The following courses are approved courses for FA23 for those pursuing a graduate certificate in Social Theory: 

ST 500: Introduction to Social Theory (3 credits)
Instructor: Tad Mutersbaugh
Day & Time: Thursdays from 4:30-7 pm 
Location: Whitehall Classroom Building Room 305
Course Description: Multidisciplinary introduction to social theory for advanced undergraduate and graduate students. Overall goal is to substantiate the idea that social theory comprises a set of ontological and epistemological issues about human coexistence which are nondisciplinary-specific. The course will (1) examine what different social fields take as their central theoretical issues and concerns, and (2) conduct multidisciplinary explorations of key problem areas in contemporary social thought such as the nature of objectivity, the construction of gender, the role of space and time in social life, and modernity and postmodernity.

ST 610: disClosure Social Theory Journal Collective (1 credit)
Instructor: Shui-yin Sharon Yam 
Day & Time: TBA (determined by participants)
Location: TBA (determined by participants)
Course Description: The disClosure journal publishes a topical issue each year that draws upon the ST 600 seminar from the previous year (in this case the SP 23 ‘Debilities/& After/Alter-lives’ seminar). The issue is comprised of seminar interviews and peer-reviewed articles and arts (visual and creative writing) submitted in response to a call for proposals (CFP) written collaborative by the graduate student collective (with input offered by 'Debilities/& After/Alter-lives' seminar faculty). *Note: this is a required course for the graduate certificate in Social Theory*

ANT 733: Symbols and Meaning (3 credits) 
Instructor: Monica Udvardy
Day & Time: Mondays from 5-7:30 pm
Location: Lafferty Hall Room 108
Course Description: ANT 733 explores anthropological approaches to the meaning and interpretation of sociocultural phenomena. Arranged chronologically, the participant gains a comprehensive overview of anthropological approaches to symbols and meaning in human behavior, emphasizing their creation through action. This semester, we examine and critique the structuralist approaches of such theorists as Mary Douglas, Victor Turner, Edmund Leach, and Clifford Geertz, followed by the post-structural interpretations of Bourdieu and Foucault. Finally, post-structuralist approaches are examined in the context of an area of focus revealing the limitations and utility of each. This fall, we will be examining the meanings of material culture and materiality. We will draw primarily, but not exclusively, upon anthropological theories to explore the relationship of material culture to art, personhood, the global economy, and the construction of hierarchy and difference. Students from cultural anthropology, archaeology, sociology, education policy and evaluation studies, political science, gender and women’s studies, art history, landscape architecture have taken the course in the past.

GEO 722: Social Geography: Geography and Coloniality (3 credits)
Instructor: Patricia Erkhamp 
Day & Time: Mondays from 2-4:30 pm 
Location: Miller Hall 6
Course Description: This seminar examines geography’s relationship to colonialism and coloniality, examining questions of race, racism, and slavery; empire; humanity; biopolitics and necropolitics; sovereignty; as well as the role of gender and sexuality in these processes. Our goal in the seminar is to think about the afterlives of colonialism and coloniality, and to put anti-colonial, post-colonial, and decolonial writing in conversation. Additional readings are drawn from Black studies, Black Feminism, Indigenous studies, feminist, and queer theory. We will be reading some ‘classic’ texts on colonialism and then current/recent works on biopolitics, necropolitics, Blackness, indigeneity, and ongoing colonialities to see how they may inform one another and contemporary geographic scholarship.

GWS 600: Feminist Affect Theory (3 credits)
Instructor: Anastasia Todd
Day & Time: Tuesdays from 3:30-6 pm 
Location: Whitehall Classroom Building Room 333
Course Description: This graduate-level seminar explores the affective turn in the humanities and social sciences. There is no one definition of affect, but this course takes feminist and queer approaches to affect as its point of departure. We will consider how affect—as the intersubjective glue that creates, holds, and transverses relations between bodies—intersects with race, disability, gender, and sexuality. From Lauren Berlant’s theorization of “cruel optimism,” to Sara Ahmed’s concept of “stickiness,” to Jin Haritaworn’s mobilization of “queer regeneration,” we will trace how feminist and queer theorists have taken up affect and affectivity. We will also explore the critical debates around affective labor (both online and off), affective capitalism, and the intersection of biopolitics, necropolitics, and affect. Ephemeral, ordinary, mobile…affect is difficult to capture. We will ultimately ask ourselves: How can an engagement with affect enrich our understanding of contemporary systems of power? How can an engagement with affect help us transform our world? How can we harness the methodological and epistemological richness of affect in our own work? And lastly, what is a “well-dressed love machine”?

HIS/AAS 600: The Intellectual History of African Americans (3 credits)
Instructor: Anastasia Curwood
Day & Time: Thursdays from 1:30-4 pm
Location: Patterson Office Tower Room 1745
Course Description: This course introduces the ideas and ideologies of US- based Black Americans from the Middle Passage to the present. We will examine key concepts that include abolitionism, feminism, Black nationalism, Black conservatism, Black Marxism, anticolonialism, liberationism, assimilationism, integrationism, antiracism, and others; we will discuss the connections of historical contexts and historical actors to the ideas that they produce.

HIS 650-002: War and Memory (3 credits)
Instructor: Akiko Takenaka
Day & Time: Tuesdays from 3:30-6 pm 
Location: Patterson Office Tower Room 1745
Course Description: This course explores how war is remembered both by the individuals who lived through them and those who have come after them. Central to our inquiry are representation and transmission of memory, and how memory is shaped and reshaped over time. The forms of memorialization we investigate include: testimonies, oral history narratives, memoirs, popular media, visual and material culture, museum exhibits, and daily life. We will study various categories of memory such as collective memory, official memory, counter memory, and postmemory. We will investigate the impact of trauma on memory. We will discuss the relationship between memory and history. The course focuses on wars and catastrophes in the modern period drawing case studies from around the world.

HIS 650-001 Empires in World History (3 credits)
Instructor: Emily Mokoros
Day & Time: Tuesdays from 1-3:30 pm
Location: Patterson Office Tower Room 1745
Course Description: Before, during, and since the advent of nation-states, empires have been dominant features of global geopolitics. Can studying and teaching world history from the perspective of empires allows us to move away from national histories, Eurocentrism, and the myth of American exceptionalism? Can it, on the flip side, improve our understanding of our national past? In this course, we will discuss empires past and present with two main intentions: first, to understand the major historiographical traditions associated with pre-modern global empires, and second, to think practically about teaching world history at the secondary and college levels. Students and faculty in this course will work collaboratively in evaluating scholarship and teaching resources and in working towards a syllabus for a pilot course on empires in world history. The course does not require expertise in any historical period, region, or empire—just curiosity and initiative. As courses in world and global history are increasingly common, it will be of benefit to any student in the program anticipating a teaching career.

LAS 601: Interdisciplinary Seminar in Latin American, Caribbean, and Latino/a Studies (3 credits)
Instructor: Francie Chassen-López
Day & Time: Thursdays from 5-7:30 pm 
Location: Whitehall Classroom Building Room 341
Course Description: This interdisciplinary seminar engages with a variety of the fundamental issues and methods in Latin American, Caribbean and Latinx Studies. For Fall 2023, the Haitian Revolution, decoloniality, anti-racism in Cuba, the memory turn and the Dirty War in the Southern Cone, Brazilian politics and society, and the border/immigration to the U.S. in fiction and non-fiction will be some of the topics covered. The seminar will host guest appearances by LACLS affiliated faculty providing the opportunity to read and discuss their latest research. Since participants in LAS 601 come from various disciplinary backgrounds, we have the unique opportunity to actively engage with and learn from each other.

