Terms offered: Fall 2017, Fall 2016
This course is a broad survey of major canonical works (“Great Books”) emphasizing from the premodern traditions of Western Civilization since the Greeks. These texts offer responses to central questions that, across the disciplinary divides, continue to inform contemporary work in the social sciences and the humanities. By considering these enduring questions and the responses of writers in Ancient, Medieval, Early Modern, and Modern Europe, we seek to examine core issues of the liberal arts as they find expression across what would later become disciplinary divisions.

Terms offered: Fall 2017, Spring 2017, Fall 2016
This is an interdisciplinary survey course that seeks to understand how we define justice, evil, and individual responsibility in modern society. In particular we are going to probe carefully how humans reflect on and practice the process of moral reasoning. We will focus on human behavior in extreme situations: war, life and death conflicts, genocide and mass killing, as well as competing conceptions of human freedom. The course has a distinctive dual purpose. On the one hand we want to encourage the learning of critical thinking skills. This includes the ability to systematically evaluate information and competing moral claims. Also, it is intended as an exposure to the interdisciplinary approach. That is, how can different perspectives illuminate the same issue? With this in mind the course draws on important work from philosophy and ethics, social psychology, jurisprudential analysis, historical-political accounts, and personal memoirs.

Terms offered: Fall 2017, Spring 2017, Fall 2016
Seminars for the group study of selected topics not covered by regularly scheduled courses. Topics will vary from semester to semester.

Terms offered: Fall 2017, Summer 2017 First 6 Week Session, Spring 2017
This course, required of all ISF majors but open to all students, provides an introduction to the works of foundational social theorists of the nineteenth century, including Karl Marx and Max Weber. Writing in what might be called the “pre disciplinary” period of the modern social sciences, their works cross the boundaries of anthropology, economics, history, political science, sociology, and are today claimed by these and other disciplines as essential texts. We will read intensively and critically from their respective works, situating their intellectual contributions in the history of social transformations wrought by industrialization and urbanization, political revolution, and the development of modern consumer society.

Terms offered: Fall 2017, Spring 2016, Spring 2015
This is a course exploring how we understand the idea of the self in contemporary social worlds. The course shares the presumption that the modern self is a created endeavor. It charts traditional and contemporary understandings of individual identity, the maturation process and the notion of an inner life, the concepts of freedom and individual agency, the force of evolution and heredity, and the influence of social causation. The course stresses the complex interplay between the development of a sense of self, and the socialization pressures at work in the family, society, and global cultures.

Terms offered: Fall 2017, Spring 2017, Summer 2014 Second 6 Week Session
This course examines the role of language in the construction of social identities, and how language is tied to various forms of symbolic power at the national and international levels.? Drawing on case studies from Southeast Asia, Europe, Canada, and the U.S., we will pay special attention to topics such as the legitimization of a national language, the political use of language in nation-building processes, the endangerment of indigenous languages, and processes of linguistic subordination and domination. This course will be interdisciplinary in its attempt to understand language in terms of history, politics, anthropology and sociology.

Terms offered: Fall 2014, Spring 2014, Fall 2013
This course surveys the technological revolutions of the 19th and 20th centuries, it then focuses on the development of the computer and the Internet. The final part examines the impact of the Internet on social movements.

Terms offered: Fall 2015, Fall 2014, Fall 2013
This interdisciplinary course is an introduction to the complex interplay of transnational values, international rights and legal institutions that increasingly govern social, cultural and geopolitical interactions in our contemporary world. Theoretical and methodological tools from the social sciences, jurisprudence, and philosophy will be applied im the analyses of these interplays. A study of rights and norms presupposes not only an understanding of the empirical evolution of rights traditions (including constitutional traditions) in a variety of global regions, but also an understanding of the theories of rights and laws that support such traditions as they are embedded in them (just war theories, peace theories, etc.) The study of rights and norms also requires an exploration of the transformations of crucial international norms and rights due to the formation of supranational institutions and organizations in the 20th century (UN, UNESCO, GO's, etc.). The course will provide the students with an opportunity to place emerging transnational rights institutions into a historical and geopolitical framework.

Terms offered: Fall 2017, Fall 2016, Fall 2015
The focus of this course will be on the various ways the nature and trajectory of modern capitalism has been interpreted. Our stress will be on post-Marxist works of analysis. The initial focal point will be on the work of Max Weber and Joseph Schumpeter, as well as important current debates in economic history and social theory generated by their work. Both Weber and Schumpeter display a strong fascination and elaboration with the work of Marx. The way they analyze Marx is very revealing about the way contemporary analysts seek to understand the capitalist system. We will also consider a number of current efforts that look at the systemic nature of capitalism. In particular, we are interested in how economic historians now see the development of capitalism. We also want to examine the Weberian tradition in terms of the role of culture in shaping economic behavior. Debates about the nature of globalization will also be considered as well as analysis of the changing nature of work.

