(Offered as AMST 308 and SOCI 308) The relationship between girls’ empowerment and education has been and continues to be a key feminist issue. For instance, second wave liberal feminist approaches sought to make schools more equitable through equal access to educational resources for girls and the elimination of gender discrimination. Yet the relationship between gender and schooling remains a complex site of research and policy.
Sundays are not necessarily sunnier than Mondays. Nonetheless, most people prefer Sundays to Mondays. In this course, we discuss this interesting phenomenon in reference to the following question: which historical factors distinguish between days, hours, activities, and places within the “productive” and “unproductive” binary?
(Offered as AMST 200 and SOCI 200) Large numbers of students continue to drop out or disengage from American schools each year. Critical educational researchers have argued that many school practices, policies, and cultures “push out” the most marginalized students, or at the very least, do not take sufficient steps to create a culture of belonging. This course examines political, social, and institutional belonging as well as the conditions of schooling that prompt students’ formal and less formal forms of school disengagement.
This course explores a key concept in contemporary political theory that gives rise to intriguing and far-reaching social and philosophical questions. Modes of address, such as a police hailing or following directions from our cellphones, are forms of signification. People, other living beings, objects, and places direct these modes at each other. Address underpins large-scale political structures, such as transnational organizations, national institutions, technology, publicity, and cosmopolitanism, as well as diminutive everyday interactions like seeing, hearing, and feeling.
We live in a world in which we are constantly surrounded by technology. In fact, we increasingly relate to the world, to each other, and to ourselves, by means of modern technologies. How do we understand this technological life from the perspective of political and social theories? This course focuses on this problem by covering theoretical foundations that offer groundbreaking and intriguing perspectives on technology in the modern world: Martin Heidegger, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Bruno Latour, Slavoj Žižek, and more.
Day-to-day experiences of the lovely, the playful, the zany, the uncanny, and the mysterious encode an intricate sociality and politics. This course explores their potentialities and powers of these experiences. How do these experiences animate society and mesh with elements of critical reason, performance, and the market? What alternative kinds of pleasure and desire come to light? What other categories are urgent today? Readings in contemporary political and aesthetic theory in multiple traditions.
