Fall 10
WSCP 71700 - Global Feminisms
GC M 4:15-6:15 p.m., Room 3207, 3 credits, Prof. Rupal Oza [12783]
Global feminisms will explore the gender dynamics of racial, ethnic, and economic relations of power in domestic, international, and transnational settings. We will examine feminist scholarship produced by and about American women of color, Third World women, and other social and political actors whose experiences and thinking have shaped contemporary ideas about gender, power, and international political economies. We will explore how both self-identified feminists and people who do not consider themselves feminists write about and understand gender, justice, human rights, tolerance, agency, imperialism, and other relevant topics. We will also examine how women and self-identified feminists practice solidarity across and within national boundaries, paying attention to the possibilities and constraints that shape transnational feminist activism. We will look at both empirical and theoretical texts from a range of academic disciplines. We will explore some of the following questions: How do racial. sexual, and national identities change the meanings of gender and feminism? Who should be the arbiter of "equality," "fairness," and "human rights"? How have conceptions of citizenship both changed and remained the same in the contemporary world? What ethical questions shape the practices of feminism and feminist politics both domestically and internationally? How has human rights discourse been deployed? What is the relationship between modes of production, political economy, and gender politics?
WSCP 81001 - Feminist Texts and Theories
GC W 4:15-6:15 p.m., Room 3209 , 3 credits, Profs. Kyoo Lee and Alyson Cole [12784] [Cross listed with MALS 72100]
This course provides a broad overview of the issues and texts of Women's Studies. The instructors will use an interdisciplinary approach to consider some of the themes, questions, methodologies, and findings of Women's Studies scholarship. The course will cover a selection of feminist texts, taken from both literary and social science sources, and also classic and contemporary theoretical works. In addition, students will explore the ways in which the field of women's studies has raised new questions and brought new perspectives to those areas where the humanities and social and behavioral sciences intersect, with material which is interdisciplinary in nature and frequently poses a challenge to conventional disciplinary boundaries.
WSCP 81000 - Introduction to African Studies: African Diaspora
GCW 4:15-6:15 p.m., Room 8404, 3 credits, Profs. Leith Mullings [12785] [Cross listed with Anthro. 71200 and IDS. 81610] Permission of the instructor required.
WSCP 81000 - Ethnography
JJ T 4:15-6:15 p.m., Room TBA, 3 credits, Prof. David C. Brotherton [12786] [Cross listed with CRJ 80100]
WSCP 81000 - Asian American Literatures, Asian American Discourses
GC M 11:45.- 1:45 p.m., Room 4433 , 3 credits, Prof. Kandice Chuh [12787] [Cross listed with Eng. 85000]
This course will provide entry into the literary history of Asian American literature. By identifying and engaging some of the principle critical debates that have organized Asian American literary studies, we’ll consider the different meanings that “Asian American Literature” has come to have over the past several decades. This course aims to provide students with a sense both of the particularities of Asian American literary history, and of the ways in which U.S. academic discourses operate more generally. We will be collectively asking, how do we understand, contextualize, and participate in the contemporary critical preoccupations of Asian American and/or U.S. cultural studies? Such non- equivalent terms as “post-identity”; “feminist”; “postcolonial”; “affect”; “ethnic”; “activist”; “queer”; “diasporic”; “theory”; “immigrant”; and “aesthetic,” are shorthand references to the kinds of debates we will examine.
The formal written assignments of the course will be geared toward encouraging students to become aware of how we embed ourselves into specific areas or fields of cultural studies.
Students taking the course for 2 credits will be asked to produce and present on an annotated bibliography that reviews the literature on a specific issue or text; students taking the course for 4 credits will be expected to produce a 15-20 pp essay. The texts anchoring the course will include work by such writers as Maxine Hong Kingston; Frank Chin; Lois Ann Yamanaka; Jessica Hagedorn; Mei-mei Berssenbrugge; Karen Tei Yamashita; Han Ong; Ruth Ozeki; Theresa Hak Kyung Cha; Chang- rae Lee; Jhumpa Lahiri; Kimiko Han; R. Zamora Linmark; and Monica Truong.
