Human Rights Courses

This civilizations sequence introduces students to the critical study of human rights, through interdisciplinary texts presented in a mix of historical and conceptual units. The first quarter opens with a unit on universality, human dignity, and human rights as these concepts came to play a role in the politics of the new United Nations and the political practice of domestic social movements. It is followed by three thematic clusters, “Bearing Witness and Testimony”, that explores the different ways that witnessing and testimony figures in the politics of post-atrocity and memory; "Anti-Slavery, Humanitarianism, and Rights" that explores possible prefigurations of human rights politics in earlier practices of anti-slavery and humanitarian concern; and "Declarations as a Human Rights Genre” that explores the genre of rights declarations, rooting The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, in a longer tradition, reaching back into the late 18th century. 
 
This course is part of a 2-part sequence and satisfies a civilizations sequence requirement. If not used to satisfy that requirement, the course may be used to satisfy Human Rights Major Requirements as an elective in any stream.

The US Supreme Court's 2022 decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization has sharpened our awareness of the perils that besiege our reproductive futures. This course offers a deep dive into comparative reproductive justice theory and practice rooted both in unique cultural particularities and in globally resonant issues and challenges. While exposing students to the foundational texts shaping the reproductive justice movement, the course shall engage critically with the possibilities and limitations of a rights-based framework and the challenges and liberatory potential of a justice-based approach to reproductive decision-making. Drawing from literature and media from across the world, the course shall provide global perspectives on issues as varied as contraception, assisted reproductive technology, mass sterilization, and family leave, along with scholarship and resources from the US. While engaging critically with theory, the course shall also provide practitioners' perspectives through guest lectures by ethnographers, lawyers, and healthcare professionals working in the field. This course counts as a Foundations course for GNSE majors. 

This course examines basic human rights norms and concepts and selected contemporary human rights problems from across the globe, including human rights implications of the COVID-19 pandemic. Beginning with an overview of the present crises and significant actors on the world stage, we will then examine the political setting for the United Nations' approval of the Universal Declaration on Human Rights in 1948. The post-World War 2 period was a period of optimism and fertile ground for the establishment of a universal rights regime, given the defeat of fascism in Europe. International jurists wanted to establish a framework of rights that went beyond the nation-state, taking into consideration the partitions of India-Pakistan and Israel-Palestine - and the rising expectations of African-Americans in the U.S. and colonized peoples across Africa and Asia. But from the beginning, there were basic contradictions in a system of rights promulgated by representatives of nation-states that ruled colonial regimes, maintained de facto and de jure systems of racial discrimination, and imprisoned political dissidents and journalists. Cross-cutting themes of the course include the universalism of human rights, problems of impunity and accountability, notions of "exceptionalism," and the emerging issue of the "shamelessness" of authoritarian regimes. Students will research a human rights topic of their choosing, to be presented as either a final research paper or a group presentation.

In this class, we explore the philosophical foundations of human rights, investigating theories of how our shared humanity in the context of an interdependent world gives rise to obligations of justice. We begin by asking what rights are, how they are distinguished from other parts of morality, and what role they play in our social and political life. But rights come in many varieties, and we are interested in human rights in particular. In later weeks, we will ask what makes something a human right, and how human rights differ from other kinds of rights. We will consider a number of contemporary philosophers (and one historian) who attempt to answer this question, including James Griffin, John Rawls, John Tasioulas, Samuel Moyn, Jiewuh Song, Pablo Gilabert, and Martha Nussbaum. Throughout we will be asking questions such as, "What makes something a human right?" "What role does human dignity play in grounding our human rights?" "Are human rights historical?" "What role does the nation and the individual play in our account of human rights?" "When can one nation legitimately intervene in the affairs of another nation?" "How can we respect the demands of justice while also respecting cultural differences?" "How do human rights relate to global inequality and markets?"

