Now in her third year as Chapple Professor, Kristi Andersen works with the diverse MAX Course teaching teams to identify the critical issues and debates that will be the focus each year — such as the electoral process, health care reform, education, and Social Security. "One of its goals is to teach students how to be critical consumers of data as citizens as well as potentially as policy analysts or working in some social science-related occupation," Andersen says.

A new book by political scientist Shana Gadarian explores how anxiety over public threats affects the political arena.

The Maxwell Citizenship Initiative aims to identify common interests in citizenship issues among faculty and students throughout the school, and then to provide new avenues and support for sharing ideas and collaborating. “Our goal,” says Prema Kurien, professor of sociology and one of the founders of the project, “is to create faculty clusters based on research interests.”