PHI 680: What is Philosophy? (3 credits) 
Instructor: Natalie Nenadic
Day & Time: Thursdays from 4:00-6:30pm 
Location: Patterson Office Tower 1445
Course Description: The insights and conceptual breakthroughs of major figures in the history of philosophy -- across traditions (e.g., Western philosophy and Eastern philosophy) and including figures in an ever evolving and diverse canon -- enact philosophy that variously reflects on human existence and navigates a meaningful life. Such philosophical reflection is inevitably spurred by worldly and life concerns. To an unprecedented extent, in the late 19^th and 20^th centuries, Western philosophy began moving away from life concerns. That turn culminated in a path aimed at reducing philosophy to logic, in a development that has since governed much academic philosophy. This turn precipitated a response by canonical thinkers and others that existentially questioned what we even understand philosophy to be, with the aim of consciously re-grounding it in life. More recently, this response has challenged philosophy’s marginalization from addressing major contemporary problems in profound and relevant ways.

In this seminar, we will attain a “bigger picture” historical understanding of this development. This perspective will help us grapple with pressing questions today about the nature and task of philosophy, which remain shaped and constrained by this development, as we reflect on how we might philosophically address current crises in original and relevant ways. Such crises include, for instance: artificial intelligence (AI), social media technology, and freedom; authoritarianism and threats to democracy; racial injustice; widespread sexual objectification and violence against women and girls, pornography, and #MeToo; and war and genocide.

Some key topics that we will treat are: philosophy’s relation to and distinction from science; epistemology and ontology; philosophy’s source in contemporary life concerns, its inextricable relation with other disciplines, and the generative nature of philosophy’s relation with its living past; differences between “applying” past concepts to contemporary problems, which covers up those problems in the name of addressing them, and coming up with the original ideas and concepts that these crises demand; and some distinctions and tensions that have existed across history between philosophy understood as delivering new frameworks or paradigms and some of the activities of academic philosophy. Subjects that we may cover include Daoist philosophy, Dilthey, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Charles Taylor, and Richard Rorty. Some readings that we may cover include selections from Robert C. Scharff’s How History Matters to Philosophy: Reconsidering Philosophy’s Past After Positivism, Nietzsche’s On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life, and excerpts from Heidegger’s The Phenomenology of Religious Life and from his other early writings.

PHI 650 (3 credits)
Instructor: Julia Bursten
Day & Time: Mondays from 4-6:30 pm 
Location: Patterson Office Tower Room 1445
Course Description: Kinds and categories play essential roles in our reasoning and figure into philosophical dialectics across metaphysics, philosophy of language, logic, and philosophy of science. In this seminar, we examine kinds, categories, and classification from the lens of contemporary philosophy of science, focusing on the many roles of kinds and classification in scientific reasoning. The course will begin with a historical introduction to the problem of scientific classification in 21st century philosophy of science as it has evolved from the problem of natural and unnatural kinds in 20th century analytic philosophy. After that, seminar participants will contribute to the selection of contemporary topics across select areas of scientific interest. Particular attention will be given to the relationship between scientific classification and scientific modeling practices.

ST 600: Debility and After/Alterlives 
Crystal Felima, Nari Senanayake, Karrieann Soto Vega, Anastasia Todd
Friday 2 - 4:30 pm; Gaines Center Bingham Davis House 101
We live in a moment where struggles over health and bodies are ubiquitous. In this course, we engage in scholarly conversations about bodies and health through the frameworks of debility and after/alterlives. We position these concepts as conceptual threads that cut across the seminar and allow us to envision productive interdisciplinary conversations between health geography, medical anthropology, decolonial feminist rhetoric, and feminist disability studies. Across these literatures, the seminar will pay close attention to how race, gender, class, nation, sexuality, and ability shape which bodies (both human and non-human) are rehabilitatable, which bodies are marked as contagious or toxic and in need of containment, and which bodies are consequently rendered disposable (Chen 2012, Fritsch and McGuire 2018; Taylor 2017).

GEO 715: Seminar on Foucault
Michael Samers
Thursday 2 - 4:30pm; Whitehall Classroom Building 305
Michel Foucault was an historian, philosopher, and social thinker, and his work has fostered intellectual debates in anthropology, criminology and penal studies, gender and sexuality studies, geography, history, law, political science, psychiatry, and sociology, among many others. This course is designed as an advanced introduction to his work, from his earliest writings on madness and discipline to his later work on the state, security, governmentality, as well as the ‘care of the self’. The course reviews individual chapters, lectures, or major parts of his most celebrated texts, examining especially Foucault’s method and his critical insights, as well as additional texts by other authors that comment on or mobilize these insights.

Fall 2022 SOCIAL THEORY and SOCIAL THEORY AFFILIATED COURSES 
(ST courses are required for the Social Theory Graduate Certificate. ST-affiliated courses have significant social theory content and may be substituted for the required ST 690 credit.)

ST 500: Introduction to Social Theory
Tuesday + Thursday 2:00-3:15pm / Stefan Eric Bird-Pollan / 3 credit hours
The course is designed to give an overview of main currents in 20th Century critical theory. Critical theory is understood as standing in the tradition of the critique of dogmatism stemming from Kant’s Copernican turn and Hegel’s extension of the concept. Critique is the process whereby thought turns back on itself, inquiring into its own suppositions in order to be more adequate to its sensible or merely experiential understanding of reality. The objective of the course is to track three, at times overlapping, conceptions of critique. We begin with the strand which proceeds from Marxist to Frankfurt School Critical theory. Second is the strand that begins with a more cultural rather than materialist understanding of the notion of critique extending from Gramsci to Foucault and Laclau. Finally, we examine the intersection of feminist criticism of social structures with Marxist critique which issues in a discussion of Critical Race Theory.

ST 610: "disClosure" Journal Editorial Collective
TBD (student-determined meeting times) / Advisor Stefan Eric Bird-Pollan / 1 credit hour
Course provides editorial experience in the production of "disClosure," a multidisciplinary social theory journal operated by students. Activities include: soliciting manuscripts, overseeing the external review process, communicating with authors, accepting and rejecting manuscripts, producing and distributing a single issue. May be repeated to a maximum of three credits. Follows after the prior spring seminar, on the assigned topic (Fall 2022: Reproductive Justice).

ST 690: Transdisciplinary Perspectives in Social Theory [Topic: _____]
Thursday 1:00-3:30pm / Priscilla McCutcheon / 3 credit hours
An advanced seminar in transdisciplinary social theory, taught jointly by a faculty member representing the humanities and the social sciences, respectively. Social Theory encompasses the theoretical study of social life and the substantive knowledge informed by such theory. Transdisciplinary Social Theory seminars may focus on such topics as Space and Representation, Frankfurt School and Contemporary Critical Theory, or The University in Theory and in a Global Context. In each case, the seminar substantially and theoretically links the articulation of that particular topic as has occurred within both the social sciences and humanities.

