INT 100 | INTRODUCTION TO INTERNATIONAL STUDIES | 4 quarter hours
(Undergraduate)
This course introduces students to contemporary international politics and the social theory that international studies scholars use to make sense of those politics. As an interdisciplinary field, students learn about international studies approaches that connect with history, geography, anthropology, economics and political science. Students critically engage with a set of global issues -- environmentalism, violence, migration, law, etc. -- that are selected by the course instructor. The course aims to present students with a general understanding of problems, approaches, and solutions to contemporary global issues.
INT 150 | GLOBAL PERSPECTIVES ON SOCIAL JUSTICE | 4 quarter hours
(Undergraduate)
This course is intended for non-majors who are looking to add an international perspectives course to their study. It looks at conceptions of and forms of social justice actions in different locations across the globe.
INT 200 | INTRODUCTION TO POLITICAL ECONOMY | 4 quarter hours
(Undergraduate)
INT 200 serves as a bridge between economics and political economy. The course acquaints students with the standard theories of international trade and international monetary systems and introduces them to the interdisciplinary approaches that distinguish political economy from economics.
INT 201 | NATION STATES, NATIONALISM, EMPIRE | 4 quarter hours
(Undergraduate)
The international system of nation states structures political and social life for people everywhere. When and how did this system come about, and why? In this course, students learn the story behind nations and nation states and how nationalism became such a powerful ideology in the modern world of mass warfare, colonialism, and empire. Students learn about nation building processes, from democratic and liberating to exclusionary and oppressive. In gaining a practical understanding of how context and personality interact in the making of national history, students in the course complete two simulation projects in the role of a historical figure participating in an important event of national formation.
Sophomore standing or above and status as an International Studies or Applied Diplomacy major or minor is a prerequisite for this class.
INT 202 | THEORIES OF INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS | 4 quarter hours
(Undergraduate)
This course analyzes the nature of power in the international arena, conflicts that emerge among nations, and processes through which conflict may be resolved. It includes a critical perspective on theories of international relations.
INT 203 | INTERNATIONAL MOVEMENTS AND SOCIAL CHANGE | 4 quarter hours
(Undergraduate)
The international system of nation states structures political and social life for people everywhere. When and how did this system come about, and why? In this course, students learn the story behind nations and nation states and how nationalism became such a powerful ideology in the modern world of mass warfare, colonialism, and empire. Students learn about nation building processes, from democratic and liberating to exclusionary and oppressive. In gaining a practical understanding of how context and personality interact in the making of national history, students in the course complete two simulation projects in the role of a historical figure participating in an important event of national formation.
INT 204 | CULTURAL ANALYSIS | 4 quarter hours
(Undergraduate)
This course introduces the student to the models and logic of cultural analysis. It offers students the opportunity to explore ethnographic accounts of lived experiences. Students will assess the meaning of such experiences by addressing a range of socio-cultural issues, including colonial and post-colonial accounts from a micro-cultural perspective.
INT 205 | INTERNATIONAL POLITICAL ECONOMY | 4 quarter hours
(Undergraduate)
This course examines the relations between economics and politics at international and national levels. The emphasis is on capitalism, the dominant form of organizing political and economic life on a global scale in the post-Cold War era. We will focus on the material histories and key political and economic theories that have shaped the contemporary era (neoclassical, Keynesian, neoliberal, institutionalist, Marxist, anarcho-communist). Topics include the causes and consequences of global inequality, regional and spatial disparities, labor and class relations, privatization, financialization and deregulation of economies, public health, and environmental crises.
INT 200 is a prerequisite for this class.
INT 206 | IDENTITIES AND BOUNDARIES | 4 quarter hours
(Undergraduate)
Boundaries - from legal borders to conceptual lines - structure modern life and help to mold human identities. Boundaries have intensified under late globalization, with nationalist identity politics and wall-building proliferating even as the world works to become more interconnected. Students study boundary-making and line-drawing as sources of power and knowledge used by states, economic and cultural actors, and institutions. Final projects in the course allow students to explore the techniques of boundary drawing and identity formation in a case of their choosing, while imagining alternative and beneficial ways of repurposing boundaries and lines in the coming decades.
INT 301 | SENIOR SEMINAR | 4 quarter hours
(Undergraduate)
This course combines formal class work and independent research. Students conduct and present competent original academic research on a relevant and novel question of their choosing. Seminar topics vary, but projects typically require comparative research conducted in the student's target language.
Senior standing and declared International Studies major or minor are prerequisites for this course.
INT 302 | CRITICAL SOCIAL THEORY | 4 quarter hours
(Undergraduate)
All systems of knowledge are constituted through and in turn help constitute relations of power. This course introduces students to social theory as a reflexive practice that is aware of the power-infused conditions of its own production. Students who take this course should be able to examine the society around them with critical awareness, interrogate the naturalization of social knowledge, and become aware of the conditions through which knowledge, expertise, and transformative social practices are reflexively produced. Cross-listed with INT 401.
INT 304 | MIGRATION AND FORCED MIGRATION | 4 quarter hours
(Undergraduate)
This course examines the integral role that different processes of mobility play in shaping today's world: emigration, immigration, displacement, refugee and internally displaced persons flows. Students study the causes and effects of population movements including push-pull factors, demographic, economic, and political variables. Students also look at the role of state and non-state actors and organizations. Cross-listed with INT 404.
