Graduate

An introduction to history of consciousness required of all incoming students. The seminar concentrates on theory, methods, and research techniques. Major interpretive approaches drawn from cultural and political analysis are discussed in their application to specific problems in the history of consciousness. Prerequisite(s): first-year standing in the program. See the department office for more information.

Writing-intensive course based on readings in HISC 203A.

Seminar anchored in a question fundamental to the history of ideas in the modern history of empire: How to think globally about political thought. Through sustained examinations of classic texts in the history of moral and political philosophy, the seminar explores how the "global" itself becomes a universal framework essential to understanding politics worldwide.

Examines modern humanism and its critics in a trajectory composed of three moments: foundational texts of 19th century humanism and some of their 20th century interpreters, the critiques of humanism launched by structuralist/post-structuralist continental theory in the 1960s that dealt with the essentialization of the human (theoretical anti-humanism), and contemporary critiques that take issue with anthropocentrism (posthumanism/transhumanism). Students consider thematics that have shaped humanism and the controversies surrounding it including questions of secularism, morality, and materialism, essentialism and class/gender/racial identity, anthropocentrism, and universalism. Readings include Feuerbach, Marx, Sartre, Heidegger, Foucault, Althusser, Haraway, Braidotti, and Ferrando.

Students read Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit from cover to cover. This book has been critical for many disciplines such as philosophy, politics, psychology, anthropology, sociology

Examines major streams of theorization about the subject in postwar and contemporary continental and critical theory. Thinkers include Althusser, Badiou, Balibar, Butler, Fanon, Foucault, Honneth, Laclau and Mouffe, Mbembe, Ranciere, and Sartre.

There is a history of political consciousness that culminated in the project of enlightenment. There is a history of individual, collective, and political unconscious, which culminated in fascism. These two histories are intertwined, but their outcome is not preconceived. On the contrary, their relationship and integration constitute a field of possibilities for social, political, and human experimentation. This course inquires into the concept of political unconscious by exploring thinkers, such as Kant, Foucault, Adorno, Horkheimer, Freud, Jung, Reich, Fromm, Marcuse, and Klein.

Explores foundational and emergent theoretical and methodological approaches to the study of race. Issues examined include the production of race within and across various spheres of human activity and how race has shaped notions of difference and commonality in the past and present.

Addresses about 10 of the significant critiques of human rights discourse published in the past decade by authors, such as Moyn, Douzinas, Fassin, Ticktin, J. Slaughter, D. Chandler, Mamdani, Weitzman, Badiou, and Meister.

Students expected to locate with fluency and precision their own research projects within the conceptual and methodological frameworks defining the late-20th century constellation of thought to be laid out systematically over the course of the term.

Attempts to break through the pervasive dystopia and catastrophism of the present and open up speculative proposals regarding the not-yet and what's to come. Students critically consider methodologies of futurity among varieties of radical imaginaries grounded in the traditions of the oppressed—including Afrofuturisms, Indigenous, Chicanx/Latinx, multispecies, postcapitalist, and communist proposals—and place them in relation to threatening reactionary, neo-fascist tendencies.

Although democracy is generally accepted as the best and most legitimate form of government, there is little agreement on what it means and how it should function. This course explores the concept and theories of democracy, with a focus on the “People”—who constitutes the people, how popular will is embodied, and how it may be expressed. Course explores debates about different models of democracy and examines how alternatives to democracy, such as dictatorship, autocracy, and tyranny, have been conceptualized. Also studies democracy and its “others” in relation to a constellation of concepts including power, equality, participation, accountability, resistance, legitimacy, and the rule of law.

Examines how artists and activists are responding by using surveillance technologies to look over "big brother's" shoulder and to create greater awareness of privacy issues. Course pays particular attention to metadata, big data, bio-power, and the relationship between various forms of surveillance with respect to privacy, publicity, and free speech.

Writing-intensive course based on readings in HISC 222A.

Through close readings of Althusser's major texts, this course systematically examines the political and philosophical thought of Louis Althusser and analyzes why he is one of the most important thinkers of the 20th century.