Affiliated Courses

ENG 651 001 STUDIES IN AMERICAN LITERATURE BEFORE 1860: Aesthetics & Politics
Thursday 5:00-7:30pm / Michelle Sizemore / 3 credit hours
This seminar joins aesthetics and political theory in an investigation of democracy across the long nineteenth century. Throughout the semester, we will ask how aesthetics and politics are mutually constitutive, paying special attention to the role of form, feeling, and fiction in the ideation of democratic concepts and institutions. We will approach familiar ideas such as citizenship, popular sovereignty, and “the people” in surprising ways and tour unexpected terrain such as political theology, democratic taste, and democratic feelings. While we will explore an array of topics over sixteen weeks, our discussions will build on the same broad set of questions: What are democracy’s forms and fictions? What are the political dimensions of emotions? How are aesthetics deployed in times of crisis? What can the study of form, feeling, imagination, pleasure, and taste offer to the study of race, racism, and racial reckoning? It is worth emphasizing that this is an interdisciplinary course; a considerable portion of our readings will come from fields and disciplines that inform literary studies, including political theory, aesthetic theory, affect theory, feminist and queer theory, and critical race theory. Writers may include Charles Brockden Brown, Catharine Sedgwick, Alexis DeTocqueville, John Neal, Victor Sejour, Edgar Allan Poe, Maria Cummins, William Wells Brown, Elizabeth Keckley, Louisa May Alcott, Charles Chesnutt, Pauline Hopkins, and more.

ENG 450G STUDIES IN AMERICAN LITERATURE: Democracy's Stories
Tuesday and Thursday 3:30 / Michelle Sizemore / 3 credit hours
Democracy has dominated public discourse recently. But what is meant by “democracy,” and what are democracy’s stories? This course explores narratives about America, its aspirations and failings, and government for and by the people. Since this is an English class, we will place special emphasis on the role of language and representation in the creation of American identities and democratic ideals. We will explore the allure of the American Dream and the desire to “sing America” alongside forces of exclusion and assimilation based on race, gender, sexuality, religion, region, and class. We will probe topics in our fictional landscape that seem unrelated to democracy at first: utopianism and dystopianism, worldbuilding, conspiracy theories, trust and its erosion, political emotions, charisma and celebrity, social media activism, and more. Our readings will span the nineteenth- through the twenty-first centuries and may include the following: poetry by Walt Whitman and Langston Hughes, stories by Edgar Allan Poe, William Wells Brown's Clotel: The President's Daughter, Louisa May Alcott's Behind a Mask: Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, Philip Roth's The Plot Against America, Lin-Manuel Miranda's Hamilton, Claudia Rankine's Citizen, Celeste Ng's Everything I Never Told You, Brit Bennett's The Vanishing Half, Colson Whitehead's The Nickel Boys, and others.

EPE 640-001: Philosophy of Education
Monday 4:00-6:30 pm / Eric Thomas Weber / 3 credit hours
This course covers major figures in the philosophy of education. We concentrate on the nature and the social and personal aims of education. We attend both to the ideals various figures propose for the educational endeavor as well as to the realities and conflicts at work in oppression, discrimination, and the stratifications and classifications of people in education and society. All along, our careful reading of key selected texts will note differences in outlooks as well as in their consequent implications for policy and practice in education. The course is especially designed, furthermore, to embody the highest ideals that it covers, with students’ interests and powers driving their work and assignments. Assignments include the writing of a statement of educational philosophy or a "teaching statement" often useful on the job market in schools and in higher education. Students also have the opportunity to present on a recent book relevant to the course and to their area of study for the purpose of writing and publishing a book review. The final research paper project is intended to be built on student interests and amenable to a supportive or central role in students' further research endeavors. For more information on why you should enroll in the course see the instructor's short video here.

PHI 680: Living in a Digitalizing World
Monday 4:00-6:30pm / Ted Schatzki / 3 credit hours
This seminar will consider various social theoretical and philosophical issues about living in a world that is becoming increasingly digitalized. Overall, the seminar will examine the process of living, the digitalization of the practices and material arrangements through and amid which lives proceed, and changes in living wrought by this digitalization. Topics will include living and living through complexes of practices; living, subjects, selves, and persons; the digitalization of the practices and material arrangements through and amid which everyday life proceeds, (i.e., how digitalization alters the contexts and conditions under which individual lives proceed); and changes in lives consequent on these altered contexts and conditions, including whether digitalization enhances the appropriation of collective ways of being (concerning, e.g., attention or affect) or effects a creeping “cyborgization” of life. Readings have not yet been firmly determined but could include works of Tim Ingold, Gilles Deleuze, Julia Kristeva, Sara Ahmed, Ole Dreier, Bernard Stiegler, Nick Couldry & Andreas Hepp, Lucien Floridi, Mark Andrejevic, Shoshana Zuboff, Mike Power, Brett Frischmann & Evan Selinger, and Stacey Irwin.

GWS 630-001: Feminist Research Methods
Monday 5:00-7:30pm / Srimati Basu / 3 credit hours
How do we gather and produce knowledge, and how do we hold ourselves accountable for this knowledge? What constitutes feminist methodology, and what is its relationship to intersectional, decolonizing and queer methodologies? In this graduate seminar, we explore questions of epistemology, ethics and method by a. reading theoretical texts and debates; b. evaluating examples of particular methods including surveys, participant observation, ethnography, discourse and sensory processes; and c. applying your knowledge of these techniques to design a semester-long project where you gather data through participant observation, interviews and other methods of your choice and analyze the data and your methods in a final paper. This course is required for GWS PhD students. How do we gather and produce knowledge, and how do we hold ourselves accountable for this knowledge? What constitutes feminist methodology, and what is its relationship to intersectional, decolonizing and queer methodologies? In this graduate seminar, we explore questions of epistemology, ethics and method by a. reading theoretical texts and debates; b. evaluating examples of particular methods including surveys, participant observation, ethnography, discourse and sensory processes; and c. applying your knowledge of these techniques to design a semester-long project where you gather data through participant observation, interviews and other methods of your choice and analyze the data and your methods in a final paper. This course is required for GWS PhD students.

SPRING 2022 SOCIAL THEORY and SOCIAL THEORY AFFILIATED COURSES
(ST courses are required for the Social Theory Graduate Certificate. ST affiliated courses have significant social theory content and may be substituted for ST 690.)

ST 600: Reproductive Justice and Politics seminar
Friday 2-4:30; co-taught by Drs. Sharon Yam (Rhetoric), Lindsey Chambers (Philosophy), Carol Mason (Gender and Women's Studies), Lydia Pelot-Hobbs (Geography).
How do we theorize this historical moment when movements for black lives and against reproductive freedom converge? We will open the seminar with African American perspectives that allowed a radically expansive take on reproductive politics. Readings will illuminate the history and theory of reproductive justice, the blending of reproductive rights and social justice movements, and Loretta Ross will be our first speaker. In the second unit, we will engage with transnational scholarships, critical race and gender theories to explore the intersections across stratified reproduction, assisted reproductive technologies, and queer family-making. This unit will begin with a talk by Natalie Deomampo (Fordham), whose research focuses on the ways in which international commercial surrogacy shapes transnational politics on race and kinship. Next we examine how racial and colonial state violence has been leveraged against the reproductive autonomy of Black , indigenous and communities of color from sterilization campaigns to the foster system to the criminalization of abortion. This unit will include a talk by Brianna Theobald whose research explores the intersection of colonial and reproductive politics in Native America from the late nineteenth century to the present. In our final unit, we’ll turn to the philosophical arguments about the morality of abortion, the moral status of fetuses, and the use of reproductive technology to avoid so-called undesirable genetic traits or to select for genetic enhancements. We’ll end with a talk by Natalie Lira (Illinois), who has written on the racism and ableism of California’s 1920’s to 1950’s eugenics program.