INT 305 | CULTURE AND INEQUALITY | 4 quarter hours
(Undergraduate)
This course interrogates the concept of culture by showing the dynamic ways in which inequalities define and shape it. Students examine theories of culture and different approaches to studying culture to understand the relationship between the construction of cultural difference and social inequalities. Cross-listed with INT 405.
INT 306 | GLOBAL EMPIRES | 4 quarter hours
(Undergraduate)
In this course, students gain an acquaintance with theories of imperialism and post-colonial theory through historically situated studies. 'Power' serves as the generative concept for this course, to be understood as emergent at multi-scalar levels. Cross-listed with INT 406.
INT 307 | RACE, SEX, DIFFERENCE | 4 quarter hours
(Undergraduate)
Power circulates through systems of social hierarchies. Such hierarchies are the material basis through which difference is defined. This course examines theories of class, race, and sex to show how difference operates.
INT 308 | NATURE, SOCIETY AND POWER | 4 quarter hours
(Undergraduate)
This course is an interdisciplinary exploration of environmental issues pertinent to international studies. The reproduction of human societies occurs in a symbiotic relationship with the natural world, yet in the modern era nature has come to be increasingly conceptualized as a resource. This course explores the repercussions of this instrumental separation of nature from culture and society. Our conceptions of nature range from the physical environment to the human body; and the course explores a range of related political, economic, ecological, and socio-cultural issues from theoretical, comparative, and practical perspectives. Issues explored include those of environmental justice and social and political equity, and questions such as who defines what constitutes environmental issues, who is included or excluded from environmental concerns, and who benefits or is harmed by environmental changes occurring as a result of social interventions. Cross-listed with INT 408.
INT 309 | CRITICAL DEVELOPMENT THEORY | 4 quarter hours
(Undergraduate)
The uneven integration of the world economy has been shaped by a succession of policies and theories of development, modernization, and globalization. This course investigates how these theories and policies have contributed to centrally organizing concepts such as poverty, inequality, growth, and progress, which have been instrumental in ordering contemporary societies. Cross-listed with INT 409.
INT 315 | READING GRAMSCI: STUDYING CULTURE, POWER, AND HEGEMONY | 4 quarter hours
(Undergraduate)
This class will read Gramsci's Prison Notebooks and more contemporary research that has deployed Gramscian thought to examine culture, power, and hegemony.
INT 316 | THE SOCIAL AND POLITICAL LIFE OF OIL | 4 quarter hours
(Undergraduate)
Since the industrial revolution hydrocarbons have reshaped every aspect of human, social, and planetary life. This course is a critical and interdisciplinary examination of the wide-ranging impact of petroleum and its derivatives on the contemporary social relations of power, as well as on nature-society/human-environment interactions.
INT 317 | READING MARX'S CAPITAL | 4 quarter hours
(Undergraduate)
This course is a close reading of volume 1 of Karl Marx's major work, Capital, a key text in contemporary social and political economic thought. Capital is a highly challenging, but ultimately rewarding text. Students are required to engage the text rigorously, and to work individually and in groups. The class format is a combination of lectures, seminar discussions, and oral presentations by students.
INT 321 | INTERNATIONAL ENVIRONMENTAL POLITICS | 4 quarter hours
(Undergraduate)
This course examines the international processes by which scientific knowledge concerning environmental change and degradation is translated into action on the parts of individuals, groups, states, and global institutions. We look at the political, legal, economic and cultural structures that reproduce the global propensity to disrupt or degrade the environment and that likewise prevent amelioration.
INT 322 | INTERNATIONAL ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE AND LAW | 4 quarter hours
(Undergraduate)
International Environmental Law (IEL) governs a wide range of vital problems, from addressing climate change to preventing contamination of air, water, land and forests by border-crossing toxins. IEL shapes our relationship to nature and for life with dignity on the planet. The course introduces students to IEL, its history, doctrines and institutions, while foregrounding questions of justice and fairness. It examines how the law allocates the costs and risks of ecological degradation and remediation. The course is designed to be of use to any student interested in environmentalism and how law can serve justice-based approaches to protecting Earth's ecosystems. No prior course work in law is required.
INT 323 | HUMAN RIGHTS AND INTERNATIONAL LAW | 4 quarter hours
(Undergraduate)
International Human Rights Law and the system of International Law from which it arises express the hopes of many for moving toward a more peaceful and just world. Are such hopes well placed? Students in the course explore the history, doctrines and institutions of Human Rights Law, learning about both triumphs and unrealized promises, from the promotion of civil and political rights and the founding of the International Criminal Court (in which DePaul played a role) to the problems associated with achieving a more egalitarian and secure material existence for vulnerable populations, such as refugees and those subjected to state violence. For their final project, students research a pressing global injustice or problem of their choosing and map the prospects of a human rights based solution. No prior coursework in law is required.
INT 324 | INTERNATIONAL ECONOMIC LAW FROM COLONIALISM TO GLOBALIZATION | 4 quarter hours
(Undergraduate)
International Economic Law structures material life everywhere on the planet, and this course provides students the opportunity to study legal frameworks behind international finance, investment, trade, and money. The course examines colonial roots of international economic law and the ongoing efforts by once colonized nations of the Global South to create a new international economic order. Students learn about the legal regimes protecting investors and intellectual property, as well as the unique enforcement powers of World Trade Organization, International Monetary Fund and World Bank. In the final project students research international law in an area of economic interest, while considering prospects for working through law to build a more climate- or human-friendly economy of the future. No previous coursework in law is required.