WSCP 81000 -Beyond Human Rights
GC F 11:45-1:45 p.m., Room 3309, 3 credits, Prof. Nico Israel [12788] [Cross listed with Eng. 76000]
This seminar explores the history of human rights discourse, with a special focus on how twentieth century literature and critical theory both support and challenge that discourse. The course weaves together critical strands currently preoccupying twentieth century studies: transnationalism, cosmopolitanism, Cold War politics, transitional justice, post-colonial studies and globalization. It should be of particular interest to those students interested in exploring the possibilities of ethics “after” post-structuralism.
Questions we will consider include: How do we define “human rights” and what do those rights have to do with global literary production? How do we negotiate between the subject who bears rights and the literary subject? How are human rights and literary narratives (or non-narratives) related? How can the logic of human rights account for imperialism and colonialism, and material disparities? Where is thedifference in human rights rhetoric?
We will begin by exploring the “Déclaration des droits de l'homme et du citoyen” produced just after the French Revolution, and will look at a couple of nineteenth century philosophical texts that both extend the rhetoric of rights (Hegel) and debunk them (Nietzsche). We will then spend several weeks on early twentieth century encounters with the codification of rights and other universal ideas, including the establishment of the League of Nations, the international socialist and social-democratic movements, and the history of Esperanto, in conjunction with literary texts (and/or excerpts of texts) by Franz Kafka (various stories) T.S. Eliot (The Waste Land) Ezra Pound (Cantos), James Joyce (Ulysses), Thomas Mann (Magic Mountain) Robert Musil (The Man without Qualities) and others. Particular focus during the middle of the course will be the development of the United Nations international declaration of human rights in the immediate aftermath of the second world war, and texts that problematize those rights, including those of Primo Levi (If This Is a Man), Frantz Fanon (Black Skin White Masks), Martin Heidegger (“The Age of the World Picture” [1939]), Hannah Arendt (Eichmann in Jerusalem), and Paul Celan (selected poetry) The later third of the class will explore the relation between human rights and civil rights in the era of the cold war (Ralph Ellison); Bessie Head’s critique of post-colonial reason; the work of J.M. Coetzee and the question of “barbarism” and reparation; W.G. Sebald and “holocaust fiction”; and the idea of the global human rights novel in the age of the “War on Terror” (Dave Eggers’s What is the What?). In conjunction with these other texts, we will read recent theoretical interventions into these questions by Derrida, Badiou, Hardt and Negri, Butler, Harraway, Agamben, Rancière, and Joseph Slaughter
WSCP 81000 - Aestheticism, Decadence, Modernism, 1880-1930
GCGCW 6:30-8:30 p.m., Room 4422, 3 credits, Prof. Richard Kaye [12789] [Cross listed with Eng. 86000]
This class explores the relation between turn-of-the-century aestheticist and decadent movements and their crucial determination of modernist aesthetics. Beginning with the fin de siècle, we will consider works by Hardy, Wilde, James, and Huysmans. The late-Victorian period was a time of pervasive fears and fantasies dominated by such figures as the New Woman, the urban detective, the homosexual bachelor, the Anarchist, the Oriental, the overreaching colonialist, the self-preening aesthete, the vampire, and the femme fatale. In the diverse writings of Pater, Olive Schreiner, Vernon Lee, Symonds, and Wilde, aestheticism emerged as a theoretically coherent and varied movement absorbed in exquisite surfaces and useless artifice. For decadent writers and artists, scientific theories of “degeneration” could be re-conceived as erotically charged, non-teleological experiments, while Freud drew on “decadent” scenarios for his proto-modernist narratives of hysteria and sexual disorder. Women writers, meanwhile, struggled to find a place within the male-defined coteries of aestheticism and decadence, a theme dramatized in James’ tale “The Author of Beltraffo,” narrated by a decadent acolyte, in which the aestheticist project must be sequestered from female readers, who can only misconstrue it as immoral. In the class’s second part we will explore how the fin outlasted the siècle, maintaining an intense afterlife in the Anglo-American modernist writing of Yeats, James, Eliot, Joyce, Stevens, Lawrence, and Djuna Barnes. The morbidity, subjectivism, sexual experimentalism, and excesses of literary technique characteristic of 1890s sensibility foment modernist revisions. We consider Joyce’s “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” as a rewriting of Wilde's “The Picture of Dorian Gray” (whose