Social Sciences Course & Program Innovations

In this three-course intensive bundle we explore how human rights have been constructed in a variety of idioms while exposing students to their contested genealogies and limits. In the first two courses, we investigate the history, philosophy, and rhetoric of human rights through a variety of disciplinary lenses, with readings drawn from political philosophy and law, to novels and films. We explore themes like testimony and bearing witness to atrocity, immigration and human rights, decolonization, and global justice. With this broad foundation in place, in the third course, we examine the way international law interacts with the politics of law, with special attention to the interface between emergency powers and international law. When are international law principles relevant? What guidance or constraints does international law impose on emergency powers? What is the relationship between national and international control mechanisms? How do international law mechanisms supervise or monitor the exercise of emergency powers—from the “global war on terror” to Covid19-- and how effective are they? Taken together, this the three course intensive bundle will provide students with a human rights background and a toolkit to [re]conceptualise international law in order to better understand the hegemonic contestation over the rights-based discourse and how this impacts the full realisation of human rights in times of crisis for many people across the globe today. 

Students in the recommended fourth course will contribute to the Pozen Center’s new documentation project which is designed to archive these quite extraordinary moments of change in the global landscape amid Covid-19 and Black Lives Matters. The shape and form of these projects can vary. Some students may adopt an ethnographic approach--detailing stories of their own immediate family or community as they respond to (or participate in) policing, protests or to document the impact of Covid19. Students may opt to work individually or in small groups; depending on the proposed project. The mediums through which to construct these projects will necessarily vary (including but not limited to interviews, audio, video, photography and survey data) and ultimately with be stored in an dedicated history archive in Special Collections at the Regenstein Library. The course instructors will work with students over the quarter to develop the methodological skills they need to undertake their own individual or group projects.  

All three courses offered in 3-week intensive format.  Optional fourth course offered in standard quarter-long format. Students who enroll in the human rights course bundle will also have the opportunity to complete an optional internship with an employer in their field of interest.

• HMRT 10100/1 Human Rights in World Civilizations 1 (Laurence - MTuWTh 2:00 - 4:00 PM)
• HRMT 10200/1 Human Rights in World Civilizations 2 (Krauss - MTuWTh 2:00 - 4:00 PM)
• HMRT 21007/1 The Politics of Human Rights Law (Cavanaugh - MTuWTh 2:00 - 4:00 PM)
• HMRT 24689/1 Documenting Change: Narrative and Memory in Turbulent Times (Cavanaugh - TBD)

The College’s Classics of Social and Political Thought core sequence invites students to participate in a conversation about human flourishing. What does it mean to live a good and distinctively human life? How might we pursue such a life? What role do our fellow human beings play in its attainment? How can our social and political arrangements support and hinder this pursuit? In Autumn quarter 2020, Classics of Social and Political Thought will offer some students the opportunity to pursue this three quarter sequence, compressed into the ten weeks of Autumn quarter. Students who enroll in this compressed sequence will also have priority access to registration for Introduction to Political Theory, taught by Professor James Wilson. This intensive sequence aims to provide students with a sustained introduction to social and political thought, and to cultivate strong habits of reading, thinking, and writing for the social sciences.

All three Classics courses offered in 3-week intensive format; Introduction to Political Theory offered in standard 10-week format

• SOSC 15100/16 Classics of Social & Political Thought I (Kasimis - MWF 9:30 AM - 12:20 PM)
• SOSC 15200/16 Classics of Social & Political Thought II (Moreau - MWF 12:30 - 3:20 PM)
• SOSC 15300/16 Classics of Social & Political Thought III (Moreau - MWF 12:30 - 3:20 PM)
• PLSC 28701/10 Introduction to Political Theory (Wilson - TuTh 11:20 AM - 12:40 PM)

This interdisciplinary bundle brings together the most exciting contributions from economics,psychology, and neuroscience made during the last century and teaches them in an innovative and integrated manner. How would you play the prisoner’s dilemma game? What would you do if you were a participant in the ​Golden Balls​ or ​Friend or Foe​ TV shows? ​It is reasonable to assume that you and your partner will choose to “Defect”, “Steal”, or be a “Foe” and both of you will end your day penniless or in prison. However, naturally occurring data provided by individuals facing real stakes in these TV shows have shown that a significant percentage of participants/players successfully manage to cooperate for the better outcome. They go home with a prize and manage to avoid incarceration! But why?