INT 325 | LAW OF INTERNATIONAL ORGANZIATIONS, NGOS AND GLOBAL GOVERNANCE | 4 quarter hours
(Undergraduate)
This course is an introduction to the law of inter-governmental and non-governmental organizations (NGOS), institutions which play a leading role in the formation of the rules-based order of global governance. The course allows students to learn about global governance as a system in which authority flows through organizations that operate both above and below the level of states, from the United Nations to Doctors Without Borders. Cases of organization-led global governance studied include rule of law and democracy promotion projects, humanitarian action, including as undertaken by intergovernmental refugee aid organizations or civil groups such as the White Helmets, pandemic responses by the World Health Organization and philanthropic organizations such as the Gates Foundation, or human rights accountability through the institutions of international criminal law. No previous coursework in law is required.
INT 327 | THE LONG LIFE OF EMPIRE | 4 quarter hours
(Undergraduate)
This course introduces students to studies of colonialism and postcolonialism that exist within International Relations (IR). The course materials will take a critical approach to concepts often taken for granted in studying international politics. This course introduces students to the main threads of this scholarly challenge and its attendant concepts -- Other, alterity, subalternity, subjectivity, knowledge, discourse, and power.
INT 328 | ORIENTALISM: COLONIALISM, MODERNITY, AND HISTORY | 4 quarter hours
(Undergraduate)
The course begins with Edward Said's Orientalism, a landmark text in the sense that it started a critique of the West's gaze on the East and spawned a vigorously contested and highly complex debate to this day. The course incorporates material that engages with Said's text and that builds upon it or that we can read alongside Orientalism. The assigned readings approach the topic of knowledge practices from different angles thereby incorporating concepts like gender, identity, art, primitive, colonization, modernity, and history.
INT 329 | BEYOND IMPERIALISM | 4 quarter hours
(Undergraduate)
This political theory course explores what it might mean to `unlearn' our social and political education. Starting with Ariella Azoulay's insight that imperial power dynamics are both socially embedded and learned, the course works through a set of questions about what we might want or need to unlearn to in order to learn (or relearn) other modes of being. What do the stories that we tell indicate about how our world is configured? How else might be narrate our societal orientations? How can a focus on potentialities transform what is possible? The questions, coursework, and writing aim to orient us to think about how `unlearning' might return us to a recognizable social self.
INT 330 | TOPICS IN EAST ASIAN STUDIES | 4 quarter hours
(Undergraduate)
Topics in the social, political, and economic institutions, and the cultural history of selected regions within East Asia. (See schedule for current offerings).
INT 331 | POLITICS OF IMMIGRATION AND INTEGRATION IN FRANCE | 4 quarter hours
(Undergraduate)
This study abroad will focus on critical perspectives on immigration, refugees, and the politics of integration in France. The curriculum will analyze the history of immigration in France, the politics of identity and inclusion, and the contemporary refugee crisis in France. Sub-topics include security studies and anti-terrorism efforts, social welfare assistance, and gender politics.
INT 332 | AMERICA AS EMPIRE | 4 quarter hours
(Undergraduate)
This class explores the history, politics, and economics of the US Empire, with a particular focus on the seizure of the North American continent, incursions in Latin America, the extension into the Pacific in the later 19th century, and the contemporary hidden empire of military bases scattered around the world.
INT 333 | THE PSYCHE AND GEOPOLITICAL ECONOMY | 4 quarter hours
(Undergraduate)
This course adds another layer of analytical complexity to our understanding of the world, namely, the "psychical unconscious" or psyche--the terrain of subjective irrationality. Using analytical tools that plumb the psyche, this course examines how identity formations of gender, sexuality, race, and person, are tied to unconscious anxieties which are also mediated by external demands and conditions. In so doing, we complicate international studies, allowing us to see how our own identity formation is tied to the vicissitudes of the world and how we are called into it.
INT 341 | SEX, GENDER, REPRODUCTION | 4 quarter hours
(Undergraduate)
This course explores how the global economy, the machine, and 'sex' are linked and how, today, many are seeking means for changing the processes of reproduction through technologies that are biological, surgical, surrogacy-related, and machinic in nature. These interventions are re-fashioning the 'body' in ways that are cyborgic or transhuman, opening up the meaning and reproductive purposes of sexual dimorphism to significant change. The technologies are nevertheless expensive, dividing the world up economically into differently sexed and reproductive parts.
INT 346 | GENDER AND COLONIALISM | 4 quarter hours
(Undergraduate)
This course is a conceptual analysis of gender and an historical examination of imperial gendered power dynamics that emerged in the context of (mostly British) colonialism. This course focuses on a weaving together of a political economic examination of women and capitalism and a critical analysis of imperialism and gendered power dynamics. The course will use these two analytical frameworks to make sense of black and afro-feminist interventions on questions of how to understand what is at stake and how to challenge the imperial legacy of colonial dynamics.
INT 347 | AFRO-FEMINIST POLITICS | 4 quarter hours
(Undergraduate)
This course focuses on Black and Afro-Feminist interventions in questions of how to understand what is at stake in and how to challenge the imperial legacies of colonial dynamics of power. The course will engage the conceptual complexity of the notions of gender and the political relations they frame. Bringing together authors like Joy James, Sylvia Tamales, Yolande Bouka, bell hooks, and others in the context of a single course will allow seminar participants to broadly investigate feminist inquiry while remaining grounded in the lived experiences that bell hooks describes in Belonging: A culture of place.
