Mar 14, 2026  
2025-2026 Undergraduate Catalog 
    
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2025-2026 Undergraduate Catalog

HS 353 Political Discourse in Global Context

4 Credits
IS353 + PS 353 + IP 553

Political Discourse in Global Context explores the critical role language practices play in the production of race, gender, and class inequities in both the “little p” politics of everyday life and the “capital P” politics of governmental and intergovernmental intuitions, agencies, and organizations. This broader inquiry unfolds through our consideration of different genres of political discourse (presidential rhetoric; legislative debates; street and social media protests; human rights campaigns; etc.) within, across, and between several historical and contemporary contexts, including (neo)colonial Mexico, Spain, India, Israel, and the US. As part of this, we engage the politicization of language itself, not only in cases of linguistic injustice, such as the (neo)imperial policing and destruction of racialized and otherwise minoritized languages. We also address cases of linguistic justice, such as language revitalization programs and fights for the formal recognition of language rights. To actively grasp the centrality of language in the construction and realization of politics, students learn and employ the method of ethnographic discourse analysis on data they compile related to a topic of their choosing. And the class is structured around the stages of research-writing that undergird this method.

Lecture Spring