Investigates the politics of identity and recognition as the basis for claims about institutional legitimacy and social struggle. Examines such diverse figures as Sartre, Fanon, Bataille, Foucault, Lacan, Levinas, Derrida, Deleuze, Zizek, and Badiou.
Instructor
Robert Meister
Focuses on moral, metaphysical, and epistemological issues using classical texts along with some contemporary readings on related philosophical problems. Plato, Kant, and Sartre provide the central readings on ethics, while Descartes, Hume, Kant (again), and Wittgenstein provide the central metaphysical and epistemological discussions. Issues of philosophy of language and method are highlighted throughout.
Instructor
Emmett Peixoto
General Education Code
TA
Studies the modern concept of revolution. Course proposes to inquire into the concept of revolution, insurgency, revolt and resistance in theory and practice. The course aims to analyze thinkers such Thomas Hobbes, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Immanuel Kant, G.W. F. Hegel, Karl Marx, Carl Schmitt, Hannah Arendt, V.I. Lenin, Rosa Luxemburg, and the revolutionary declarations from the French Revolution to the Zapatista insurgency.
General Education Code
TA
Explores the politics of resistance and how different thinkers have conceptualized what it means to resist, why it is necessary, and with what methods it should be done. Side by side with the theorists of resistance, the course analyzes examples of resistance from around the world, traversing different time periods, geographies, and cultures. Examples range from peasant revolts to labor movements, feminist struggles to anti-war mobilizations, prisoner uprisings to anti-colonial wars and contemporary forms of corporeal, self-sacrificial resistance. Relying upon the concrete political problems posed by each historical instance as springboards into larger theoretical concerns, the course focuses on questions such as the nature of power relations, different forms of political organization and representation, the relationship between means and ends, the role of violence, and the function of different media, especially as they become manifest in the complexity of real politics.
General Education Code
TA
Places the anti-imperial radical and thinker Mohandas Gandhi in the context of twentieth-century global politics, philosophy, and history. Studies political and philosophical history through the global prism of empire and modernity.
General Education Code
PE-H
In the core of a London slum, with wars raging all around him, the printer William Blake sounded the trumpet of prophecy. This course channels Blake's war-time revelations, laying bare the antimonies of imperial violence and the prophetic tradition.
General Education Code
IM
Students develop the skills necessary to analyze popular music. First, challenging common-sense understandings of how music functions. And second, understanding how history works its way into musical forms.
General Education Code
IM
Examines the history and theory of the Black Panther Party (BPP). Texts situate the historical conditions leading to the BPP's rise; theoretical inspirations and contributions; national and international reach; and decline following state repression, electoral campaigns, and guerrilla warfare.
General Education Code
ER
Investigates the social, spatial, and economic inequalities that mark urban life in the United States. Focuses on broad debates and narratives about progress, development, race, creativity, and justice, tying these large themes to how the contemporary American city is produced, governed, and imagined.
General Education Code
ER
Examines how histories of war are inextricably tied to the histories of media, particularly in the the context of 20th-century United States. Emphasis given to the development of an interdisciplinary field of cybernetics (a study of control, purposiveness, information, and communication) as a response to the World War I. Interrogates how this field provided the theoretical material for media studies—at the same time contributing immense technological means to wartime development. Materials draw from political history, media studies, communication studies, philosophy of science, and critical theory, as well as various audio-visual materials such as music and film, to examine the intricate relationship between mass-produced communication and conflict.
General Education Code
TA
What is the witch? A historical person? A vestige of pre-colonial European ancestry? A cultural object whose image and identity are shaped by film, paintings and literature. Class considers the witch's development in Europe. Also reviews the witch as a tool of racial, economic and social stratification in society. By looking at how the witch is represented through visual and literary culture, students develop an understanding of the witch as a historic symbol of shifting relations of gender, class and power.