INT 348 | BLACK GEOGRAPHIES | 4 quarter hours
(Undergraduate)
Black Geographies explores how space and power are racially linked. This linkage is easily seen in the contexts of apartheid, segregation, Jim Crow, red lining, the prison industrial complex, and environmental racism. Racialized space-power connections likewise reside in spatial tropes, like marginalization, fringe elements, sidelining, and outsider. All of these constitute spatial tactics meant to exclude, control, contain, and injure. The death-driven nature and exceptional violence of these tactics makes the extraordinary spatial generativity of Black life even more exceptional, to wit, the Maroon settlements of slavery, the Underground Railroad of Harriet Tubman, the early ballroom culture of Harlem, the Clowning and Krumping circuits of South Central LA, and the virtual spatial innovations of Black Instagram and Twitter. This generativity points to a fundamental contradiction: that those who presume they are the most free (those with the greatest capacity to own) are in fact the most un-free. Tied to a system where 'value' manifests only in possession, the freedom to love becomes impossible, a fact with extraordinary planetary-political implications.
INT 350 | SOCIETY, POLITICS AND CULTURE IN THE MIDDLE EAST | 4 quarter hours
(Undergraduate)
This course will examine the formations of the historical and contemporary social relations of power in the Middle East by questioning the prevalent stereotypes of the region. The main focus will be on the critical investigation of relations of gender, the complexities of state formations, and the dynamics of the contemporary social counter-movements. The latter range from cosmopolitan popular uprisings (Green Movement in Iran, the Arab Spring), to ideological Islamist formations (ISIS, Muslim Brotherhood, etc.).
INT 351 | AFRICA, CULTURE, POLITICS: THE FANON CANON | 4 quarter hours
(Undergraduate)
This course investigates the relationship between culture and inequality using 'Africa' as a nodal point. As Ferguson notes, 'the question of cultural difference itself is...tightly bound up with questions of inequality, aspiration, and rank in an imagined "world"' (2006, 19). Using Fanonian texts on culture and politics alongside two classic texts in the area of African Studies, students will examine how the notion of culture gives form to the way we understand world politics.
INT 352 | INTERNATIONAL DEVELOPMENT AND REGIONAL INEQUALITY | 4 quarter hours
(Undergraduate)
This course charts the economic transformation in the Third World /Global South. The first third of the course examines theories of development and underdevelopment before moving on to a critique of the concept of development as a modernist paradigm using a postcolonial framework. The rest of the course examines the restructuring of the agricultural, manufacturing and service sectors, including the financial sector, in non-Western countries. Students are recommended but not required to take INT 349 before this course. Cross-listed with GEO 215.
INT 355 | POLITICAL ECONOMY FROM THE MARGINS | 4 quarter hours
(Undergraduate)
This class explores examples of political-economic thought generated from the margins. We read Walter Rodney's How Europe Under Developed Africa along with other challenges to the liberal, Anglo-European political-economic vision of world politics.
INT 360 | TOPICS IN DEVELOPMENT STUDIES | 4 quarter hours
(Undergraduate)
Topics in the problem of endemic poverty in the Third World and the various forms of public action designed to alleviate poverty. (See schedule for current offerings).
INT 362 | LANGUAGE AND THE POLITICS OF TERROR | 4 quarter hours
(Undergraduate)
Politics is, among other things, the arena in which human bodies are broken. This course will concern itself with the breaking of human bodies through torture, genocide, war and poverty. Throughout, a focus will be maintained on the interface between bodies and language, on how bodies placed under extremes of pain and degradation lose their capacity for speech, and how language reaches its intrinsic limits in trying to represent bodies in pain.
INT 366 | TOPICS IN INTERNATIONAL LAW | 4-8 quarter hours
(Undergraduate)
Topics in international law, human rights, and other legal topics. (See schedule for current offerings).
INT 382 | INTERNSHIP RESIDENCY | 2-8 quarter hours
(Undergraduate)
Used to register credit hours for both Chicago-based and off-campus residencies to complete internship agreements and approved independent research proposals. 2-8 credit hours.
INT 383 | TOPICS IN AFRICAN STUDIES | 4 quarter hours
(Undergraduate)
Topics in the social, political, and economic institutions, and the cultural history of selected regions within Africa.
INT 384 | TOPICS IN MIDDLE EASTERN STUDIES | 4 quarter hours
(Undergraduate)
Topics in the social, political, and economic institutions, and the cultural history of selected regions within the Middle East. (See schedule for current offerings).
INT 385 | TOPICS IN ASIAN STUDIES (SOUTH, EAST, SOUTHEAST, CENTRAL) | 4 quarter hours
(Undergraduate)
Topics in the social, political, and economic institutions, and the cultural history of selected regions within South Asia. (See schedule for current offerings).
INT 386 | TOPICS IN LATIN AMERICAN AND CARIBBEAN STUDIES | 4-6 quarter hours
(Undergraduate)
Topics in the social, political, and economic institutions, and the cultural history of selected regions within Latin America and the Caribbean. (See schedule for current offerings).
INT 387 | TOPICS IN EUROPEAN STUDIES | 4-8 quarter hours
(Undergraduate)
Topics in the social, political, and economic institutions, and the cultural history of selected regions within Europe. (See schedule for current offerings).
