Global Arc

This course surveys Artificial Intelligence (AI) and its policy implications. Technology topics include a history of the field; evolving conceptions of machine intelligence; and the current state of the technology. Policy topics include the economic effects of AI; regulatory policy; automated vehicles; autonomous aircraft; ensuring fairness, governance, and control; the role of AI in public decision making; national security implications, including autonomous weapons; cybersecurity; and the long-term future of AI. This course is suitable for students of all backgrounds; no technical knowledge is assumed.

Examines modern genetics' implications for public policy focusing on health, law, consumer products, and criminal justice. Topics include: genetic testing and therapy; consumer regulations including FDA rules on at-home genetic testing; the law and genetic discrimination in insurance; and uses of forensic DNA in the courtroom. Explores social, political, and philosophical problems in these areas: changing conceptions of the self; relation of new genetics to the old, racially-charged, eugenics; impact of new theories of gene action and epigenetics on ideas about the "hardwiring" of health and behavior, and on "genetic blame" and future policy.

This course will explore the public policies that have affected wealth, inequality, social mobility, and economic growth in the United States. We begin with the premise that the nation is both richer and poorer than it was half a century ago. That is, we raise the question of why, in the last few decades, American incomes have stagnated and the divide between the top and bottom has grown, with some even labeling ours the "new Gilded Age." To explore that puzzle, we will go back in time to study the evolution and impact of labor, social welfare, and economic policies in recent decades.

This undergraduate lecture course examines the effects, response to, and legacies of pandemics in the past -- their short term and lasting impacts on government, civil liberties, trust in experts, ethnic and racial tensions, social inequalities, and global and local economies. The course uses insights from these past cases of world-changing pandemics (from the plague through influenza, polio, AIDS, and COVID) to inform our understanding of current social, political, and economic challenges. Analysis of the past is also used to inform policy discussions about planning for the future.

How do we solve the social dilemmas posed by new technologies? Could a self-driving car or facial recognition algorithm be programmed to do good? We will look at ethical theories and apply them to these practical problems and more, including: how tech changes social networks; the meaning of "free speech" in new technological environments; technologies that exacerbate racial or gender discrimination; how the use of cryptocurrencies and fintech exacerbate inequality; how the use of A.I. in the health sectors will affect privacy; how artificial intelligence questions existing understandings of what it means to be an ethical human.

How do we evaluate whether a particular public policy is good or bad? Which goals should public policies serve? From Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) to COVID-19 Vaccines Global Access (COVAX), public policies cannot be properly understood without exploring the political and moral values that underpin them. This course asks what it means to think ethically about public policies. Each week, it introduces a domestic or international public policy, pairing it with relevant scholarship in ethics to better understand what is at stake. Students are invited to consider how they would improve or replace the policies in question.

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.