POL 4487 is also offered in Spring 2025
POL 4487 is also offered in Spring 2024
POL 4487 is also offered in Spring 2023
POL 4487 is also offered in Fall 2021
Spring 2020 | POL 4487 Section 001: The Struggle for Democratization and Citizenship (53365)
- Instructor(s)
- Class Component:
- Lecture
- Credits:
- 3 Credits
- Grading Basis:
- Student Option
- Instructor Consent:
- No Special Consent Required
- Instruction Mode:
- In Person Term Based
- Times and Locations:
Regular Academic Session
UMTC, West Bank
Blegen Hall 115
- Enrollment Status:
Open (17 of 30 seats filled)
- Also Offered:
- Course Catalog Description:
- How best to advance democracy - through the ballot box or in the streets? This question more than any other is what informs the course. As well as the streets, the barricades and the battlefields, it argues, are decisive in the democratic quest. If democracy means the rule of the demos, the people, then who gets to be included in "the people"? An underlying assumption of the course is that the inclusion of previously disenfranchised layers of society into the category of the people, the citizens, is due to social struggles or the threat of such - an assumption to be examined in the course. Struggles refer to any kinds of movement for social change, from protests and strikes to revolutions broadly defined. This course seeks to see if there are lessons of struggle. The course traces the history of the democratic movement from its earliest moments in human history and attempts to draw a balance sheet. In the process it seeks to answer a number of questions. Did social inequality always exist? How do property rights figure in the inclusion process? What is the relationship between the state, social inequality and democracy? Which social layers played a decisive role in the democratic breakthrough? What are the effective strategies and tactics in the democratic struggle? How crucial is leadership? And lastly, can the lessons of the past inform current practice? A particular feature of the course is to read about the thinking and actions of activists on both sides of the democratic struggle in, as much as possible, their own words.
- Class Notes:
- http://classinfo.umn.edu/?animtz+POL4487+Spring2020
- Class Description:
- The setting for this course is the mounting effort on the part of states and a variety of social forces to roll back the historic gains of the world-wide democratic movement--from anti-immigrant campaigns (in both fascist and non-fascist clothing) that would limit citizenship rights to efforts that undermine civil liberties in the guise of combatting terrorisim. This takes place in a larger context in which increasing numbers of citizens feel disempowered and alienated from the state. As democracy and popular participation are central to citizenship the course traces the origins of the democratic process with particular emphasis on how the disenfranchised fought to become included. Both implicitly and explicitly it seeks to understand how that occured in order to see if there are lessons of the past that that might have appllicability for the defense and extension of democratic rights today. To understand it was the disenfranchised who empowered themselves is in itself empowering. An underlying assumption of the course is that the inclusion of previously disenfranchised layers of society into the category of citizens is due to social struggles or the threat of such--an assumption to be examined in the course.
- Grading:
- 25% Midterm Exam
50% Final Exam
25% Reports/Papers
- Exam Format:
- Essay
- Class Format:
- 75% Lecture
25% Discussion
- Workload:
- 100 Pages Reading Per Week
15 Pages Writing Per Term
2 Exam(s)
2 Paper(s)
- Textbooks:
- https://bookstores.umn.edu/course-lookup/53365/1203
- Instructor Supplied Information Last Updated:
- 24 October 2011
ClassInfo Links - Spring 2020 Political Science Classes