INT 388 | SPECIAL TOPICS IN INTERNATIONAL STUDIES | 4 quarter hours
(Undergraduate)
Courses on topics in international studies not otherwise classifiable. (See schedule for current offerings).
INT 389 | INTERNATIONAL SOCIAL ENGAGEMENT | 4 quarter hours
(Undergraduate)
The course provides 20-25 hours of service learning opportunities for students in organizations that are pursuing local activities based on international missions or globally-informed policies. The course meetings focus on student experiences and a discussion of state, sub-state, and non-state organizational structures in the international context.
INT 390 | TOPICS IN FOOD JUSTICE | 4 quarter hours
(Undergraduate)
While the need for food is universal, geographies of food production, distribution and consumption are anything but even. This leads to multiple issues of food injustice at a variety of scales. This course critically examines the contemporary global food system with the goal of providing students with skills and knowledge to engage in food justice activism. Students study the development of food systems and how inequalities have emerged in production, distribution and consumption. The course then explores food justice movements including the emergence of alternative food networks in the U.S and internationally. Assignments may engage students in local food projects and or/advocacy campaigns.
INT 392 | TOPICS IN GLOBAL URBANISM | 4 quarter hours
(Undergraduate)
Topics in cities and urban life in global, international, or comparative perspectives. (See schedule for current offerings).
INT 393 | TOPICS IN INTERNATIONAL POLITICAL ECONOMY | 4 quarter hours
(Undergraduate)
Topics in international trade, international finance, and international macroeconomics with attention to political context. (See schedule for current offerings).
INT 394 | TOPICS IN SURVEILLANCE STUDIES | 4 quarter hours
(Undergraduate)
Surveillance is a longstanding feature of political life. Historically and today, surveillance is one of the central means of governing. After all, institutionalized political authority "the state" cannot govern without systematized, orderly knowledge. The census, taxation, licenses, passports, and the endless forms and reporting requirements of state bureaucracies are all forms of administrative surveillance. They stand alongside the work operations of military, police, and intelligence agencies as integral legibility practices that make governing possible. In this class, we try to understanding the role of surveillance in political life. We ask the following questions: What is surveillance? Can we trace the cultural and historical roots of surveillance which today underlies the foundation of the modern state? What form does surveillance take in different situations and contexts? How does the emerging imperative of security shape the use of surveillance? How is the practice of surveillance related to scientific and technological developments? How is it changing our social life, our notions of private and public, our conceptions of public spaces, and our very understanding of the self? How can social theory inform our understanding of these developments?.
INT 395 | TOPICS IN GENDER, SEXUALITY, AND REPRODUCTION | 4 quarter hours
(Undergraduate)
Topics in gender, sexuality, and reproduction taken in its broadest sense. (See schedule for current offerings).
INT 396 | TOPICS IN INTERNATIONAL ORGANIZATIONS | 4 quarter hours
(Undergraduate)
Topics in organizations such as the United Nations, the Organization of American States, the World Trade Organization, the European Union, and similar organizations or trading blocs and their associated policy issues. (See schedule for current offerings).
INT 398 | TOPICS IN WAR AND PEACE | 4 quarter hours
(Undergraduate)
Topics in war, internal and ethnic conflict, terrorism, peace, and the construction of security. (See schedule for current offerings).
INT 399 | INDEPENDENT STUDY | 1-8 quarter hours
(Undergraduate)
Student-designed course incorporating reading and research conducted under faculty supervision. Variable credit hours.
INT 401 | CRITICAL SOCIAL THEORY | 4 quarter hours
(Graduate)
All systems of knowledge are constituted through and in turn help constitute relations of power. This course introduces students to social theory as a reflexive practice that is aware of the power-infused conditions of its own production. Students who take this course should be able to examine the society around them with critical awareness, interrogate the naturalization of social knowledge, and become aware of the conditions through which knowledge, expertise, and transformative social practices are reflexively produced.
Status as a Graduate International Studies student is a prerequisite for this course.
INT 402 | INTERNATIONAL POLITICAL ECONOMY | 4 quarter hours
(Graduate)
This course examines the historical development of the contemporary international political economy. The principle channels of interaction between states, economies, and international organizations are examined: trade and investment, diffusion of technology, institutional borrowing and adaptation, the workings of the international financial system, articulations of notions of equality and mobility. In the process, students also become familiar with a range of theoretical perspectives of IPE.
INT 404 | MIGRATION AND FORCED MIGRATION | 4 quarter hours
(Graduate)
This course examines the integral role that different processes of mobility play in shaping today's world: emigration, immigration, displacement, refugee and internally displaced persons flows. Students study the causes and effects of population movements including push-pull factors, demographic, economic, and political variables. Students also look at the role of state and non-state actors and organizations.
INT 405 | CULTURE AND INEQUALITY | 4 quarter hours
(Graduate)
This course interrogates the concept of culture by showing the dynamic ways in which inequalities define and shape it. Students examine theories of culture and different approaches to studying culture to understand the relationship between the construction of cultural difference and social inequalities.
INT 401 is a prerequisite for this course.
INT 406 | GLOBAL EMPIRES | 4 quarter hours
(Graduate)
In this course, students gain an acquaintance with theories of imperialism and post-colonial theory through historically situated studies. 'Power' serves as the generative concept for this course, to be understood as emergent at multi-scalar levels.
INT 401 is a prerequisite for this course.
