Political Science

In this course students study the politics of developing nations from the perspective and theory of political development. Additionally, students examine and discuss the patterns of political rule and political economies of chosen state systems. The class focuses on several case studies from Latin America, Africa, and South Asia.

The course explores the core issues, important theories, research methods, and frontier development of electoral politics. It covers the economic, social, legal and other important aspects of political systems and examines the election system and election behavior. Students analyze the dilemma, limitations, and outlets of the elections in today's world.

This course is divided into two parts. The first half of the course offers a comparative modern history of East Asian countries, with a special focus on Hokkaido, Ryukyu-Okinawa, Taiwan, Korea and China, in the framework of Japanese “Nation-Empire” building. The course also explores categories of people, including trafficked children, peddlers, “abducted” women, the Ainu, Taiwan's indigenous people, Micronesians, and Okinawans. The second half of the course focuses on cultural studies (pop culture, movies, music manga, etc.), political economy (regional integration, ASEAN+3, TPP, RCEP, One Belt One Load), comparative politics (political regime, identity, nationalism, democracy), regional security (U.S.-Japan Alliance, U.S. military presence, military cooperation, South China and East China sea, bandwagoning or hedge). The course uses active learning in groups, making maximum use of the mixture of students from different regions and countries, and bringing out different perspectives, points of view, and opinions on various issues and topics.

This seminar aims to equip students with knowledge of institutional and politico-economic development of Asian regionalism and its role in world and regional politics. 
 

Ignorance looms large in our current political discourses. From the ignorance of epidemiological facts shaping pandemic policy and public compliance or willful ignorance of climate change which continues to perpetuate the reliance of fossil fuels to naive ignorance of epistemic exclusions that to reproduce marginalizations on the basis of race and gender, ignorance takes center stage in key public debates. With so much putative ignorance around, one might get the impression that ignorance more than knowledge gives shape to contemporary political cultures. Yet, with a more careful eye towards how ignorance functions, it is clear that we are not dealing with a singular idea. Rather, there are multiple discourses around, definitions of, and practices built on ignorance. This seminar distinguishes between two particular modalities of ignorance: positive and negative ignorance. That is, 1) ignorance defined through the absence of specific forms of knowledge, and 2) ignorance defined in terms of someone’s positionality in and situated knowledge of a complex system. The course traces the first modality of ignorance via its deployment in current political debates such as climate change, racial marginalization, and intersectional feminism. In these discourses, ignorance functions as a foundation for critique, as a moral imperative, and even as basis for political activism. The second modality of ignorance, perhaps better understood in terms of aporia, can be found today in a variety of positive programs for dealing with complexity (aporetics) such as administrative decentralization, neoliberal economics, and even public sector design. The course introduces some of the epistemological and practical preconditions for such aporetic governance. Finally, the seminar asks what forms of research, ethical conduct, and political practices may be mobilized in response to or built upon ignorance and aporia.

This course covers the different groups that are or have been at some point in American history considered as minorities: ethno-racial minorities (especially African Americans, Hispanics, Asian Americans, Native Americans), immigrants, women, but also sexual minorities, religious minorities, and people with disabilities. Various issues are discussed such as the genesis of the notion of “minority,” discrimination, minority rights, and identity politics. By the end of the students can: understand past and current public policy debates in the United States regarding minorities; analyze these debates using the theoretical frameworks provided in class; draw connections between the policies pertaining to different minority groups.