Austin Sarat - Chair of the Political Science Department
Welcome back! Hope you had a wonderful summer. All of us in Political Science are happy to have resumed teaching and working with our extraordinarily talented students.
We are eager to see you and catch up. Stay safe. Hope you are having a good semester.
Austin Sarat William Nelson Cromwell Professor Jurisprudence & Political Science, Political Science Chair 2022-23 Amherst College Amherst, MA. 01002 413-542-2308 (tel) 413-542-2264 (fax)
Gilles Verniers comes to Amherst from Ashoka University, India, where he teaches in the Political Science Department. He completed his PhD in Political Science from Sciences Po in 2016. His work focuses on questions of democracy and political representation in India, with a focus on gender and minority representation and participation in electoral politics. He is the director of the Trivedi Centre for Political Data, a research centre that builds and disseminate primary data on Indian politics and public elites, across politics, the bureaucracy and the judiciary. He is currently working on a book manuscript which charts the formation of a new political class in the state of Uttar Pradesh, and addresses the tension between the politics of inclusion and the resilient elitism of India’s representative assemblies.
This October, Professor Verniers was a featured lecturer at the Political Economy of Contemporary South Asia Conference hosted by the Institute for South Asia Studies, UC Berkeley. He gave a talk titled "Data and Democracy". This was a workshop on Dialectics of Globalism and Nationalism, Inequality and Populism, Agrarian and Urban Crises, and Data and Social Justice.
This spring Gilles will teach a new course, POSC 222 / HIST 222, entitled "Histories of the Far-Right along with Professor Adi Gordon from the History Department.
Manuela Picq
After leading a presidential campaign in Ecuador this summer, Manuela is spending the fall in Guatemala expanding her research with Maya ancestral authorities. She came to Amherst mid-October to co-host the 2023 Native American and Indigenous Studies Symposium, which was a success! Over 130 people registered for the Five College event that welcomed guest speakers from Maya and Mohawk nations to address various forms of resistance in Abya Yala in scholarly and poetic forms from the Book and Plow Farm to the Powerhouse, passing by the Mead Art Museum. October was also the occasion to welcome the artwork of indigenous Amazonians Naine Terena and Kaya Agari at the Mead Art Museum, an acquisition project curated by the students taking Manuela’s 2022 class “Indigenous Women in International Relations” (POSC 411).
Manuela has a new book out and another one coming. Her book Soberanias Vernaculas, translated to Spanish by Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, was just published by the Argentinean press Prometeo Editorial. Manuela launched the book at the University of Guayaquil in June and toured it in Ecuador over the summer. She is now revising her latest manuscript “Savages and Citizens: Indigenous-State relations from Thomas Hobbes to Evo Morales,” co-authored with Andrew Canessa, for publication with The University of Arizona Press. She is also preparing a second version of her co-edited volume “Sexualities in World Politics” for Routledge.
It was a great year for legal activist work. In November 2022, Manuela and her partner Yaku Perez Guartambel established an international precedent for when the UN’s Commission on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination recognizedindigenous ancestral marriage, winning an eight-year legal battle against the state of Ecuador. This fall, the case for her arbitrary detention during a peaceful protest in Ecuador was admitted at the Inter-American Commission of Human Rights.
Much of Manuela’s organizing focuses on water: in January she co-organized a Continental Summit of Water Defenders in Cuenca, Ecuador, and in In August, her community won a two-decade collective battle for rights to prior consultation to protect the Kimsakocha highlands from metal mining industries. Now Manuela is developing a community science project to weave collaboration between water defenders and scholars in the highlands of Ecuador. This spring, she will be awarded the 2024 Outstanding Activist Scholar of the International Studies Association (formerly granted to Naomi Klein and Angela Davis) in recognition for her activism work.
What do we mean by politics? Amherst’s Department of Political Science treats the study of politics as a liberal art, offering students new perspectives on political phenomena. The Department offers a diverse range of courses in three broad areas of study:
Political Theory
Domestic Politics and State–Society Relations
International Politics and Practices
Our courses engage theoretical assumptions that underlie political life and examine different institutional arrangements and political practices. They provide the resources by which students can critically evaluate and engage contemporary political life.
Thesis Title: Rural Reimagined: The Political Economy of Rural Short Video Production in China
Abstract: The glistening skylines and high-tech megacities that define China today tend to overshadow the devastating effects that the largest urban migration in world history has had on China’s rural communities. Since the 2000s, the Chinese Communist Party has attempted to address rural neglect, but these strategies have revealed a critical shortcoming: the necessity of bottom-up grassroots innovation to support and balance top-down government intervention. My thesis examines the emergence and rapid growth of short video platforms Douyin (TikTok) and Kuaishou in rural China and demonstrates how these platforms have begun to fill this rural development shortcoming by enabling remarkable innovation and entrepreneurship in rural China from the bottom-up. Through the analysis of several case studies, I illustrate how rural creators and entrepreneurs are beginning to record a multi-dimensional picture of the changing Chinese countryside and fuel a powerful new engine for rural revitalization. As I present these cases, I also present a timely and important update on how we ought to think about rural development in contemporary China in the wake of the pandemic.
Meet the Political Science Faculty
Political Science Faculty
The Amherst Political Science department offers a broad range of courses, including small introductory offerings in areas such as political theory, war and refugees, and contemporary China, and advanced seminars in geopolitics, nuclear security, Machiavelli and more. Follow the link below to meet our faculty.
Our faculty have posted office hours. If you cannot meet during their posted office hours, please email them to schedule an appointment. Follow the link below for more details.
The International Relations Certificate offers students an opportunity to pursue an interest in international affairs as a complement to their majors and shows graduate schools or future employers that they have a strong interest in world affairs. The Certificate is designed to encourage motivated students to develop a global perspective on the origins of the current international system, the salient concerns in international relations today, and the emerging challenges humanity will face in the years ahead. The Certificate encourages students to explore how global, regional, and domestic factors influence relations between actors on the world stage. Students are advised to make interdisciplinary connections between the complexities of numerous global challenges, such as competition among the great powers, nuclear proliferation, transnational terrorism, regional and ethnic conflict, migration, environmental degradation, demographic stress, global climate change, socioeconomic and cultural globalizations and wide disparities in global economic development.
Earning the certificate requires demonstrating competence in a contemporary foreign language (four semesters of a single college-level contemporary foreign language) and earning at least a B in each of seven courses on world politics and institutions, the international economy, the history of the international system, US foreign policy, and the politics, history, economy, or culture of one or more foreign areas.
The courses listed in these sections of the IR Certificate program can be used to fulfill your International Relations Certificate. It is important to know that courses listed below may or may not be offered during each academic year at Amherst College. However, you may be able to take similar courses at the other four participating institutions or while studying abroad. There may be additional courses offered which fulfill your requirements during the academic year which do not appear in the printed catalog but can be found in the on-line version of the course catalog.