INT 407 | RACE, SEX, DIFFERENCE | 4 quarter hours
(Graduate)
Power circulates through systems of social hierarchies. Such hierarchies are the material basis through which difference is defined. This course examines theories of class, race, and sex to show how difference operates.
INT 408 | NATURE, SOCIETY, AND POWER | 4 quarter hours
(Graduate)
This course is an interdisciplinary exploration of environmental issues pertinent to international studies. The reproduction of human societies occurs in a symbiotic relationship with the natural world, yet in the modern era nature has come to be increasingly conceptualized as a resource. This course explores the repercussions of this instrumental separation of nature from culture and society. Our conceptions of nature range from the physical environment to the human body; and the course explores a range of related political, economic, ecological, and socio-cultural issues from theoretical, comparative, and practical perspectives. Issues explored include those of environmental justice and social and political equity, and questions such as who defines what constitutes environmental issues, who is included or excluded from environmental concerns, and who benefits or is harmed by environmental changes occurring as a result of social interventions.
INT 409 | CRITICAL DEVELOPMENT THEORY | 4 quarter hours
(Graduate)
The uneven integration of the world economy has been shaped by a succession of policies and theories of development, modernization, and globalization. This course investigates how these theories and policies have contributed to centrally organizing concepts such as poverty, inequality, growth, and progress, which have been instrumental in ordering contemporary societies.
INT 410 | INTERNATIONAL LAW | 4 quarter hours
(Graduate)
This course offers students the opportunity to engage in an examination of recent developments in international treaties, legal process and international organization. Topics may include refugees, trade law, criminal law and the establishment of the international criminal court, international labor law, environmental law, theories of international law, human rights and the relationship between international law and local economic development.
INT 416 | READING GRAMSCI: CULTURE POWER AND HEGEMONY | 4 quarter hours
(Graduate)
This class will read Gramsci's Prison Notebooks and more contemporary research that has deployed Gramscian thought to examine culture, power, and hegemony.
INT 417 | READING MARX'S CAPITAL | 4 quarter hours
(Graduate)
This course is a close reading of volume 1 of Karl Marx's major work, Capital, a key text in contemporary social and political economic thought. Capital is a highly challenging, but ultimately rewarding text. Students are required to engage the text rigorously, and to work individually and in groups. The class format is a combination of lectures, seminar discussions, and oral presentations by students.
INT 418 | THE SOCIAL AND POLITICAL LIFE OF OIL | 4 quarter hours
(Graduate)
Since the industrial revolution hydrocarbons have reshaped every aspect of human, social, and planetary life. This course is a critical and interdisciplinary examination of the wide-ranging impact of petroleum and its derivatives on the contemporary social relations of power, as well as on nature-society/human-environment interactions.
INT 421 | INTERNATIONAL ENVIRONMENTAL POLITICS | 4 quarter hours
(Graduate)
This course examines the international processes by which scientific knowledge concerning environmental change and degradation is translated into action on the parts of individuals, groups, states, and global institutions. We look at the political, legal, economic and cultural structures that reproduce the global propensity to disrupt or degrade the environment and that likewise prevent amelioration.
INT 422 | INTERNATIONAL ENVIRONMENTAL LAW | 4 quarter hours
(Graduate)
This course offers students the opportunity to engage in an examination of recent developments in international environmental law. Sub-topics may include refugees, trade law, criminal law and the establishment of the international criminal court, international labor law, theories of international law, human rights and the connection between these and international economic law.
INT 423 | INTERNATIONAL LAW AND HUMAN RIGHTS | 4 quarter hours
(Graduate)
This course is an introduction to public international law, with an emphasis on the law of conflict and human rights. Students learn about the sources and functions of public international law--the law between and among nation states--and how this kind horizontal system of legal regulation deals with enforcement. The course presents the idea of transnational legal processes and authority that operate across levels, scales and institutions to constrain or shape state action and identity.
INT 424 | INTERNATIONAL ECONOMIC LAW FROM COLONIALISM TO GLOBALIZATION | 4 quarter hours
(Graduate)
This course is an introduction to international economic law. Students study the international legal framework regulating states, international financial institutions and firms in their market, development, investment, trade and public sector economic interactions and functions. This course pays particular attention to the roots of global economic structuring in colonialism and how that history shapes the ways in which formerly colonized countries engage with international economic law.
INT 425 | LAW OF INTERNATIONAL ORGANIZATIONS, NGOS AND GLOBAL GOVERNANCE | 4 quarter hours
(Graduate)
This course is an introduction to the law and function of intergovernmental and non-governmental organizations. We seek to understand global governance as a system by which power and authority may flow through international organizations that exist either above (intergovernmental) or below (nongovernmental) the level of states. Students will study the law and function of international courts and tribunals, including both global and regional bodies, as well as the ways civil society organizations shape global justice outcomes.
INT 427 | THE LONG LIFE OF EMPIRE | 4 quarter hours
(Graduate)
This course introduces students to studies of colonialism and postcolonialism that exist within International Relations (IR). The course materials will take a critical approach to concepts often taken for granted in studying international politics. This course introduces students to the main threads of this scholarly challenge and its attendant concepts -- Other, alterity, subalternity, subjectivity, knowledge, discourse, and power.
