POL S 327 A: Women's Rights As Human Rights

Human rights offer people around the world a language they can use to make claims in ways that are more powerful than simply making a request. Women’s rights are human rights, yet women’s rights claims have often not been taken as seriously as other human rights claims. Still, people around the world have continued to use this rights language to stand up to atrocities and to demand justice and equality for people of all genders.

This course will acquaint students with many complex issues—political, social, economic, and legal—that shape women’s rights around the world. It has a comparative focus rather than a United States focus—students will be asked to think critically about various areas of women’s rights while thinking comparatively about the different countries and settings that they exist within. It will focus on a number of policy areas and how they intersect with gender and women’s rights including health, labor, gender violence, and more. The course also critically examines the limits and benefits of data science approaches for women’s human rights. There are no pre-requisites for the course. 

Students will have the opportunity to research a women’s rights topic of their choosing that is related to the course content. The course will feature interactive learning opportunities in utilizing primary (data, court cases, treaties, policy reports etc) and secondary (peer reviewed journal articles and books) sources for conducting research.

Students will be assessed via a series of low stakes assignments, a short paper in the middle of the term, and a research paper & presentation.