Department of Political Science

Summer 2025 Undergraduate Course Descriptions

Maymester (May 12 – 23)

Please keep in mind that ALL Maymester courses are extremely time-intensive; you are signing up for a 3.0 credit course and earning your grade for the course in a two-week period.  Please expect to expend your time during Maymester working on your course.

PSC 374 m500 Law and Society

Instructor: Alice Timken

Class #: 72354

Offered: ONLINE ASYNC 05/12/2025 – 05/23/2025, M-F 1:00 pm – 5:00 pm

Course Description: This course looks at how the rules of the game are made and remade through interactions between the state and society. It takes a diachronic view of legal institutions and norms in the making rather than a view of “the” law as a body of synchronic and pre-established norms. Students will learn about the law’s complex role as a constitutive, regulative, and coercive force in public and private spheres. In the process, they will think critically about how law shapes and enables social and individual interactions, how law constructs difference, how law mediates power relationships, how law demarcates communal boundaries, and how the law operates as an instrument of violence, domination, and control in various jurisdictions across Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, South Asia, and the US.

Session I (May 19 – June 27 – no residential classes M 5/26, Th 6/19)

PSC 121 m001 American National Government & Politics

Instructor: Curtis Edmonds

Class #: 70004

Offered: ONLINE SYNC 05/19/2025 – 06/19/2025, M-Th 10:00 am – 11:45 am

Course Description: American political institutions. Basic principles embedded in structure and practices of American government. Practical consequences of this political system for the citizen. Credit is given for PSC 121 or PSC 129, but not both.

PSC 202 m800 Intro to Political Analysis

Instructor: Gunyeop Lee

Class #: 70447

Offered: ONLINE SYNC 05/19/2025 – 06/26/2025, M-Th 12:00 pm – 1:45 pm

Course Description: The purpose of this course, required for political science majors, is to build skills for conducting, interpreting, and presenting political science research. These skills include: basic research and data collection practices, techniques for measuring political science concepts quantitatively, hypothesis testing, interpretation of statistical evidence, and the presentation of findings in a clear and compelling manner. Tying these components together is a thematic focus on important political science concepts such as democracy, power, or representation.

PSC 355 u800 International Political Economy

Instructor: Daniel McDowell

Class #: 70218

Offered: ONLINE ASYNC 05/19/2025 – 06/27/2025

Course Description: Institutions and politics of international economic relations. Trade, investment, macro-economic policy coordination, economic development, global resource issues, and the causes and consequences of global economic integration.

Session II (June 30 – August 8 – no residential classes F 7/4)

PSC 123 m001 Comparative Government & Politics

Instructor: Aysenur Deger

Class #: 70344

Offered: IN PERSON 6/30/2025 – 8/07/2025, M-Th 2:00 pm – 3:24 pm Eggers 113

Course Description: Comparison of selected governmental institutions, individual and collective political actors, and issues across the industrialized and developing world. Particular attention to dynamics of socioeconomic and political change

PSC 124 m001 International Relations

Instructor: Michael McCall

Class #: 70295

Offered: IN PERSON 6/30/2025 – 8/07/2025, M-Th 10:00 am – 11:45 am HL215

Course Description: Foreign policy, decision making, comparative foreign policy, international transactions, and the international system. Credit is given for PSC 124 or PSC 139, but not both.

Open