This course will introduce students to the history of and contemporary fight for voting rights in the United States. We will begin with a brief overview of historical struggles over access to the ballot box, up through and including the 15th Amendment and the 1965 Voting Rights Act. The bulk of the course will focus on the contemporary context of voting rights, looking specifically at recent Supreme Court decisions, and include scholarship about white backlash against the growing political power of Americans of color.

Key to the planning profession is engagement. Most of a planner’s work necessitates engagement of institutions and of people in order to effectuate change, and change (or prevention thereof) is the planner’s currency. Specifically this course will look at community engagement, or engagement of the public within a defined geography. What is community? How is it defined? What does it look and feel like? And how does it manifest itself, or not, as part of the planning process? Communities in the United States are rarely equitable, particularly as it relates to planning.

This class will utilize a hands-on and practical approach to understanding reproductive healthcare in the context of policy and management. Students will have the opportunity to think through real-world case studies and engage with relevant reproductive healthcare topics. Such topics include contraception, abortion, forced sterilization, abuses of power, gender, and gender identity.

Advancements in awareness and understanding have led to greater equity and inclusion in society for people with disabilities and health conditions. Developments such as the establishment of Disability Studies as an interdisciplinary field in the 1980’s and the introduction of the Americans with Disabilities Act (“ADA”) in 1990 are key milestones in this journey. However, these achievements alone do not guarantee the extent of attitudinal and behavioral change needed within our communities and organizations to remove the barriers and prejudices that remain.

Together we will look at gender in the context of politics and leadership and consider how to take a practical stance in identifying both problems and solutions on the path to greater gender equality in those spheres.

Together we will look at gender in the context of politics and leadership and consider how to take a practical stance in identifying both problems and solutions on the path to greater gender equality in those spheres.

This course examines reproductive rights law and policy in the United States and how advocacy can impact it.

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, these are not

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.