In this seminar the goal is to explore dual dimensions of culture, one referring to the broad definition of culture—attitudes, belief systems, perceptions—in particular societies, and culture represented in forms of expressions—such as arts and architecture—with a focus on the U.S., India, and China.
Politics of Culture
will explore the polemics of culture in the domestic setting as well as the use of arts and culture by the individual countries in their international agenda (often defined as ‘soft power’). The relationship between the domestic attitudes and conditions and the international use of culture will be an important part of the discussions. In addition to focusing on the individual countries and specific moments or case studies, the seminar will also address the current global political realities in which the cultural expressions are created or threatened from a trans-national perspective.
This comprehensive 1.5-credit course explores –in real time- the results, takeaways and consequences of the 2018 midterms and what it means for politics and policy moving into the 2020 Presidential cycle. We will explore the ways in which both major political parties have responded to the Trump Administration’s upending of political norms. In addition to considering the relationship of each Party to the Executive Branch, we will examine how parties used the legislative and judicial branches to engage their respective policy agendas, with a look toward the 2020 elections. During this course, students will: learn to identify campaign strategies deployed during a midterm election cycle, analyze trends and consider whether there are general patterns that can be applied to future campaigns; and determine how the government, the public and the political parties respond and adapt to the outcomes. Students will also hear from an expert in human behavior as well as a campaign professional. Students will think in terms of an 18-month forecast focusing on the policies, constituencies and leaders that will be activated as a result of the midterm elections.
This course will undertake a comparative assessment of international efforts to resolve armed conflicts and prevent mass atrocities in a series of situations, some of which ended relatively well and some of which did not. In the former category, it will consider Kenya (2008), Guinea (2009), Kyrgyzstan (2010), and Côte d'Ivoire (2010-11), and in the latter Rwanda (1994), Srebrenica (1995), Sri Lanka (2009), and Syria (2011). In each of the eight cases, international decision-making will be examined through both conflict resolution and atrocity prevention lens in order to gain a keener sense of relative priorities and of how efforts to pursue one goal reinforced or complicated the other. The emphasis will be on the UN Security Council and Secretariat, but the policies of key Member States will be considered as well. It has been widely noted that most mass atrocities occur in conflict situations, but there has been little study of whether the respective techniques used to end conflict and to curb atrocities are fully compatible in the context of day-to-day crisis response efforts. The United Nations has authorized or compiled extensive lessons-learned reports on Rwanda, Srebrenica, and Sri Lanka, and there are substantial academic, journalistic, and eye witness accounts of all of the situations other than Guinea and Kyrgyzstan. The instructor will also draw on his personal involvement in United Nations decision-making, as Assistant Secretary-General and Special Adviser for the Responsibility to Protect (R2P), in all of the situations except for the two in the 1990s. Opportunities will be provided for the students to interact with national and international officials who were involved in several of these situations.
This course will assess evolving international doctrine and practice aimed at protecting populations from mass atrocities. It will address the global policies and institutions that have been put into place to curb genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and crimes against humanity, with a particular focus on forced displacement, sexual violence, and the effects of conflict on children. The class will consider the interplay between notions of sovereignty and of responsibility, taking a close look at how the principle of the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) has developed institutionally and politically over the past fifteen years. The instructor, as the first United Nations Special Adviser on the Responsibility to Protect, was the principal architect of the global strategy for implementing R2P in policy and practice. Through a visit to the United Nations, the students will have the opportunity to meet with a number of the key actors in this ongoing process. The assignments for the course will include the preparation of a Policy Analysis, a Policy Proposal, and an Institutional Proposal.
This seven-week course will first provide an understanding of the shifts that are taking place in the new global order and their impact on the implementation of the sustaining peace concept in peace and security. It will also analyze the changing nature of conflicts, including the emergence of violent extremism and transnational organized crimes, which undermine the principles of peace operations and put them under stress. A number of critical questions will be raised: What are the core principles of the new concept of sustaining peace? How can peacekeeping, which is one of the important actors involved in sustaining the peace can better aligned itself to this new framework of peace? What will it involve? What reforms will be needed? How can peacekeeping operations be less state centric and more “people-centered? Given the high risks environments in which the majority of peacekeepers are deployed (CAR, MALI, South Sudan, DRC) and the considerable efforts deployed in addressing asymmetric threats, neutralizing armed groups and protecting civilians, can peacekeeping realistically prioritize the advancement of political processes?
