LEHR Approaches Seminars introduce students to ways of studying the value systems articulated by the world’s various legal traditions, philosophies, and religions throughout history. Based upon interdisciplinary and cross-cultural inquiries, students will explore the search for meaning and purpose in different societies and cultures, and critically reflect upon the development of different governmental, legal, economic, and religious systems. Courses may contextualize the methods and theories under consideration by examining cases of social progress and decline, conflicts, revolutions, and other changes throughout history. Instructors will introduce selective approaches and methodologies from various fields and disciplines including history, philosophy, political science, psychology, law, religious studies, and other social and behavioral sciences to explore synergistic possibilities for analyzing the values of institutions, movements, groups, and individuals. Students will learn how various forms of knowledge and power complement, depend on, or conflict with each other in an increasingly connected world. We will ask how global perspectives can change traditional approaches to fields of knowledge, and we will encourage attentiveness to broad questions often neglected by more narrow discipline-specific concerns, e.g., how religion serves or impedes prospects for peace, how the enforcement of anti-bribery laws changes cultures, how the use of confession and torture reflects ideological conceptions of race, class, and gender.
Sample Courses: