Obama in 2010, is an unprecedented federal-state initiative, with provisions to expand health insurance coverage, control health care costs, and improve the health care delivery system. This course will focus on the history of health reform, as well as the implementation challenges since its enactment. We will examine the federal regulatory process, the role that states are playing in implementation, legal challenges to the statute, and Congressional oversight.

This course will explore the relationship between social movements and legal/policy reforms and critically assess the scope and limits of the 1960s-era civil rights laws through an examination of the following legal and policy issues that Black Lives Matter activists have pushed to the center stage of local and national policy debates: policing; mass incarceration; the role of prosecutors; protests and surveillance; labor, work, and wealth; education reform and school discipline; health care reform and access; housing and environmental conditions; and voting rights.

This course is designed to describe the policies defining the provision of educational services with special attention to the context of the US and Latin America. The focus will be on policies that have implications for understanding inequality in education and income through the lens of economic theory of human capital. The course topics will include governance, accountability, choice, finance, and personnel policies for K-12 education, with a focus on the role of teachers; it will also briefly cover issues related to early childhood education and higher education. Class sessions are a mixture of lectures and student-led discussions.

Open only to students enrolled in the school. See 'Program Information' for description. Juniors who are concentrators in the school must register for the policy task force as "Junior Independent Work.'' Seniors should register for SPI 401 or 402 as a course rather than junior independent work.

Open only to students enrolled in the school. See 'Program Information' for description. Juniors who are concentrators in the school must register for the policy task force as "Junior Independent Work.'' Seniors should register for SPI 401 or 402 as a course rather than junior independent work.

The junior policy research seminar serves to introduce departmental majors to the tools, methods, and interpretations employed in policy research and writing. Students may choose from a range of topics.