The course covering the 2020 elections will be both universities’ first collaboration. | Christopher Charleston/The Cougar
The UH’s political science department will be collaborating with Rice University on a course for the fall centered around the 2020 elections in November.
The University’s political science department announced via a tweet on July 23 that the collaborating course will be called, “The 2020 Elections: Pandemic, Polarization and the Future of the United States.”
The course will take the format of a synchronous online learning setting from Sept. 16 until Nov. 4.
Staff from UH include associate political science professors Elizabeth Simas and Jeronimo Cortina. Cortina is also to be co-host of the “Party Politics” podcast associated with Houston Public Media.
“The program is divided by different courses and we’re excited to collaborate with our colleagues from Rice,” Cortina said.
This collaboration on a course between UH and Rice is the first of its kind.
The course registration website mentions the course will aim to answer one holistic question: “What kind of government do we want and need in the U.S., and what strategies will allow our ‘great experiment in democracy’ to flourish?”
Some topics that students can expect in this course from the UH professors include ideology, empathy and partisanship by Simas, and shifting demographics and political strategies in Texas and the U.S. from Cortina.
“I’m going to also be talking about how, you know, elections have become more and more competitive,” said Cortina. “You don’t see now those wide margins that we used to see when Republicans were winning all the elections – we see that in certain urban areas, Democrats are gaining ground.