Terms offered: Spring 2017, Spring 2016, Spring 2015
This interdisciplinary course will explore whether it has proven possible and desirable to understand society through value-free and positivistic scientific methods as predominantly developed in the transatlantic worlds of the 19th centuries. We shall explore questions that may be applied to the realms of public health and human biology, or to the social sciences generally, including anthropology, sociology, economics, and political science.

Terms offered: Summer 2016 8 Week Session, Spring 2016, Spring 2015
How have international actors used media to construct public opinion about salient issues, such as war, terrorism and intervention, international trade and finance, and global warming and resource depletion? The purpose of this course is to introduce students to key concepts, methods, and theories in the analysis of media effects, particularly in the areas of public opinion formation and international relations.

Terms offered: Summer 2017 Second 6 Week Session
In many ways, consumption defines our lives – our identities as consumers are even more important, some would argue, our identities as workers or producers. But what are the implications of a society in which “you are what you consume?” In this class, we will address questions such as: Under what conditions does a “consumer society” develop? What does global commodity chain tell us about colonialization, global inequality, and environmental injustice? How can we shape the life cycle of basic commodities—from raw materials to iPhones--in a socially sustainable way? This course will be interdisciplinary in its attempt to understand consumer society and culture in terms of political economy, geography, history, anthropology and sociology.

Terms offered: Summer 2017 Second 6 Week Session
In this class, we will look at computing as a social phenomenon: to see it not just as a technology that transforms but to see it as a technology that has evolved, and is being put to use, in very particular ways, by particular groups of people. We will be doing this by employing a variety of methods, primarily historical and ethnographic, oriented around a study of practices. We will pay attention to technical details but ground these technical details in social organization (a term whose meaning should become clearer and clearer as the class progresses). We will study the social organization of computing around different kinds of hardware, software, ideologies, and ideas.

Terms offered: Spring 2011, Spring 2007, Spring 2004
This course is designed to sharpen our skills in understanding what happens when the world of images and words meet. Starting with the work from the Western "classical" tradition we will proceed to investigate how word/image constellations operate in a variety of media, including sculpture and poetry, painting and prose, death masks, tableaux vivants, photography, and advertising.

Terms offered: Fall 2017, Spring 2016, Spring 2015
This course provides an overview of the field of Science and Technology Studies (STS) as a way to study how our knowledge and technology shape and are shaped by social, political, historical, economic, and other factors. We will learn key concepts of the field (e.g., how technologies are understood and used differently in different communities) and apply them to a wide range of topics, including geography, history, environmental and information science, and others. Questions this course will address include: how are scientific facts constructed? How are values embedded in technical systems?

Terms offered: Prior to 2007
Introduction to central theoretical investigations concerning the construction and organization of social life. Using some works from the "classical" traditions of social theory as well as some examples of contemporary analysis, this course will explore such topics as the nature of power and social/historical change, the nature of economic production and consumption, the meaning of difference--racial, sexual, class--the development of institutions, etc.

Terms offered: Not yet offered
This course surveys the technological revolutions of the 19th and 20th centuries, then focuses on the development of the computer and the Internet. The final part examines the impact of the Internet on social movements.

Terms offered: Fall 2014, Summer 2012 Second 6 Week Session, Summer 2010 Second 6 Week Session
This course is designed primarily to allow faculty to develop courses which address specific issues, themes, or problems of interdisciplinary interest. Topics vary semester to semester. Students should consult the department's webpage for current offerings before the start of the semester.

Terms offered: Fall 2015, Spring 2007, Fall 2005
In this course, we will trace some of the substantive changes and transformations taking place in contemporary Europe in the areas of culture, society, and politics. In particular, we will look at the effects of massive migration flows--due to globalization processes--on the national culture of the core countries and examine the ways in which particular national cultures react to the increasing multiculturization of Europe. The goal of the course is, first of all, to familiarize students with a variety of cultural, social, and political innovations that accompany the formation of multicultural Europe. This involves (1) an examination of the traditional concepts of nationhood and citizenship, and (2)a study of the Europeanization of culture.