In this seminar on reproductive justice and politics, we will invite students to be critical not only of the positions taken in different disciplines with respect to reproductive justice, but also the very questions their positions are answers to.

ST 610 Disclosure Journal Editorial collective
In Spring 2022 the collective will edit the current Queer Theory issue and compiling materials for next year’s Social and Reproductive Justice issue.
Faculty advisor: Stefan Bird-Pollan

ENG 570 SELECTED TOPICS FOR ADV STUDIES IN LITERATURE: ANTICOLONIAL WRITING AND THOUGHT — THE PRIMARY DOCUMENTS
Dr. Peter Kalliney TR 11:00
This course looks at the traditions of anticolonial thought from the late nineteenth century to the present day. Comparing movements for national liberation, realignment, and literary self-determination from across the world, we'll consider the shifting claims of the British, American, French, Spanish, and Russian empires, and the colonial subjects, postcolonial frameworks, and decolonial movements that sought to contest these formations from Chile to Alcatraz, India to Ireland, and Azerbaijan to Martinique. Our focus will most often be on the manifestos and essays in which anticolonial writers outlined their literary and political programs, but we may also look at a few poems, stories, and films. From Vicente Huidobro's fantasies of a secret international society to end British Imperialism to Ngügì wa Thiong'o's call to abolish the English Department, how did the radical claimsof anticolonial political thought take shape in literary writing? This course will be taught in conjunction with parallel courses offered by Professor Leah Feldman at the University of Chicago and Professor Harris Feinsod at Northwestern University. We anticipate building opportunities for cross-campus research

LAS 601: Interdisciplinary Seminar in Latin American, Caribbean, and Latino Studies
Dr. F. Chassen-López, Tues 5:00 – 7:30 pm
This interdisciplinary topical seminar engages with a series of fundamental issues, methods, and current trends in Latin American, Caribbean and Latinx Studies. For Spring 2022, among the topics we’ll look at are social inequalities, revolution, indigenous struggles, coloniality/modernity, the memory turn, and immigration to the U.S. in fiction and non-fiction. The seminar will host guest appearances by LACLS affiliated faculty providing the opportunity to read and discuss their latest research.

GWS 600: Feminism, Capitalism, Crisis, and Socialism
Dr. Karen Tice, Thursdays- 4:30-7:00
We will explore historical trajectories, contemporary connections, debates, and the frictions that have characterized feminist engagements with capitalism and socialism from a variety of geo-political locations. We will examine the following questions: Is feminism and socialism compatible? How have they been related to each other and how have they been at odds? How have changing configurations of capitalism, neo-liberalism, globalization, affective economies, crisis, state socialism, and socialist feminism shaped feminist struggles, critiques, and affinities? How have intersectional hierarchies and differences shaped the relationship between feminism and anti-capitalist, anti-imperialism, and anti-colonialism struggles.

Phi 680: Heidegger vs Adorno
Dr. Stefan Bird-Pollan Mondays, 4:00-630.
The seminar focuses on Heidegger’s discussion of authenticity in the second part of Being and Time as an exploration of practical philosophy. After spending the first half of the seminar reading Heidegger, we will read the first half of Adorno’s Negative Dialectics. Adorno criticizes Heidegger’s notion of authenticity and present his own understanding of the basis of practical philosophy, namely attention to the particular which must be upheld against the domineering universal.

The aim is to offer an appreciation of Heidegger’s philosophical ambition to move beyond the subject to an analysis of Being. We will also seek to understand the consequence of Heidegger’s move which, for Adorno, is the evacuation of any sort of ethical content from human life.

LIS 619 (Library and Information Science) Informal Learning in Information Organizations
Dr. Daniela DiGiacomo Time: Fully online, fully asynchronous
Course description: How people learn has implications for how learning environments should be designed. This course examines theories of informal learning— primarily drawing upon research from the sociocultural tradition of learning and human development—and considers how they can be practically implemented into information organization contexts. Being grounded in a sociocultural tradition means that this class will center issues of equity, diversity, and justice as they relate to the organization and design of information organization contexts and settings (e.g. libraries, museums, youth programs, new media centers, non-profit organizations). For example, how do issues of culture and learning inform the development of afterschool literacy programs in public libraries or Maker spaces in school libraries, especially those that serve predominantly minoritized communities? By gaining a deep understanding of how people learn across their lifespan, students will be able to consider how to create a community of learners in a range of settings in which people from various backgrounds participate. Topics covered include issues related to culture and cognition, identity development, adult-youth partnerships, access to/relationships with new digital media, and design thinking. No prerequisites.

GEO 714 Political Geography: Feminist political geography 
Dr. Patricia Ehrkamp (p.ehrkamp@uky.edu)
Thursday 2-4:30pm, Dr. Patricia Ehrkamp (p.ehrkamp@uky.edu)
This course explores the contributions and connections of feminist political geography to the discipline of geography and to the wider social sciences, to social theory, and to feminist theory. We are neither attempting a genealogy nor a broad overview. Rather, at the center of our readings and conversations are the multiple spaces of politics and the politics of space—and the question of who gets to define them, by what means, and who is left out. We will talk about such concepts as sovereignty, territory, violence, home, etc. Weekly readings include various academic journal articles and books. Among the authors we’ll be reading (in no particular order for now) are Audra Simpson, Mark Rifkin, Bonnie Honig, Jennifer Hyndman, Sara Ahmed, Jenna Loyd, A. Marie Ranjbar, Rachel Pain, Judith Butler, and Katherine McKittrick. Please note that the course depends on everyone’s contributions as we work our way through a number of (sometimes difficult) texts. This means I expect everyone to read all assigned texts each week, and to come to class prepared and ready to discuss the assigned weekly readings.

ST 500 Introduction to Social Theory
Dr. Ted Schatzki
Thursdays 12:30 pm - 1:45 pm
Course Description: This course is an introduction to social theory for advanced undergraduates and graduate students. It aims to give students an overview of the type of theory known as critical social thought. By “critical social thought” is meant the use of theoretical ideas and concepts to diagnose—critically and skeptically—both the state of human sociality and the sociocultural dimension of the human condition. Part One will take up classic representatives of prominent genres: Marx and Engels’s The German Ideology and The Communist Manifesto, Max Horkheimer’s The Eclipse of Reason, Shulumith Firestone’s The Dialectic of Sex, and Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth. Part Two will examine a selection of more recent critical works: Bernard Stiegler’s For a New Critique of Political Economy, Mark Rifkin’s Beyond Settler Time, Helmut Rosa’s Social Acceleration. A New Theory of Modernity, Achille Mbembe’s Necropolitics, and Rosi Braidotti’s Posthumanism. After this, Part Three will turn the critical gaze at questions of epistemology and, probably, ecology/environment. On knowledge we will read essays from Michel Foucault, Donna Haraway, Patricia Collins, Depesh Chakrabarty, Sandra Harding, and Zaid Ahmad. I have not yet decided what to look at regarding ecology/environment.

CLD 560 / APP 500 Community Inequalities / Special topics on race and class in southern Appalachia
Dr. Lindsay Shade
Wednesdays 3:00 - 5:30 pm
Course Description: This class will focus on race and class in southern Appalachia. How do terms like redneck, hillbilly, and white trash define selves and others, and how and why did these terms become uniquely associated with Appalachia? This course examines the cultural construction and uses of "Appalachia" in defining and maintaining "whiteness" in the American consciousness, and conversely how Appalachian communities have shaped and been shaped by race, gender, and class dynamics.