INT 428 | ORIENTALISM: COLONIZATION, MODERNITY, HISTORY | 4 quarter hours
(Graduate)
The course begins with Edward Said's Orientalism, a landmark text in the sense that it started a critique of the West's gaze on the East and spawned a vigorously contested and highly complex debate to this day. The course incorporates material that engages with Said's text and that builds upon it or that we can read alongside Orientalism. The assigned readings approach the topic of knowledge practices from different angles thereby incorporating concepts like gender, identity, art, primitive, colonization, modernity, and history.
INT 429 | BEYOND IMPERIALISM | 4 quarter hours
(Graduate)
This political theory course explores what it might mean to `unlearn' our social and political education. Starting with Ariella Azoulay's insight that imperial power dynamics are both socially embedded and learned, the course works through a set of questions about what we might want or need to unlearn to in order to learn (or relearn) other modes of being. What do the stories that we tell indicate about how our world is configured? How else might be narrate our societal orientations? How can a focus on potentialities transform what is possible? The questions, coursework, and writing aim to orient us to think about how `unlearning' might return us to a recognizable social self.
INT 431 | POLITICS OF IMMIGRATION AND INTEGRATION IN FRANCE | 4 quarter hours
(Graduate)
This study abroad course will focus on critical perspectives on immigration, refugees, and the politics of integration in France. The curriculum will analyze the history of immigration in France, the politics of identity and inclusion, and the contemporary refugee crisis in France. Sub-topics include security studies and anti-terrorism efforts, social welfare assistance, and gender politics.
INT 432 | AMERICA AS EMPIRE | 4 quarter hours
(Graduate)
This class explores the history, politics, and economics of the US Empire, with a particular focus on the seizure of the North American continent, incursions in Latin America, the extension into the Pacific in the later 19th century, and the contemporary hidden empire of military bases scattered around the world.
INT 440 | GEOPOLITICAL ECONOMY AND THE 'UNCONSCIOUS' | 4 quarter hours
(Graduate)
This course adds another layer of analytical complexity to our understanding of the world, namely, the "psychical unconscious" or psyche--the terrain of subjective irrationality. Using analytical tools that plumb the psyche, this course examines how identity formations of gender, sexuality, race, and person, are tied to unconscious anxieties which are also mediated by external demands and conditions. In so doing, we complicate international studies, allowing us to see how our own identity formation is tied to the vicissitudes of the world and how we are called into it. Cross-listed with INT 333.
INT 441 | SEX, GENDER, REPRODUCTION | 4 quarter hours
(Graduate)
This course explores how the global economy, the machine, and 'sex' are linked and how, today, many are seeking means for changing the processes of reproduction through technologies that are biological, surgical, surrogacy-related, and machinic in nature. These interventions are re-fashioning the 'body' in ways that are cyborgic or transhuman, opening up the meaning and reproductive purposes of sexual dimorphism to significant change. The technologies are nevertheless expensive, dividing the world up economically into differently sexed and reproductive parts.
INT 446 | GENDER AND COLONIALISM | 4 quarter hours
(Graduate)
This course traces shifts in a feminist imaginary from its second wave to its contemporary complex iteration that encompasses ideas that students bring to class with them. Students will develop a literacy in the critique and evaluation of older sets of feminist questions and in a highly current engagement with similar questions.
INT 447 | AFRO-FEMINIST POLITICS | 4 quarter hours
(Graduate)
This course focuses on Black and Afro-Feminist interventions in questions of how to understand what is at stake in and how to challenge the imperial legacies of colonial dynamics of power. The course will engage the conceptual complexity of the notions of gender and the political relations they frame. Bringing together authors like Joy James, Sylvia Tamales, Yolande Bouka, bell hooks, and others in the context of a single course will allow seminar participants to broadly investigate feminist inquiry while remaining grounded in the lived experiences that bell hooks describes in Belonging: A culture of place.
INT 448 | BLACK GEOGRAPHIES | 4 quarter hours
(Graduate)
Black Geographies explores how space and power are racially linked. This linkage is easily seen in the contexts of apartheid, segregation, Jim Crow, red lining, the prison industrial complex, and environmental racism. Racialized space-power connections likewise reside in spatial tropes, like marginalization, fringe elements, sidelining, and outsider. All of these constitute spatial tactics meant to exclude, control, contain, and injure. The death-driven nature and exceptional violence of these tactics makes the extraordinary spatial generativity of Black life even more exceptional, to wit, the Maroon settlements of slavery, the Underground Railroad of Harriet Tubman, the early ballroom culture of Harlem, the Clowning and Krumping circuits of South Central LA, and the virtual spatial innovations of Black Instagram and Twitter. This generativity points to a fundamental contradiction: that those who presume they are the most free (those with the greatest capacity to own) are in fact the most un-free. Tied to a system where 'value' manifests only in possession, the freedom to love becomes impossible, a fact with extraordinary planetary-political implications.
INT 450 | SOCIETY, POLITICS AND CULTURE IN THE MIDDLE EAST | 4 quarter hours
(Graduate)
This course will examine the formations of the historical and contemporary social relations of power in the Middle East. The main focus will be on the critical investigation of relations of gender, the complexities of state formations, and the dynamics of the contemporary social counter-movements.
INT 451 | AFRICA, CULTURE, POLITICS: THE FANON CANON | 4 quarter hours
(Graduate)
This course investigates the relationship between culture and inequality using 'Africa' as a nodal point. As Ferguson notes, 'the question of cultural difference itself is...tightly bound up with questions of inequality, aspiration, and rank in an imagined "world"' (2006, 19). Using Fanonian texts on culture and politics alongside two classic texts in the area of African Studies, students will examine how the notion of culture gives form to the way we understand world politics.