Investigates the many layers of Marx's Capital.

Examines modern conceptions of liberty from a non-liberal perspective. Proposes to inquire into the concept of liberty as an individual and collective right by exploring its philosophical justifications and criticism in thinkers, such as Kant, Hegel, and Marx.

Provides a careful contextualization and a critically informed interrogation of the major works of Carl Schmitt, a figure at the center of many contemporary debates in political and legal thought.

Investigates Walter Benjamin's thought through a close reading of some of the texts in his production that will enable students to address his conceptions of religion, politics, art, and history.

Introduces the relation between philosophy and poetics in some major 20th-century poets and thinkers.

Writing-intensive course based on readings in HISC 230A.

Explores the rise and fall of the philosophical system. It proposes to inquire into the origin of the systematic philosophy, its development, its crisis, and its disintegration. This theoretical trajectory will be investigated together with alternative trajectories in thinkers, such as I. Kant, G. Fichte, Novalis, K.W.F. Schlegel, G.W.F. Hegel, M. Stirner, S. Kierkegaard, K. Marx, F. Nietzsche, L. Wittgenstein, T.W. Adorno, W. Benjamin, Empedocles.

Examines the various modes through which intellectuals, artists, and other commentators have written about music as a socially situated art as well as the ways they have theorized the social through examinations of musical phenomena. Focus changes with course offering.

Focuses on the critical-theoretical approaches that are associated with an interdisciplinary group of scholars affiliated with the Institute for Social Research, known as the "Frankfurt School". Surveys some of their most important contributions to the critique of capitalism, the authoritarian state, instrumental reason, culture, historical progress, law, and social organization. Discusses whether or not these different works fit together into a single tradition called "critical theory" and what theoretical and political implications the gesture of such naming entails. Investigates the normative foundations of critique and the philosophical influences that shape them. Course also explores the different "generations" of the Frankfurt School and map out the relationship of these thinkers to the traditions of Western Marxism, psychoanalysis, and social theory. Concludes by analyzing the limitations of critical theory and the intellectual challenges it faces in the contemporary world.

Students read landmark works of classical and contemporary Marxism. Writings from Marx, Lenin, Trotsky, Lukacs, Gramsci, Adorno, Benjamin, Sartre, Althusser, Anderson, Jameson, and Zizek are addressed.

Writing-intensive seminar based on HISC 237A. Students read landmark works of classical and contemporary Marxism. Writings from Marx, Lenin, Trotsky, Lukacs, Gramsci, Adorno, Benjamin, Sartre, Althusser, Anderson, Jameson, and Zizek are discussed.

Provides training for graduate students in university-level pedagogy in general. Under the supervision of the department chair, coordinated by a graduate student with substantial experience as a teaching assistant.

Study of the work and influence of Frantz Fanon from a range of viewpoints: existential, phenomenological, psychoanalytic, and political; a variety of genres: film, literature, case history, and critique; and a set of institutional histories: clinical, cultural, and intellectual.

Writing intensive course based on readings in HISC 242A.

Includes readings of selected foundational texts in the intellectual lineage now known as "racial capitalism." Focus is on critical appropriation of and/or engagement with Marxism by key thinkers in what is now sometimes known as the "Black radical tradition." Authors may include Karl Marx, W.E.B. DuBois, Eric Williams, Oliver Cox, Walter Rodney, Stuart Hall, Cedric Robinson, Angela Davis, and/or Ruth Wilson Gilmore. Course is organized around the close reading of a set of key texts. In addition to developing knowledge of the substantive topics, the course is organized to facilitate the development of key skills in textual interpretation and analytic argumentation.

Examines the history of black radical intellectual, cultural, political, and/or social movements. May take the form of a survey of different aspects of black radicalism or may focus on a particular individual, groups, period, etc.

Offers a critical introduction and overview of black critical theory across multiple fields and genres. Beginning with the question of race and ontology, students go on to consider questions of sovereignty and domination, freedom and liberation, identity and difference, and conclude with a study of race and the post-human. Major thinkers studied include: Sylvia Wynter, Achille Mbembe, Frantz Fanon, and W.E.B. DuBois, as well as contemporary figures, such as Frank Wilderson, Fred Moten, and Hortense Spillers.

