Undergraduate Fields of Specialization: Social Movements and Social Change

This field of specialization is geared to students who want to know how significant social and political change happens.  Those who hope to become effective agents of change in their own societies will find this specialization especially helpful as it reveals the ideas and tactics that human beings in various times and places have employed in hopes of creating a world more aligned with their values.  Courses in this specialization will also analyze, of course, the results of those movements for change, including the unintended consequences of “success,” and with special attention to the contexts that explain those results.  This specialization shares with all historical inquiry two significant possibilities, that of empowering students with knowledge of how the world operates and how people have deliberately changed their societies in the past and of freeing students by revealing that the way things are is not the way things have to be.