The aim of this course is to explore the tensions and convergences between two of the most profoundly important areas of environmental philosophy. "Ecocentrism" is the view that holistic systems such as ecosystems can be ethically considerable or "count" in a way somewhat comparable to human persons, and such a philosophical perspective has been shared by many prominent forms of environmentalism, from Aldo Leopold's Land Ethic to Deep Ecology to the worldviews of many Native American and Indigenous peoples. For some prominent environmental philosophers, a commitment to ecocentrism is the defining test of whether one is truly an environmental philosopher. "Environmental Racism" is one of the defining elements of environmental injustice, the way in which environmental crises and existential threats often reflect systemic discrimination, oppression, and domination in their disproportionate adverse impact on peoples of color, women, the global poor, LGBTQ populations, and Indigenous Peoples. Although historically, some have claimed that ecocentric organizations such as Greenpeace have neglected the problems of environmental injustice and racism in their quest to, e.g., "save the whales," a deeper analysis reveals a far more complicated picture, with many affinities and alliances between ecocentrists and activists seeking environmental justice. 

The aim of this course is to investigate the ways in which ethnographers have dealt with questions of human rights and humanitarianism. While ethnography is the hallmark of anthropology, it has gained popularity in recent years in other fields of social science, from sociology to political science. Over the course of the quarter, we will discuss what makes a human rights ethnography and what we can learn about human rights from the perspective of ethnography. Rather than reading chapters and articles, we will focus on excerpts of full ethnographies. The purpose of this is to delve into the nitty-gritty details of living with (or without) human rights. Students will not only learn about human rights from an ethnographic perspective, but they will also gain familiarity with ethnography as a genre.

This workshop is for Human Rights Majors who are either writing a BA Thesis or doing a Capstone Project. It is informally scheduled and meets roughly every other week in Autumn and Winter Quarters. Participants will receive training in scholarly and other skill sets needed to complete the projects; they will workshop their theses and projects with one another and their praeceptor, receiving critical feedback; and they will collectively problem solve. The workshop is intended as a supportive environment, the function of which is to help students realize their vision and push their scholarly limits. It is 0 credits in the Autumn Quarter and 100 credits in the Winter Quarter. 
 
This is a required course for 4th-year Human Rights Majors, unless they are writing a human rights related BA Thesis in another major that has its own workshop. 

The city of Chicago has welcomed over 45,000 migrants and asylum-seekers from Latin America over the past few years and has witnessed efforts to effect a welcoming and sanctuary city through government, non-profit, mutual aid network and individual volunteer work. Students in this course will conduct in-person field research with migrants and service networks to explore the ways that Chicagoans both new and established imagine and attempt to create a sanctuary or welcoming city. Through field research practice, students will gain experience with ethnographic methods of participant-observation, taking fieldnotes, conducting interviews and ethnographic writing. Accompanying course readings will guide us through ethnographic methods, the root causes of migration, migration pathways and infrastructure, refugee and migrant reception and sanctuary city concepts and policies.

The international human rights regime took form in the shadow of the atom bomb and WWII, a historical juncture which, for many, marked the limits of techno-scientific rationality and progress. Utopian narratives of inevitable, technologically-driven social and economic progress nonetheless remain a cornerstone of American political and cultural imaginaries. In this course, we will draw on anthropology, law, and allied disciplines to explore the ambiguous intersections of technological innovation and human rights. Through a series of case studies, the course will consider how new technologies and their allied knowledge practices call into question the foundational categories of human rights law, complicating understandings of the individual, personhood, family, and life. The course will further examine how emerging developments in biotechnology, information technology, robotics, and AI variously enhance and undermine the substantive protections of human rights, including the rights to health, privacy, freedom of expression, security, and indigenous knowledge. Finally, we will consider how human rights norms and institutions can be mobilized to inform and constrain the design and application of potentially threatening new technologies.

This interdisciplinary course explores aesthetics, environmental racism, and a human rights approach to the Commons to inform our perspective on the politics and aesthetics of water from the local to the global. The course will look at issues of scarcity and abundance through the lenses of art and human rights. The course will incorporate work by artist Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle, who will visit the class. Students will consider works by other artists, including Mel Chin, Allan Kaprow, LaToya Ruby Frazier, and Fazal Sheikh, to understand how art can confront the 21st century's environmental challenges. Readings will include Susan Sontag's Regarding the Pain of Others and Fred Moten & Stefano Harney's The Undercommons. The course will include visits to site-specific installations by artists Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle and Mel Chin and visits to Chicago-area natural sites such as the Big Marsh and Lake Michigan. This course is an extension of a collaborative project at the Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry with human rights lawyer Susan Gzesh, artist Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle, and curator Abigail Winograd.

