Spring 2026
The following courses are approved courses for SP26 for those pursuing a graduate certificate in Social Theory (listed alphabetically):
ARC 513-002: Carceral Environments (3 credits)
Instructor: Seda Kayim
Day & Time: Tuesdays 2:00 – 4:30 (Gray Design Building 227E)
Course Description: Carceral practices are inherently architectural because they necessitate the confinement of human and nonhuman bodies through spatial and material means. This seminar examines global histories of confinement from the medieval period to the present to discuss architecture’s complicity in creating carceral environments and consider its responsibility for envisioning new spatial modalities toward justice and freedom. The seminar focuses on built environments that reduce intelligent existence to bare life: not only for humans (plantations, penitentiaries, camps, asylums) but also non-human animals (industrial farms, zoos, circuses). How does architecture enable different forms of spatial suffering and subjugation? What links can be revealed between built environmental practice, political economy, governing ideology and technology in charting histories of human and non-human unfreedom? How would a potential post-carceral future look spatially? The seminar will introduce students to theories on carceral politics and scholarship on carceral practices from across the humanities, providing them with a critical toolbox to understand systems of permanent registration, compulsory labor, and behavioral modification that we are all entangled in.
Please contact the instructor in advance as seats are limited and enrollment requires approval.
A-H 526/626: Art/Artist in Society (3 credits)
Instructor: Peter Wang
Day & Time: Thursdays 12:30-3pm (SAVS106)
Course Description: Borrowing from the framework of "curatorial activism," this course examines issues of race and representation in art and art history with an emphasis on works by BIPOC artists in the United States. (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color) In addition to a closer look at how race is visualized and represented in art, the course revisits major exhibitions and critical issues in curatorial practice. How does art both shape and reflect on race in the United States? How do power and privilege affect the way we express ourselves? How might art help us build more just, equitable societies? The course invites students to explore and reconsider the role of art and the artist in society.
ENG 653: Studies in American Literature Since 1900 (3 credits)
Instructor: Jeff Clymer
Day & Time: Thursdays 2:00-4:30pm (POT 1245)
Course Description: In this graduate seminar, we will study significant post-2000 American novels within the historical and theoretical paradigm known as “Critical Finance Studies.” Also sometimes called the “New History of Capitalism,” current scholarship at the nexus of literature and economics explores the roles that credit, debt, and risk have played in American literary and social history. This course will serve as an introduction to both important fiction and the scholarly paradigms that have emerged within this subfield to analyze the culture and literature of “financialization.” No advanced understanding of finance or economics is required – only an interest in how literary authors represent the social effects of money’s circulation in the United States. Reading list will include works such as Jonathan Dee, The Privileges; Don DeLillo, Cosmopolis; Lionel Shriver, The Mandibles: A Family, 2029-47; Emily St. John Mandel, The Glass Hotel; Adam Haslett, Union Atlantic, and Hernan Diaz, Trust, as well as theorists and historians of modern capitalism such as Fredric Jameson, Greta Krippner, Annie McClanahan, Randy Martin, Jacob S. Hacker, Dave Graeber, Max Haiven, Hyman Minsky, and David Harvey.
GEO 718: Geographies of the State (3 credits)
Instructor: Alicia Barceinas Cruz
Day & Time: Mondays 2-4:30 pm (room TBD)
Course Description: This seminar examines how the state is figured as the only way to guarantee lasting peace, security, and welfare. We will ask about the kinds of geographies that result from dominant institutions of global governance working under the premise of the necessity of a sovereign state to administer territories and people. Drawing from a plurality of theories of the state and its effects, we will take a multi-scalar approach to analyze the state’s writings on Earth and bodies. As shown in the contemporary case of Palestine, statehood is framed as paramount to ensure the survival of people and their territorial rights. But states also hold the power to plunder lands and waters, to control bodies through bio- and necropolitical means, and to exert fast and slow violence. State governance largely fails to prevent—indeed it is implicated in the production of—environmental injustices related to climate change, resource extraction, industrial pollution, land grabs, and the loss of more-than-human life. So why do some societies keep turning to the state in their pursuit of freedom and justice? And, in turn, why do other societies insist on a politics of refusal to build alternatives to the state, be that through autonomous communities, mutual aid, grassroots and abolitionist organizing, or utopian social ecology? To tease out these questions, we will read theoretical texts along with ethnographies from North America/Turtle Island, Latin America and the Caribbean/Abya Yala, Africa, and Southeast Asia. Our inquiry will lead us to challenge prevailing notions of place, territory, and sovereignty.