premise Joyce admired as “fantastic”) and the gothic fin-de-siècle bachelor’s reemergence as an aesthete-narrator in Lawrence’s neglected first novel “The White Peacock. ” The keenly observing, detached bachelor also narrates Rilke’s “The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge” (arguably the first modernist novel) and forms the paralyzed, solitary consciousness of Eliot’s “Prufrock.” Drawing on aestheticist models, Wallace Stevens is bedeviled by criticism that he is an "Aubrey Beardsley" of American modernism as he strives for a uniquely American (and sometimes "pagan") aestheticism. Intensifying our class’s focus on productively murky transitions and tensions, we will consider the discord between Edwardian realists, with their stress on social and historical topicality, and modernist experimenters obsessed with heightened subjectivity, perfect objects, and endless interiority, a rift made famous in Virginia Woolf’s essay “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown.” Yet this breech may have been overstated. Our class concludes with James’ “The Golden Bowl,” a novel of twinned adulteries that is one of James’ most topical, aesthetically difficult, and decadent works of fiction. Among the texts we will read: Hardy, “Jude the Obscure,” Huysmans, “Against Nature”; Wilde, “The Picture of Dorian Gray”, “Salome”; Huysmans, “Against Nature,” Freud, “Dora: A Case of Hysteria”; Stoker, “Dracula”; Lawrence, “The White Peacock”; Joyce, “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man,” Yeats, “The Celtic Twilight”; Eliot “Selected Poetry;” Stevens, “Selected Poetry”; James, “The Golden Bowl”; Barnes, “Nightwood,” Showalter, ed., “Daughters of Decadence.” We will read relevant critical and theoretical texts in the fields of Victorian, modernist, New Formalist, Feminist, Psychoanalytic, Gender, and Queer Theory as well as critical texts such as Symons, “The Decadent Movement in Literature”; Mario Praz, “The Romantic Agony,” George Bataille, “Literature and Evil”; Richard Ellmann, “The Uses of Decadence”, Richard Gilman, “Decadence: The Strange Life of an Epithet”; Linda Dowling, “The Decadent and the New Woman”; Michael Riffaterre, “Decadent Paradoxes,” and Leo Bersani, “The Culture of Redemption”. A mid-term paper and a final paper that may be expanded from the mid-term essay.
WSCP 81000 - Modernism and Its Margins
GCW 2:00-4:00 p.m., Room 3309, 3 credits, Prof. Jane Marcus [12790] [Cross listed with Eng. 76000]
This class will focus on canonical texts of what is called “High Modernism” paired with alternative works, lost or suppressed texts. Each class period will look at examples and relevant criticism, theory, biography or history. Our task will be to examine the cultural construction of various modernisms and to sort out competing definitions of what Modernism was or is. So we will look at some definitional studies, keeping in mind the fact that, for one thing, a certain Modernism in architecture, painting, music, writing and cultural style arrived in different cities and countries at different times. I hope we can look at various movements in art history, photography and culture as well as our reading projects. Although there appears to be a move among critics to isolate “modernism” to England and the U.S. with a few European Movements thrown in, as in Lawrence Rainey’s new Blackwell Anthology of Modernist texts, this class will try to use texts in which the empire writes back and to include the discourses of women, blacks, Hispanics, the uncanonized Irish, Africans and other non-Europeans. A project which comes to mind is to examine the influence of late arriving Brazilian Modernism on the poetry of Elizabeth Bishop, using her lover’s architectural work as a way of beginning. Was there a gay modernism? If we study gender in/and modernism, race in/and modernism or modernism and war, fascist modernism, modernism and empire/colonialism, we are assuming a central place for certain ideas of industrial and cultural progress, speed, simplicity, a reaction against Victorian excess. European modernism needs the primitivism it sees in Africa, the Caribbean, etc to define itself (Picasso and African art) and to claim its energy. On the other hand it is clear that India remains enshrined in a timeless religious, backward death-worshipping symbolic space for E.M Forster or Leonard Woolf, a space in which they can come to terms with their own identity and sexuality. I am thinking here of the emergence of a sort of Late Modernism in the works of the Turkish writer, Orhan Pamuk , especially Istanbul, which celebrates a melancholy anti-modernist love of a lost past, as well as Bilge Karasu’s Garden of the Dead Cats. Emerging writers from the non-western world were often influenced by Joyce, Eliot and Conrad and taught to devalue and lose their native cultures and languages, creating complex cultural struggles that continue to change.