This course will introduce students to the legal architecture of international human rights law. Whilst the legal framing of rights emphasizes universality and the common good, its application reflects the historical compromises and political uncertainties of the times. This course will explore the tensions that are produced when politics meets 'the law' and examine the issues, actors, doctrines and practices that make up the human rights project. As human rights law is evolutive, we will look at how the human rights project has changed and evolved in connection to historical movements and post-colonial politics and has developed in order to address state violence, 'terrorism', minority rights, women's rights, gender and sexuality, transitional justice, health, and responsibility to protect, to name but a few. We will draw on case studies, including the United States, in order to examine the complicated role of the state as both perpetrator and protector and promoter of human rights. Students will be encouraged to think critically about the human rights project; how does it confront the underlying issues of injustice and abuse, as well as the inherent conceptual and structural limitations of supranational human rights mechanisms in addressing and providing remedies for the problems facing the world today.

Documentary Video Production focuses on the making of independent documentary video. Examples of various modes of documentary production will be screened and discussed. Issues embedded in the genre, such as the ethics, the politics of representation, and the shifting lines between "the real" and "fiction," will be explored. Story development, pre-production strategies, and production techniques will be our focus, in particular-research, relationships, the camera, interviews and sound recording, shooting in available light, working in crews, and post-production editing. Students will work in crews and be expected to purchase a portable hard drive. A five-minute string-out/rough-cut will be screened at the end of the quarter. Students are strongly encouraged to take CMST 23931 Documentary Production II to complete their work. Consent of instructor is required to enroll.

In American public discourse, it is common to hear abortion referred to as a "religious issue." But is abortion a religious issue? If so, in what ways, to whom, and why? In this course we will answer these questions by tracing the relationship between religion and abortion in American history. We will examine the kinds of claims religious groups have made about abortion; how religion has shaped the development of medical, legal, economic, and cultural perspectives on the topic; how debates over abortion have led to the rise of a certain kind of religious politics in the United States; and how issues of race, class, gender, sexuality, and the body are implicated in this conversation. Although the course will cover a range of time periods, religious traditions, and types of data (abortion records from Puritan New England, enslaved people's use of herbal medicine to induce miscarriage, and Jewish considerations of the personhood of the fetus, among others), we will give particular attention to the significance of Christianity in legal and political debates about abortion in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. There are no prerequisites for this course and no background in Religious Studies is required. However, this course may be particularly well-suited to students interested in thinking about how certain themes or areas of study-medicine and medical sciences, gender and sexuality, race and ethnicity, political science-converge with religion and Religious Studies.

This course explores anticolonial worldbuilding through literature, film, art, and philosophy. It focuses on the role of the cultural Cold War in shaping anticolonial aesthetics and politics during the twentieth century as well as its impact on our current political moment. The mid-century was characterized by an expansion of anticolonial festivals, exchanges, and congresses and marked by political crises and coalitional solidarity across Vietnam, Palestine, Cuba, Soviet and US imperial expansion, and the May 1968 student protests. We will explore how Pan-Arab, Pan-African, Non-Aligned/Global South, Marxist-Leninist, Indigenous land rights, and racial justice movements mobilized class, gender, and language politics. Exploring anticolonial literature, film, and art across a multilingual and transnational archive, we will ask how socialist and speculative realism, engaged literature, third cinema, agitprop, and other aesthetic movements generated powerful internationalist imaginations and networks of resistance.

This course introduces students to games of complete information through solving problem sets. We will cover the concepts of dominant strategies, rationalizable strategies, Nash equilibrium, subgame perfection, backward induction, and imperfect information. The course will be centered around several applications of game theory to politics: electoral competition, agenda control, lobbying, voting in legislatures, and coalition games. 

Taught by Anand Grover, a former UN Special Rapporteur on the right to health and a practicing Senior Counsel in the Supreme Court of India, this course addresses the practical challenges of realizing the global right to health. Topics include HIV, COVID-19, abortion, and access to affordable medicines. This intensive, 1-credit course is open to law students with an interest in health and human rights. It can also be audited via Zoom by students from other departments and disciplines, including undergraduates. Non-law students seeking consent should email rsherer@bsd.uchicago.edu a resume and a brief description of their interest.
 

