Students in this course will explore the spatial aspects of inequality, including racial segregation, concentrated poverty, and government structure. Course materials will investigate the consequences of these inequalities for individuals, communities, and American society as a whole, as well as how these seemingly-intractable problems were created by and continue because of public policy decisions. This course will be an interactive experience, requiring preparation before coming to class and active exchange during class.

This course brings together a wide range of thinking and scholarship about race and identity to encourage learning about what race is, why it matters, and racial dynamics in organizations and how best to address them.

The politics of immigration and immigration policy seem more critical now than ever.  Public debates about immigration have roiled nations around the world, and disagreements about how immigration should be regulated, who should have the right to migrate, what political rights immigrants should have once they cross a border, and how immigrants should participate in the economy have strained political alliances and upended norms of political discourse.  In some cases, conflicts over immigration debates have been used to justify the overhaul of political institutions.  However,

This graduate level course will provide an in-depth analysis of gender and sexuality policy in the United States. We will focus on the role that criminalization plays in this area, examining topics such abortion and regulation of intimate partner behavior, including sodomy. Practical application on how policy is made will be intertwined throughout the course and we will use case studies to examine why certain policy efforts, such as marriage equality was successful, while the Equal Rights Amendment failed.

This course examines the nature and extent of poverty primarily in the U.S. but with a comparative perspective (developed countries in Europe). To start, this course will focus on how poverty is defined and measured. It will proceed to explore how conceptions of poverty are socially constructed and historically bounded; examine what the causes and consequences of poverty are and discuss how these are complex and interwoven; and show how people can experience poverty at different points in their life course—some groups experiencing poverty more so than others.

This course addresses the macro and micro effects of gender in the workplace, from the complicated reasons for the lack of representation of women in senior leadership across sectors to the dynamics of individuals of various genders working together. The landscape of the workplace has changed dramatically over the last few decades, and with a shift towards a more diverse and global workforce, understanding the intersection of work dynamics and gender is critical.

The field of urban economics addresses a wide variety of questions and topics. At the most general level, the field introduces space into economic models and studies the location of economic activity. Urban economics typically addresses four sets of questions, and this course is organized around these four areas. The first set of questions focuses on the development of urban areas. Why do cities exist and why do some grow more rapidly? How can local governments encourage such growth? The second set of questions addresses patterns of development within metropolitan areas.

Over the last few decades, disparities in income, wealth, and mobility have widened in the United States, but the U.S. fares worse in wealth inequality than income inequality. Wealth, in particular, is crucial to many functions across the life course and between generations, including but not limited to: spending on healthcare and education, acquiring and retaining investments for profit, weathering unexpected expenses or shocks, ascribing social status, and transferring assets to children and/or other family members.

We enter any subject of investigation filled with learned viewpoints, opinions, and select facts that we choose to employ. This helps to make the task of uncovering what we mean by Jewish and Jewish community fraught with unusual difficulty. Whatever our background, it will be hard to shake preconceived positions. In addition, the Jewish community seeks to nurture purely voluntary association at a time of little support in the popular culture for sustaining communal norms, existing institutions or unenforceable obligations.

Recent momentum behind criminal justice reform permitted new discussions concerning incarceration policy and punishment in the United States.  This course takes an interdisciplinary approach in examining the role of crime, incarceration policy, and institutions in driving contemporary discussions on criminal justice reform—with race often being a salient component for many of these public policy conversations.  This course will provide students with an opportunity to critically examine topics such as racial differences in crime, policing, incarceration policy, and prisoner reentry

This course examines historic and contemporary patterns of racial and ethnic stratification often found at the center of disputes concerning urban development, the allocation of city resources and unequal distributions of power. Also embedded throughout the course are ongoing analyses of the ways in which structural inequalities often function in class and gender-specific ways.