Graduate Program

The Faculty

The UC Santa Cruz Politics Department's faculty provides a distinctive mix of senior scholars whose work has led the field toward interdisciplinary and engaged research, and junior scholars whose work represents the diverse cutting-edge of U.S. and international political research. The small size of the program encourages close interaction among faculty and students.

The department enjoys several areas of especial strength. These include American political development and a focus on the social foundations of democratic politics and democratization. Clusters of faculty also specialize in the study of varieties of capitalism and post-communist politics and economy, the politics of Southeast Asia and Latin America, the study of race and politics, the politics of language, post-colonial theory and nationalist discourse, early modern political thought, and informal and translocal political organization.

The Curriculum

The Politics Department is impressed by the fact that many of the best studies of politics today disregard the conventional boundaries of the political science's disciplinary subfields. Therefore, the core graduate curriculum and qualifying examination process are structured around four interrelated themes central to political inquiry. Each of these areas of emphasis focuses, in a different way, on the relations among material life, institutional authority, collective mobilization, and political vision at all levels of politics.

Political and Social Thought brings together the history of political thought, contemporary social and critical theory, and the contributions of legal and institutional analysis of various kinds. This area of inquiry emphasizes the critical study of political practices that are experienced or understood as in some way limiting, oppressive, or wrong. The work of political and social theory as we see it is to transform our understanding of these practices, to see their contingent conditions and to articulate the possibilities of governing ourselves differently.

Political Institutions emphasizes the comparative and international study of political institutions as instruments of collective decision making and action. It focuses on the state and on transnational, subnational, and regional political institutions. In this area, we emphasize historical patterns of institutional development in relation to domestic political conflict and the changing contours of   international political economy and patterns of conflict and cooperation among states.

Political Economy focuses on the relationship between states, markets and societies. It addresses the history of the liberal state in the context of the origins and development of markets and capitalisms and the historical evolution of national and supranational economies. It considers the relationships among labor, capital, production, and consumption; political contexts for economic regulation and management; and the global and national problems of social welfare, resources, and the environment.

Political and Social Forces concerns the interaction of social forces and political ones, drawing upon the work of scholars focused on social mobilizations and histories. Accordingly, it focuses on the articulation and organization of political interests and identities. It studies the mutual interaction of these interests and identities with structures (states, discourses, public policy, and the law) uniting substantive and theoretical concerns across regional, national, and global politics.

Logics of Inquiry investigates approaches to study of politics and to enterprise of social science in general. Works from positivist, interpretive, historical, and critical approaches provide examples held up to critical and epistemological reflection.

The Politics graduate curriculum works critically upon and within conventional social science research and also ranges beyond its methods, drawing upon cultural studies, historical sociology, and history as they inform the study of politics. Students in the Politics graduate program also work with faculty in other distinguished departments at UCSC, including Literature, History of Consciousness, History, Latin American and Latino Studies, Environmental Studies, Philosophy, International Economics, and Feminist Studies.

Scholars and students in the program emphasize the articulation of important questions prior to the development of methods for grappling with them, while recognizing the importance of appropriate methodological tools for doing meaningful political research.

Teaching

Throughout its history, the department has been strongly committed to undergraduate teaching. The graduate program offers graduate students the opportunity to work closely with faculty and undergraduates as teaching assistants. Advanced graduate students are also eligible to design and teach their own lower-division Politics courses in the summer session. The Politics Department's faculty is committed to "the teaching of teaching;" its training of college educators emphasizes the importance of civic education in undergraduate instruction.