ENG 491G Studies in Theory: Postcolonial & Global Theory
Dr. Jap-Nanak Makkar
Thursday/Friday 4:30 pm
Course Description: Through this reading-intensive seminar, students gain a foundation in postcolonial and global theory, an area of "theory" that explores topics of racial difference, colonial domination and capitalist expansion. We read in order to survey the field-taking in everything from early essays in postcolonial studies to cutting-edge accounts of globalization-but as we do, we attend with particular interest to the methodological commitments of our theorists. Guided by three unit divisions, we ask what Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Homi Bhabha gained from notable texts of deconstruction, such as Writing and Difference or "White Mythologies"? How did a book such as Foucault's Madness and Civilization guide Edward Said when the latter proposed to study orientalism as a "discourse"? And, finally, to what extent have Fredric Jameson's theories of "a singular modernity" helped to move postcolonialism toward a more robust confrontation with uneven development? This course will appeal to anyone with interests in studying British, American, or postcolonial literature in a transnational frame. Literary works by Mahasweta Devi, Joseph Conrad, and Ousmane Sembène.

GWS 600-002 Topics in GWS: Transnational Feminisms
Dr. Elisabeth Williams
Mondays 4:00 - 6:30 pm
Course Description: This course will examine texts from a variety of geographic locations to ask how feminisms operate differently across space and time. We will look critically at the legacies of imperialism, slavery, capitalism, and globalization and how they have impacted issues of gender and sexuality. We will also consider how indigenous hierarchies-including ethnicity, caste, and religion-intersect with global feminist movements. Throughout the course, we will attend to the following questions: To what extent are ideas about feminism translatable across geographic space and political context? How can feminist scholars located in the West avoid reasserting global inequalities? how can you add or strengthen transnational perspectives in your own teaching and research?

(*Note: This course also counts toward requirements for the GWS graduate certificate, PhD, and other degrees as appropriate. This course counts as the cross-cultural requirement for the GWS graduate certificate.)

HIS 650/700 War and Memory
Dr. Akiko Takenaka
Thursdays 3:30 - 6 pm
Course Description: This course explores how war is remembered both by the individuals who lived through them and those who have come after them. Central to our inquiry are representation and transmission of memory, and how memory is shaped and reshaped over time. The forms of memorialization we investigate include: testimonies, oral history narratives, memoirs, popular media, visual and material culture, museum exhibits, and daily life. We will study various categories of memory such as collective memory, official memory, counter memory, and postmemory. We will investigate the impact of trauma on memory. We will discuss the relationship between memory and history. The course focuses on wars and catastrophes in the modern period drawing case studies from around the world.

ST 600: Multidisciplinary Perspectives in Social Theory
Queer Theory
Fridays 2:00 pm - 4:30 pm Hybrid (online & Whitehall Classroom Bldg Rm.336)
Instructor: Co-taught by UK scholars, Dr. Elizabeth Williams, Jack Gieseking, Yi Zhang, and Rusty Barrett
Course Description: The field of Queer Theory emerged in the early 1990s and is devoted to examining how concepts like “queerness,” deviance, and normativity informed larger systems of power. At the time, most of the research on sexuality consisted of identitarian recovery research that sought to add the voices of marginalized people (especially gay, lesbian, and trans people) to the existing canon. Queer Theory rejected this focus on identitarian categories: rather than look at people who were “gay” or “straight,” Queer Theory asks how ideas of normativity/deviance work at a systemic level to shape concepts like race, gender, class, sexuality, nationality, religion, ability, etc. Queer Theory thus offers scholars a number of tools which allows us to deconstruct a binaristic vision of the world (as male/female, gay/straight, trans/cis),reveal what it hidden in the interstices, and use solidarities across non-”normativities” to fight for justice.

Queer Theory has had its detractors, and these debates have spawned various sub-fields of theoretical approach. In particular, Queer Theory has sometimes (rightfully) been accused of centering whiteness and ignoring the ways in which differing positionalities of race, but also class, ability, region, geography, religion, etc., mediate the extent to which queerness proves an emancipatory or positive framework. For example, scholars, including E. Patrick Johnson, Rod Fergeson, Fatima El-Tayeb, C. Riley Snorton, Gayatri Gopinath, Mel Chen, Martin F. Manalansan, and Chandan Reddy, have developed the field of Queer of Color Critique that more centrally locates issues of racial difference as a key component of Queerness.

The authors of the readings in this course have been assembled with a particular set of goals in mind. First, authors were chosen based on the degree to which their work engaged with Queer Theory, rather than examining the lives of GLBT2IA subjects or sexuality in general. Queer Theory proposes a particularly methodological and theoretical approach which extends beyond identitarian projects to consider “queerness” as a broader heuristic device. Second, the authors offer a strongly diverse body of work for seminar study across the professors’ areas of research, which includes Latin America, China, Africa, and the US.

PHI 715 Hannah Arendt, Covid-19, and Thinking in Dark Times
Online
Instructor: Dr. Natalie Nenadic
Course Description: This course centers on close readings of Hannah Arendt’s major works The Origins of Totalitarianism and Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil as well as key essays. Her thought analyzes major political crises of our era focused on authoritarian government -- from totalitarian systems (Nazism and communism) to other types of dictatorship. We will cover her treatment of such topics as: how societies slip into authoritarianism; concurrent shifts in societal and moral norms; systemic inequality, racism, and anti-Semitism; questions of law, criminality, evil, and legal accountability; and ethics and personal responsibility. Arendt evinces the idea that philosophy or thinking is most needed in times of crisis to help us understand and navigate them and that it emanates from a multidisciplinary proximity to these developments and through knowledge of the past that resonates with them. In this way, we will consider how her thought may help us make sense of today’s extraordinary times. We will center on the unique experience of COVID-19 in the United States and will include topics such as its disproportionate health and economic effects on communities of color, Native American nations, and women and its intersections with Black Lives Matter.

GWS 600-001: ISSUES IN GWS: AMERICAN FICTIONS OF THE 1970’S
M 4:00-6:30PM Online
Instructor: Dr. Carol Mason
Course Description: This seminar critically examines three right-wing cultural narratives taking influential form in the 1970s whose legacies impact us today: the Invisible Government; the Militant Homosexual; and the Northwest Imperative. We will read primary materials from right-wing movements contextualized with secondary sources by scholars to understand the bases for current conspiratorial fictions known as “deep state,” “gender ideology,” and the “great replacement.” In this way we will be poised to analyze comparatively the concept of “America” as it manifested in 1970s politics and popular culture of the United States and as it currently transcends national boundaries in the midst of a global rise of the right. Tertiary sources will therefore include cultural and feminist studies of the 1970s as well as American Studies guides to interdisciplinary analysis.