Terms offered: Fall 2017, Summer 2017 First 6 Week Session, Spring 2017
This class is an introduction to research methods, leading students through different units built around specific learning goals and practical exercises. The course is designed to teach a range of research skills, including the ability to formulate research questions and to engage in scholarly conversations and arguments; the identification, evaluation, mobilization, and interpretation of sources; methods and instruments of field research (interviews, questionnaires, and sampling) and statistical thinking; and the construction of viable arguments and explanation in the human sciences. At the same time, the course is designed to help students identify their own thesis topic, bibliography, and methodological orientation.

Terms offered: Fall 2017, Summer 2017 8 Week Session, Spring 2017
The ISF Senior Thesis requirement is the capstone experience and final product of the ISF major. The thesis is a sustained, original, and critical examination of a central interdisciplinary research question, developed under the guidance of the ISF 190 instructor. The thesis represents a mature synthesis of research skills, critical thinking, and competent writing. As the final product of a student's work in the major, the thesis is not the place to explore a new set of disciplines or research problems for the first time, but should develop methods of inquiry and bridge the several disciplines that students have developed in their course of study.

Terms offered: Prior to 2007
Supervised experience relevant to the student's specific area of concentration in the Interdisciplinary Studies Field Major in off-campus organizations. Regular individual meetings with faculty sponsor and written reports required.

Terms offered: Spring 2017, Spring 2016, Fall 2015
Seminars for the group study of selected topics not covered by regularly scheduled courses. Topics will vary from semester to semester.

Terms offered: Fall 2017, Summer 2017 First 6 Week Session, Summer 2017 Second 6 Week Session
Directed individual independent study and research of special topics by arrangement with faculty.

Terms offered: Summer 2007 Second 6 Week Session
Introduces the nature of research and the research university's role in the production of knowledge. Explores differences and similarities among modes of inquiry in sciences, social sciences, and humanities by looking at UCB faculty and their various approaches to current problems. Examines challenges and rewards of doing research. Profiles undergraduate researchers. Online course for new freshmen culminates in (optional) welcome week activities.

Terms offered: Prior to 2007
Introduces the nature of research and the research university's role in the production of knowledge. Explores differences and similarities among modes of inquiry in sciences, social sciences, and humanities by looking at UCB faculty and their various approaches to current problems. Examines challenges and rewards of doing research. Profiles undergraduate researchers. Online course for new freshmen culminates in (optional) welcome week activities. This course is web-based.

Terms offered: Spring 2010, Spring 2009, Spring 2008
Course covers introduction to the basis of common sight reducing visual disorders with major public health implications for society--e.g., myopia, cataracts, diabetic hypertensive eye disorders, developmental disorders (e.g., lazy eye), and environmentally induced disease and disorders (solar eye burns, cataracts). Major approaches to the prevention, diagnosis, and treatment of common disorders will be addressed in terms of the biological and optical sciences underlying the treatment or prevention. Impact of eye care on society and health and care delivery will be reviewed.

Terms offered: Spring 2016, Spring 2015, Spring 2014
Freshman and sophomore seminars offer lower division students the opportunity to explore an intellectual topic with a faculty member and a group of peers in a small-seminar setting. These seminars are offered in all campus departments; topics vary from department to department and from semester to semester.

Terms offered: Fall 2015, Spring 2015, Fall 2014
This course introduces the fundamentals of K-5 science education through demonstrations, skill modeling, and discussion. Topics include inquiry-based and cooperative learning strategies; team building and management tools; and assessment techniques. Students are placed in an elementary school and are provided the support needed to successfully participate in the classroom. This seminar offers an opportunity to explore teaching, foster children's natural curiosity, and inspire local students.

Terms offered: Fall 2015, Spring 2015, Fall 2014
This course introduces the fundamentals of K-5 math education through demonstrations, skill modelng, and discussion. Topics include inquiry-based and cooperative learning strategies; team building and management tools; and assessment techniques. Students are placed in an elementary school and are provided the support needed to successfully participate in the classroom. This seminar offers an opportunity to explore teaching, foster children's natural curiosity, and inspire local students.

Terms offered: Fall 2015, Spring 2015, Fall 2014
This course introduces the fundamentals of sixth to eighth grade science education through demonstrations, skill modeling, and discussion. Topics include inquiry-based pedagogy, assessment techniques, empirically-based lesson revision, and adolescent development. Students are placed in a middle school and are provided the support needed to successfully participate in the classroom. This seminar offers an opportunity to explore teaching, foster children's natural curiosity, and inspire local students.

