This collection features seven articles which tackle the subject of religion and its resurgence in international politics from diverse approaches.

The careers of MIT scientists and engineers are significantly determined by public policy decisions made in Washington by the government. However, their access to information on how this system works is limited. Meanwhile, we increasingly understand that science and technology-based innovation is deeply connected to society’s economic growth and its ability to generate societal wellbeing, so the public role of science is growing. This course will examine the public policy behind and the government’s role in the science and technology innovation system. Given the challenges to future federal science support, this seminar will aim to equip those planning careers in and around science and technology with a basic background for involvement in science policymaking.
This course is offered during MIT’s Independent Activities Period (IAP), which is a special 4-week term at MIT that runs from the first week of January until the end of the month. It features student-led discussion incorporated into the course structure as well as opportunities to interact with MIT students and faculty involved in aspects of science policy. The course has been offered since 2006 and has developed as a collaborative effort between the instructor and MIT students from the Science Policy Initiative.

This class examines the role of science in the US environmental policy-making process. It investigates the methods scientists use to learn about the natural world, the way scientific knowledge accumulates, the treatment of science by advocates and the media, and the role of science in legislative, administrative and judicial decision making. It also considers how other political systems use science in an effort to put the US approach in comparative perspective.

This course examines the science of natural catastrophes such as earthquakes and hurricanes and explores the relationships between the science of and policy toward such hazards. It presents the causes and effects of these phenomena, discusses their predictability, and examines how this knowledge influences policy making. This course includes intensive practice in the writing and presentation of scientific research and summaries for policy makers.

This volume builds on Scholarship of Teaching and Learning research to showcase a wide range of IR teaching and learning frameworks. Contributors explore their signature pedagogies relevant to the study and practice of teaching IR by detailing how pedagogical practices and their underlying assumptions influence how we teach and impart knowledge. Authors critically engage with their approaches by exploring the following questions: What concrete and practical acts of teaching and learning do we employ? What implicit and explicit assumptions do we impart to students about the world of politics? What values and beliefs about professional attitudes and dispositions do we foster and in preparing students for a wide range of possible careers? Authors, as such, provide educators, students, and practitioners’ pedagogical insights and practical ways for developing their own teaching and learning approaches.

This course explores the issue of human trafficking for forced labour and sexual slavery, focusing on its representation in recent scholarly accounts and advocacy as well as in other media. Ethnographic and fictional readings along with media analysis help to develop a contextualized and comparative understanding of the phenomena in both past and present contexts. It examines the wide range of factors and agents that enable these practices, such as technology, cultural practices, social and economic conditions, and the role of governments and international organizations. The course also discusses the analytical, moral and methodological questions of researching, writing, and representing trafficking and slavery.

This course examines the nature of attitudes, beliefs, and values, and the influences which indiviudals' attitudes have upon their behavior. Various theories of attitude organization and attitude change are discussed, and the development of social attitudes is explored by examining the differential impact of the family, the educational system, the mass media, and the general social environment. The changing content of public opinion over time and its relationship to the political system are also discussed.

This course seeks to provide students with a general understanding of the form of collective action known as the social movement. Our task will be guided by the close examination of several twentieth century social movements in the United States. We will read about the U.S. civil rights, the unemployed workers’, welfare rights, pro-choice / pro-life and gay rights movements. We will compare and contrast certain of these movements with their counterparts in other countries. For all, we will identify the reasons for their successes and failures.

The wars in Iraq and Syria have changed the course of international relations in the 21st century. During these conflicts, hundreds of thousands have died and millions have been displaced. After 13 years, these conflicts continue with no end in sight. The central question of this course is: How do political science theories and methods help us understand the course of these wars? In this course, you will answer this question by integrating three elements: theory, data/description, and application of theory to data/description. The primary goal of this course is to bolster students’ skills in using various social science methods to explain important variations in violent conflict.

This course is a graduate reading seminar, in which historical and contemporary studies are used to explore the interaction of technology with social and political values. Emphasis is on how technological devices, structures, and systems influence the organization of society and the behavior of its members. Examples are drawn from the technologies of war, transportation, communication, production, and reproduction.

