Courses in this MPP core sequence examine how social categories, group-based cleavages, and inequalities shape contemporary leadership and policy challenges. The modules equip students with core knowledge, analytic approaches, and professional skills to understand and navigate how institutions and policies interact with dynamic, contested, and conflictual group-based identities and hierarchies. Through a diverse set of complementary module-length courses addressing race, ethnicity, gender, indigeneity, caste, class, and more, this sequence grounds questions and debates about identity, intergroup conflict, unequal treatment, and shifting social and political boundaries in rigorous empirical and historical perspective. This course is a four-credit sequence in which you'll take two half-semester modules selected out of seven options (note: some modules are offered twice). See full list of options here.
Sections B1/B2 (Fall 2): Cornell William Brooks. Justice, Advocacy, and You: Race, Class, and Crime as a Case Study
Grounded in rigorous theory and demanding practice, this module equips students with sophisticated advocacy strategies to end systemic racism—and related “isms." Using the U.S. criminal legal system as a case study, students study successful movements and case studies, economic and moral arguments, legislative and legal strategies, data and storytelling, as well as history to develop their own campaigns to address today’s injustices now.
This course is required of all MPP1 students.