Course Offerings

This course will examine the existing international legal framework for the protection of women’s rights and contrast the law with the nearly universal perception that the world of women is a private sphere, one where laws made in the public realm have less weight, or are more difficult to implement due to lack of witnesses, or worse, community acceptance of certain types of gender-based violence. But activists are making progress across the globe in combating insufficient implementation of women’s rights. This course will explore their remarkably innovative strategies to achieve conflict resolution and the protection of women in challenging circumstances.

This course discusses the intellectual foundations of contemporary psychology. Students learn about the concepts, theories and experiments basic to an understanding of the discipline, including classic thought and recent advances in psychology such as psychoanalysis, learning theory,biological mechanisms, developmental, social, cognitive, personality and abnormal psychology.

Surveys major issues concerning gender and the science of psychology in an attempt to answer the question: why is there such a gender gap when women and men share more psychological similarities than differences? Topics include: developmental processes and gender; gender roles and stereotypes, biology and gender; cross-cultural perspectives of gender; social-cultural theories of gender; language and gender, emotions and gender, health and gender.

Students will learn the basics of doing experimental research in psychology, including the ethics of working with human subjects, researching ideas in the scholarly literature, and designing and interpreting research findings. The principles learned here apply in many domains where research is employed to describe and understand persons and social reality. MA1020 is recommended as a prerequisite.