WSCP 81000 -Mind, Body and Memoir
GCR 4:15-6:15 p.m., Room 3309, 3 credits, Profs. Nancy K. Miller and Jason Tougaw [12791] [Cross listed with Eng.87500]
Neurobiologist Antonio Damasio describes the mind as a "veil thrown over the skin," hiding "the inner states of the body" from the "organism"—or self. According to his theory, the brain builds a sense of self by mapping the body's interior states, but ironically the body's inner-workings are largely obscured from the self in the process. Autobiographies and memoirs from Augustine's Confessions to Kay Redfield Jamison’s An Unquiet Mind represent a tradition of first-person narratives that explore the mysterious relations between mind and body. In recent years, neurobiologists like Damasio, Gerald Edelman, and Oliver Sacks have revived and transformed debates about the mind-body problem, recasting it in response to the explosion of evidence emerging from the latest brain research. Writers like Temple Grandin, Siri Hustvedt, and Lauren Slater have also begun experimenting with this new information in memoir form, as they tell the intimate stories of their embodied lives, connecting the domains of brain, mind, body, and self. Throughout the semester, we will consider a wide range of autobiographical writing in the light of this research, as well as classic theories of mind and body.
Seminar readings will include a mix of canonical and non-canonical works drawn from literature, science, philosophy, and psychoanalysis.
Work for the course: weekly responses, oral presentation, one final paper.
WSCP 81000 -Theory Colloquium: Race, Space, Slavery, Diaspora
GCR 2:00-4:00 p.m., Room 3305, 3 credits, Prof. Robert Reid-Pharr [12792] [Cross listed with Eng.80100]
In this course we will refuse the Hegelian notion of the (black) African’s “lack of history.” Indeed we will push this idea to its limits by attempting to discern not only resistance but also forms of self-directed thought and action among enslaved blacks in those locations where they are most regularly portrayed as lacking will, culture, knowledge, and consciousness: the hold of the slave ship and the interior of the slave market. Specifically, we will ask whether the means and methods by which blacks inhabited these spaces might be understood as examples of so-called historical consciousness. Thus we will read scholars of slavery, race, and Diaspora against scholars of space and place. In the process we will attempt to tease out some of the possibilities inherent in the images of darkness, compression, and lack offormal knowledge (savoir) that frame almost all considerations of the slave trade. Students will be expected to produce five short (five page) essays during the course of the semester that address the week’s readings. This will begin the third week of class and students will be expected to read their completed works in class, turn them in to the instructor, and post them on-line for the rest of the seminar participants. These short papers will be assigned by lottery.
WSCP 81000 - Women in the Colonial and Early Republican Eras, 1609-1820
GCR 2:00-4:00 p.m., Room 5212, 3 credits, Prof. Carol Birkin[12793] [Cross listed with Hist.75300]
This course will examine the lives of American women – European, Indian, and African- from the colonial period to the antebellum era. The readings and discussion will focus on demographic patterns, family structure, gendered division of labor and female work patterns, gender ideologies, legal status, women’s religious experiences as well as the role women played in the American Revolution and the antebellum crusade for abolition. Careful attention will be paid to regional, racial and class differences in shaping women’s lives. We will discuss the central historiographical debates in the field as well as methodological problems in reconstructing women’s past.