Four thematic clusters structure the second quarter. "Migration, Minorities, and Refugees" examines minority rights, the evolution of legal norms around refugees, and human trafficking. "Late Twentieth Century Human Rights Talk" explores the contestations between rights claims in the political-civil and socio-economic spheres, calls for sexual rights, and cultural representations of human rights abuses. "Global Justice" considers forms of international criminal law, transitional justice, and distributive justice. "Indigenous Rights as Human Rights" takes up the relatively new domain of the rights of indigenous peoples and how they relate to contemporary human rights practice.

Medical disciplines from psychiatry to surgery have all attempted to identify and to treat gendered misalignment, while queer theory and feminisms have simultaneously tried to understand if and how trans- theories should be integrated into their respective intellectual projects. This course looks at the logics of the medical treatment of transgender (and trans- more broadly) in order to consider the mutual entanglement of clinical processes with theoretical ones. Over the quarter we will read ethnographic accounts and theoretical essays, listen to oral histories, discuss the intersections of race and ability with gender, and interrogate concepts like "material bodies" and "objective science". Primary course questions include: 1. How is "trans-" conceptualized, experienced, and lived? How has trans-studies distinguished itself from feminisms and queer theories? 2. What are the objects, processes, and problematics trans- medicine identifies and treats? How is "trans-" understood and operationalized through medical practices? 3. What meanings of health, power, knowledge, gender, and the body are utilized or defined by our authors? What relations can we draw between them

Globalizing and local forces are generating a new politics in the United States and around the world. This course explores this new politics by mapping its emerging elements: the rise of social issues, ethno-religious and regional attachments, environmentalism, gender and life-style identity issues, new social movements, transformed political parties and organized groups, and new efforts to mobilize individual citizens

This course explores the fundamental role that race and racism have played in the structure, stratification, and social functioning of American public schools, and how schools in turn shape our collective ideas about race in the United States. Working from both a historical perspective and an analysis of contemporary policy, we will use theoretical and empirical texts to explore questions of identity, otherness, and ethics, such as: what can the histories of schooling for Black and Native students reveal about the educational project of the nation? How does the notion of whiteness as property shape public presumptions about what makes a "good" school? How are taken-for-granted ideas about other vectors of identity such as class, disability, and language informed by racialized school policies? Most fundamentally, can schools contribute to creating a more just world, and if so, how?

This course examines basic human rights norms and concepts and selected contemporary human rights problems from across the globe, including human rights implications of the COVID pandemic. Beginning with an overview of the present crises and significant actors on the world stage, we will then examine the political setting for the United Nations' approval of the Universal Declaration on Human Rights in 1948. The post-World War 2 period was a period of optimism and fertile ground for the establishment of a universal rights regime, given the defeat of fascism in Europe. International jurists wanted to establish a framework of rights that went beyond the nation-state, taking into consideration the partitions of India-Pakistan and Israel-Palestine - and the rising expectations of African-Americans in the U.S. and colonized peoples across Africa and Asia. But from the beginning, there were basic contradictions in a system of rights promulgated by representatives of nation-states that ruled colonial regimes, maintained de facto and de jure systems of racial discrimination, and imprisoned political dissidents and journalists. Cross-cutting themes of the course include the universalism of human rights, problems of impunity and accountability, notions of "exceptionalism," and the emerging issue of the "shamelessness" of authoritarian regimes. Students will research a human rights topic of their choosing, to be presented as either a final research paper or a group presentation

This course attempts to define health and health care in the context of human rights theory and practice. Does a "right to health" include a "right to health care"? We delineate health care financing in the United States and compare these systems with those of other nations. We explore specific issues of health and medical practice as they interface in areas of global conflict: torture, landmines, and poverty. Readings and discussions explore social determinants of health: housing, educational institutions, employment, and the fraying of social safety nets. We study vulnerable populations: foster children, refugees, and the mentally ill. Lastly, does a right to health include a right to pharmaceuticals? What does the big business of drug research and marketing mean for our own country and the world?