This course exposes students to conceptual and practical skills needed to develop a "reflective practice" orientation to applied professional work in international peace building and conflict resolution. The class focuses on skills for designing, implementing, and evaluating conflict resolution interventions. During the semester, students co-design projects, creating specific objectives and activities in collaboration with a Project Supervisor in a pre-selected field-based partner institution. Students are encouraged to work in teams of 2-3 in the course. Students implement the project during the summer, taking into consideration changes on the ground, through internships under the guidance of their field-based Project Supervisors. Students return in the fall to deliver a report of their activities in the field reflecting on their experiences and presenting their findings to the SIPA community. The course supports students in developing critical practical skills and experiences in managing a conflict resolution project while exploring the professional field of applied conflict resolution.
This course requires instructor permission in order to register. Please add yourself to the waitlist in SSOL and submit the proper documents in order to be considered.
Prerequisites: Undergraduate course in genetics, probability and statistics
The course aims to cover a range of current topics in human genetics, with two main aims: to provide students with a basic toolbox with which to analyze human genetic data and to expose them to important, open questions in the field. Topics to be covered include sources of genetic variation, functional genomics, methods of analyses of pedigree and population data, strategies for trait mapping, the geographic structure of human genetic variation and natural selection in humans.
This course will be taught as a seminar to collectively explore changes in inter-state relations in Latin America and the foreign policy implications of those changes, for the U.S., for larger powers such as Brazil and multilaterally.
Prerequisites: permission of the departmental adviser to Graduate Studies.
This course surveys the historical relationships between anthropological thought and its generic inscription in the form of ethnography. Readings of key ethnographic texts will be used to chart the evolving paradigms and problematics through which the disciplines practitioners have conceptualized their objects and the discipline itself. The course focuses on several key questions, including: the modernity of anthropology and the value of primitivism; the relationship between history and eventfulness in the representation of social order, and related to this, the question of anti-sociality (in crime, witchcraft, warfare, and other kinds of violence); the idea of a cultural world view; voice, language, and translation; and the relationship between the form and content of a text. Assignments include weekly readings and reviews of texts, and a substantial piece of ethnographic writing. Limited to PhD students in Anthropology only.
The goal of this course is to provide an overview of the economics of international development. The key objective is to give students a framework to think about the processes that drive economic development, as well as policies that might promote it.
Prerequisites: SIPA U6501
This course will develop the skills needed to prepare, analyze, and present data for policy analysis and program evaluation using Stata. Students will be instructed on how to apply statistical concepts from Quantitative Methods I and II in order to explore policy questions. Through a ombination of lectures, hands-on data assignments and individual data projects, students will develop a general knowledge of statistical programming (e.g., generating and organizing Stata code), data analysis (performing and interpreting descriptive analysis and regressions), data visualizations (charts and tables), and how to best present results. These skills will be reinforced through a data project of students’ choosing to be presented and submitted at the end of the semester. The larger goal of this course is to help students become effective data analysts: given the available data, what sort of analysis would allow us to best answer the research question at hand? How can we gather data and implement this analysis using Stata, and how can we begin to draw conclusions about the causal effects of programs and policies and not just correlation?
