TechnoPolitics 3070 3 F
Technology and Politics
Class Time: Wednesday 2:30-5:30
Class Location: 010 Accolade East

Technology and politics have always been intertwined. This course examines the technopolitical convergence in selected works of Marx, Deleuze, Derrida, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Steigler, DeLanda, Latoure, McLuhan, Virilio and Kroker.

The thread that links these political philosophers and social theorists is a convergence in the belief that technology alters existence in terms of self and other, essence, agency, consciousness, intimacy, intelligence, reason, life, embodiment, identity, and gender.

The teleology of humans defining their world through fabrication, the instrumental direction of tools and technology, is altered in what Steigler calls  ‘originary technicity’: in the human/ technological interface there is no obvious distinction between doer and means; technology and human endeavor are coupled in a manner in which technology constructs the human, as much as, perhaps more than, the human constructs technology.

This course has three objectives: 1) To determine how key thinkers in the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries have constructed the techno-human interface. 2) To determine how these same thinkers have derived not simply a politics of technology but a new political genre: technopolitics.  And, 3) To examine the terrain of technopolitics as a contested terrain.

POLS 3070 3 F
Psychology and Politics
Tues & Thurs 10:00-11:30

This course involves the use of psychoanalytic and psychological concepts in contemporary and post contemporary political thought. After outlining key psychological theories, beginning with Freud, the focus is on themes such as ideology and freedom, democracy and paranoia, sexual repression and desire, patriarchy and gender, power and resistance, schizophrenia and politics, the colonized body and (imperialist) psychology, the post psycho-body and cyber psychology.

POLS 3011 3. W
Politics of Sexuality \ Sexual Politics
Tues & Thurs 10:00-11:30

Human sexuality has become a contested site of political and social conflicts. Since the 1980’s research has challenged popular conceptions of sex as a natural and biological force. The course explores the socio-political construction of sexualities through the fields of psychoanalysis, law, sexology, and popular culture.

Focusing on Canada, the United States and Britain from the nineteenth century to the present, the course investigates a range of subjects: gender identity, heterosexuality, homosexuality, transsexuality, bisexuality, ‘femininity,’ ‘masculinity,’ transgender, sexual representation, pornography, and disease.

POLS 4670 3 W
GS/POLS 5670 3 W
Politics of Cyberspace
Wed. 10:30-12:30

As a component of the information revolution and globalization, the internet has since 1989 rapidly emerged as a feature of contemporary politics. The internet is subject to competing claims regarding its positive and negative impact on power relations and individual identities.

This course focuses on a variety of interpretative methods that are applied to the internet – communication theory, Marxism, feminism, postmodernism, international relations, identity theory, information theory, technological determinism, political economy.

The characterization of the internet as a new medium and its political significance will be emphasized. The course will examine the influence of “non-place” communication on democratic development, social power and interaction as well as identity formation.

GS POLS 6085 3 F
GS SPTH 6033 3 F
The Politics of Identity
Tues: 14:30-16:30

This course probes identity/difference, post identity, self and other, human and post human, public and personal, gender and post gender, masochist and sadist, east and west. The aim is to problematize both sides of the identity/difference divide, looking at the ways in which identity is consolidated through the constitution of difference and how difference, as a category and practice, in late modernity has been politicized and depoliticized as a site of resistance.

The course will examine how the politics of identity has simultaneously politicized and depoliticized the public and personal facilitating a potential for both radical democracy and neoconservatism in the public, and a possibility for extreme activism, passive indifference, radical indifference and engaged endeavor in the personal.

Key concepts include power, resentment, responsibility, representation, gender, race, ethnicity, community, citizenship, class, labor, mobilization, sovereignty, neoimperialism, neocolonialism, virtuality, performativity, indifference, and endeavor.

Three questions structure the course: what is left of the concept of citizenship in the political scape of identity and post identity politics, how can the public be reclaimed as a site of action, and how can living be a process of endeavor rather than excess and labor. The course ends by examining performance, specifically post human performance, as a site of endeavor.

GS\POLS 6086 3 W
GS SPTH 6632 3 W
Thinking Power and Violence
– co-taught with Professor Gad Horowitz (University of Toronto)
Tues.14:30-14:30

In the twentieth century there have been numerous attempts to think seriously about the meaning of power and violence as fundamental categories of human existence.

‘Thinking Power and Violence’ is concerned with violence in many forms and manifestations: violence at the foundation of human community, conservative violence, ‘divine violence,’ redemptive violence, self as violence against self and other, exclusionary violence, the violence of liberal freedom and the commodity, counter-hegemonic violence, the violence of the spectacle, the violence of outsiders and gender violence.

The objectives of ‘Thinking Power and Violence’ are first, to develop an appreciation of the elusive multidimensionality of violence as a phenomenon and second, to heighten awareness of the risk of violence implicit in the textualization of violence.