Surveys writings that bridge the divide between Black studies and environmental studies and, by extension, between environmental/ecological and postcolonial/antiracist movements. Considers the work of theorists, historians, and other academics, as well as that of activists engaged in on-the-ground struggle. Encourages an understanding of how colonialism and slavery and their legacies have been intertwined with the destructive ways of inhabiting the earth that have contributed to environmental crises facing the planet today. Draws upon such an understanding to assess present-day forms of critique and mobilization around racism and the environment.

French poststructuralism, with particular attention to the main philosophical texts of Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault. Other representative theorists as well as critics of poststructuralism are studied as time permits.

Survey of 19th- and 20th-century intellectual history that focuses on a cross-section of major works from Hegel to Levi-Strauss.

Examines key works of Frankfurt School theorist Jurgen Habermas, his followers, and critics, on topics such as the public sphere, the theory of communicative action, power and domination, and religion and secularism.

Survey of European philosophies of difference, tracing the evolution of philosophical concepts and frameworks from Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Bergson, and Heidegger through later 20th-century French post-structuralist, feminist, and Frankfurt School theory.

Examines the position of Africa in cultural studies and the simultaneous processes of over- and under-representation of the continent that mark enunciations of the global and the local. Themes include defining diaspora, the West as philosophy, and Africa in the global economy.

Focuses on the theorization of life and death in relation to power as proposed by 20th-century thinkers. Investigates how a biopolitical problematic has emerged and what insights into politics it offers. Explores the different ways in which thinkers have conceptualized biopolitics and its broader implications.

Focuses on the exploration of biopolitics and necropolitics on the body. Examines how the body has become deeply integrated into power relations in modern society. Also explores different forms of corporeality that are conduits of political struggle and sites of transgression, resistance, and refusal.

Readings include works by speakers at UCSC's Rethinking Capitalism Initiative. Topics are: (1) financialization versus commodification (how options-theory has changed capitalism); (2) material markets (how this theory performs); and (3) valuation and contingency (how economies make worlds).

HISC 268A addressed changes in the theory and practice of capitalism as derivatives markets have become increasingly central to it. This course, which can be regarded as either background or sequel, concerns questions that surround recent debates about derivatives from the standpoint of broader developments in law, culture, politics, ethics, ontology, and theology. What would it mean to see questions of contingency and value as a challenge to late-modern understandings of these modes of thought?

Covers modern conceptions of property and their critique. Inquires into the concept of property as an individual right by exploring its philosophical justifications and criticism in thinkers, such as John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Immanuel Kant, G.W. F. Hegel, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, and Karl Marx.

Explores the critique of the unilinear historical time through the prism of Reinhart Koselleck, Walter Benjamin, and Ernst Bloch's attempts to reconfigure the concepts of time and history. During the course, students investigate how time affects both representation of reality and political praxis.

Course aims to rethink Marx against the grain, from the debate with Russian populists to Capital and the Grundrisse. Investigates formal subsumption not as a historical stage, but as a form that denotes how capitalism encounters, incorporates, and combines existing modes of production without creating a homogeneous world.

The guiding thought of this seminar is the question of what is, and is not, sovereign. Exploring a wide range of authors (such as Bodin, Hobbes, Spinoza, Rousseau, Kant, Schmitt, Bataille, and Fanon), this seminar addresses the most salient problems in recent discussions of sovereignty.

The planetary environmental debacle has exposed the damaging consequences requiring the re-invention of eco-social arrangements. Knowledge fields have responded by assimilating ecological concepts, frameworks, and methods into ways of thinking and acting in the world, sometimes taking the sciences as a normative blueprint for the realignment of social, political, and ethical values. Course identifies the reclaiming of a speculative orientation in research dedicated to creatively fostering a diversity of ecological futures and explores the relevance of speculative thought for research and writing.