Terms offered: Fall 2015, Spring 2015, Fall 2014
This course introduces the fundamentals of sixth to eighth grade math education through demonstrations, skill modeling, and discussion. Topics include inquiry-based pedagogy, assessment techniques, empirically-based lesson revision, and adolescent development. Students are placed in a middle school and are provided the support needed to successfully participate in the classroom. This seminar offers an opportunity to explore teaching, foster children's natural curiosity, and inspire local students.

Terms offered: Fall 2017, Summer 2017 8 Week Session, Spring 2017
This course surveys basic approaches to K-8 science and math teaching through modeling inquiry-based teaching and discussion. Topics include inquiry-based pedagogy, assessment techniques, lesson plan design and revision, and child development. Students are placed in science and math learning environments with upper elementary and middle school children to practice teaching. This seminar offers an opportunity to explore teaching, foster children's natural curiosity, and inspire local students.

Terms offered: Prior to 2007
This course surveys basic approaches to K-8 math teaching through modeling inquiry-based teaching and discussion. Topics include inquiry-based pedagogy, assessment techniques, lesson plan design and revision, and child development. Students are placed in math learning environments with upper elementary and middle school children to practice teaching. This seminar offers an opportunity to explore teaching, foster children's natural curiosity, and inspire local students.

Terms offered: Fall 2015
This course surveys basic approaches to K-8 science teaching through modeling inquiry-based teaching and discussion. Topics include inquiry-based pedagogy, assessment techniques, lesson plan design and revision, and child development. Students are placed in science learning environments with upper elementary and middle school children to practice teaching. This seminar offers an opportunity to explore teaching, foster children's natural curiosity, and inspire local students.

Terms offered: Prior to 2007
This course examines major aspects of Arab culture through literature, art, film, and other media. Questions of religious, political, and philosophical nature co-exist in Arab culture with literary conventions and aesthetic norms. The course explores the dynamic interaction among these abiding concerns of Arab culture from pre-Islamic times to the present.

Terms offered: Fall 2017, Spring 2017, Fall 2016
Seminars for the group study of topics not covered by regularly scheduled courses. Topics may vary from semester to semester.

Terms offered: Fall 2017, Fall 2016, Fall 2015
This course focuses on the social and personal meaning of disability and chronic illness. We will explore definitions and conceptual models for the study of disability, the history of disabled people, bio-ethical perspectives, the depiction of disability in literature and the arts, public attitudes, and legal and social policies. The course will investigate the interaction of disability with social factors such as gender, sexual orientation, race, ethnicity, and class. The course is for students with and without disabilities, and may be of special interest to students preparing for careers in the health professions, education, law, architecture, social work, or gerontology.

Terms offered: Spring 2017, Spring 2016, Spring 2015
This course will explore the intersection of women's experience and disability issues, emphasizing the social and personal impact of disability and chronic illness on relationships, identity, employment, health, body image, sexuality, reproduction, motherhood, and aging. Through real stories of women's lives which reached the media in the last decade and before, students will move toward a dynamic understanding of the impact of a range of physical, emotional, and mental disabilities in the context of current social forces and public policy. We will explore historic perspectives as well as current trends in medicine, independent living, care-giving, insurance, public benefits, law, and community activism as they affect and are affected by disabled women and girls and their families. We will discuss controversial ethical issues such as prenatal screening, wrongful birth law suits, and physician-assisted suicide. Course readings will draw on the rich literature of disabled women's anthologies, biography and autobiograhpy, scholarly and popular literature of disability, feminist analyses, creative writing, women's art, film, and theatre.

Terms offered: Fall 2011, Fall 2010, Fall 2009
A graded service-learning internship course in disability studies. Students will draw lessons from working in collaboration with major disability rights and independent living organizations. Each student will do an internship at one of these organizations for six hours a week. In an additional one-hour a week seminar together, students will first prepare for the internships, setting objectives for skills to be learned and planning effective projects, and then analyze and reflect on the work done, both in order to create greater understanding of each intern's individual experiences and in order to think critically about how "service" and "organizing" can address the needs and goals of the disability community. Students must apply in advance for admission into this course.

Terms offered: Spring 2017, Fall 2015, Fall 2014
This course is an introduction to the study of language as applied to real world problems in specific situations in which people use and learn languages, e.g., language learning and teaching, language socialization, bilingualism and multilingualism, language policy and planning, computer-mediated communication, stylistics, translation, intercultural communication, language and symbolic power, political and commercial rhetoric. Fieldwork consists of observation and analysis of language-related real world problems.

Terms offered: Fall 2017, Spring 2017, Fall 2016, Spring 2016, Fall 2015
This course will study the end of life--dying and death--from the perspective of medicine and history. It seeks to confront the humanist with the quotidian dilemmas of modern clinical practice and medicine's deep engagement with death more generally. It invites pre-med, pre-law, and public policy students to understand these matters in light of the historical and, more broadly, literary and artistic perspectives of the humanities.