Prerequisites: SIPA U6501
The goal of this course is to enable students to evaluate the policy relevance of academic research. While academic research frequently considers treatments that approximate a potential public policy, such prima facie relevance alone does not inform policy. In particular, public policy is predicated on the credible estimation of causal treatment effects. For example, although researchers frequently document the strong correlation between years of schooling and better health, this tells us surprisingly little (and arguably nothing) about the health effects of public tuition assistance, compulsory school laws, or any other program that raises educational attainment. Policies guided by statistical correlations - even the regression-adjusted estimates that dominate the academic literature - will frequently have unintended and even perverse real-world effects. Policymakers must distinguish between causal estimates that should inform policy design and statistical correlations that should not. The catch is that distinguishing correlation from causation in empirical studies is surprisingly difficult. Econometric technique alone does not provide a reliable path to causal inference. Applications of instrumental variables (IV) techniques, while wildly popular, arguably obscure sources of identification more often than isolating exogenous variation. Similar concerns apply to popular panel data and fixed effects (FE) models, which can eliminate certain unobservable sources of bias. Furthermore, causal claims by a study's author should be regarded with skepticism - frequently this is merely the marketing of a non-transparent statistical correlation. Put differently, when has a researcher portrayed his empirical result as a mere correlation when in fact he/she had identified a credible causal impact? A basic theme of the course is that identification strategy - the manner in which a researcher uses observational [real-world] data to approximate a controlled/randomized trial (Angrist & Pischke, 2009) - is the bedrock of causal inference. Econometric technique cannot rescue a fundamentally flawed identification strategy. In other words, econometrics and identifications strategies are complements in the production of causal estimates, not substitutes. Examples of appropriate econometric technique applied to compelling identification strategies will be described to illustrate this approach (most often from health economics), along with their implications for public policy.
This course is aimed at familiarizing students with the main econometric methods currently used in public policy impact evaluation. The course starts by discussing the idea of causal inference, which is central to any statistical analysis of impact. Following, it covers in detail the five main statistical methods for estimating causal effects: randomized control trials, instrumental variables, regression discontinuity designs, difference-in-differences, and matching techniques. Randomized control trials are commonly seen as the paradigm among impact evaluation methods, but they are not always feasible. Be it due to political constraints, lack of planning, or cost considerations, it is common for policy analysts and researchers to be faced with situations where randomized control trials are not an option. The other four impact evaluation methods considered are designed to reproduce the properties of randomized experiments in settings where only observational data are available. Each method has advantages and disadvantages and can only be used with some degree of confidence under certain circumstances. The course discusses the circumstances adequate for the use of each impact evaluation method and presents concrete examples of its use. It also provides practical exercises for students to apply the methods covered in class. The goal of the course is to provide students with enough technical and practical knowledge to enable the critical reading of reports and academic articles on public policy evaluation. It is also expected that the material covered would be enough to allow students to independently conduct relatively simple impact evaluation studies.
This course explores the central themes in K-12 and higher education from an economic perspective. Topics in K-12 education include the effects of class-size, peer effects, teachers, accountability, charter schools, and vouchers. Topics in higher education include the decision to invest in human capital, estimating returns to college, and the market for college education. The course will cover research and policy issues from both domestic and international contexts.
This mini seminar is an introduction to psychoanalytic theories of group emotional adaptations and their representations as applied to the study of social, cultural and historical phenomena. The role of group emotional responses and adaptational processes will be described. The phenomenon of symbolic alterations of reality will be discussed. The inclusion of group emotional adaptations will make for a more comprehensive ethnology and historiography.
This course presents a brand new curriculum in economics for public policy master’s students. It is aimed to teach economics as it is done by researchers today, and “as if the last 30 years have happened”. We will be piloting a newly developed textbook, CORE-ESPP (Economy Society, and Public Policy), which is a variant of CORE’s “The Economy” textbook tailored to public policy masters’ students. “The Economy” is a completely new way of teaching the principles of economics, based on a coherent presentation of economics from the last 30 years of research. CORE-ESPP re-presents the material in CORE in a matter suitable for students who are not planning further training in economics, and who are looking to apply economics to concrete policy problems. To see the text book table of contents go here: https://www.core-con.org/espp/book/text/0-3-contents.html While this course is technically simple (limited to no calculus for example), admission will be restricted to students who already have microeconomics, either having taken it at SIPA or having tested out of the usual microeconomics course, or with permission of instructor. This is mostly because the course is experimental and the textbook is still in beta form, and having students with some experience of economics will likely help in communicating the new ideas. While the material is not particularly technical, it is conceptually unfamiliar to students who have seen only limited economics before (e.g. bargaining and principal agent problems). One distinctive component of ESPP is that it integrates data handling and data analysis into economics education. For example, the first problem set consists of analyzing temperature data and convincing oneself that climate change is real, using either excel or R, depending on their experience. https://www.core-econ.org/doing-economics/book/text/01-01.html For an introduction to ESPP (and the text materials) see: https://www.core-econ.org/introducing-economy-society-and-public-policy-a-new-ebook-by-the-core-team/
Prerequisites: Refer to course syllabus.