Course Requirements: Students will write a 3-5 page critique of each week’s reading assignment. Students must be prepared to present their arguments regarding the reading in class discussion.
WSCP 81000 - The Medium of Culture
GCT 2:00-4:00 p.m., Room 5212, 3 credits, Prof. Dagmar Herzog [12794] [Cross listed with Hist. 71300]
This graduate seminar is designed to introduce students to both classic and recent texts in cultural theory-informed history and allied disciplines as well as to provide a forum for exploring persistent problems in history and culture that historians are presently struggling to theorize more effectively – among them violence, faith, desire, knowledge, and madness. All five of these topics test the limits of our available interpretive frameworks and unsettle conventional categories of analysis. All five of these topics are the focus of resurgent global significance. At the same time, interesting scholarship on these topics also raises profound questions – about human nature and its changeability, about historical causation, about the use and analysis of evidence – that challenge historians more generally. All force scholars to rethink assumptions about the relationship between past and present. All are also inextricably – albeit often complicatedly – interwoven with questions of gender. The course will draw on work informed by feminist, queer, psychoanalytic, and poststructuralist critical theory, and juxtapose the work of anthropologists and political theorists with a rich variety of historiography. The core focus will be on Europe and the U.S. in the 20th and 21st centuries, with some additional materials drawn from South Asian and Middle Eastern history.
WSCP 81000 - Prisons in Global Perspective
GCT 4:15-6:15 p.m., Room 4433, 3 credits, Prof. Mary Gibson [12795] [Cross listed with Hist. 72000]
This course will explore the development of prisons as the dominant form of punishment in the modern world. Readings will include “progressive” historians who consider prisons to be a humane alternative to corporal punishment and “revisionist” writers (including Michel Foucault, David Rothman, and Michael Ignatieff) who condemn incarceration as an intrusive and repressive disciplinary mechanism. The theory, architecture, organization, and subcultures of prisons will be explored within the historical context of industrialization, urbanization, and state-building in the United States and Europe. New research on Latin America, Africa, and Asia will provide a basis for discussing the spread of incarceration during the age of colonialism and imperialism and the treatment of political prisoners. Particular attention will be paid to the categories of gender, race, and age in the evolution of the theory and practice of punishment.
WSCP 81000 - The Fabrics of Cultures: New York Fashion
GCT 4:15-6:15 p.m., Room 6493, 3 credits, Profs. Eugenia Paulicelli and Joseph Glick [12796] [Cross listed with IDS. 82300 and MALS 70200]
The seminar will examine fashion as an industry, an economic force and a mechanism that creates and performs identities and fosters the interplay between gender, the body and sexuality. In particular, the focus of the seminar will be on New York and on American fashion from the Gilded Age till the present. Particular attention will be given to periods of great transformation when fashion plays an important role in shaping the cultures of cities, has an impact on lifestyles and gender perception in the workplace and other social and private spaces. The course will also pay attention to the various changes that had an impact on fashion in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The course will cover the span from the sweatshop of the second half of the nineteenth century where Jewish and Italian immigrants worked to the emergence of the “American Look” in the 1930s and 1940s, on to the subsequent shifts that occurred in the 1960s, up until the present with the New York Fashion week and New York as a global fashion capital. Special attention will be given to spaces of consumption and cultural mediation, department stores, magazines and the popular press, photography, film, art and design. New York fashion will be analyzed in both global and comparative perspectives. Topics will include immigration, ethnic identities, design, art and crativity, global versus local etc.
Readings will include authors such as Veblen, Simmel, Harvey, Benjamin, Arnold, Breward. In addition we will study literary and cinematic texts.
