Spring 2026

This interdisciplinary course explores aesthetics, environmental racism, and a human rights approach to the Commons to inform our perspective on the politics and aesthetics of water from the local to the global. The course will look at issues of scarcity and abundance through the lenses of art and human rights. The course will incorporate work by artist Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle, who will visit the class.

This practicum offers an applied exploration of how anti-rights actors shape discourse, law, and public policy across Africa, and how rights-affirming advocates can respond. Students analyse the growing sophistication of anti-gender, anti-LGBTQ+, anti-democracy, and anti–sexual and reproductive health movements, examining their links to religious institutions, political elites and shifting geopolitical forces.

Are there too many people in the world? Is human reproduction a right, a duty, or an interest? In 1798, a pamphlet titled An Essay on the Principle of Population was published anonymously in London. The author claimed that a growing population increases the supply of labor, inevitably lowering wages and living standards. The author warned that future improvements for humanity would be hindered if governments failed to address the issue of overpopulation.

This course examines the legal and political dimensions of the phenomenon of international migration: when migrants cross territorial borders and enter a state to whose citizenry they do not belong. During the first half of the course, we will ask why and how migrants move - studying theoretical explanations for population flows - and why and how receiving states try either to attract them or to keep them out.

The course engages with three formidable thinkers of the early and mid-twentieth century-W. E. B. Du Bois, B. R. Ambedkar, and Hannah Arendt. The purpose of this course is to understand how these three thinkers raised fundamental questions about the philosophical and anthropological idea of humanity.

Religious minorities are seeking accommodations in a variety of forms: exemptions (kosher and halal regulations); recognition (representation quotas); assistance (subsidies, museums); self-government (schools, religious courts, territorial sovereignty) and more. Drawing on the rich experience of countries where such accommodations were granted, the course will inquire into the legitimacy and problems associated with such accommodations. In doing so, the course will draw on modern theories of multiculturalism and religion and state designs.

This course will think through the relationship between corporatism and human rights. This considers, most immediately, the field of business and human rights, which includes attempts at strategic litigation and advocacy to hold corporations accountable for human rights violations. More substantively, however, it interrogates the meanings and histories of "Corporatism" itself, as a relation of production and a mode of governance. What is the relationship between corporatism and capitalism? How is it implicated in histories of colonization and empire?

This course addresses the question of violence in the context of contemporary Latin America. We will use the tools of sociology--and the social sciences more broadly--to better understand the kinds of violence that have arisen, how people make sense of them at different degrees of proximity, and how communities have resisted them. The course will focus on three Latin American contexts: Colombia, Mexico, and Argentina.

This course examines basic human rights norms and concepts and selected contemporary human rights problems from across the globe, including human rights implications of the COVID pandemic. Beginning with an overview of the present crises and significant actors on the world stage, we will then examine the political setting for the United Nations' approval of the Universal Declaration on Human Rights in 1948. The post-World War 2 period was a period of optimism and fertile ground for the establishment of a universal rights regime, given the defeat of fascism in Europe.

In a world where political vocabularies are increasingly losing shared meaning, this seminar examines the global circulation of human rights through the lens of the concept of translation. Rather than treating human rights as a single stable or universal language, the course asks how the meanings of human rights are produced, transformed, and contextualized as they are invoked across different institutional, cultural, and historical settings.