Leadership courses

Instructor: Molly Spencer 
Course listing from previous term: PubPol 300
Anticipated Winter 2026

This course, structured as a seminar and writing workshop, intensively develops students' persuasive writing and critical reading skills through abundant practice and feedback. Weekly writing assignments and exercises will focus on every stage of the writing process, from brainstorming and research through drafting and revision, in three vital areas of political writing: the short opinion piece, the policy memorandum, and the polemical essay. We will read and analyze a wide variety of examples from traditional print and online media, from journalistic, government, and academic sources. We will also explore ethical considerations of policy writing, considering the ways in which our rhetorical choices, tone, word choice, even syntax construct our subjects and frame contentious issues for target audiences.

Instructor: Cat Summers
Course listing from previous term: PubPol 475.011
Anticipated Winter 2026

This course will introduce you to the fundamental leadership concepts and skills you need to successfully navigate and shape dynamic organizational and policy environments. You will have opportunities to develop a deeper understanding of yourself and build your ability to effectively lead teams. You will learn how to set a tone, a focus, and a direction for an organization, its members, and other stakeholders. You will practice leadership behaviors that will help you better connect across differences and enact change in complex, multi-layered contexts. Designed to provide you with opportunities for reflection, study, debate, and practice, this course will enhance your ability to make a positive and meaningful difference.

Instructor: Kamissa Camara
Course listing: PubPol 475.012
Anticipated Winter 2026

Great power rivalry is a critical concept that frames current perceptions of international affairs around China's rise, Russia's resurgence and the United States relative decline. This undergraduate course goes beyond the traditional focus on the U.S., China, and Russia by providing a comprehensive overview of the shifting dynamics in global power politics of the 21st century. It will explore the involvement of rising powers in the international order, such as India, Brazil, South Africa, Turkey, Morocco, Gulf countries and Indonesia. The course will examine each rising power's foreign policies and strategic priorities, their economic and military capabilities and how these shape how they engage and compete in the global order. The course will also examine how global rivalries play out within multilateral organizations (such as the United Nations, NATO, the European Union and the African Union) and will deep dive into current geopolitical crises such as the war in Ukraine, the political crises of the Sahel and China's ambitions over Taiwan. 

Instructor: Morela Hernandez
Course listing: PubPol 580

We often think of policy analysis as a technical field in which we apply analytical tools to determine the most effective and efficient way to achieve policy goals. However, every time we enter the policy arena, we confront normative questions with no agreed-upon answers:  What is the public good? How do we decide among competing goods? What should our policy goals be and how do we determine them? How do we make decisions when normative commitments and goals are themselves in conflict?

This course is based on the conviction that understanding the moral and ethical dimensions of public policy is necessary to effective policy analysis and a crucial foundation for any policy career. This course will familiarize you with a set of concepts and tools for reasoning, arguing, and writing about the normative issues that confront people working in politics and public policy. Our approach will combine theoretical interrogation of applied ethics with a case-based approach to theoretical applications. We will connect concepts from political philosophy and applied ethics including utility, liberty, justice, and rights to unpack and assess real-world challenges that face policy analysts and policymakers. Our examination will span topics from a variety of policy arenas. This section of 580 focuses primarily on U.S. domestic policy, with some attention to international policy.

Students who take this course will:

* Gain an understanding of key concepts in applied ethics, including the ethics of professional practice

* Develop and demonstrate the ability to think in a sophisticated, reflective, and reflexive manner about the values and goals of public policies in a variety of arenas

* Develop the ability to identify the values implicit in policies, articulate their own values, and engage the values of others

* Develop and demonstrate the ability to communicate concisely and persuasively, both orally and in writing, about the moral and ethical dimensions of politics and public policy

* Develop the ability to integrate ethical considerations into policy analysis and decision-making 

Instructor: Morela Hernandez
Course listing: PubPol 582

This course will introduce you to the fundamental leadership concepts and skills you need to successfully navigate and shape dynamic policy environments. You will have opportunities to develop a deeper understanding of yourself and build your ability to effectively lead teams. You will learn how to set a tone, a focus, and a direction for an organization, its members, and other stakeholders. You will practice leadership behaviors that will help you better connect across differences and enact change in complex, multi-layered contexts. Designed to provide you with opportunities for reflection, study, debate, and practice, this course will enhance your ability to make a positive and meaningful difference.

Instructor: Attia Qureshi
Course Listing: PubPol 583

Negotiation Basics for Public Policy will provide students with an understanding of the theory and processes of negotiation as practiced in a variety of settings. It is designed for relevance to the broad spectrum of bargaining problems faced by the manager and professional. Students will have the opportunity to develop negotiation skills experientially and to understand negotiation in useful analytical frameworks. Emphasizes simulations, exercises, role playing, and cases.

Instructor: Amy Harris
Course Listing: PubPol 586.002

This course will equip students with the management skills and tools to strategically plan and implement initiatives that further their intended positive impact. The course will help students develop a framework to move from a public problem they observe in the world and develop a results-driven approach to addressing it. Students will develop and apply an analytical toolkit and set of leadership best practices to manage for positive change, including: mapping their environment, strategic organizational planning, planning for results, and managing for results. In teams, students will create strategic and performance management plans for a public or non-profit organization that furthers a positive impact. These plans will be submitted as a group memo, and presented during class. Students will also complete an individual reflection paper.

Instructor: Kaitlin Raimi
Course listing: PubPol 589.001
Course listing: PubPol589.002

Conflict is an evitable part of the human experience--in relationships, at the work place, in public administration and especially in the public policy making process. Unresolved conflict can hinder decision making and impede organization change, but when conflict is addressed, managed or transformed, it is possible for relationships, organizations, and systems to grow and succeed. Drawing on empirical research and case studies, this skills-based course will begin with a discussion of the impact of conflict in systems and a taxonomy of forms of conflict with an eye toward public administration. Then the course will focus on the development of strategies that can be used to resolve or manage conflicts, with opportunities for students to develop those skills through in-class exercises. Special attention will be paid to skills that can be used to address conflicts that emerge across differences such as race and ethnicity, political orientation, and gender. 

Instructor: Yazier Henry
Course listing: PubPol 495.001

What are public official apologies? How are official public apologies related to the complex politics of difficult social questions of national democratic membership, memory and constitution? How national dialogues on reparations are mediated and publicly articulated over time shapes not only nation state but also how members, groups and citizens see themselves in relation to each other. How do individuals, communities, nations and states mediate, acknowledge, remember, deny or ignore their violent national pasts and conflicts? What has been the role of transitional justice mechanisms such as truth commissions and acts of official public apology in shaping reparative frameworks as part of the democratic state’s quest for greater social cohesion after conflict? Why is it important to understand how the intersecting structural relations and imbalances of power, domination and subordination inherent to conflict dynamics can be addressed through national public policy and reparative frameworks? What are the historical, social, economic and policy challenges faced by states after extended periods of administrative violence and internal conflicts. How do the politics inherent to collective, institutional, group and collective interests strategically influence the ways in which the policy frameworks and corresponding social, political and economic outcomes are resolved politically? These national membership questions remain a constant part of the legal, political, moral, historical and national dialogue constituting the current national public policy frameworks which in turn affect important questions and conflicts on reparative, social, administrative justice and the meaning of human rights. To address these questions this comparative public policy seminar will explore the currency and economics of transitional justice mechanisms, reparative processes and public official apologies in South Africa, New Zealand, Australia, Canada and the USA.