Critical Social Inquiry 0203 - The Queer University in Ruins

What is the idea of the University and how did we materially find ourselves here? What, or who, is the University for? The University, as we now know it, is a place of immense contradiction: supposedly sites of nationalist or cultural cohesion, but also, as Bill Readings has shown, empty signifiers for "excellence." Places where we might theorize queer horizons, but, at the same time, institutions that have financial investments in anti-queer industries like weapons, prisons, and dispossessive technologies. In this class we'll trace a history of the University and its interfacing with queerness, from the GI Bill to today's encampments for Palestine. We'll seek to understand how it was that queerness became absorbed into the University, and to what ends. Throughout, we'll think queerness alongside other topics in critical university studies: labor, precarization, globalization, debt, and neoliberalism's phagocytic relation to "difference." Keywords:University, theory, educational justice

In/Justice The content of this course deals with issues of race and power Students should expect to spend 8 hours weekly on work and preparation outside of class time Books: Title:The University in Ruins Author:Bill Readings ISBN:0-674-92953-5 Cost:$26.56 Title:The Reorder of Things Author:Roderick A. Ferguson ISBN:978-0-8166-7279-0 Cost:$25 Title:The Autocratic Academy: Reenvisioning Rule Within America's Universities Author:Timothy V. Kaufman-Osborn ISBN:978-1-4780-1982-4 Cost:$28.95 Title:Ebony and Ivy Author:Craig Steven Wilder ISBN:978-1-6081-9402-5 Cost:$25.64 Title:Poor Queer Studies Author:Matt Brim ISBN:978-1-4780-0820-0 Cost:$27.95 Title:On Being Included Author:Sara Ahmed ISBN:978-0-8223-5236-5 Cost:$26.95 Title:The Making of a College Author:Franklin Patterson & Charles Longsworth ISBN:https://sites.hampshire.edu/ctl/files/2014/07/The_Making_of_ a_College.pdf Cost:Free online