Explores the grounds for thinking that may be opened by engagements with earth, land, and soil as figures, places, and materialities in contemporary social and cultural theory. Engages with re-emergences of Earth as a ground for shared ecological consciousness and belonging and with critiques of planetary epistemic colonialisms that erase human and non-human experiences and conflicts from Indigenous land relations to the reclaiming of soil materialities. Amid anxieties for the planet’s future, we give attention to tensions between place-based ecological attachments and the perpetuation of nativist and nationalist exclusions, and to how Earth, land, and soil world-makings may appear uneven, unequal and divergent, common and uncommon, as well as inevitably interdependent.

Explores art movements that played a role in major struggles for independence and liberation from colonial regimes or reflected upon them subsequently. These art movements are examined though international art and media exhibitions. Case studies vary with each course offering. (Formerly HAVC 282.)

What is the meaning of autonomy in the midst of the current socio-ecological crisis? Is autonomist politics possible in the 21st century? The course discusses different dimensions of autonomy–self-determination, self-institution, self-valorization, self-definition—and focuses on the relevance and limits of autonomist politics across different social fields and across a multiplicity of unfolding translocal and transnational struggles. As we de-center, provincialize, and posthumanize autonomism, we examine the meaning of refusal and exodus in a contentious multi-polar geopolitical order and in a manifestly more-than-human world.

Readings focus on the early 20th-century rediscovery of political theology; its use in theorizations of the Holocaust; and its return in 21st-centurty debates on empires, war, terror, enmity, reconciliation, fanaticism, human rights, political economy, and global catastrophe. Students cannot receive credit for this course and HISC 85.

Independent study formalizing the advisee-adviser relationship. Regular meetings to plan, assess and monitor academic progress, and to evaluate coursework as necessary. May be used to develop general bibliography of background reading and trajectory of study in preparation for the qualifying examination.

A practicum in the genres of scholarly writing, for graduate students working on the composition of their qualifying essay or doctoral dissertation.

Research carried out in field settings, based on a project approved by the responsible faculty. The student must file a prospectus with the department office before undertaking the research and a final report of activities upon return.

Research carried out in field settings, based on a project approved by the responsible faculty. The student must file a prospectus with the department office before undertaking the research and a final report of activities upon return.

Research carried out in field settings, based on a project approved by the responsible faculty. The student must file a prospectus with the department office before undertaking the research and a final report of activities upon return.

Directed graduate research and writing coordinated with the teaching of undergraduates. Students submit petition to sponsoring agency.

Directed graduate research and writing coordinated with the teaching of undergraduates. Students submit petition to sponsoring agency.

Directed graduate research and writing coordinated with the teaching of undergraduates. Students submit petition to sponsoring agency.

Systematic working through a prearranged bibliography which is filed as a final report at the end of the quarter with the signature of the instructor. Students submit petition to sponsoring agency.

Systematic working through a prearranged bibliography which is filed as a final report at the end of the quarter with the signature of the instructor. Students submit petition to sponsoring agency.

Systematic working through a prearranged bibliography which is filed as a final report at the end of the quarter with the signature of the instructor. Students submit petition to sponsoring agency.

Systematic working through a prearranged bibliography which is filed as a final report at the end of the quarter with the signature of the instructor. Students submit petition to sponsoring agency.

A seminar study group for graduate students focusing each quarter on various problems in the history of consciousness. A statement and evaluation of the work done in the course will be provided each quarter by the students who have participated in the course for that quarter, and reviewed by the responsible faculty.

Independent study and research under faculty supervision. Students submit petition to sponsoring agency.

Independent study and research under faculty supervision. Students submit petition to sponsoring agency.

Independent study and research under faculty supervision. Students submit petition to sponsoring agency.

Under the supervision of a History of Consciousness faculty member, students finishing their dissertation meet weekly or bi-weekly to read and discuss selected draft chapters, design difficulties and composition problems.

Prerequisite(s): advancement to candidacy.

Prerequisite(s): advancement to candidacy.

Prerequisite(s): advancement to candidacy.