3.0

Average Course Rating

Race and racism are political productions and—as such—have significantly shaped the study of political science, whose origins in the race science and eugenics milieu of the late nineteenth century (largely at Johns Hopkins) led to a discipline that evolved to systematically exclude and distorts serious consideration of race and racism as constitutive of politics. This exclusion and distortion has resulted in a social science that fails to effectively predict, explain, and diagnose political phenomenon. In this seminar, we will explore both the formative effect of racism in political science and its implications for how political science subfields study race as a political concept and practice, and the tradition of racial capitalism, “written out” of political science until very recently. Students will emerge from this seminar with a solid account of the racial foundations of political science, a critical view on existing approaches to the study of politics, and a grasp of a sidelined tradition of the joint study of race and capitalism.