Social Thought & Polic. Econ 492H - STPEC Focus Seminar II
Spring
2021
01
4.00
Agustin Lao-Montes
W 4:00PM 6:30PM
UMass Amherst
82833
Fully Remote Class
lao@soc.umass.edu
A four credit honors seminar for STPEC students who have completed STPEC 391H. Focus seminar topic changes each semester. Fulfills the STPEC Focus seminar requirement.
Open to Senior and Junior STPEC majors only. STPEC 391H Topic Title: "Civilizational Crisis, Necropolitics, Movements for Black Lives and the Rise of Radical Vitalism"
This STPEC Seminar will explore not only the roots causes and symptoms of the Coronacrisis as a climatic moment of the global civilizational crisis, but also the wave of resistances, struggles, and social movements that preceded the pandemic and acquired worldwide character with the global wave of protests with the banner ?Black Lives Matter?, in the aftermath of the assassination of George Floyd on May, 25, 2020, constituting what we call the Ebony?s Spring. Arguably, the Ebony's Spring, as a compelling response to the necropolitics of the coronacrisis, constitute a key articulation of the conditions of possibility for the rise of what we call a radical vitalism, namely a politics for life that is radical in so far as it challenges the entangled forms of oppression and inequality of capitalist modernity. On that key, the seminar will study the multiple causes and diverse manifestations of the crisis and how the pandemic exacerbated oppressions and facilitate space for the emergence of new ones, at the same time that it became generative of a new wave of antisystemic movements. Given that is goal is to investigation and analyze the proximate past and the present, history-in-the-making, sort to say, the seminar will be a workshop to device creative ways to understand a very complex and rapidly changing world on the basis of readings from some of the most interesting and imaginative interpretations as well as from our own experiences and projections for possible futures
This STPEC Seminar will explore not only the roots causes and symptoms of the Coronacrisis as a climatic moment of the global civilizational crisis, but also the wave of resistances, struggles, and social movements that preceded the pandemic and acquired worldwide character with the global wave of protests with the banner ?Black Lives Matter?, in the aftermath of the assassination of George Floyd on May, 25, 2020, constituting what we call the Ebony?s Spring. Arguably, the Ebony's Spring, as a compelling response to the necropolitics of the coronacrisis, constitute a key articulation of the conditions of possibility for the rise of what we call a radical vitalism, namely a politics for life that is radical in so far as it challenges the entangled forms of oppression and inequality of capitalist modernity. On that key, the seminar will study the multiple causes and diverse manifestations of the crisis and how the pandemic exacerbated oppressions and facilitate space for the emergence of new ones, at the same time that it became generative of a new wave of antisystemic movements. Given that is goal is to investigation and analyze the proximate past and the present, history-in-the-making, sort to say, the seminar will be a workshop to device creative ways to understand a very complex and rapidly changing world on the basis of readings from some of the most interesting and imaginative interpretations as well as from our own experiences and projections for possible futures