POL 3235W is also offered in Fall 2024
POL 3235W is also offered in Spring 2024
POL 3235W is also offered in Fall 2023
POL 3235W is also offered in Spring 2023
POL 3235W is also offered in Fall 2022
POL 3235W is also offered in Spring 2022
POL 3235W is also offered in Fall 2021
POL 3235W is also offered in Summer 2021
Summer 2021 | POL 3235W Section 001: Democracy and Citizenship (81420)
- Instructor(s)
- Class Component:
- Lecture
- Credits:
- 3 Credits
- Grading Basis:
- Student Option
- Instructor Consent:
- No Special Consent Required
- Instruction Mode:
- Completely Online
- Class Attributes:
UMNTC Liberal Education Requirement
Online Course
- Times and Locations:
Regular Academic Session
Mon,
Wed 05:30PM - 08:00PM
Off Campus
UMN REMOTE
- Enrollment Status:
Open (21 of 25 seats filled)
- Also Offered:
- Course Catalog Description:
- This course considers the nature of contemporary democracy and the role that members of the political community do, can, and should play. While approaches in teaching the class vary, students can expect to read historical and contemporary texts, see films and videos, to approach questions about the nature of democracy, justifications for democracy, and challenges faced by contemporary democracy. Topics will include such questions as the role of civil society in democratic life, deliberative democracy, as well as questions about how members of political communities can best participate in democratic life. Students will write a longer essay that allows them to demonstrate their capacities to understand and explain complex ideas and to make a theoretically compelling argument, using appropriate supporting evidence. prereq: Suggested prerequisite 1201
- Class Notes:
- http://classinfo.umn.edu/?mitam001+POL3235W+Summer2021
- Class Description:
What is democracy? What makes a good citizen? Interrogating the figure of the optimal democratic citizen, this course will explore approaches to democratic projects in order to take seriously the notion that modern democracies and ruling ideologies are most clearly viewed from the vantage of what and who they exclude, excise, and attempt to write out of existence. Drawing on teachings from critical race, feminist, postcolonial, queer, and disability studies, we will collectively problematize canonical political theoretic visions of what makes good citizens in a good democratic society (for example those found in the works of traditional forefathers of political theory, specifically social contract theorists and some of their inheritors - Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Jacques Rousseau, Alexis de Tocqueville).
Examining the tensions in what are taken as American democratic theory's foundational texts alongside contemporary explorations of these themes in social movements, we will dive into the fissures in (predominantly) U.S. democratic order. We will do so in order to defamiliarize state designations of good citizens, instead taking these optimal characteristics as foils for exploring how democracies' founding mythologies are troubled by the ways everyday people negotiate the state and aiding us in imagining democratic practice otherwise.
- Who Should Take This Class?:
- Students enrolled in this class (political science majors and those totally unfamiliar with political theory are all welcome) should expect to contribute to the difficult work of defamiliarizing the concepts and categories with which we typically understand the world around us as well. Centrally, we will interrogate our own role in these structures and hierarchies. As those who have arrived on this land in many ways, at many times, with varying plans to stay and/or agency in our habitation here, we must recognize that questions of citizenship are not an abstract or purely academic matter. Rather, who has citizenship - who is permitted to live where, when, and under what conditions - is a matter we must all consciously address because we partake in its construction and consequences.
- Grading:
Participation: 30%
Reflections x 3: 10% each
Project: 30%
Critical Autobiography: 10%
- Workload:
- approximately 30 pages of reading per class
- Textbooks:
- https://bookstores.umn.edu/course-lookup/81420/1215
- Instructor Supplied Information Last Updated:
- 27 January 2021
ClassInfo Links - Summer 2021 Political Science Classes