Perhaps it is better to give than to receive, but exactly how much giving ought one to engage in and to whom or what? Recent ethical and philosophical developments such as the effective altruism movement suggest that relatively affluent individuals are ethically bound to donate a very large percentage of their resources to worthy causes-for example, saving as many lives as they possibly can, wherever in the world those lives may be. And charitable giving or philanthropy is not only a matter of individual giving, but also of giving by foundations, corporations, non-profits, non-governmental and various governmental agencies, and other organizational entities that play a very significant role in the modern world. How, for example, does an institution like the University of Chicago engage in and justify its philanthropic activities? Can one generalize about the various rationales for philanthropy, whether individual or institutional? Why do individuals or organizations engage in philanthropy, and do they do so well or badly, for good reasons, bad reasons, or no coherent reasons? This course will afford a broad, critical philosophical and historical overview of philanthropy, examining its various contexts and justifications, and contrasting charitable giving with other ethical demands, particularly the demands of justice. How do charity and justice relate to each other? Would charity even be needed in a fully just world?

This course explores how organizations-civic, private, governmental-working in the field of environmental advocacy construct, deploy and are shaped by distinct discourses governing relationships between nature and society. The environment is a field of social action in which organizations attempt to effect change in large domains like resource conservation, access, stewardship, and a basic right to environmental quality in everyday life. The work of effecting change in these complex domains can assume a variety of forms including public policy (through the agencies of the state), private enterprise (through the agency of the market), 'third sector' advocacy (through the agency of nonprofit organizations) and social activism (through the agency of social movements and community organizations). State, market, civil society and social movement organizations are where ideas are transmitted from theory to practice and back again in a recursive, dialectical process. These contrasting forms of organization have different histories, wellsprings and degrees of social power. Moreover, they bring different epistemologies to their claims about being legitimate custodians of nature-that is to say they can be understood genealogically. As such, organizations working to effect environment change are at once animated by and constitutive of distinct discourses governing the relationships between nature and society. The course explores how those distinct discourses are associated with a suite of different organizational realms of social action; the goal is trying to connect the dots between discursive formations and organizational forms

This course combines economic theory (the theory of the firm), legal theory (labor law), and labor history, with political philosophy to examine questions of justice for workers that are often ignored in academic political philosophy. The course begins by considering very basic questions from economic theory, including what markets are, and why production in the economy is organized through firms, and what economists have to say about why firms are arranged so hierarchically. Given this background, we next turns to consider injustices at the work, including worker domination, exploitation, and the casualization of employment. We consider responses including universal basic income that decouples access to goods from work; worker organization and resistance through the labor movement and tools such as collective bargaining; and finally, the reorganization of the economy to foster either shared control over firms or worker cooperatives. Along the way we consider the right to strike, the connection of race and labor, and different visions of a more just future for workers.

Ideas of justice are not self-evident truths but constructed through a variety of practices. This course will explore how the language of human rights, which scholars have called the moral lingua franca of our time, is constructed and circulated through aesthetic representation (such as literature, painting, and film), the law, HRNGOs, and public intellectual debates in the 20th and 21st centuries. Throughout the course, we will ask: How are ideas of human rights produced, transformed, or troubled by aesthetic production? What kinds of aesthetic and political claims can we stake in the name of human rights? And what might alternative visions of justice look like? We will discover how literature and visual art help both constitute and reflect the social and political truths by which we live, as well as how these seemingly obvious truths produce a variety of normative assumptions about what constitutes justice. Works will include texts by Ernst Bloch, Richard Wright, Kwame Nkrumah, Rigoberta Menchú, Leon Golub, Jacobo Timerman, and Ai Weiwei. Texts can be read in the English translation or original.

