Graduate Identity Politics Syllabus

Whether one considers the partisan and electoral choices citizens make or the judgments citizens render in response to officer-involved shootings or other salient social and political events, the centrality of identity in our politics is indisputable. But what is an identity? What are the conditions under which identities become politicized? How do identities work to structure attitudes and affect behavior? This course seeks to provide some answers to these questions. Using an interdisciplinary and cross-subfield approach, students are brought into conversation with scholarship that demonstrates the powerful ways that identities influence all aspects of the political. A primary goal of the course is to provide students a foundation for thinking carefully and creatively about the way that identity and identity-based considerations matter for the various research questions they seek to answer.