Power & Inequality

DPI 386MD Subject & Catalog Number

Description

Courses in this MPP core sequence examine how social categories, group-based cleavages, and inequalities shape contemporary leadership and policy challenges. The modules equip students with core knowledge, analytic approaches, and professional skills to understand and navigate how institutions and policies interact with dynamic, contested, and conflictual group-based identities and hierarchies. Through a diverse set of complementary module-length courses addressing race, ethnicity, gender, indigeneity, caste, class, and more, this sequence grounds questions and debates about identity, intergroup conflict, unequal treatment, and shifting social and political boundaries in rigorous empirical and historical perspective. This course is a four-credit sequence in which you'll take two half-semester modules selected out of seven options (note: some modules are offered twice).  See full list of options here.

Section D (Spring 1): Jennifer Hochschild. Identities, Politics, and Institutions

How can policymakers manage issues involving racial and ethnic inequality, political identity, and associated policy contestation? This module investigates two core disputes in the US aspiration to liberal democracy, and three more specific topics: how governments define and deploy “race” and related identities; how identity-inflected threats and intergroup contact help shape political activity and policy choice; and how particular identities become more or less important in different political and policy contexts. 

Course Notes

This course is required of all MPP1 students.