ClassInfo

This course considers approaches to the study of power, equity, and diversity (PED) in American higher education across the social sciences and humanities. It is the Core course of the PED concentration offered by the Department of Political Science.The PED concentration emerged as a counter-weight to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives that divorced the pursuit of equity and diversity from critiques of power. On account of this separation, institutions of higher education could appear equitable and diverse without making meaningful changes to enduring hierarchies, the kind of changes required for actual equity and diversity. The PED concentration abandons aspirations for mere inclusion and instead takes recent interest in and support for DEI as an opportunity to advance scholarly agendas that center power. The concentration replaces efforts to superficially administer DEI with intellectual inquiry and cutting-edge research about PED. At root, this course asks, how are the social sciences and humanities disciplines constituted? Who gets to conduct research? What historical struggles have been waged to open these fields to marginalized groups? How has the opening changed the substance of research agendas? And finally, what role have the American social sciences and humanities played in the world at large?

To focus and enrich our investigation, the course pairs a wide-ranging inventory of interdisciplinary approaches to power, equity, and diversity (PED) with a critique of Political Science, the discipline nominally charged with the study of power in the American academy. In the United States, the field of Political Science most conventionally understands power as the capacity of the state or individuals to shift outcomes in their favor. How do other disciplines in this country and/or formations of the discipline in other locales approach the study of power? How must we reconceptualize power - its agents, dynamics, and effects - when we foreground questions of equity and diversity? How, if at all, does a PED framework challenge Political Science as a discipline, i.e., as a provincial formation in the service of empire? And how does it challenge received understandings of power beyond Political Science? What new modes of inquiry are compelled by a cross-disciplinary engagement and/or by an emphasis on equity and diversity? Any attempt to study the intersection of power, equity, and diversity worth its salt must also address questions about knowledge production in the study of politics. Here, again, American higher education reveals a peculiar arrangement. The study of politics nominally falls to the discipline of Political Science, the title of which designates expertise in the service of broader scientific knowledge. Political Science turns the noun "politics" into an adjective ("political") in order to describe a particular type of "science." Meanwhile, every other discipline in the social sciences and humanities features significant studies of politics conducted from their own respective methodological orientations - at times incorporating politics as a case study, at others pursuing approaches that Political Science renders silent. How did this arrangement come to be? What does it make possible and what does it foreclose?