Fall 2026
The following courses are approved courses for FA26 for those pursuing the graduate certificate in Social Theory. This list is not final, and courses may be added up to the beginning of the Fall semester.
PHI 715: Time and Space Today (3 credits)
Instructor: Ted Schatzki
Day & Time: Tuesdays, 4:00-6:30 pm
Location: POT 1445
Course Description: In the past thirty years or so, a spate of thinkers has claimed that digitalization has altered space and time. Sometimes these thinkers mean that digitalization has altered, not this or that feature or configuration of space or time, but space and time as such, that is, their nature. This seminar will consider this claim. Its principal aim is to determine what, if any, deep differences digitalization has made to these phenomena. A second aim is to determine whether digitalization sheds light on how best to conceptualize space and time as phenomena relevant to understanding human society. Readings will include parts of Paul Virilio, Open Sky; Byung-Chul Han, The Scent of Time; Nick Couldry, The Space of the World; Sarah Sharma, In the Meantime; Luciano Floridi, The Fourth Revolution: How the Infosphere is Reshaping Human Reality; Robert Hassan, Empires of Speed: Time and the Acceleration of Politics and Society; William Gibson, “Burning Chrome”; and selections from Bernard Stiegler and Yuk Hui on digitalized time. Background readings on space and time will include David Harvey on space-time compression; Barbara Adams on timescapes; Martin Heidegger on the time and space of existence and the space of dwelling; Doreen Massey on place; Edmund Husserl on the time of consciousness; Norbert Elias and G.J. Whitrow on, respectively, the social construction and the history of time; and Harold Innis on space, time, and societies.
SOC 651/ ST 500: Classical Sociological Theory
Instructor: Jordan Brown
Day & Time: Wednesdays, 3-5pm
Location: POT 1545
Course Description: This course will be an intensive examination of the ideas and continuing significance of leading nineteenth century sociological theorists. The work of Marx, Weber, Durkheim, and Simmel or Mead is given particular attention. Discussion concerns the contents of their writings, the sociohistorical context in which they were developed, and their applicability to contemporary society.
GEO 702: Concepts in Geography
Instructor: Nari Senanayake
Day & Time: Tuesdays, 3-5:30pm
Location: Miller 6
Course Description: This course examines key debates and interventions in geography, focusing on scholarship that rethinks concepts of space, nature, power, and difference through feminist and decolonial theory. As we engage with contemporary work, we will situate it within the broader history of geographic thought and consider the politics of knowledge production within the discipline itself.
SOC 779: Theories of Social Psychology
Instructor: Robyn Brown
Day & Time: Mondays, 1-3:30pm
Location: POT 1545
Course Description: This seminar surveys a broad range of theoretical approaches within sociological social psychology. While most of the readings focus on theories or theoretical perspectives, I have included at least one theoretical application (i.e., an empirical paper that applies a theory or theoretical perspective to a substantive topic) in most weeks’ readings. We focus on major theoretical paradigms. Note that this is an advanced seminar for graduate students, and I assume that students have some background in sociological or social science theory and methods.
ENG 682: Studies in Fiction: "Theory of the Novel"
Instructor: Jap-Nanak Makkar
Date & Time: Tuesdays, 2-4:30
Course Description: This course examines the novel as a form typical of modernity. This course explores a small number of influential theories of the novel, and the novels that accompany them. We engage with the novel as a form typical of modernity, in which conflicts related to the birth of interiority, the waning of tradition, or the intensification of technology are staged and resolved. According to the theorists we read, the novel does not report on modern life by including a car or a computer in the content of the story; that, decidedly, is not what’s modern about the novel. Modernity is in the form’s construction, its discontinuities, its interstices, or recesses—terms we investigate with the assistance of Lukács, Jameson, Bewes, Ngai, Kornbluh, Goethe, Flaubert, Conrad and Coetzee.