Message from the Department Chair
Not Just What? But Why? And How?
Welcome to the Department of Political Science and International Relations! Our faculty and students investigate power and politics as part of the human experience in a wide array of settings. These include the interaction of political institutions with ordinary people; democracy, autocracy, and democratization; the politics of gender and race; law and human rights; political economy and philosophy; foreign policy, and international security. All this takes place in the context of geopolitical realities in regions including the United States and North America more broadly, Latin America and the Caribbean, Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and Europe. The scholarly endeavors of POIR faculty and students come together in a vibrant mosaic…
Statement of Solidarity with our Community
Dear All,
We write, first and foremost, to say that we stand against all forms of systemic racism, white supremacy, and anti-Black violence.
We are outraged by the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery. This onslaught of anti-black police violence combined with a pandemic that is disproportionately infecting and killing Black and brown people is heartbreaking, infuriating, and demoralizing. Police brutality and the racial disparities in infection and healthcare are only the most (currently) visible manifestations of the deeply rooted structures of racism that pervade our state institutions, our streets, our hospitals, our classrooms, our homes, and our minds. Witnessing militarization and police violence against peaceful protest is dismaying for us all, but disproportionately traumatic for Black people.
We write to stand in solidarity behind, alongside, and in front of our students and colleagues who are fighting every day to survive in and change these structures. We write to publicly commit ourselves to acknowledging and working to better understand the additional fear, grief, and exhaustion our Black students and colleagues experience every day…