INT 455 | POLITICAL ECONOMY FROM THE MARGINS | 4 quarter hours
(Graduate)
This class explores examples of political-economic thought generated from the margins. We read Walter Rodney's How Europe Under Developed Africa along with other challenges to the liberal, Anglo-European political-economic vision of world politics.
INT 482 | INTERNSHIP RESIDENCY | 2-8 quarter hours
(Graduate)
Used to register credit hours for both Chicago-based and off-campus residencies to complete internship agreements and approved independent research proposals. 2-8 credit hours.
INT 483 | TOPICS IN AFRICAN STUDIES | 4 quarter hours
(Graduate)
Topics in the social, political, and economic institutions, and the cultural history of selected regions within Africa.
INT 488 | SPECIAL TOPICS IN INTERNATIONAL STUDIES | 4 quarter hours
(Graduate)
Special courses will be offered as students and faculty identify selected topics of common interest. This number is also used for students taking 300-level courses in the undergraduate International Studies program. In this case, students must have the approval of their thesis advisor and the director of the International Studies program before registering for the course.
INT 489 | INTERNATIONAL SOCIAL ENGAGEMENT | 4 quarter hours
(Graduate)
The course provides 20-25 hours of service learning opportunities for students in organizations that are pursuing local activities based on international missions or globally-informed policies. The course meetings focus on student experiences and a discussion of state, sub-state, and non-state organizational structures in the international context.
INT 493 | TOPICS IN INTERNATIONAL POLITICAL ECONOMY | 4 quarter hours
(Graduate)
Provides students writing theses in the area of international political economy with opportunities to read contemporary works in the field, including growth theories, capital and labor flows, and transformation of regimes. Students develop analytical skills that can be applied to their projects. The seminar is offered in the Spring of the first year; the course focuses on different topics under different instructors.
INT 402 is a prerequisite for this course.
INT 494 | TOPICS IN SURVEILLANCE STUDIES | 4 quarter hours
(Graduate)
This course examines the role of surveillance in social and political life. Historically and today, surveillance is one of the central means of governing. Students will examine the cultural and historical roots of surveillance, the relationship between surveillance and security, and how different forms of surveillance are practiced in specific political and cultural contexts.
INT 495 | TOPICS IN INTERNATIONAL LAW | 4 quarter hours
(Graduate)
Course offers students the opportunity to engage in an examination of recent developments in international treaties, legal process and international organization. Topics have included refugees, trade law, criminal law and the establishment of the international criminal court, international labor law, environmental law, theories of international law, human rights and the relationship between international law and local economic development. Students work on the international law and institutional aspects of their theses.
INT 529 | GEOGRAPHY, FOOD AND JUSTICE | 4 quarter hours
(Graduate)
While the need for food is universal, geographies of food production, distribution and consumption are anything but even. This leads to multiple issues of food injustice at a variety of scales. This course critically examines the contemporary global food system with the goal of providing students with skills and knowledge to engage in food justice activism. Students study the development of food systems and how inequalities have emerged in production, distribution and consumption. The course then explores food justice movements including the emergence of alternative food networks in the U.S and internationally. Assignments may engage students in local food projects and or/advocacy campaigns.
INT 570 | FIELD RESEARCH IN INTERNATIONAL STUDIES | 4-8 quarter hours
(Graduate)
Supervised independent research aimed at acquiring primary data for the thesis.
INT 590 | DIRECTED RESEARCH SEMINAR | 4 quarter hours
(Graduate)
Students will take this course with an already approved proposal in hand. Students will be directed to further examine the approach they plan to use in order to undertake their projects and to complete a preliminary draft of their project.
INT 401 is a prerequisite for this course.
INT 591 | MASTERS RESEARCH I | 4 quarter hours
(Graduate)
Students will take this course as an independent study with their advisor, during which they will work on their project in line with their approved proposal.
INT 590 is a prerequisite for this class.
INT 592 | MASTERS RESEARCH II | 4 quarter hours
(Graduate)
Students will take this course as an independent study with their advisor during which they will complete their project.
INT 591 is a prerequisite for this class.
INT 599 | INDEPENDENT STUDY | 4-8 quarter hours
(Graduate)
Student-designed course incorporating reading and research conducted under faculty supervision. Variable credit hours.
INT 601 | CANDIDACY CONTINUATION | 0 quarter hours
(Graduate)
This 0-credit hour course is available to master's degree candidates who are actively working toward the completion of a thesis, project, or portfolio. Enrollment in this course is limited to three quarters and requires thesis/project advisor and graduate director approval and demonstration to them of work each quarter. Enrollment in this course allows access to the library and other campus facilities. This course carries and requires the equivalent of half-time enrollment status. The student may be eligible for loan deferment and student loans. This course is graded as pass/fail. (0 credit hours)
INT 699 | CANDIDACY MAINTENANCE | 0 quarter hours
(Graduate)
This 0-credit hour course is available to graduate students who are not registered for a course in a given quarter but need to maintain active university status. Enrollment in this course is limited to three quarters and requires permission of the graduate director. Enrollment in this course allows access to the library and other campus facilities. This course does not carry an equivalent enrollment status and students in it are not eligible for loan deferment or student loans. This course is not graded. (0 credit hours)