SPA 681 Magical Realism Meets Weird Materialisms: Latin/x American Women Fiction Writers Theorize the Horrors of the 21st Century
Wednesdays 4:30 - 7 pm Online
Instructor: Dr. Dierdra Reber
Course Description: “Ghost stor[ies] for the real world,” “psychological realism, science fiction, comedy and horror, fantasy and fabulism” whose narrative modalities include “psychological menace,” “black magic,” “physical and metaphysical blindness,” and “dangerous games that blur the line between love and violence,” are some of the descriptors of Latin American women’s fiction published in the last ten years. Primarily short story anthologies and novels, this literary corpus of predominantly 30s- and 40s-something writers from the Southern Cone, the Andes, the Caribbean, Mexico, and the United States is populated with “broken souls,” “toxins,” “drugs,” “pain,” “disappearance,” “psychopathic cannibal[s],” “Catholics-turned-terrorists,” “17th-century buccaneers,” “African-derived religious practices,” “Siamese fighting fish, cockroaches, cats, snakes, [and] strange fungus” in apartment buildings and libraries, on road trips and space travel, at the Mexico-US border and in the Antilles, across time in the past, present, and future. One author is likened to a “psychoanalyst in a planetary refugee camp.” We will explore this fiction alongside feminist theoretical texts from both hemispheres in the Americas, but we will fundamentally consider how these works enunciate their own theory about current cultural realities from a literary platform. Using a kaleidoscopic mix of genres, these authors play with horror, magic, and the weird to render fierce social criticism from their narrative exposition of material realties about relationships, affect, power, and the prospects for self-determination and decolonization of the feminist subject. Course materials will be available in both Spanish and English; class discussion will be conducted Spanish or English as determined by enrollment. Exercises will include short weekly position papers, student teaching, and a final essay.Fiction (novel and short story) may include:Liliana Colanzi, Nuestro mundo muerto (Our Dead World; Bolivia 2016, Mariana Enríquez, Las cosas que perdimos en el fuego (Things We Lost in the Fire; Argentina 2016), Rita Indiana, La mucama de Omicunlé (Tentacle; Dominican Republic, 2015), Paulina Flores, Qué vergüenza (Humiliation; Chile 2015), Valeria Luiselli, Lost Children Archive (Desierto sonoro; US/Mexico 2019), Carmen María Machado, Her Body and Other Parties (US 2017), Lina Meruane, Sangre en el ojo (Seeing Red; Chile 2012), Silvia Moreno-García Certain Dark Things, (Canada/Mexico 2016), Malka Older, …and Other Disasters (US 2019), Guadalupe Nettel, El matrimonio de los peces rojos (Natural Histories; Mexico 2013), Samanta Schweblin, Distancia de rescate (Fever Dream; Argentina 2014), Sabrina Vourvoulias, Ink (US 2012). Theory: Sara Ahmed, Laura Catelli, Mel Y. Chen, María Luisa Femenías, Olga Grau, Donna Haraway, Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, Nelly Richard, Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, Ofelia Schutte, M. Urania Atenea Ungo, Kathryn Yusof

LIS 690-201Informal Learning in Information Organizations
Virtual Office Hours: Wed, 2–4 PM, via Zoom
Instructor: Dr. Daniela Kruel DiGiacomo
Course Description: How people learn has implications for how learning environments should be designed. This course examines theories of informal learning— primarily drawing upon research from the sociocultural tradition of learning and human development—and considers how they can be practically implemented into information organization contexts. Being grounded in a sociocultural tradition means that this class will center issues of equity, diversity, and justice as they relate to the organization and design of information organization contexts and settings (e.g. libraries, museums, youth programs, new media centers, non-profit organizations). For example, how do issues of culture and learning inform the development of afterschool literacy programs in public libraries or Maker spaces in school libraries, especially those that serve predominantly minoritized communities? By gaining a deep understanding of how people learn across their lifespan, students will be able to consider how to create a community of learners in a range of settings in which people from various backgrounds participate. Topics covered include issues related to culture and cognition, identity development, adult-youth partnerships, access to/relationships with new digital media, and design thinking. No prerequisite

ANT/BSC/PSY/SOC 776 Dependency Behavior: An Interdisciplinary Graduate Seminar
Online
Instructor: Co-taught by Dr. Claire D Clark and Scott K Taylor
Course Description: This course will take an interdisciplinary approach to examining dependency in the United States. We will examine the roots of the idea of addiction to alcohol and drugs, its ascendency in the 20th century, and the current moment when the disease model of addiction is undergoing challenges from several different directions. The aim is to take the perspectives of several disciplines - including history, literary criticism, sociology, and anthropology - to give students a broader understanding of dependency behavior than the DSM-5 (the standard guide to mental disorders published by the American Psychiatric Association) provides and to question why dependency behavior today is still understood as both a biological disease and a supposed moral failing. This course is designed for students from many different disciplinary backgrounds, and students will have a wide latitude in designing their own final projects.

ST690 Health, Bodies, and Debility
Anastasia Todd (GWS) and Nari Senanayake (Geography)
Fall 2020, M 2-4:30
Course Description: We live in a moment where struggles over health and bodies are ubiquitous. Recent research, for instance, has examined these struggles under conditions of global climate change (Curtis and Oven), resource conflict (Sultana 2011, 2012), mass displacement and detention (Loyd and Mountz 2018), extrajudicial killings of black and brown bodies (Mbembe 2003, 2019) and life under military occupation (Puar 2017). While scholarly engagement with questions of health and bodies is not new, it assumes renewed importance in the context of these highly dynamic, contested and intractable problems and thus, increasingly captivates academic interest across the social sciences and humanities.

In this course, we explore the potential of debility - as both a concept and lived experience - to extend these scholarly conversations. We position debility as a conceptual thread that cuts across the seminar and allows us to envision a productive interdisciplinary collaboration between health geography and feminist disability studies. Broadly, engaging with debility allows us to theorize the materiality of the bodymind and question the ontological assumptions that undergird the dichotomies of health/illness, and disability/able-bodiedness. Debility also provokes us to think through the porosity of bodies, troubling distinctions between the human/non-human and the body/environment.

Recent scholarship in feminist disability studies, for instance, has troubled the constructed boundary between able-bodiedness and disability. This work presents debility as a conceptual alternative to theorize the nuanced and various ways in which the body is incapacitated, or alternatively, recapacitated under neoliberal capitalism (Fritsch 2015; Kolarova 2015; Puar 2017; Shildrick 2015). The concept of debility does not necessarily signal the death of the disabled subject; but rather, it decenters the spectacularized white, western, rights-bearing disabled subject. In this way, debility presents a capacious conceptual framework that helps us make sense of how certain bodies and minds, who may not identify as disabled, are subjected to slow death. In health geography the concept animates questions about everyday life in toxic spaces and has been used to blur the lines between health and illness and normal and pathological, particularly in cases of chronic and contested illnesses (Murphy 2000, 2006, Moss and Dyck 2004). In this literature, the concept of debility helps theorize more continuous and less dichotomous understandings of health and illness and bodies and environments. It has also been powerfully mobilized to illuminate the gradual brutalities that communities who live with toxic pollution endure over time (Davies and Polese, 2015, Davies, 2018, 2019, Lora-Wainwright 2018, Petryna 2013).

Across these literatures, the seminar will pay close attention to how race, gender, class, nation, sexuality, and ability shape which bodies (both human and non-human) are rehabilitatable, which bodies are marked as contagious or toxic and in need of containment, and which bodies are consequently rendered disposable (Chen 2012, Fritsch and McGuire 2018; Taylor 2017). Through this course, we ask: What is the utility of debility, as a theoretical intervention, to conceptualize the ways in which the body lives, labors, and copes under the conditions of neoliberal capitalism and toxic pollution? And, how do race, gender, class, sexuality, and citizenship come together to create uneven access to “health,” both material and imagined, for some bodies more than others?