How is the queer enemy politically constructed? And what are the uses and effects of this enemy in contemporary politics? This course investigates queer sexuality as a specific kind of threat and homophobia as a specific mode of political antagonism. Key to understanding this specificity is the examination of other kinds of political enemies. Across categories of gender, sexuality, race, religion, and empire, the course theorizes the queer enemy in a comparative perspective. Engaging scholars like Monique Wittig, Simone de Beauvoir, Frantz Fanon, and Jean Paul Sartre, we compare homophobia with other forms of political enmity like misogyny, anti-Black racism, and anti-Semitism. After investigating antagonism across categories of political difference, we delve into the specificities of homophobic antagonism in the second half of the course. Here, we explore how the queer threat is framed: through metaphors of civilizational destruction but also through anti-sodomy and anti-disclosure laws. We also trace how the normalization of the queer enemy has produced new enemies. Through notions of "Pinkwashing" and the "Gay International," we further examine how queer liberation is made to stand in for colonial domination. But we also read critiques of the "gay=colonialism" equation, asking how homophobia mediates anti-colonial politics. Finally, we conclude the course with Michel Foucault's seminal essay and relate the question of the queer enemy to the threat of new human relations

Global climate change, the increase in authoritarian government worldwide, disruptions of global supply chains, and growing problems of debt have fallen with particular ferocity on the postcolonial Global South. In countries with poor public health infrastructures and millions of people already vulnerable and insecure at or below the poverty line, the pandemic has set back many of the improvements in human development of the previous decade. In addition to loss of life, millions have been thrown into abject poverty. This course addresses these and related questions of poverty in the Global South from the particular vantage point of social justice and human rights. The course is built around a set of substantive issues - what one can describe as struggles over systems of livelihood associated with access to control over key resources such as land, forests, minerals, water, food - drawing upon case studies from Latin America, South Asia and sub Saharan Africa in particular. This course seeks to understand the sorts of conflicts and struggles over these sorts of resources in postcolonial settings against a wider backdrop of the political economy of contemporary development

Global climate change, the increase in authoritarian government worldwide, disruptions of global supply chains, and growing problems of debt have fallen with particular ferocity on the postcolonial Global South. In countries with poor public health infrastructures and millions of people already vulnerable and insecure at or below the poverty line, the pandemic has set back many of the improvements in human development of the previous decade. In addition to loss of life, millions have been thrown into abject poverty. This course addresses these and related questions of poverty in the Global South from the particular vantage point of social justice and human rights. The course is built around a set of substantive issues - what one can describe as struggles over systems of livelihood associated with access to control over key resources such as land, forests, minerals, water, food - drawing upon case studies from Latin America, South Asia and sub Saharan Africa in particular. This course seeks to understand the sorts of conflicts and struggles over these sorts of resources in postcolonial settings against a wider backdrop of the political economy of contemporary development.

This course prepares students to relate the academic study of human rights to human rights practice. It will provide training in human rights monitoring, analysis, documentation (including the use of photography and videography), the use of public information and records, intervention and capacity building, trauma informed research, effective storytelling in human rights advocacy, effective interview techniques, stakeholder mapping, statistical analysis in R, mapping technologies and GIS. Importantly, this course will also address the 'ethics' side of field work, including principles of do no harm as well as self-care, which is so critical to human rights work.

This class focuses on the history and theory of human rights by considering it as a quintessentially postcolonial political form. We consider how Euro-American genealogies of rights intersect and interact with trajectories of colonial rule and postcolonial politics. In the process, the question of rights itself comes to be posed afresh. Empirically, the class focuses on the histories and presents of India and South Africa. Both these countries underwent processes of constitutional decolonization. Thus, rights have a foundational place in both postcolonial polities. What does that mean? How does that create openings for the imaginations and instantiations of socially transformative policies? How does it lead to the endurance of traces and aspects of colonial government? What are the promises and limits of rights as we consider them in such historical and political contexts? In what ways are political struggles in these countries marked as being both for and against rights? In the process, how does our thinking and conceptualization of rights itself come to be at stake?