GWS 600: Queer Theory and Critique (3 credits)
Instructor: Ellen Riggle
Day & Time: Wednesdays 3:30-6pm (Kastle 210)
Course Description: “Queer” is a versatile word that may be used as a noun, verb, adverb, or adjective; the word may denote something as different, extraordinary, or unconventional. “Theory” is a “system of ideas intended to explain something,” and is how people try to understand the world around them. “Critique” is the art of evaluation or assessment of ideas. Applied within gender and women’s studies, “queer theory” becomes a framework for critiquing existing explanations, and building new narratives that go beyond the ordinary. In this course, we will begin by reading The Serviceberry by Robin Wall Kimmerer; engage in reflexivity exercises; and learn forms of expression to support the art of breaking down assumptions and hegemonies, while creating new narratives and pictures to inform our discourse and how these can (re)visualize and (re)shape our world. We will read some classic qt works and expand the scope through a student centered approach; students will be expected to engage with and help build out the syllabus based on their fields of study and expertise.
GWS 630: Feminist Research Methods (3 credits)
Instructor: Jenn Hunt
Day & Time: Tuesdays & Thursdays 2-3:15 pm (King Library 213E)
Course Description: Because Gender and Women’s Studies is an interdisciplinary field, feminist scholars employ a wide range of methodologies in their research. In this seminar, we will discuss what constitutes feminist research and examine the research process, from generating research questions through writing and dissemination. We will begin the course by discussing epistemological and ethical questions related to feminist inquiry. We then will consider a range of methodologies, including participant observation, ethnography, interviewing and oral history, survey methods, archival analysis, and decolonial and participatory action research. Approximately one-third of class sessions will be workshops focused on developing skills, including writing good questions, coding qualitative data, engaging in field work, and writing for publication. Throughout the semester, students will examine the use of various methods in existing feminist scholarship and engage in hands-on research projects to gain experience with different methodologies.
GWS 700: Hitchcock's Women (3 credits)
Instructor: Carol Mason
Day & Time: Tuesdays 3-5:30 pm (Breckinridge 107)
Course Description: Film director Alfred Hitchcock (1899-1980) is known as “the master of suspense” and “the original cinema influencer.” His movies have indelibly shaped world cinema and how we view women. This class presents a sliver of scholarship generated by his oeuvre with an aim to analyze how women are represented. For newcomers to Hitchcock, film studies, and American culture, we begin with a recent journalistic account, Hitchcock’s Blondes by Laurence Leamer. This first book familiarizes students with the popular representation of Hitchcock films (and why we study popular culture) and the longstanding perception that he had a “dark obsession” with his leading ladies. We will then read Tania Modleski’s The Women Who Knew Too Much: Hitchcock and Feminist Theory (third edition), which delves into scholarly readings of particular films. Our third major text is Robert Corber’s award-winning In the Name of National Security: Hitchcock, Homophobia, and the Political Construction of Gender in Post-War America, which uses film to analyze historical eras and ideas. This course is designed to meet the students where they’re at, whether they are advanced doctoral students of film studies or master’s students new to the academic pursuit of studying gender and women.
PHI 715: Foucault (3 credits)
Instructor: Philipp Rosemann
Day & Time: Mondays 4-6:30 pm (POT 1445)
Course Description: This seminar will serve as an introduction to Foucault’s oeuvre, from his early writings—such as The History of Madness—to the latest texts, including some posthumous publications like volume 4 of The History of Sexuality. The goal is to arrive at an understanding of the coherence of Foucault’s project, despite the numerous turns it took. Although there are many dimensions to Foucault, I take his central question to be concerned with what he calls the “empirico-transcendental doublet” (a term from The Order
of Things)—the fact that modern thought is at once transcendental, conceiving of the subject as constitutive, and committed to investigation of the empirical conditions of that subject. What ensues is a tension that threatens to tear the modern project apart. We will read (excerpts from) The History of Madness, The Order of Things, History of Sexuality (esp. volumes 1 and 4), and perhaps Le discours philosophique.
SOC 751: Contemporary Sociological Theory (3 credits)
Instructor: Ana Liberato
Day & Time: Tuesdays 5-7:30 pm (POT 107)
Course Description: A survey of major theoretical perspectives in modern sociology, focusing on twentieth century developments in European and American sociological theory. The principal contributions of selected theorists are considered and their role in the establishment of contemporary sociology is assessed.
**This course is accepted as a substitute for ST 500**