My course on Imagining Social Justice was by far one of my favorites. This seminar-based class dealt mainly with topics related to Black life and issues within the social justice system.  We read and thought critically about what social justice means to different cultures, and how it is creatively expressed in literature and film. I particularly enjoyed reading August Wilson’s play, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, and discussing the commodification of Black culture in a capital-oriented society. 

This course provided me with a comprehensive understanding on the nature and history of terrorism, both in this country and abroad. Some of the key take aways from this course was learning that terrorism is a contextual phenomenon, meaning that in order to understand a terroristic incident, we must consider the context that surrounds it. First, we must analyze which social, political, and economic grievances may have been present to motivate an attack. Second, we must also consider which factors played a role in facilitating an attack. By doing so, we not only gain greater insights about the attack, but this helps us determine which policy solutions are needed. This course also inspired me to learn more about how social media is currently being weaponized by a right-wing terrorist groups to spread false and misleading information. 

Understanding conflict and war from an empirical perspective helped me apply some of the skills I learned from my Research Methods course. We studied causal relationships and researched the different explanations of war from an individual, state, and structural level. The individual explanations of war mirrored some of the topics that were present in my Politics of Leadership course. In both cases, we examined the nature of certain political leaders and how their behavior ultimately changed the course of history forever. Reading the works of James Fearon, an expert in rational explanations of war, also helped me understand how factors like proximity and material capabilities have a profound impact on the likelihood of war. 

My Capstone on International Relations not only provided me an opportunity to strengthen my analytical and problem-solving skills, but helped me tie together some of the central political science concepts that I have learned over the years. For my thesis, I was instructed to consider a real-life global collective action problem and consider which public policy solutions would best address it. Living in the midst of a pandemic, it may seem obvious why I chose to research re-emerging infectious diseases and its relationship to vaccine refusal. However, it was actually my course on the History of Public Health that inspired me to study epidemiological transitions from a political perspective.

My course on Social Theory was also another one of personal favorites. I enjoyed re-visiting some of the seminal works of Karl Marx, Emile Durkheim, and Max Weber. Their ideas still have a strong foothold in society today and I was really intrigued by the parallel’s I was able to draw between Marx’s explanation of Napoleon Bonaparte’s rise to power in the 18th century and the rise of alt-right groups seen here in the United States today. Marx makes the crucial claim that when once dignified workers are deemed useless in a new age, there becomes an immense longing for the past – even if the past was never that great to begin with. I was also excited to engage with the works of Anna Julia Cooper and W.E.B. du Bois and see how their ideas on internal conflict continue to explain strained social relations today.

This course primarily helped me become an effective writer when it comes to communicating with international organizations or those that speak English as a second language. I particularly enjoyed this course because as someone that aspires to work with international organizations and foreign intelligence, it’s vital to be able to write and speak in a manner that is both culturally acceptable and easy to understand. I worked with my teammates to provide a country report on China and discussed how a shift in geopolitical power may replace English as today’s preferred global language.

My course on Foreign Policy in a Changing World began much like my class on International Relations. We started by defining the broad relationships present between states – namely realism, liberalism, and constructivism. However, we discussed how foreign policy branches away from international relations because it considers the agents and leaders responsible for forging the relationships between states. In this class, my group members and I decided to analyze Lyndon B. Johnson and his decision to dramatically increase the number of troops in Vietnam. Looking in depth at one foreign policy decision allowed me to understand all the underlying factors that influence decision-making.