Terms offered: Fall 2008, Fall 2007, Fall 2003, Spring 2002
Since visual and literary studies have historically been viewed as separate disciplines, we will use theories from both to study those forms of self-representation that defy disciplinary boundaries, or what we call "visual autobiography." The course aims to help students become conversant with the elements of alphabetic literacy (reading and writing) and visual literacy (observing and making) in order to develop a third distinctive textual/visual literacy.

Terms offered: Spring 2012, Spring 2011, Spring 2007
The American forest will be examined in terms of its ecology, history, and representations in paintings, photographs, and literary essays. This examination seeks to understand the American forest in its scientific and economic parameters, as well as the historic, social, and ideological dimensions which have contributed to the evolution of our present attitudes toward the forest.

Terms offered: Fall 2017, Spring 2017, Fall 2016
The "Hand-Printed Book" is a studio course taught in the Bancroft press room. Using antique presses and 19th century type, each class produces by hand a rare first edition of a work from the Bancroft collections that has never been published before. As students learn how hand-produced books have been made in the west for the last 500 years, they are also taught about the history of the book, using examples from Bancroft's rare books and manuscripts collection.

Terms offered: Fall 2007, Spring 2006, Spring 2004
This class will examine the emergence and development of classical Judaism, its piety, institutions, thought, and literature.

Terms offered: Fall 2017, Fall 2016, Fall 2015, Spring 2015, Fall 2013
This is the fourth course in a four-course sequence in the history of Jewish culture and civilization. It explores the major themes in Jewish history from 1750 to the present, with special attention paid to the transformation of Jewish communal and individual identity in the modern world. Topics to be treated include the breakdown of traditional society, enlightenment and emancipation, assimilation, Hasidism, racial anti-Semitism, colonialism, Zionism, and contemporary Jewish life in Europe, North America, and Israel. The multicultural nature of Jewish history will be highlighted throughout the course through the treatment of non-European Jewish narratives alongside the more familiar Ashkenazi perspective.

Terms offered: Spring 2017, Spring 2016, Spring 2015
The HRI Capstone Workshop structures the process of turning research projects into conference papers in preparation for the HRI conference. The course allows students to tackle common research and writing problems together in a series of group advising sessions.

Terms offered: Summer 2017 10 Week Session, Summer 2016 10 Week Session
With this course, you will be able to add a new dimension to your internship experience: a reflection on global citizenship. You will be challenged to use your internship experience as an opportunity to critically explore cultural differences, modes of conduct and values. A series of audio-visual lectures, practical exercises, writing assignments, projects, and online group discussions will stimulate you to leave the comfort zone of what you are familiar with and to explore alternative views on right and wrong, good and bad and the beautiful and the ugly. The course will also encourage you to interact with locals and to engage with the city/region/country where you live during your internship.

Terms offered: Fall 2017, Fall 2016, Spring 2016
This course delves into various facets of the Arts in Washington, D.C., whether involving public arts through museums such as the Smithsonian, or performance venues such as theatres; art history and public issues involving arts sponsorship and presentation.

Terms offered: Fall 2015, Spring 2012, Spring 2011
As history has shown, there is no bully pulpit in the world like the American presidency. Whether it was Roosevelt declaring war on the Japanese or Regan declaring war on government bureaucracy, they, like all presidents, understood the power of their words to make history and to change it. This course will study the history of the presidency through their speeches. We will read and analyze remarks delivered from the podium in economic booms and busts, in times of social unrest, and even in moments of humor. By reading others and drafting our own, we will also learn the elements of an effective speech and how to craft and deliver one. A few former and current presidential speechwriters will be featured as guests throughout the semester. Course requirements include the 750-word op-ed, preparation and delivery of a 10-minute speech, writing a mid-term paper based on course materials and sitting for a final exam.

Terms offered: Spring 2017, Spring 2016, Spring 2015
Few things have characterized mass culture in the 20th century more consistently and thoroughly than sports. We will look at the phenomenon ubiquitous to all advanced industrial societies where disorganized contests, competitions, and games mutated into what we have come to know as modern team sports. We will see how this transformation was virtually identical in every industrial society and should thus be seen as a fine gauge of modernity.

Terms offered: Spring 2017, Fall 2015, Spring 2010
The purpose of this seminar is to equip students to think deeply and critically about racial politics in the American city in general--and about racial politics in the American city of Washington, D.C. in particular. The seminar will begin with an introduction to a set of concepts fundamental to our subject--race, consciousness, racism, political action - and then move on to central features of city politics with race prominently in mind.

