English

Cities are very important spaces within which complex economic, political, cultural, and environmental processes are produced and experienced. This course introduces students to urbanization from a global perspective. The objective is to understand contemporary processes of urban change in historical perspective from both the global north and the global south. The course draws on case studies and examples from South America, North America, Europe, South Africa, and Asia to exemplify key themes in urban studies including industrialization, suburbanization, global cities, inequality, and sustainability.

In this course, students learn about contemporary archaeological and anthropological perspectives in the study of material culture. Questions that come up include: why the summer solstice is celebrated at Stonehenge; how houses differ across cultures; why we give each other gifts and wrap them; and how clothing gives us identity? Studying human-object relations from a range of perspectives, students explores the role of materiality and the consumer society.

The key question of this course is how freedom is compatible with the authority of the state. During the course, students look at some classical responses to this question as well as to the related questions of how to organize statehood in a way that balances concerns for liberty, equality, and community. In exploring the theoretical foundations of today’s debates on these issues, students initially focus on a selection of historical thinkers from the pre-Enlightenment period onwards, later bringing the debate more up to date with scholarship by more modern thinkers.

This course examines the basic concepts and modern software architectures on distributed and parallel computing. Topics include: computer network primitives, distributed transactions and two-phase commits, webservices, parallelism and scalability models, distributed consistency models, distributed fault-tolerance, actor and monads, Facebook photo cache, Amazon key-value stores, Google Map-reduce, Spark, and TensorFlow.

This course surveys a number of key debates in the very broad literature on electoral and political behavior in democratic states.  Topics include how citizens think about parties, politically salient groups and political issues, including how citizens make vote choices, the mechanisms behind differences in turnout and participation across different individuals and over time and levels in political knowledge.  The course provides a comparative examination of political behavior in democratic contexts, but because of the historical development of the research literature in this area, there is greater weight placed on the US relative to other countries. 

The course examines the close connection between music and science that has existed historically from Pythagoras on into modern times. The course introduces the essential physics of musical sound production and analysis in order to understand the elementary principles behind wind, string and percussion instruments and their characteristic timbre. The course examines the development of scales from fundamental principles to identify some of the subtle differences between Chinese and Western music. Contemporary music and science interactions focus on electronic music and the working principles of modern instruments such as the electric guitar. Finally the course looks at some scientific understanding of musical appreciation and the factors that make music pleasing. 

This course explores the relationship between technology and human labor, with a special interest in its socio-political implications. Technological change is one of the fundamental drives that has shaped the modern economy. From factories, railroads, telegraphs, electricity, and petrochemical Industrial Revolution to the contemporary bio-digital revolution, technological changes have had profound impact on how human labor is organized, mobilized, utilized, and exploited. Technological changes have affected humans-tools relationship; created new breeds of workers (e.g. “proletariat class,” “white-collars,” “knowledge-workers,” “clinical laborers or bio-surrogates,” “platform workers,” and many kinds of invisible workers (such as undocumented immigrants) and changed work-place environments. 

Though technological changes are often recognized as (and indeed they are) “progress,” they also interact with and exacerbate the existing social inequalities and injustices and undermine the hard-won labor rights. The course focuses on market labor but will also include relevant discussions on non-market labor (such as households). The course also discusses broader structural changes such as economic globalization and its work implications. 

This course examines the purpose and application of theoretical paradigms in international relations. Theories provide frameworks to understand the behavior of actors in a complex and dynamic global environment. Distinct theoretical paradigms make central assumptions about primary factors that drive human action with implications for how we understand, explain, and predict issues and interactions in the international arena. Such factors range from scarcity and a drive for control (e.g., classical realism, neorealism, game theory); to a drive to cooperate for absolute gains (e.g., neoliberal institutionalism, liberalism), constructed identities based on historically-contingent meanings and values (e.g., constructivism), and unequal power relations that underpin a drive for autonomy, agency, and empowerment. (e.g., critical theories, feminist theory). The course teaches all theoretical paradigms with a focus on how they can be applied to better understand political issues and challenges in the contemporary global environment.