WSCP 81000 - Introduction to Lesbian and Gay Queer Studies
GCR 2:00-4:00 p.m., Room 3307, 3 credits, Prof. Matt Brim [12797] [Cross listed with IDS. 70100]
IDS 70100 will introduce students to the interdisciplinary field of LGBTQ studies. It will provide an overview of the foundational texts and theories that have both defined and challenged modern constructions of sexual identity, from 19th-century sexological research, through the psychoanalytic tradition, to feminism, to gay and lesbian assimilationist/ separationist identity politics, and especially the recent scholarly interventions made possible by queer theory. The course will emphasize contemporary issues that have helped to define the meaning/understanding of sex and desire: gay and lesbian activist movements, the relationship of queer theory to gender and feminist theory, the AIDS crisis, transgender liberation, queer of color critique, and the transnational flow of non-normative desire. Ultimately the course will help students examine the ways sexuality and desire exist within and through broader frameworks of cultural and social power.
WSCP 81000 - Globalization and Labor Power in the U.S.
GCT 4:15 -6:15 p.m., Room 5383, 3 credits, Prof. Frances Fox Piven [12798] [Cross listed with PSC 82002]
A large literature on popular or subaltern power has developed in the last three decades in the fields of political science, sociology, history and anthropology. This work was initially stimulated by the social movements that arose in the rich countries of the west in the 1960s and early 1970s, by insurgent peasant movements in Southeast Asia, and more recently by popular uprisings in Latin America. We have learned a great deal from this work. But even a cursory overview reveals two large problems for an understanding of contemporary and future popular upheavals. First, much of the literature has been framed by the assumption that movements are shaped by and oriented to national governments, and national governments in turn mediate responses to the movement. At the very least, globalization in its many dimensions complicates this understanding. Second, and this problem is more longstanding,
the literature is weak in explaining what are sometimes called movement outcomes or, in other words, movement power. This course will be guided by preoccupation with both of these problems. We will try to understand how the economic, political and cultural transformations we call globalization have influenced the potential for popular power, the forms it takes, and responses to it. And because of its historical importance, and the weight of the theoretical and historical attention that has been devoted to it, we will anchor our inquiry in the study of labor power.
We will begin this inquiry by reviewing the main theoretical perspectives on power, on globalization, and on the distinctive political history of workers in the U.S. The main empirical case we will examine will be familiar, the contemporary labor movement in the United States. We will consider arguments and data that illuminate the impact of globalization on traditional forms of labor power. More importantly, we will scrutinize new strategies emerging in the American labor movement and among workers elsewhere in the world that are premised on cross-border cooperation. In other words, we will consider the possibility that popular power strategies can not only cope with globalization, but even take advantage of the complex changes in economy, politics and society associated with the new world order.
WSCP 81000 - Power, Resistance and Identity
GC R 4:15 -6:15 p.m., Room 5212, 3 credits, Prof. Ruth O’Brien [12799] [Cross listed with PSC 82004]
This course studies individual forms of socially constructed identity (e.g., gender, race, ethnicity, sexuality, disability, and humanness), intersectional forms of identity (e.g., race and gender) and collective forms of identity (.e.g., labor, citizenship, social movements). It explores how these identities affect power and resistance as understood by contemporary philosophers such as Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, Gilles Deleuze, and cultural studies theorists Stuart Hall, Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri, among others.
*(Until the subfield, which is pending, this class would be counted like American Politics Course but it is under a General Header. It can be used to count against the five 800-level courses needed regardless of your major.)
SCP 81000 - Social Welfare Policy
GCW 4:15 -6:15 p.m., Room 5383, 3 credits, Prof. Janet Carol Gornick [12801] [Cross listed with PSC 73901]
This course will examine social welfare policy in the United States , in both historical and cross-national perspective.
The course will begin with an overview of the development of social welfare policy in the U.S. We will focus on three important historical periods: the Progressive Era, the New Deal, and the War on Poverty. We will end the first section with a review of developments in the tumultuous 1990s.
Second, we will survey selected areas of social policy provision, such as anti-poverty policy; health policy; employment-related social policy; social policy for the elderly; and/or work-family reconciliation policies. In each of these policy areas, we will assess current provisions and evaluate contemporary debates, integrating political, sociological, and economic perspectives.