Terms offered: Spring 2014, Spring 2013, Spring 2012
World leaders at the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) held in Copenhagen this past December announced that they reached "a meaningful agreement" that will lead to a global treaty to address climate change. Many observers see the politics of the Copenhagen Accord as a glimpse into the new world order in which international diplomatic power will increasingly be shared by the United States (U.S.) and emerging powers, such as China. Climate change policy also offers a lens through which the U.S. domestic environmental policymaking process can be viewed and its evolution better understood. This course will examine the dynamics of global environmental treaty-making after first studying the development of U.S. environmental protection efforts. Students will then analyze the international and domestic efforts that led up to the Copenhagen Accord and assess what is needed and likely to result from the next UNFCCC meeting to be held in Mexico City in 2010.

Terms offered: Spring 2012, Spring 2011
This course will explore the role of interest groups and lobbyists in the American political process. We will discuss what makes an influential lobbyist in Washington. We will examine the ways in which organized interests try to achieve their goals, and what determines whether or not they are successful. We will investigate whether the tens of thousand of lobbyists roaming the streets of Washington improve or detract from the quality of American democracy.

Terms offered: Fall 2017, Spring 2017, Fall 2016
This course will be an intense examination of lobbying in Washington with particular attention given to the role of money and campaign finance in the operation of what has become a highly sophisticated and poorly understood network of advocacy and influence. The approach of the instructor is to provide a basic understanding of three different but interrelated knowledge sets: the Congress, political money, and lobbying by interest groups.

Terms offered: Fall 2011
This course will introduce students to the Supreme Court of the United States and its work. Besides covering the Court's historical origins, its institutional power and limitations, and its current cases, this course will attempt to de-mystify one of the nation's most cloistered governmental institutions. Students will learn the nuts and bolts of what happens to a case from the day a petition to review a dispute arrives at the Supreme Court until the day the justices issue a final opinion.

Terms offered: Spring 2016, Fall 2015, Spring 2015
In this course, students will be introduced to recent issues concerning intelligence, such as intelligence failure, reform, and oversight, with a focus on how the change in U.S. intelligence in the post-9/11 context has increasingly emphasized domestic or "homeland" intelligence. Students will gain an understanding of the different types of intelligence, the range of responsibilities that the different Intelligence Community members hold, and the relationship between intelligence and the policymaking process.

Terms offered: Fall 2015, Fall 2014, Spring 2014
This course provides an overview of modern Middle Eastern politics with the aim of gaining a deeper understanding of the recent events of the Arab "Spring." This course begins with a historical analysis outlining the development of the states in the Middle East. Through this course, students will gain an understanding of the dynamics of the Middle Eastern politics and society.

Terms offered: Fall 2017, Fall 2016, Spring 2016
What are the United States' interests in the Middle East? Who and what determine those interests? And how are those interests pursued? This course addresses these questions in two parts. Students should leave this class with a strong understanding of the challenges that the U.S. faces in the Middle East, as well as an informed viewpoint regarding how well America is meeting those challenges.

Terms offered: Fall 2017, Spring 2017, Fall 2016
This class will explore the relationships among politics, news media, and government. It will do so by focusing on particular news events in which the role of the media becomes an integral part of the story.

Terms offered: Fall 2017, Spring 2017, Fall 2016
This class will teach you how to better understand the fundamental factors that drive elections in America and to learn some of the skills employed by political professionals. Many of your assignments will require you to apply the lessons of this class to real time events. Our goal in this class is to go beyond the spin and hyperbole of many election commentators and understand how voters decide and how strategists persuade.

Terms offered: Spring 2014, Spring 2013
The decline of traditional sovereignty is the focus of this course. The nature of that transformation--what is causing it, why, and with what implications--will be the object of our concern. While time frames are elusive, the bulk of our attention will be on the post-Cold War world.

Terms offered: Summer 2013 8 Week Session
This course combines two areas of continual fascination in Washington and beyond - US foreign policy and policies regarding national security. The course provides students with a framework to understand policy analysis, development, and implementation while introducing them to a range of the most pressing substantive policy issues the US is currently facing. The course will alternate between foreign policy issues and functional organizational tools used to address these issues.

Terms offered: Fall 2014, Fall 2013
This course will focus on the evolution of U.S. foreign policy toward Africa from African independence until present day. Specific themes include economic development, China's economic expansion, foreign aid, democracy, and human rights. Specific attention will focus on the role of race and ethnic politics and their influence on U.S. policy.