12.000 Solving Complex Problems is designed to provide students the opportunity to work as part of a team to propose solutions to a complex problem that requires an interdisciplinary approach. For the students of the class of 2013, 12.000 will revolve around the issues associated with what we can and must do about the steadily increasing amounts CO2 in Earth’s atmosphere.
12.000 is a core course for the MIT Terrascope freshman learning community. Each year’s class explores a different problem in detail through the study of complementary case histories and the development of creative solution strategies. It includes training in Web site development, effective written and oral communication, and team building. Initially developed with major financial support from the d’Arbeloff Fund for Excellence in Education, 12.000 is designed to enhance the freshman experience by helping students develop contexts for other subjects in the sciences and humanities, and by helping them to establish learning communities that include upperclassmen, faculty, MIT alumni, and professionals in science and engineering fields.

Sounds of War, by Susanna Hast, is a book on the aesthetics of war experience in Chechnya. It includes theory on, and stories of, compassion, dance, children’s agency and love. It is not simply a book to be read, but to be listened to. The chapters begin with the author’s own songs expressing research findings and methodology in musical form. Susanna Hast is Academy of Finland postdoctoral researcher with a project “Bodies in War, Bodies in Dance” (2017–2020) at the Theatre Academy Helsinki, University of the Arts. She does artistic research on emotions, embodiment and war and teaches dance for immigrant and asylum-seeking women in Finland.

The 2014 Russia–Ukraine conflict has transformed relations between Russia and the West into what many are calling a new cold war. The West has slowly come to understand that Russia’s annexations and interventions, interference in elections, cyber warfare, disinformation, assassinations in Europe and support for anti-EU populists emerge from Vladimir Putin’s belief that Russia is at war with the West. This book shows that the crisis has deep roots in Russia’s inability to come to terms with an independent Ukrainian state, Moscow’s view of the Orange and Euromaidan revolutions as Western conspiracies and, finally, its inability to understand that most Russian-speaking Ukrainians do not want to rejoin Russia. In Moscow’s eyes, Ukraine is central to rebuilding a sphere of influence within the former Soviet space and to re-establishing Russia as a great power. The book shows that the wide range of ‘hybrid’ tactics that Russia has deployed show continuity with the actions of the Soviet-era security services.

This graduate seminar provides an examination of mass and elite political behavior in the United States, with an emphasis on political participation, political inequality, elections, voting behavior, and political organizations.

This course provides an introduction to the vast literature devoted to public opinion. In the next 12 weeks, we will survey the major theoretical approaches and empirical research in the field of political behavior (though we will only tangentially discuss political  participation and voting). For the most part we will focus on American public opinion, though some of the work we will read is comparative in nature.

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Prospects for Sustainability

Short Description:
This book is a collective effort to understand and apply current conceptualizations of sustainability to a study of state and local government. It is an attempt to focus our attention on a basic understanding of the time-tested institutions and guiding principles likely to take society and governance towards greater advancement. Our work is, however, tempered by a developing understanding of smart growth — growth in productive capacity, quality of life and social justice that does not necessitate large-scale destructive or extractive activity. The growth sought produces widespread mutual benefit, is prudent in design and thoughtful in execution. The growth in question here is mindful of the past, yet builds better lives and futures for our posterity. Data dashboard

Word Count: 139622

(Note: This resource's metadata has been created automatically by reformatting and/or combining the information that the author initially provided as part of a bulk import process.)

This course examines alternative conceptions and theoretical underpinnings of sustainable development. It focuses on the sustainability problems of industrial countries, and of developing states and economies in transition. It also explores the sociology of knowledge regarding sustainability, the economic and technological dimensions, and institutional imperatives, along with implications for political constitution of economic performance.
17.181 fulfills the undergraduate public policy requirement in the Political Science major and minor. Graduate students are expected to explore the subject in greater depth through reading and individual research.

This course examines alternative conceptions and theoretical underpinnings of sustainable development. It focuses on the sustainability problems of industrial countries, and of developing states and economies in transition. It also explores the sociology of knowledge regarding sustainability, the economic and technological dimensions, and institutional imperatives, along with implications for political constitution of economic performance.
17.181 fulfills the undergraduate public policy requirement in the Political Science major and minor. Graduate students are expected to explore the subject in greater depth through reading and individual research.

This is the 2021 Spring Semester PO 102 United States Government Syllabus taught at Bennett College in Greensboro, NC.