The course presents an advanced treatment of the theory of financial risk management and its application to infrastructure finance.

Africa is the world’s most youthful continent and by the end of this century its 54 countries will be home to one in three people on Earth. This course examines contemporary African policy trends – challenges and opportunities – through the prism of national, sub-regional and international politics.

With the deepening of political divisions on societal challenges, policymakers must navigate increasingly tense environments to engage in constructive dialogues across political fault lines. They must be equipped with relevant personal competences interpersonal abilities to maintain productive relationships with difficult counterparts as they search for realistic compromises on programmatic options.

In this course, students explore an alternative theory of justice that places greater emphasis on democracy, and look at concrete examples of the application of this alternative policy-making framework to concrete domains like housing, good jobs and the economy, education, and climate.

What does it mean to be alive and to be human right now? To what should we devote our lives? The world is on fire. War, faltering growth, huge investments in artificial intelligence, increasing political polarization, accelerating inequality and a global move towards populist authoritarianism are undermining economies and political systems across the planet. Meanwhile ecosystems are collapsing and global temperatures continue to increase, driving floods, droughts and fires, and threatening to make a significant fraction of the earth’s surface uninhabitable. How did we get here? How can we bear the feelings of grief, rage and powerlessness that opening ourselves up to what is happening often entail? Are we looking at collapse, or could this moment be laying the foundation for opening towards something new?

This course takes a range of themes to interpret contemporary China’s actions in the world, and understand how China’s history can explain important aspects of contemporary policy and decision-making. The course takes key themes and examines them in both contemporary and historical context.

Debates about the significance of the Earth are increasingly central to the humanities, as scholars wrestle with the impact of climate change in our work. Informed by these debates, this course explores imaginaries of Place, World, Planet at the intersections of Christian thought, colonialism, and geopolitics.

Towering icebergs, adrift in the polar oceans, have long captured our imagination: from the ominous iceberg that sank the Titanic to idioms of a large, hidden part, “the tip of the iceberg”. But are icebergs so mysterious? In this seminar we look at icebergs through the lenses of oceanographers, glaciologists, paleoclimatologists, artists and Arctic people.

In this advanced French language and culture course we will explore iconic French industries through the lens of sustainability. Beginning in the Industrial Revolution, we will interrogate themes such as class, space, labor, and cultural appropriation in France and subsequently focus on the evolution of the sustainable practices of each industry today.

This seminar is clickbait vaccine to boost your critical thinking. It is designed to help you identify and refute misinformation, disinformation, and BS rampant on the internet. It will help you recognize sensationalism when science is communicated in the press. It will familiarize you with the main logical fallacies that students and scientists themselves are prone to. As a framework for discussion, we use Bergstrom and West's book "Calling Bullshit” along with supplemental readings.

The graduate workshop on Climate Sociology offers a venue for discussing new research that takes a sociological perspective toward climate change. Such perspectives include Environmental Sociology as well as areas of the field that have tended to develop independently of the problems of climate change, such as Social Organization, Social Stratification, Culture, Gender, Immigration, Political Sociology, and Race and Ethnicity.

This class will explore art that attempts to respond to the complexities of global climate change. We are living in a moment where the reality of massive, human-made global climate change has become unavoidable. While fires burn in California and coastlines disappear there have been calls for art that explores and imagines the present and oncoming disaster, with critics such as Amitav Ghosh ask “where is the fiction about climate change?” At the same time, many argue that we already have fiction, art, and poetry about climate change, while others wonder whether art about climate is even important in the face of crisis. Throughout the class we will be asking questions about representation and imagination: How do we describe a climate in flux? The negative effects of climate change are inflicted unevenly. How do people create narratives about environmental loss and the injustice of this loss? Is “Cli-Fi” a genre and if it is what does it look like? What does it mean to imagine the end of humanity or the end of the world, or, as importantly, what does it mean to imagine a future within or after crisis?