In this novel bundle you will learn to distill interactions among a small number of players to their essence and analyze them in fruitful and rigorous ways. Adding behavioral elements to the model can better capture the decision processes by individuals. Furthermore, social neuroscience, which ​“looks under the hood” of decision-making by focusing on how the brain mediates cognition and behavior, will help you understand social behavior better by giving you a deeper understanding of how neural processes and physiological systems impact observable behavior.

As part of this bundle, and a way of testing the predictions of game theory, behavioral economics, and social neuroscience, students will design and implement their own experiments using state-of-the-art methods. This empirical approach will not only help students to better understand the behavior of individuals but also to improve and reformulate standard theoretical models.

Prerequisites: ECON 20100/20110 (or ECON 10000 for declared business economics specialization).

• ECON 20700/1: Game Theory and Economic Applications (Fang - TuTh 11:20 AM - 12:40 PM)
• ECON 21800/1: Experimental Economics (Lee - MW 09:10 AM - 10:30 AM)
• PSYC 22350/1: Social Neuroscience (Decety - Tu 09:40 - 11:00 AM)

Since Gary Becker’s work on the Treatise of the Family, economics has grown to study a wide range of human activity. From questions on development, discrimination, crime, and marriage to education, taxation, and finance, ultimately the goal of the economist is to measure and understand the impacts of these topics. Ultimately though economists lack the controlled environment of the laboratory to truly understand and control these marginal impacts. This bundle introduces students to the statistical tools of the econometrician to measure the impacts of policies, discipline theoretical models, and predict future outcomes. It utilizes an integrated approach to provide context to the statistical and algebraic toolbox utilized to analyze data and answer impactful economic questions. Students will be given not only the how for statistical analysis but the why as well as the practical implementation utilized by applied economists to answer some of the most difficult questions of the current day.

Prerequisites: MATH 13300/15300/16300/16310 and ECON 10200/20000/20010 (Standard Economics students should complete the third quarter calculus and ECON 20000/20010 before taking ECON 21010. Students who have declared business economics specialization should complete the third quarter of calculus and at least ECON 10200 before taking ECON 21010.)

• ECON 21020/3: Econometrics (Roark - TuTh 09:40 - 11:00 AM)
• ECON 21010/2: Statistical Methods in Economics (Staff - MW 09:10 - 10:30 AM)
• MATH 19620/20: Linear Algebra (Staff - TuTh 09:40 - 11:00 AM)

Have you ever wondered how accounting, business, and economics are so intertwined? Are the quantitative methods in the three disciplines related and applicable? How could accounting help you in supply chain, business management and optimizing your business? How can accounting help us understand the economics of money and banking? How important is accounting to the economy, and monetary policy? What are the economic considerations for business, supply chain management, and corporation finances? What can we learn, how can we improve from, and how can we weather this pandemic in the perspectives of these three principles?

In this bundle, you will study the overarching foundations of financial accounting, business, and macroeconomics. Starting and centering around accounting principles and financial statement analysis, students will apply the knowledge to broaden and complement the studies of (1) supply-chain management, and (2) financial market, money, banking and macroeconomics. Students will investigate the supply-chain management and business planning with the viewpoints of accounting and financial analysis. At the same time, students will apply the studies of money, investment, interest rates and financial markets in both economics and financial accounting aspects. Students will also analyze data and practice using statistical and optimization techniques in both supply-chain management, economics, and financial market contexts.

At the end of this quarter, you will not look at financial and accounting ratios in the same way again.

