Emily Julia Hanson

The course will examine contemporary issues in gender-based violence (GBV) from both theoretical and applied viewpoints. We will discuss topics including understandings of gender and gendered violence, GBV in the media, intersectional experiences of GBV, and evolving areas of research, including the effect of the climate crisis (e.g., on migration), social justice and advocacy movements, and radical right-wing populism. The course will take a global and interdisciplinary perspective toward GBV and will pull from critical feminist, post-colonial, and intersectional scholarships. We will also use concepts from criminology, sociology, and psychology. The applied portions of this course will examine public policy as well as community-driven approaches to confronting GBV. The goal for the course is that students will be able to apply these diverse literatures to analyze and address GBV.

This course examines how psychology informs politics, including how we build political identities, why people engage in political behaviors, and the mutually constitutive relationship between people and institutions. The course will primarily focus on research from social psychology, but we will also look to broader literatures including cognitive and personality psychology, sociology, political science, and international relations. Although much of the research in this field is conducted with a focus on the “global north”, and the United States in particular, in this course we will take a global perspective. We will cover topics such as ideology, political personality, partisanship, attitude change, motivated reasoning, intergroup relationships, conflict, conspiracies, and prejudice/stigma.

In this course, students will learn about the history, theory, and practice of social justice. The course aims to provide a critical understanding of social justice as both a domain for theoretical research and applied practice. In the theoretical portion of the course, we will discuss the relationship between social justice and concepts like power, identity, emotion, systems thinking, and intersectional solidarity. In the applied part of the course, students will learn about the practice of community organizing, including identifying goals, targets, and tactics, as well as ethical principles for organizing. The goal of the course is for students to be able to articulate diverse concepts of social justice and apply these perspectives to analyze and address real-life issues.

The Seminar in Social psychology aims to familiarize students with core texts in the field, develop academic skills and foster critical thinking of students in themes associated to social psychology. The Seminar will be organized around reading core academic texts in social psychology, watching related audiovisual materials, discussions and written assessments.