The North American City

William Dakan
Professor of Geography
University of Louisville
bdakan@louisville.edu

U.S. and Canadian cities share a continent, what can we say about their cultures, living conditions and governance? This course will answer this question by exploring four interrelated debates over North American urban life. First, do U.S. and Canadian cities have a similar character, regardless of the border separating them. Second, are Canadian cities uniform from region to region, unlike the distinctions we notice in United States between rust and sun belt cities. Third, if there are differences within Canada, can they be defined in regional and linguistic terms. Fourth, are the internal urban variations based on class, ethnicity, income and life-style one each side of the border? In other words, does it make more of a difference if you live in Vancouver or Seattle than where you live in those cities.

Comparative Constitutional Law:
The United States, Canada, and Germany

William Green
Professor of Government
Morehead State University
w.green@morehead-st.edu

Constitutions embody a commitment to limiting governmental power by entrenching a panoply of fundamental rights and freedoms. We will explore the role of constitutional courts in defining the meaning of individual rights and then will analyze the US, Canadian, and German constitutional court decisions on speech, religion, privacy and equality. We will give particular attention to obscenity, defamation, and hate speech; the display of religious symbols in public schools; abortion; and gender equality and homosexuality. We will also examine the European Court on Human Rights decision on these issues and the UN Human Rights Committee's Quebec language rights decision. Finally, we will ask why the United States remains largely unaffected by the civil liberties decisions of other nations and the growing body of international law.

Politics of the North American Auto Industry:
The United States and/or Canada

Ernest J. Yanarella
Professor of Political Science
University of Kentucky
ejyana@pop.uky.edu

The changing global political economy and restructuring of national, state, and local economies have placed the future of the North American automobile industry in jeopardy. This course will explore the politics of the Big Three in the United States and Canada in terms of globalizing trends in the international automobile marketplace, the emergence of Japanese and South Korean transplants in North America, the challenge of flexible production methods to traditional assembly line production, the problem of overcapacity in the international auto market, the role of union labor in the reorganization of the workplace, the technological advances in automobile construction and fuel efficiency, and the prospects for renewal of North American auto manufacturing in the face of global competition.