Foundation Seminars

• Instructor: Ilona Moore, International Relations: Uses & Abuses of Human Rights

  This course encourages students to develop curiosity about major questions we face in a global era. We follow a formative thread of the past couple of centuries of global history: how the idea of "rights" has shaped international interactions.

  The course facilitates a historical, philosophical and geopolitical journey: human rights might seem "softer" than war or economic policy, but we follow how "human rights" were constituted alongside the violence of global engagement (from colonial conquest to contemporary conflict).

  Our focus highlights how "human rights" has been both a discourse used in projects that deny people basic aspects of rights (even life itself), and also how a rights discourse has emerged within and alongside, or out of, the profound violations that have created our modern world.

   

• Instructor: Cymone Fourshey, International Relations: Global Pandemics & Human Rights

  Challenge assumptions about human rights and justice in the global arena as you analyze this important topic and discuss humanitarian rights regimes.

  Consider important questions like: In what ways do they challenge harm caused by imperialism and colonialism? Do they perpetuate inequality, injustice and underdevelopment? Does globalization offer opportunities for justice that colonialism and imperialism did not?