Terms offered: Spring 2016, Spring 2015, Spring 2014
What are the most pressing foreign policy challenges in Asia today? How do American foreign policymakers respond to crises in Asia?
To what extent does domestic politics influence or inform our policy making? This course seeks to help students develop the analytical skills necessary to understand American policy toward Asia, especially in preparation for a career in foreign policy.

Terms offered: Spring 2016, Spring 2015
This course will provide an overview of the different types of diplomatic engagement that are being utilized by governments, multilateral institutions, and other actors that impact international relations. It will consider what the goals of diplomacy should be in today's interconnected world and what are the most effective tools to support our national security, foreign policy, and economic interests. The course will also examine variations such as diplomacy related to defense, development, and economic issues. Guest speakers with a variety of diplomatic experiences will provide a context for contemporary diplomacy.

Terms offered: Fall 2017, Fall 2016
The purpose of this course is to give students a comprehensive overview of the major issues facing U.S. fiscal policy, with special emphasis on structural issues, such as the problems facing the major entitlement programs: social security, and Medicare/Medicaid. The course will emphasize the economic aspects of fiscal issues, but will also address their historical roots and political aspects.

Terms offered: Fall 2011, Fall 2010, Spring 2009
The federal government effects policy (e.g., enhancing public safety, protecting the environment, promoting a viable and growing economy, etc.) primarily in three ways: taxing, spending, and regulating. This course will explore how regulations -- an important instrument of government and one of the easiest ways for a President to make his/her mark -- are developed, amended, or repealed, with an emphasis on how the various institutions of the federal government are involved in the process and how they interact with the other interested entities.

Terms offered: Spring 2016, Spring 2015
The course examines trends in a media landscape transformed by technology over the last three decades, from the post-Watergate era to the early soundings of the 2016 presidential campaign. The course will lean hard on guest speakers to give it topicality, urgency, and a sense of personal connection. We will also dissect media in its many forms to see if the old standards of objectivity have given way to a new model that verges on advocacy.

Terms offered: Spring 2017, Spring 2016
The course is space for writing and discussing poems in the nation's capital. The course is as much about reading poems as writing (and revising) them. Students will attend at least one live literary event as well as visit a museum or gallery to use the visual or plastic arts as a springboard for their poetry. Finally, students will acquire and hone the vocabulary necessary to offer constructive feedback on one another's work.

Terms offered: Spring 2010, Fall 2009, Spring 2009
This course explores museums as dynamic sites of intellectual and cultural debate, and as institutions vested with the authority to define aesthetics, history, heritage, and even citizenship. Now more than ever, as the process of globalization raises questions about the fluidity, preservation, and "authenticity" of culture, museums of all kinds are attracting great interest both as places to visit and as a subject of critical analysis in their own right. As places defined by the collection, display, and interpretation of objects, museums are bound up in questions of permanence and transience, difference and identity, equity and privilege--issues that lie at the heart of what is termed the "new museology." But as institutional repositories of community memory or indigenous knowledge, they are also bound up in questions of representation, access and ownership--issues that move the debate over museum collections squarely into the politics of local, state, and national control over heritage. If ownership and control are the new realities of international heritage policy (and law), museums have quickly emerged as important sites on which and through which these claims are being made.

Terms offered: Fall 2015, Fall 2014, Fall 2013
This course explores the history, theory, and practice of public attempts to reform electoral and political processes at the national level. Emphasis will be on key players and institutions in Washington, D.C., and key theories underlying our conceptions of good government and politics.

Terms offered: Spring 2016, Spring 2015, Spring 2014
The course offers students an opportunity to gain insights into how the knowledge and expertise they acquire during their university studies can be applied to facilitating or enhancing efforts by public health agencies (local, state, national, and international) and by food producers, food manufacturers, food distributors, and other pertinent industry, to ensure food safety.

Terms offered: Fall 2012
This course will serve to teach and discuss the topic "Negotiating with Terrorists." The focus will be on negotiations with collective terrorist movements, not on bargaining with hostage takers in the course of single-event hostage taking incidences. The course will be organized in four thematic blocks with three classes each. All of the classes will be based on working on analytic themes. During classes, case studies will be equally discussed to foster understanding of these matters.

Terms offered: Spring 2016, Spring 2015, Spring 2014
How do we create a sustainable world? What is the role of energy and environmental policy? Will technical innovation lead to better solutions? What is the role of the consumer? Should business climate change planning be under government mandate or voluntary? Will market-based solutions work? What metrics should we use to determine the relative effectiveness of various policies? These are the sorts of questions we will ask in this course.

