Course Catalog

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SENIOR SEMINAR (PO4090)

The senior seminar is the culmination of the degree program and is designed to encourage students to combine their skilled analysis of the political in a challenging new context. While topics cover all three track concentrations, the goal of the seminar is to foster a sense of intellectual autonomy, to facilitate the ability to assess paradigms, and to provide a platform for a professional oral presentation of research results, as well as the incorporation of original research in a written thesis. Recent seminar topics include: Sovereignty, International Criminal Law, and Democracy.

TOPICS IN POLITICS (PO4091)

Topics vary by semester

SENIOR PROJECT (PO4095)

A Senior Project is an independent study representing a Major Capstone Project that needs to be registered using the Senior Project registration form.
(Download: https://aupforms.formstack.com/workflows/senior_project)

MODULES (PO5002)

The module topics change each semester and are taught by working professionals in the fields of international affairs, conflict resolution and civil society development. Each semester four or more different modules are offered. May be taken twice for credit.

CULTURAL DIVERSITY & GLOBALIZATION (PO5003)

The course will explore the ways in which cultural difference is mobilized – socially, politically and economically – by individuals and groups and the ways in which current discourses and practices of cultural difference interact with globalization. The course will analyze the combined processes of homogenization and fragmentation that result from this encounter. It will examine how affirmations of cultural distinctiveness are joined by yearnings for negotiations and ‘translations’ between them. As different actors deploy divergent understandings of ‘culture’, questions of cultural ‘identity’, access, agency and power come to the fore. The actors in question range from academic cultural theorists to officials in governmental agencies; they also include international organizations, cultural entrepreneurs, NGO activists and artists. Against the backdrop of globalization, the course will analyze how these actors articulate ‘cultural’ discourses and strategies and practices as well as how the media re-articulate and reflect the latter. Two particular discursive formations will be emphasized: i) those of ‘cultural diversity’ that focus on cultural goods and services and ii) those inspired by the notions of inter- or trans-cultural communication and dialogue.

PHILO. FOUND. OF INTERNAT'L RELATIONS (PO5005)

Articulated within the emergence of the European nation-state and born in the context of the First World War and its aftermath, the discursive field of International Relations is organized around the constitutive concepts of conflict, anarchy, power, system, rule, law, and justice, and the practices of civil society and political economy. These concepts and practices organize, in turn, both the major schools of International Relations theory and contemporary methodological pluralism. This course interrogates these founding concepts from a philosophical perspective within the historical and discursive context of each major school: 1) from classical liberalism to international liberalism; 2) from classical realism to modern realism; 3) the ‘English School’ of IR theory (Bull); 4) Marxist tenets within international relations (from Karl Marx to international political economy); 5) Modern and Contemporary Critical Liberalism (Polanyi and Held); 6) The philosophical grounds of contemporary Constructivism.

GLOBALIZATION AND ITS DISCONTENTS (PO5006)

This course of offers graduate students a comprehensive conceptual and factual treatment of historical globalization, from the Industrial Revolution in the late-modern period to the universalization of capitalism and the ICT revolution in the late-twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

CIVIL SOCIETY: INTERNAT'L & COMP. PERSP. (PO5012)

“Civil society” is one of the more elusive entries in the social science lexicon, and not a few have argued that we could do well without it. In a critical but appreciative spirit, this seminar introduces to the various meanings and uses that have been attributed to, or made of, civil society across time and national contexts. A constant in its various meanings is the reference to an elementary capacity of social self-organization beyond states and markets. This has made civil society an attractive alternative to diminished states and unfettered markets in the era of globalization, interestingly for the political left and right alike.

DIGITAL ADVOCACY: WITHIN/ WITHOUT BORDERS (PO5016)

This course analyzes the rhetorical-cultural aspects of global advocacy, such as how to fashion persuasion that speaks to multiple national, ethnic, religious and political audiences about issues of transnational importance and which have the same or similar persuasive goals. Case studies will be used to move back and forth between theory and practice, where studying the practice will inform the theory, and vice-versa. The course will answer important questions for global advocates.

COMMUNICATION & THE GLOBAL PUBLIC SPHERE (PO5025)

This course focuses on the concept of the/a public. Discusses how media and political actors rhetorically constitute the public; how they (and occasionally governments) constitute “public spaces”(virtual and material) in which public discourse takes place, and how institutional and technological forces constitute “public opinion” and articulate “the public interest.” On the other hand, we will consider how political economy of media and social practices facilitate or stifle spaces, political actors, and publics. The course will also compare contemporary manifestations of public-making with Habermas’s theory of the public sphere, which he thought was an area of social life vital to a legitimate democracy. The potentiality, control, and use of new communication technologies are explored in relation to the existence and future of a global public sphere.