Political Science

The course exposes students to the closely coupled worlds of decision making and technology in the modern world of public service and public policy. Students learn how to analyze decisions and consequences from different units of public policy analysis such as the individual, organization, and culture. The course covers the role technology and machines are playing in shaping this modern context. It course begins with rational human theory, builds toward administrative and organization behavior, and looks at what this means for the institutions that maintain society. The course then looks at how the tasks that decision-making focuses upon can be completed either by humans or by machines. The fields of public administration, law, and machine behavior are used to analyze these concepts. This approach will seek to establish a broad and interdisciplinary approach to human decision making within public service and the corresponding capacity to utilize machines to augment, automate, and generate new tasks to be completed through a decision-making process.

This course investigates how the early childhood period contributes to the reproduction of social inequalities, focusing on the role of early education and care, and on the interplay between micro-level characteristics with the policy context. Several interdisciplinary concepts are introduced, as well as the key policy evaluation tools, as applied to (early) education and care. The course discusses and questions current concepts in the early childhood literature and their relevance to the reproduction of social inequalities; examines early education and care; explores cross-national differences in early childhood policies and current policy debates; considers the concepts behind key policy evaluation tools; and applies acquired knowledge to evaluate early education programs and their role in the production of inequalities. Sessions are interactive and require participation.