2007–2008 Public Policy Courses
The Arts and the Law as Normative Performative Practices
Level: Open
Semester: Spring
Do the arts and the law both function as normative performative practices? That is, what roles do the arts and the law play in the dynamic relationship between ideas, norms, and public policy? To what extent do they help construct or deconstruct identity and society through “language that acts”? To what extent are they divisible into their familiar institutional constructs? This course will introduce students to and problematize the concepts of power relations, hegemony, contingency, indeterminacy, and counterhegemonic practice. We will follow the lineage of Foucault and Gramsci through performance studies scholars such as Taylor, Rehm, and Schlossberg and critical legal theorists such as Balbus, Gordon, and MacKinnon.
Workers, Law, and Global Justice
Level: Intermediate
Semester: Year
In this yearlong seminar, we will examine the complex relationship between the law, working people’s struggles, and movements for social change in a global economy, from Yonkers to Oaxaca. At the same time, we will be a central part of building a grassroots coalition supporting immigrant day laborers’ struggles for justice. We will orient ourselves with a brief introduction to the fundamentals of community organizing. We will begin our scholarly work by analyzing U.S. workers’ rights in relation to labor history and political economy and the symbiotic relationship between the development of labor and employment laws and social movements of immigrants, people of color, and working women. We will then examine contemporary phenomena such as contingent work, the outsourcing/offshoring of manufacturing, the rise of service-sector behemoths such as Wal-Mart, the decline and transformation of the labor movement, the use of undocumented immigrants as low-wage workers, and the rise of workers’ centers. This inquiry will provide the raw material for a critical examination of the relationships between changes in the political economy, social movements, and key modern labor and employment laws in the United States. In the spring, we will examine workers’ rights in a climate of global economic integration. We will study contrasting responses by workers in the Americas and the Caribbean to the integration of the global economy under the “neoliberal” philosophy of globalized privatization, deregulation, and “structural adjustment.” We will be introduced to the concepts of economic human rights and international labor rights and to the international institutions responsible for monitoring and enforcing them. We will interrogate the viability of transnational solidarity as a means to build alternatives to the neoliberal model and will critically analyze competing strategies in this struggle. Students will be expected to devote four hours per week (outside class) to a community partnership addressing issues raised by our studies as part of their conference work. While it is my preference that students work with me on the SLC Institute for Policy Alternatives day labor organizing project, students may also arrange to work with other area unions, community groups, or legal organizations doing workers’ rights-oriented advocacy. Spanish proficiency is desirable but not required.