Fall 2025/Spring 2026 LSC Emphasis
In the 2025–2026 year, the following courses make up the emphasis, along with year-long participation in the Socio-Legal Studies Workshops:
Set up to “do good,” welfare projects, donor regimes, NGOs, and transnational advocacy campaigns are shaped by complex histories and politics. This course will critically analyze the politics of aid, advocacy, welfare, and humanitarianism in different global contexts. We will read texts across an inter-disciplinary spectrum of history, sociology, anthropology, law and society, feminist studies, and critical perspectives on welfare, human rights, humanitarianism, and NGOs. Through them, we will explore the meanings, entanglements, histories, politics, and consequences of different forms of aid and advocacy. How have colonial legacies, state policies, laws, social movements, humanitarianism, capitalism, and neoliberalism molded aid and advocacy across global contexts? What collaborations and tensions emerge as they are shaped by different actors, entities, institutions, and processes? How do they impact communities they are set up to help, and how do those communities navigate and respond to them?
This course examines the origins, operations, and outcomes of historical and contemporary international justice measures used to address—and potentially adjudicate—crimes of the state, including torture, disappearances, genocide, etc.
The tenth cohort includes three students representing the School of Social Sciences, and the School of Social Ecology:
Caroline Bergman
Adviser: Ted Martin
Joma Geneciran
Adviser: Sameer Ashar
Cyndi Harris
Adviser: Fantasia Painter