ST 690 Social Theoretical Approaches to Economic Phenomena
Fall 2020, T 5-7:30 pm
Chris Pool and Ted Schatzki
Course Description: The discipline of economics has long claimed that economic phenomena are its domain. This claim ignores long traditions in political economy, Marxism, anthropology, and archaeology as well as historical or more recent approaches in sociology and geography. Economic phenomena are social phenomena. Theories of social life, accordingly, should inform accounts of such phenomena or at least stand in the background of such accounts. The aim of this seminar is to provide an overview of select social theoretical approaches to economic phenomena. Given the vast range of social theoretical or social theory-informed accounts of economic matters, the seminar must be selective regarding the literature it considers and the specific economic phenomena it focuses on.

We will first consider several approaches whose analyses of economic phenomena reflect general propositions about social life, not just in the modern world but across history, thus in premodern worlds, too. These approaches, which include the substantivist economics of Karl Polanyi, actor-network theory, assemblage theory à la Deleuze and Guattari, and practice theory, find resonance in the wider social theoretical community. We will also read from within the penumbra of political economy. Although selections are not yet finalized, we will read texts from such thinkers as Michel Callon, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Pierre Bourdieu, Ester Boserup, David Harvey, Eric Wolf, and Immanuel Wallerstein.

After this introduction to general social theoretical approaches to economic phenomena, we will turn our attention to two crucial such phenomena: money and markets. We will read theoretical works about these two phenomena and pay special attention to similarities and differences in money and markets in premodern and modern worlds. On markets, we will read such authors as Karen Ho, Viviana Zelizer, Neil Fligstein, Richard Blanton, and Karin Knorr Cetina, whereas on money we will consult such authors as Jane Guyer, Geoffrey Ingham, Nigel Dodd, and Frederick von Hayek.

We will conclude by considering several social theoretical analyses of the latest form of money: cybercurrencies.

Details have not been finalized, but participants will be expected to present in class and to write a term paper. We also anticipate that each participant will have the opportunity to call the seminar’s attention to a work of special interest to him, her, or them.

SPA 685: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Latinx Studies
Dr. Arcelia Gutiérrez
Fall 2020, Mondays 3:30-6p.m.
Course Description: Latinx studies encompasses a set of interdisciplinary approaches to the study of Puerto Rican, Mexican, Cuban, Caribbean, Central American, and Latin American communities in the US. Latinx studies offers a rubric for understanding not only the interconnections between diverse Latinx communities but also the differences that sometimes divide them. This course will expose students to core knowledge about Latinx histories and communities as well as the various disciplinary rubrics through which Latinx studies is elaborated including sociology, historical studies, political science, studies of immigration and citizenship, anthropology, and cultural studies. As a true interdisciplinary “introduction” to the study of Latinxs in the U.S., the pedagogical aim of this course is to help graduate students develop the background knowledge, theoretical language and methodological skills needed to analyze the histories, cultural production, and material realities of Latinxs in the U.S. Required texts will provide students both with an overview of longstanding questions in the field, while familiarizing them with emerging areas of scholarship. This course will be taught in English.

GWS 630: Feminist Research Methods
Srimati Basu
Thursday 4-6:30
Course Description: How do we gather and produce knowledge, and how do we hold ourselves accountable for this knowledge? What constitutes feminist methodology, and what is its relationship to intersectional, decolonizing and queer methodologies? In this graduate seminar, we explore questions of epistemology, ethics and method by a. reading theoretical texts and debates b. evaluating examples of particular methods including surveys, participant observation, ethnography, discourse and visual sources c. applying your knowledge of these techniques to design a semester-long project where you gather data through participant observation, interviews and other methods of your choice and analyze the data and your methods in a final paper.

ST 500 Introduction to Social Theory
Tad Mutersbaugh
Fall 2020, TR 12:30-1:45
Course Description: This course is an advanced introduction to social theory. It will focus on the genre of theory known as critical social thought, by which is meant the use of theoretical concepts and approaches to investigate sociocultural dimensions of the human condition. Part One will take up classics: Marx and Engels's The Communist Manifesto, Frederick Douglass's Narrative, and Firestone's The Dialectic of Sex. Part Two will examine contemporary works with a focus on issues including theories of affect, embodiment and value (e.g. Butler, Hochschild, Ahmed, Bifo), postcolonial, poststructural, and posthumanist critique (e.g. Deleuze, Mbembe), transnational feminism (Mohanty, Federici, Cusicanqui), and feminist political ecology (Guthman, Mansfield).

ST 600: Multidisciplinary Perspectives in Social Theory: Animals
Instructors: Dierdra Joy Reber, Erin Koch, Jon Anthony Stallins, Douglas N Slaymaker
Time: Fridays, 2-4:30pm
How do we think with animals? How do they shape us as we shape them through our discursive entanglements? In this seminar we explore how animals are folded into ways of thinking about the world, from how we define our identities to how we articulate and recognize otherness.

ST 610: disClosure Editorial Collective
Instructor: Stefan Bird-Pollan
Time: TBD
Course provides editorial experience in the production of "disClosure," a multidisciplinary social theory journal operated by students. Activities include: soliciting manuscripts, overseeing the external review process, communicating with authors, accepting and rejecting manuscripts, producing and distributing a single issue. May be repeated to a maximum of three credits. Lecture, two hours per week.

HIS 700-001: War and Memory
Instructor: Akiko Takenaka
Time: Tuesdays 2-4:30 pm
This course explores how war is remembered both by the individuals who lived through them and those who have come after them. Central to our inquiry are representation and transmission of memory, and how memory is shaped and reshaped over time. The forms of memorialization we investigate include: testimonies, oral history narratives, memoirs, popular media, visual and material culture, museum exhibits, and daily life. We will study various categories of memory such as collective memory, official memory, counter memory, and postmemory. We will investigate the impact of trauma on memory. We will discuss the relationship between memory and history. The course focuses on wars and catastrophes in the modern period drawing case studies from around the world.

SOC 735: Seminar in Inequalities: Masculinities
Instructor: Edward Morris
Time: Thursdays: 3-5:30pm
This course provides an introduction to sociological research and theory on masculinity. While the majority of scholarship in gender has focused on women, in this course we will critically interrogate men and the constitution of masculinity. This tack is crucial to understanding gender inequality because men as a group benefit from the gender order, and enactments of masculinity tend to reproduce power and dominance. At the same time, we will consider how intersections with other dimensions of inequality such as class, race, place, and sexuality complicate masculinities and position men differently in relationship to gender dividends. The course is organized to examine: 1) masculinity in theoretical and historical context, 2) masculinity and gender socialization, 3) masculinity in intersectional perspective, 4) spaces and strategies for enacting masculinity, and 5) the future of masculinity research and praxis. We will cover topics such as the theory of hegemonic masculinity and critiques; inclusive and hybrid masculinity; how masculinity intersects with race, class, geography, and sexuality; masculinity and violence; and enactments of manhood in areas such as education, sport, criminal justice, and virtual spaces.

EPE 773/525: Campus Activism and Educational Justice
Instructor: Karen Tice
Time: Wednesdays 4-6:30pm
This graduate (EPE 773) and upper level undergraduate course (EPE 525) will consider student movements and campus dissent across time and space. We will examine a variety of precursor and contemporary student movements that have challenged gendered and racial injustices and exclusions on campus; militarism/imperialism/neoliberalism; gendered violence; university investments and budgets; workplace issues; policing and repression; anti-immigration sentiments; governance and diversity policies; student debt and privatization; LGBTQ rights and right-wing student movements. We will analyze various forms of student protest including teach-ins, occupations, and hashtag activism as well as the variant state and administrative responses to student mobilizations.