In the final section of the course, we will assess selected social policy lessons from Europe , where provisions are typically much more extensive than they are in the U.S. We will close by analyzing the question of "American exceptionalism" in social policy, and will assess a range of institutional, ideological, and demographic explanations.
WSCP 81000 -In a Violent World: The Historical and Contemporary Intersections of Race, Gender and Violence
GCW 6:30 -8:30 p.m., Room 8202, 3 credits, Profs. Gail Garfield and Louis Kontos [12802] [Cross listed with Psych. 80103]
This course examines the social/political contexts of the nature and causes of violence in American society, whether the state, organized groups, or individuals perpetrate that violence. With an analytical focus on the intersection of race, gender, and class it explores the moral and political consequences of evolving forms of social control to answer a central question that is inherent in any debate on violence: When, if ever, should hurt, harm, or damage be used in the pursuit of some political end? In seeking answers, the course will draw upon both historical and contemporary examples of different types of violence in the development of America that include conquest and rebellion, revolution and counter-revolution, social order and disorder, and state rights and human rights.
WSCP 81000 - Interactive Environments
CCT 4:15-6:15 , Room 3305, 3 credits, Prof. Joan Greenbaum [12803] [Cross listed with Psych. 80103
This seminar includes our participatory analysis of interactive environments such as: Facebook, Google Earth; Youtube; Iphone applications; smart phone uses; as well as a wide variety of interactive digital media. Our starting point will be in studying people and the situations in which they use digital tools. For those who are interested, the readings and activities will also involve considerations for design of alternative human-centered interactive environments.
We will engage in readings and mini empirical projects using Actor Network Theory, and mixed interdisciplinary research approaches. Readings will include studies of place from newer works in Human Computer Interaction (HCI), Participatory Design and Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) as well as studies from the field of Environmental Psychology, Sociology and Geography. Environmental Psychology involves the study of built environments such as parks and homes and schools. This course takes as its starting point the fact that interactive environments--everything from ipods and mobile phones to web sites and interactive 3-D worlds—are also built environments that are often experienced as places.
Students using new media in their research, as well as those who are generally curious about digital media will find interesting connections. In particular it can be inspirational for students in Environmental Psychology, Geography, English, Music, Sociology, Urban Education and Women’s Studies as well as students in the Interactive Technology and Pedagogy certificate program.
WSCP 81000 - The Family in Transition
GCM 4:15-6:15 p.m., Room 6114, 3 credits, Prof. Margaret Chin [12804] [Cross listed with Soc. 83300
Today, the American family shows little resemblance to the breadwinner and homemaker nuclear, traditional, households of the mid 1950s. In the 21st century, we see instead a diverse set of families, including, same-sex parents and single parent households, dual-earning couples with children, and unmarried and childless adults. As a starting point, we will discuss sociological theories and research on the transition from the historical family to the modern and contemporary family including immigrant and transnational families. Then we will take an in-depth look at some important issues that affect families. It will touch upon how history, politics, culture, gender, sexuality, the economy, racism, the larger community, and social policy affect families.
WSCP 81000 - Objects, Networks, and Relations: Issues in Social Theory
GC R 6:30 -8:30 p.m., Room 5417, 3 credits, Prof. Patricia T. Clough [12805] [Cross listed with Soc. 80000]
As social theorists are drawn again to discussions about the social occurring across various disciplines, we will be asked to engage the philosophical and methodological attention now being paid to performance, to non-human agency, to the quantum dynamics of organic and nonorganic life and to the relationality immanent to matter. This shift in attention is in part a response to the exhaustion of critical philosophical approaches of the last forty years and a further development of their yet underdeveloped aspects as methodological concerns in relationship to digital technologies. However abstract the discourses moving these discussions may be, they are raising questions about the allure of the sensual, the force of the affective and the resonances of dynamic matter; they are putting materiality, temporality and affect centre stage in engaging epistemological and ontological concerns. In the course, we will give some attention to the ongoing philosophical discussions but even more attention to the implications for a study of the social, the political and the populational in terms of individuals and assemblages rethinking matters of race, gender, sexuality and ethnicity. We will explore the features of the technological infrastructure of an aesthetic capitalism, the beyond of biopolitical governance, their related effects on forms of living, creating and loving. We will consider a number of authors on objects, networks and relationality including Bruno Latour, Gilles Deleuze, Melanie Klein, Graham Harmon, Mark Hanson, Donna Haraway, Isabelle Stengers, Michel Foucault, Luciana Parisi, Steven Shaviro, Lauren Berlant and Brian Massumi.
