Courses

Senior Seminars and Thesis Courses

2024-25 Academic Year

Senior Thesis

Senior Thesis writers enroll in INTL4951 (Prof. Hiroshi Nakazato)
** Your first semester of INTL4952 will count as an elective in your concentration; the second semester will fulfill your senior project requirement.

Senior Seminars:

Fall 2024:

(Re-) Imagining Environmentally-just Futures  
Prof. Brian Gareau
INTL 4941.01
Mondays 3:00 - 5:25pm (Stokes 111S) 

In this seminar, students will explore the intersection of environmental sustainability and social justice through the lens of speculative science fiction. Drawing on contemporary literature and critical international studies perspectives, students will engage with narratives that envision diverse futures shaped by the ongoing climate crisis. By analyzing texts such as Kim Stanley Robinson's "Ministry of the Future" and NK Jemisin's "Broken Earth" trilogy, students will critically examine how authors portray the complexities of environmental challenges and the possibilities for equitable solutions on a global scale.
 

A Cinema of Dissent
Prof. Jonathan Kirshner 
INTL4941.02
** Required film screening Wednesdays 7:00-9:30pm (Higgins 300)
** Seminar meets Thursdays 4:30-6:55pm (Stokes 101N)

What is a cinema of dissent? For more than a century now, the movies – principally a form of mass entertainment – have also commonly been vehicles to express critical and even radical opposition to the prevailing practices (and the powers that be) of the day. Raising the stakes in these endeavors, since their inception the movies have been subject to strict and often draconian censorship by dangerous, frightened governments (and abetted by timid studios). Yet throughout history many brilliant films expressing subversive and forbidden ideas have been able to find production, even under the ominous, watchful eyes of brutally repressive dictatorships (and hypocritical censorious democracies). This class looks closely at a number of dissident masterpieces produced under chilling circumstances from around theworld—and the contentious political contexts in which they were crafted.

Spring 2025:

Critical Appropaches to Development 
Prof. Joseph Getzoff 
INTL4941.01
Thursdays 3:00 - 5:20pm

Development, since World War II, reigns as the mandate for addressing inequality in the Global South. Development’s promise has been to equalize the uneven relations between the former colonized and colonizers. And yet, many post-colonial states face continued poverty, exploitation, and environmental degradation, what some call neo-colonial relations. Students will engage with interdisciplinary scholarship that spans many engagements with development, including Third Worldist critiques, postcolonial theory, environmental issues, the politics of expertise, social justice, biopolitics, and case studies of developmental efforts in the present. Our goal, as a class, will be to reimagine development for the challenges facing not only the Global South, but for the North as well.

 
Geopolitics, Religion & Security
Prof. Elizabeth Prodromou
INTL4941.02
Mondays 1:30-3:50pm 

What is geopolitics? This seminar explores geopolitics as a way of making sense of territorial (classicalgeopolitics) and identity (critical geopolitics) geographies and their implications for politics, in order tounderstand international relations as a geopolitical contest for hegemony waged by state and non-stateactors. The seminar analyzes the significance of religion for defining geographies, for competitivestruggles, and for affecting security. Introducing country, regional, and transregional case studiesprimarily drawn from Eurasia, the seminar uses cross-disciplinary literatures and presentations by guestexperts with diverse professional expertise at the intersections of religion and security in historical andcurrent geopolitics.