PSYC 778: Diverse Families
Instructor: Rachel Farr
Time: Mondays 9:30am-12pm
The notion of the “traditional American family” is transforming. With new historical circumstances, families in the United States have become increasingly more diverse. This course is intended to provide graduate students in psychology (others may enroll with instructor’s permission) with an overview and analysis of a variety of contemporary family systems in the U.S., such as single-parent families, adoptive and foster family systems, families who have children via reproductive technologies, and families with sexual minority parents. Taught from a developmental psychological perspective, graduate students will also gain understanding in family systems theory and in research methods for studying family systems. Course material will be considered within the context of social issues, questions, and public controversies, e.g., “Is the traditional family disappearing?”, “Is the institution of marriage dying or changing?”, “Do children need both a mother and a father for optimal development?”. The course will address factors that contribute to positive family functioning and healthy outcomes for children and parents. Implications for future research, clinical practice, public policy, and law surrounding parenting and families (e.g., custody and placement decisions) will be covered. Course goals are accomplished through interactive dialogue of course readings, multiple opportunities for presentation on course topics, and several course projects/papers.

GWS 600 / PSYC 779 / SOC 779 (section 1): Prejudice and Inequality: Views from the Social Sciences
Instructor: Jenn Hunt
Time: Thursdays 2-4:30pm
In recent decades, there have been marked improvements in attitudes toward many groups that are stigmatized due to race, gender, sexual orientation, class, and other social identities. Nevertheless, considerable inequalities remain across social groups, subtle forms of discrimination thrive, and, in many cases, prejudice is still openly expressed. This course will attempt to understand this juxtaposition by examining theories of prejudice and inequality from different social science perspectives, including Psychology, Sociology, Gender Studies, Critical Race Theory, and Critical Whiteness Studies. First, we will consider theories on the nature of contemporary prejudice to understand why biases related to race, gender, sexual orientation, etc. persist, how prejudices against different groups are similar and different, and how intersectional oppression occurs. Second, we will consider how pervasive inequality and discrimination affect members of stigmatized groups. We also will examine how members of dominant groups, especially White people, form group-based identities and understand their experiences of privilege. Third, we will analyze different approaches – both good and bad – to reducing prejudice and promoting meaningful rather than rhetorical equality.

- Please note: Currently, there are 7 seats for the GWS prefix, 7 seats for the PSY prefix, and 1 seat for the SOC prefix. I am happy to shift them around based on student needs.

AAS 654 / HIS 654: Readings in Modern African American History
Instructor: Anastasia Curwood
Time: Wednesdays 3-5:30pm
The scholarly field of African-American History is distinguished by its rendering of black historical actors as full participants, and by centering the perspectives of those historical actors, along with blunt analysis of power relationships within the United States and investigation into the workings of other aspects of identity (gender, class, sexuality) as they mediate the experiences of black Americans. This course takes up those topics in the period since the Civil War.

ENG 651: Studies in American Literature before 1860: Disenfranchised Voices in Early American Narrative
Instructor: Marion Rust
Time: TBD
"Disenfranchised": African American, Native American, female, transgender, nonmarital, antinomian, young, indentured. "Narrative": poetry, captivity narrative, criminal narrative, spiritual autobiography, feminist theory, musical drama, trial transcript, slave narrative, epistolary correspondence, novel, newspaper. In this class, we will read work by and about escaped captives, religious subversives, con men, anonymous congregations, abused wives, midwives, Black seamen, same-sex married women, and Native American preachers. Possible authors include Anne Hutchinson, Anne Bradstreet, Mary Rowlandson, Olaudah Equiano, Martha Ballard, Abigail Abbot Bailey, Samson Occom, William Apess, Sarah Pierpont Edwards, Phyllis Wheatley, Judith Sargent Murray, Stephen Burroughs, and others whose names we may never know. Requirements consist of active preparation and participation, a final research paper of about 20 pages, multiple short written commentaries, and willingness to lead at least one class.

GWS 650: Feminist Theory
Instructor: Karen Tice
Time: Tuesdays 5-7:30pm
This seminar will explore the major themes and debates falling within the broad terrain of feminist theorizing. The seminar will analyze historical trajectories as well as contemporary theorizations of feminist analyses of gender, sexualities, race/ethnicity, identities, intersectionality, nationalism, neoliberalism/imperialism, populism, precarity, violence, and transnationalism across geo-political and personal borders. The objectives of this seminar is for students to become familiar with multi-disciplinary applications of feminist theory and the ways in which feminist frameworks and methodologies can be applied to your particular research interests.

LIS 690 (online course): Informal Learning in Information Organizations
Instructor: Daniela Kruel DiGiacomo
Virtual office hours: Wednesdays 2-4pm
How people learn has implications for how learning environments should be designed. This course examines theories of informal learning— primarily drawing upon research from the sociocultural tradition of learning and human development—and considers how they can be practically implemented into information organization contexts. Being grounded in a sociocultural tradition means that this class will center issues of equity, diversity, and justice as they relate to the organization and design of information organization contexts and settings (e.g. libraries, museums, youth programs, new media centers, non-profit organizations). For example, how do issues of culture and learning inform the development of afterschool literacy programs in public libraries or Maker spaces in school libraries, especially those that serve predominantly minoritized communities? By gaining a deep understanding of how people learn across their lifespan, students will be able to consider how to create a community of learners in a range of settings in which people from various backgrounds participate. Topics covered include issues related to culture and cognition, identity development, adult-youth partnerships, access to/relationships with new digital media, and design thinking. No prerequisites.

EPE 628: Ethics in Educational Decision Making
Instructor: Eric Thomas Weber
Time: Tuesdays, 4-6:30pm
This course concerns major moral challenges for leadership in educational decision making. These include conflicts between religion and ethics, as well as the responsibilities of and for education in democratic societies. We will draw on resources from bioethics and ethical norms that have arisen in relation to the performance of research on human subjects to examine and reveal the ways in which historical norms are applied, updated, challenged, and revised in the light of new democratic contexts, particularly applied to the contexts of colleges and schools. We will review dominant moral theories and how they variously apply or conflict with modern norms, yet continue to inspire divergent outlooks on education. We will then conclude the course with focus on particular contexts for challenges in democratic societies, such as with regard to integration and self-segregation, conflicts of interest, challenges for teachers, administrators, and testing in schools, as well as with regard to special education.

ARC 513: Architecture and War
Instructor: Wallis Miller
Time: Tuesdays, 2-4:30pm
War has been an unusual topic of interest to architects since it has more to do with the destruction of architecture than with its production. But contemporary politics as well as the turn toward social change in architectural theory and practice have made it a central topic for designers. In this seminar, we will look at a range of examples that address the multiple intersections of architecture and war. For example, we will look at structures built for war and try to understand them architecturally and the militarization of the civilian landscape to see the ways in which the techniques as well as the structures of war have affected the everyday. The consequences of war will also be an important subject in terms of how architects have addressed refugees and the destruction of the landscape as well as how they have used their visualization techniques to identify war crimes. And, finally, we will consider the ways in which people remember war and inscribe those memories in the landscape or erase them from it.