Terms offered: Spring 2016, Spring 2015, Spring 2014
Students will study the ways power and politics affect and are affected by such issues as reform and innovation, centralization and decentralization within federal systems of governance, privatization and school choice, race and ethnicity, poverty and inequality, professionalism and bureaucratization, and testing and accountability.

Terms offered: Fall 2017, Spring 2017, Fall 2016
Framed around the topic of sustainability, the course engages students from different math, science, and engineering majors in the process of applying the content knowledge from their discipline to build project-based curricula for presentation as part of a 45-hour field placement in a local high school classroom. Students develop pedagogical content knowledge and relate teaching theory to practice through readings, classroom activities, discussion, lesson planning, and field observations.

Terms offered: Fall 2017, Spring 2017, Fall 2016
Students undertake several in-depth research projects to develop methods for engaging in authentic research in the science or mathematics content area related to their major. Interactive lectures and labs are designed to meet the needs of future teachers by practicing specific techniques--including statistics, mathematical modeling, and scientific writing--needed to address scientific questions so that they may guide their future K-12 students to develop skills in problem solving and research.

Terms offered: Summer 2017 8 Week Session, Summer 2016 10 Week Session, Summer 2016 8 Week Session
This course is designed to provide connections between research methods and science and math content learned in a research lab with teaching in the K-12 classroom. Hands-on inquiry-based science and math lessons are modeled and discussed. Students write research proposals, create posters demonstrating their research accomplishments, develop K-12 lesson plans that align with their research, and assemble digital portfolios on standards-based teaching and assessment.

Terms offered: Summer 2017 10 Week Session, Summer 2016 10 Week Session, Summer 2015 10 Week Session
Students enrolled will develop an independent research project under the supervision of a research mentor. Students will submit a formal research proposal and a final research paper, guided by the instructor.

Terms offered: Fall 2017, Spring 2017, Fall 2016
Undergraduate Research Apprenticeship Program (URAP). Directed individual research on topics connected to faculty scholarship.

Terms offered: Fall 2017, Spring 2017, Fall 2016
Undergraduate Research Apprenticeship Program (URAP). Directed individual research on topics connected to faculty scholarship.

Terms offered: Fall 2017, Spring 2017, Fall 2016
Undergraduate Research Apprenticeship Program (URAP). Directed individual research on topics connected to faculty scholarship.

Terms offered: Fall 2017, Spring 2017, Fall 2016
Undergraduate Research Apprenticeship Program (URAP). Directed individual research on topics connected to faculty scholarship.

Terms offered: Fall 2017, Spring 2017, Fall 2016
Undergraduate Research Apprenticeship Program (URAP). Directed individual research on topics connected to faculty scholarship.

Terms offered: Summer 2017 8 Week Session, Summer 2016 8 Week Session, Summer 2015 8 Week Session
This course provides a credited internship for all students enrolled in the Cal-in-the-Capital/UCDC summer program. 196N requires that students work 3-4 days per week as interns in settings selected to provide them with exposure to and experience in government, public policy, international affairs, media, the arts, or other areas of relevance to their major fields of study.

Terms offered: Fall 2017, Spring 2017, Fall 2016
This course is the UCDC letter-graded core seminar for 4 units that complements the P/NP credited internship course UGIS C196B. Core seminars are designed to enhance the experience of and provide an intellectual framework for the student's internship. UCDC core seminars are taught in sections that cover various tracks such as the Congress, media, bureaucratic organizations and the Executive Branch, international relations, public policy and general un-themed original research.

Terms offered: Fall 2017, Spring 2017, Fall 2016
This course provides a credited internship for all students enrolled in the UCDC and Cal in the Capital Programs. It must be taken in conjunction with the required academic core course C196A. C196B requires that students work 3-4 days per week as interns in settings selected to provide them with exposure to and experienc in government, public policy, international affairs, media, the arts or other areas or relevance to their major fields of study.

Terms offered: Fall 2017, Spring 2017, Fall 2016, Spring 2016, Fall 2015, Spring 2015, Fall 2014
Students work in selected internship programs approved in advance by the faculty coordinator and for which written contracts have been established between the sponsoring organization and the student. Students will be expected to produce two progress reports for their faculty coordinator during the course of the internship, as well as a final paper for the course consisting of at least 35 pages. Other restrictions apply; see faculty adviser.

Terms offered: Fall 2017, Spring 2017, Fall 2016
Seminars for group study of topics not covered by regularly scheduled courses. Topics may vary from semester to semester. Students must have completed 60 units to be eligible to enroll.