Prerequisites:  ECON 10200/19900/20200/20210

• BUSN 20100/1: Financial Accounting (Heltzer - TuTh 01:00 - 02:20 PM)
• BUSN 20520/1: Supply Chain Management (DeValve - W 09:10 AM - 12:00 PM)
• ECON 13000/1: Introduction to Money and Banking (Kuevibulvanich - TuTh 09:40 - 11:00 AM)

Good ideas are worthless if they aren’t communicated well. Learn how to develop and communicate economic ideas clearly and concisely in writing with ahands-on integrative approach. In this course bundle you will simultaneously develop skills to apply macro and micro models to private sector research, and learn how to write briefs and reports to convey the insights of those models. The bundle covers macroeconomic models of international markets and micro models of business decisions, giving you a toolbox ready to usein consulting and banking jobs.

Prerequisites: ECON 10000/19800 and ECON 10200/19900/20200/20210

• ENGL 13000/1: Academic and Professional Writing - "The Little Red Schoolhouse" (Staff - TuTh 02:00 - 03:20 PM)
• ECON 17110/1: International Monetary Systems (Pieters - MW 04:10 - 05:30 PM)
• ECON 18010/1: Introduction to Managerial Microeconomics (Pena Muñoz - MW 01:50 - 03:10 PM)

The bundles in Environmental and Urban Studies feature both curricular and para-curricular opportunities to engage with the City of Chicago as a place to test and inform ideas explored in the classroom. Activities will feature experiential learning and applications related to urban design, urban science and public spaces, including Chicago-focused datasets, design and mapping workshops, virtual and small group in-person or self-guided tours of Chicago architecture and land use planning, excursions in or near the Loop, guest lectures from Chicago practitioners and historians, and opportunities to learn with Chicagoans from all walks of life.

Are cities designed to be sustainable and resilient? Concerns about health, environment, economy and social cohesion have a strong impact on the design of urban spaces, as do crises like pandemics and natural disasters. Through a combination of history, theory, practice and experiential engagement in Chicago, these courses explore the normative influences that drive the purposeful design of cities and neighborhoods, and the societal outcomes that result.

The first course, Urban Design with Nature, will use the Chicago region as the setting to evaluate the social, environmental, and economic effects of alternative forms of human settlement. Students will examine the history, theory and practice of designing cities in sustainable ways – i.e., human settlements that are socially just, economically viable, and environmentally sound. Students will explore the literature on sustainable urban design from a variety of perspectives, and then focus on how sustainability theories play out in the Chicago region. How can Chicago’s neighborhoods be designed to promote environmental, social, and economic sustainability goals?

Much of the cultural vibrance, economic strength, and social innovation that characterizes cities can be credited to their density. Put simply, cities bring people together, and togetherness allows for complex and fruitful exchange. But togetherness also brings risks, notably from infectious disease. A pandemic feeds on propinquity. "Social distance," while a short-term public health imperative, is antithetical to the very idea of the urban. In Pandemics, Urban Space, and Public Life, we will explore these competing tensions in light of current and past disease outbreaks in urban settings. Drawing on a range of texts from history, design theory, sociology, and anthropology, as well as cultural artifacts like film, graphic memoir, and photography, we will engage questions like: How are the risks of contagion balanced with the benefits of density? How are such risks distributed throughout society? What creative responses have architects, urban designers, and planners brought to this challenge? Most importantly, how can we respond constructively to the challenge of pandemic to create cities where the benefits of togetherness are maximized, perhaps even improved on compared with the pre-outbreak condition? Students will have the opportunity to propose design or policy interventions to help their own communities cope with the present coronavirus/COVID-19 crisis as it is unfolding and to return to post-pandemic life more vibrant than ever.

• ENST 27155/1: Urban Design with Nature (Shaikh, Talen - W 10:20 - 01:30 PM)
• ENST 20170/1: Pandemics, Urban Space, and Public Life (Carver - TuTh 04:20 - 05:40 PM)

The bundles in Environmental and Urban Studies feature both curricular and para-curricular opportunities to engage with the City of Chicago as a place to test and inform ideas explored in the classroom. Activities will feature experiential learning and applications related to urban design, urban science and public spaces, including Chicago-focused datasets, design and mapping workshops, virtual and small group in-person or self-guided tours of Chicago architecture and land use planning, excursions in or near the Loop, guest lectures from Chicago practitioners and historians, and opportunities to learn with Chicagoans from all walks of life.