The fundamental principle underlying human rights is that they are inherent in the identity of all human beings, regardless of place and without regard to citizenship, nationality, or immigration status. Human rights are universal and must be respected everywhere and always. Human rights treaties and doctrines mandate that a person does not lose their human rights simply by crossing a border. While citizens enjoy certain political rights withheld from foreigners within any given nation-state, what ARE the rights of non-citizens in the contemporary world? Students will research a human rights topic of their choosing, to be presented as either a final research paper or a group presentation

Law is everywhere within the social world. It shapes our everyday lives in countless ways by permitting, prohibiting, protecting and prosecuting native-born citizens and immigrants alike. This course reviews the major theoretical perspectives and sociological research on the relationship between law and society, with an empirical focus on immigrants in the United States, primarily from Mexico and Central America. To begin, we explore the permeation of law in everyday life, legal consciousness, and gap between "law on the books" and "law on the ground." The topic of immigration is introduced with readings on the socio-legal construction of immigration status, theories of international migration, and U.S. immigration law at the national and subnational levels. We continue to study the social impact of law on immigrants through the topics of liminal legality; children, families, and romantic partnerships; policing, profiling, and raids; detention and deportation; and immigrants' rights. This course adopts a "law in action" approach centered on the social, political, and cultural contexts of law as it relates to immigration and social change. It is designed to expose you to how social scientists study and think about law, and to give you the analytical skills to examine law, immigration, and social change relationally.

Documentary Production II focuses on the shaping and crafting of a non-fiction video. Enrollment will be limited to those students who have taken CMST 23930 Documentary Production I. The class will discuss issues of ethics, power, and representation in this most philosophical and problematic of genres. Students will be expected to write a treatment outline detailing their project and learn about granting agencies and budgeting. Production techniques will concentrate on the language of handheld camera versus tripod, interview methodologies, microphone placement including working with wireless systems and mixers, and lighting for the interview. Post-production will cover editing techniques including color correction and audio sweetening, how to prepare for exhibition, and distribution strategies. Consent of instructor is required to enroll.

This course will examine the development of environmental justice theory and practice through social scientific and ethical literature about the subject as well as primary source accounts of environmental injustices. We will focus on environmental justice issues in Chicago including, but not limited to waste disposal, toxic air and water, the Chicago heat wave, and climate change. Particular attention will be paid to environmental racism and the often understudied role of religion in environmental justice theory and practice. Throughout the course we will explore how normative commitments are expressed in different types of literature as well as the basis for normative judgments and the types of authorities authors utilize and claim as they consider environmental justice.

This course familiarizes students with the perspectives, debates, and attitudes that characterize the contemporary field of postcolonial theory, with critical attention to how its interdisciplinary formation contributes to reading literary works. What are the claims made on behalf of literary texts in orienting us to other lives and possibilities, and in registering the experiences of displacement under global capitalism? To better answer these questions, we read recent scholarship that engages the field in conversations around gender, affect, climate change, and democracy, to think about the impulses that animate the field, and to sketch new directions. We survey the trajectories and self-criticisms within the field, looking at canonical critics (Fanon, Said, Bhabha, Spivak), as well as reading a range of literary and cinematic works by writers like Jean Rhys, E.M. Forster, Mahasweta Devi, Derek Walcott, Arundhati Roy, and Salman Rushdie). 

Coming to terms with diversity in an increasingly multicultural world has become one of the most pressing public policy projects for liberal democracies in the early 21st century. One way to come to terms with diversity is to try to understand the scope and limits of toleration for variety at different national sites where immigration from foreign lands has complicated the cultural landscape. This seminar examines a series of legal and moral questions about the proper response to norm conflict between mainstream populations and cultural minority groups (including old and new immigrants), with special reference to court cases that have arisen in the recent history of the United States.

This course offers an interdisciplinary encounter with three rich concepts of abiding interest to scholars in the humanities and humanistic social sciences: violence, trauma, and repair. A central goal for the seminar is to think through the relationships between these concepts and their effects in our contemporary world. The course readings comprise several kinds of primary objects: literary texts, ethnographies, psychoanalytic case studies, memoirs, and journalism. These are drawn from the four historical contexts that will serve as touchstones throughout the course: the Holocaust, the legacies of the slave trade, the Rwandan genocide, and the South African TRC. My intention is that the works we cover in this course will give you the tools to think comparatively across these cases, and that you'll be able to bring the insights of the class to bear on your own projects. By the end of the course, my hope is that you will be familiar with some of the central questions regarding political violence and its ramifications; be able to theorize trauma in light of scholarly attempts to complicate and historicize the concept and have developed a critical account of how trauma has been harnessed to varying contexts, including social justice demands for individual and societal repair.