WSCP 81000 - Gender and Health
GCW 4:15-6:15 p.m., Room 7314, 3 credits, Prof. Mary Clare Lennon [12806] [Cross listed with Soc. 83300
This seminar will consider key conceptual and substantive issues in gender, health and health care. It will primarily focus on the United States context. The seminar will include readings on the historical context in which health issues are situated and the social construction of sex and gender over time. Readings will focus on selected topics, including the women’s health movement, medicalization and social construction of health, and mental health.
WSCP 81000 - Transnational Social Movements
GCW 2:00-4:00 p.m., Room 5382, 3 credits, Prof. Carolina Munoz [12807] [Cross listed with Soc. 84600
In this course, we will explore the global response to the rise of neoliberalism and economic globalization. While social movements in the U.S. are significantly weaker than they were in the 1960s and 1970s, there has been an explosion in transnational movements. “Transnational social movements are movements with members in at least two nations that cooperatively engage in efforts to promote or resist change outside the bounds of their nation” (Gould and Lewis 2010). The first part of this course will briefly cover the main theoretical debates in the social movements literature. In the rest of the course, we will largely focus on labor, human rights, and anti-globalization movements. In analyzing transnational social movements, we will consider such questions as: How did these movements arise? Are transnational social movements effective responses to globalization and neoliberalism? How effective is the World Social Forum in providing a space for activists around the world to coordinate and organize collective projects? What are the limitations of transnational social movements? And how do transnational social movements negotiate race, class and gender dynamics.
WSCP 81000 - Social Welfare Policy and Planning I
H T 2:00- 4:00 p.m., Room TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Mimi Abramovitz [12808]
[Cross listed with SSW 71000] Permission of the instructor required.
This course is an advanced introduction to social welfare policy in the United States. It reviews the history of the U.S. welfare state, contemporary social welfare policies, forces contributing to the expansion and contraction of the welfare state, and alternate welfare state models. It develops a framework for analyzing social welfare policy and the skills for critical analysis. Special attention is paid to dynamics of race, gender and class and to feminist theories of the welfare state.
WSCP 81000 - Women’s Performance Art and Its Legacy
CCW 4:15-6:15, Room 3305, 3 credits, Prof. Annette Saddik [12810] [Cross listed with Thea 85700
During the late 1960s and early `70s, women's performance art evolved in conjunction with the feminist movement, positioning women as speaking subjects in the theater, as opposed to passive objects for visual consumption. More recently, neo-burlesque and cabaret have flourished as subversive performance models in response to shifting feminisms during the turn of our new century, when civil liberties were being stripped away. The performance artists we will be studying in this course use the spectacle of the female body as an active, desiring body to reveal and question the codes of heterosexual femininity, or what it means to "be a woman" on the stage in American culture, as they explore the hegemonic constructs surrounding gender and the complex ways in which language, silence, and "play" serve to both create and reflect these constructs. We will be using theorists such as Philip Auslander, Jill Dolan, Judith Butler, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Rebecca Schneider, Elin Diamond, Lynda Hart, Peggy Phelan, Sue-Ellen Case, Elaine Ashton--to inform our readings of the work of various women performers from the 1960s to the present--Carolee Schneemann, Annie Sprinkle, Karen Finley, Holly Hughes, Deb Margolin, Robbie McCauley, Lisa Kron, Anna Deavere Smith, Meow Meow, Dirty Martini, Julie Atlas Muz--in order to explore how these artists expose the invisible power relations that function in a patriarchal society and challenge the relationship of women to the dominant system of representation.
Assignments will include two essays (6-8 pages and 10-12 pages) as well as an in-class presentation.