Drawing on the emerging scientific understanding of how cities work, these courses focus the theories, frameworks and quantitative and spatial methods to explore urbanization and cities as complex systems.

Introduction to Urban Sciences is a grand tour of conceptual frameworks, general phenomena, emerging data and policy applications that define a growing scientific integrated understanding of cities and urbanization. It starts with a general outlook of current worldwide explosive urbanization and associated changes in social, economic and environmental indicators. It then introduces a number of historical models, from sociology, economics and geography that have been proposed to understand how cities operate. We will discuss how these and other facets of cities can be integrated as dynamical complex systems and derive their general characteristics as social networks embedded in structured physical spaces. Resulting general properties of cities will be illustrated in different geographic and historical contexts, including an understanding of urban resource flows, emergent institutions and the division of labor and knowledge as drivers of innovation and economic growth. The second part of the course will deal with issues of inequality, heterogeneity and (sustainable) growth in cities. We will explore how these features of cities present different realities and opportunities to different individuals and how these appear as spatially concentrated (dis)advantage that shape people's life courses. We will show how issues of inequality also have consequences at more macroscopic levels and derive the general features of population and economic growth for systems of cities and nations.

Understanding the location of business activities - agricultural, industrial, retail, and knowledge-based - has long been a focus for economic geographers, regional scientists, and urban planners. Introduction to Location Analysis traces the key theories and conceptual models that have been developed over time to explain why economic activities tend to locate where they do. To introduce and explain these theories, this course covers several foundational concepts in economic geography and urban planning, such as: bid-rent theory, locational triangulation, various models of urban structure and growth, urban market areas, transportation, economic restructuring, and the "back-to-the-city" movement. This course incorporates several GIS exercises to teach students the basic principles of location optimization and to help illuminate the foundational theoretical principles of economic geography.

• ENST 24600/1: Introduction to Urban Sciences (Bettencourt - TuTh 11:20 AM - 12:40 PM)
• ENST 25910/1: Introduction to Location Analysis (Credit - TuTh 11:20 AM - 12:40 PM)

What is the "globe" in Global Studies? Intro to Global Studies introduces the Global Studies major by considering how people have organized and conceptualized political and social difference across space. From World Systems theory and coloniality to the movement of global capital and the problem of the nation-state, we will prioritize approaches offering insight into the unequal distribution and flow of power worldwide. This course will also provide brief introductions to the pressing issues confronting Global Studies today, including public health and infectious disease, borders and migration, climate change, and transnational religious and political movements.

In "Global Viral News Lab," students will track recent journalistic work on the political, economic, and other forms of social fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic through news portals, podcasts, and other media. Ethnic and racial politics, class conflict, and the obsession with quantification have all consistently re-emerged as issues and frequently as dangerous tropes in coverage. Moreover, omnipresent “crisis” narratives often slip into easy justifications for bipartisan corporate bailouts, surveillance, and the unequal access of intricate, amplified social hierarchies. How does the commodification, clickbait news-making, and late capitalist temporalities each pose threats to an ideology of supposedly unmediated, unfiltered, “just the facts” information-sharing (including in academia)? How do viruses, illness, and health emerge as both news stories and metaphors for understanding the contemporary media and social landscape? In this experimental new course, students will relate their weekly findings to recent classics in the history and ethnography of journalism. In tracking contemporaneous reporting on the pandemic, students will consider how their analysis of news connects to those developed by scholars of journalism who have critically considered stories of state collapse, conflict, and other topics of crisis reporting.

The third class in this bundle is a standard Fall section of Self, Culture, and Society (SOSC 12400).

• GLST 23101/1 -  Intro to Global Studies (Maidof - TuTh 01:20 - 02:40 PM)
• GLST 25841/1 - “Global Viral NewsLab”: Crises, Inequalities, and Pandemic Trajectories of Global News and Information (Kohl - TuTh 04:20 - 05:40 PM)
• SOSC 12400/24 - Self, Culture, and Society I (Salem - MW 01:50 - 03:10 PM)