Instructor
Gabriel Mindel
General Education Code
IM
Examines how the integration of global trade, finance, and production networks has affected the lives of workers, with a particular emphasis on workers in (or from) the Global South. Each unit focuses on a particular aspect of working-class experience—migration, precarity, and coercion, successively.
General Education Code
CC
The goal of this course is to introduce students to the thought of Karl Marx and some of the major thinkers working in the Marxist tradition. The majority of the course centers on Marx's writing, though students also read texts that extend and develop Marx's ideas into areas that Marx himself did not explore. Course addresses questions central to the Marxist tradition: What is capital? What is capitalism? What is a capitalist state? How did Marx understand colonialism and national liberation struggles? What is the specific nature of gendered oppression and exploitation under capitalism? What is the relationship between capitalist production and cultural production?
General Education Code
CC
Course takes, as its starting point, the formation of the Marxian concept of imperialism in the early 20th century, in the context of centuries of colonialism and the late 19th-century scramble for Africa. Course surveys debates about imperialism in the post-World War period, particularly as they relate to the history of capitalism in the Global South and developments in world trade, finance, and production, leading to consideration of the present moment and grappling with what is novel in global capitalism today.
General Education Code
TA
Considers both the religious sources of political ideas and the political sources of religious ideas, addressing topics, such as sovereignty, justice, love, reason, revelation, sacrifice, victimhood, evil, racism, rebellion, reconciliation, and human rights.
Instructor
Robert Meister
General Education Code
TA
Starting from Donna Haraway's "A Cyborg Manifesto," course explores theoretical and myth-making texts that articulate visions of a future beyond humanity. Examines manifestations of the posthuman in film, fiction, and scholarly work. Readings include Haraway, Plato, Descartes, and others. Explores the concept of artificial intelligence as a fascination of science fiction, an engineering objective, a field of study, a philosophical problem, etc. Discussions on: (a) the figure of the thinking machine, its promises and attendant anxieties; (b) the history of ideas leading up to the birth of the field of artificial intelligence in the early 20th century; and (c) the philosophical roots of underlying concepts, such as intelligence, artificiality, agency, mechanism, identity, rationality, logic and free will.
Instructor
Michael McCarrin
General Education Code
TA
Cross-listed Courses
Workshop investigating moving and still images to create visual and sonic languages for production, exhibition and installation. Core faculty Mark Nash and Isaac Julien invite students to participate in ongoing projects as well as present and discuss their own work. Established artists, film makers and curators are also invited to present their work to the group. (Formerly offered as Research Group: Isaac Julien Studio Lab.)
Cross Listed Courses
FILM 250F, HISC 250F
Interrogation of the relationship between law and its instantiating gendered categories, supported by feminist, queer, Marxist, critical race, and postcolonial theories. Topics include hypostasization of legal categories, the contest between domestic and international human rights frameworks, overlapping civil and communal codes, cultural explanations in the law, the law as text and archive, testimony and legal subjectivity.
Cross Listed Courses
HISC 212
Explores how human subjects come to be visually defined and marked by race discourse. Covers diverse theoretical literatures on the topic, primarily in visual studies, but also in cultural studies, post-colonial studies, and psychoanalysis.
Cross Listed Courses
HISC 245, FMST 245
Instructor
Jennifer Gonzalez
Examines modes of thinking and imagining the future throughout human history, and considers the fate of the future today. Topics include apocalyptic religion, utopia and dystopia, progress, revolution, finance, and everyday life. Critical approach designations: Histories, Power and Subjectivities. Distribution requirement: Global.
Cross Listed Courses
HISC 149H
Instructor
Christopher Connery
General Education Code
PR-E
The social, affective, and psychic structures of our neoliberal era make it difficult to live a good life. Drawing on the broad tradition of critical theory and utopian imaginings, the course aims to give practical and theoretical guidance toward achieving a good life.
Cross Listed Courses
HISC 149
Instructor
Christopher Connery
General Education Code
TA