An introduction to combinatorial optimization, network flows and discrete algorithms. Shortest path problems, maximum flow problems. Matching problems, bipartite and cardinality nonbipartite. Introduction to discrete algorithms and complexity theory: NP-completeness and approximation algorithms.
Prerequisites: (APMA E2101) and (APMA E3101) and (MECE E4602) or (COMS W4733)
Corequisites: MECE E3401
Kinematic modeling methods for serial, parallel, redundant, wire-actuated robots and multifingered hands with discussion of open research problems. Introduction to screw theory and line geometry tools for kinematics. Applications of homotropy continuation methods and symbolic-numerical methods for direct kinematics of parallel robots and synthesis of mechanisms. Course uses textbook materials as well as a collection of recent research papers.
Prerequisites: (IEOR E6613) and (EEOR E4650)
Convex sets and functions, and operations preserving convexity. Convex optimization problems. Convex duality. Applications of convex optimization problems ranging from signal processing and information theory to revenue management. Convex optimization in Banach spaces. Algorithms for solving constrained convex optimization problems.
The goal of this course is to familiarize students with some of the key public policy challenges facing Latin America and, in particular, Brazil. The course focuses on four topics: inequality, education, crime, and health. Though the topics are interconnected, each has its particularities and has been the object of specifically designed public policies and of intense debate. The connecting thread running through the course is the idea that inequality and social exclusion permeate most of the main public policy challenges in the region.
This course examines the workings of emerging financial systems and their efficacy as a pillar for sustained economic development. The course methodology is to study a major financial system chosen for anchor (Brazil’s) in comparison with those of four other G-20 developing economies: Mexico, Turkey, India and China. Aspects examined include the role of domestic private, public sector and foreign banks; credit availability and cost; systemic resilience; dependence on and access to foreign capital; and breadth and depth of domestic capital markets.
Prerequisites: Written permission from instructor and approval from adviser.
Written permission from instructor and approval from adviser. This course may be repeated for credit. A special investigation of a problem in nuclear engineering, medical physics, applied mathematics, applied physics, and/or plasma physics consisting of independent work on the part of the student and embodied in a formal report.
Prerequisites: Written permission from instructor and approval from adviser.
Written permission from instructor and approval from adviser. This course may be repeated for credit. A special investigation of a problem in nuclear engineering, medical physics, applied mathematics, applied physics, and/or plasma physics consisting of independent work on the part of the student and embodied in a formal report.
Prerequisites: Written permission from instructor and approval from adviser.
Written permission from instructor and approval from adviser. This course may be repeated for credit. A special investigation of a problem in nuclear engineering, medical physics, applied mathematics, applied physics, and/or plasma physics consisting of independent work on the part of the student and embodied in a formal report.
Prerequisites: Written permission from instructor and approval from adviser.
Written permission from instructor and approval from adviser. This course may be repeated for credit. A special investigation of a problem in nuclear engineering, medical physics, applied mathematics, applied physics, and/or plasma physics consisting of independent work on the part of the student and embodied in a formal report.
Prerequisites: Written permission from instructor and approval from adviser.
Written permission from instructor and approval from adviser. This course may be repeated for credit. A special investigation of a problem in nuclear engineering, medical physics, applied mathematics, applied physics, and/or plasma physics consisting of independent work on the part of the student and embodied in a formal report.
Prerequisites: Written permission from instructor and approval from adviser.
Written permission from instructor and approval from adviser. This course may be repeated for credit. A special investigation of a problem in nuclear engineering, medical physics, applied mathematics, applied physics, and/or plasma physics consisting of independent work on the part of the student and embodied in a formal report.