Courses

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This full-year course is mandatory for all first-year PhD students in Social & Political Thought. Normally the course is facilitated by the gradate program director of Social & Political Thought and reviews a diverse variety of ideas, theories, methods and research approaches.

The course provides students with an opportunity to draft their proposal and their Major Research Paper (MRP) in a collective environment. It also provides them a chance to work closely with their instructor in developing the design, methodology and theoretical approach of the MRP. Third, it gives students a chance for reflexive and dialogical space for students to interact and provide feedback on each other's projects.

Examines various models of domination associated with significant historical events and persistent social issues including totalitarianism, ideological and cultural domination, patriarchal domination, racial domination, imperial and colonial domination, the domination of nature, and violence and domination. The course concludes with an examination of responses to problems of domination from social and activist movements and advances in human rights.

This course addresses itself to the question of whether a focus on faith, reason, and atheism as founded on a conception of the human being as constituted by the irreducibly other provides a hermeneutical basis for working through the multiple and often conflictual relationships among these apparently disparate discourses in European thought.

An introduction to the histories, theories, concepts and praxis of Black Feminism, as produced through intersectional struggles around race, class gender and sexuality. It considers shifts in the articulation of Black feminisms across geography, culture and time, and encourages further research into the specificities of Black Canadian feminism.

Accelerating Technicity examines the concept of technology in select works of Heidegger, Marcuse, Deleuze, Simondon, Stiegler, Hayles, Virilio and Acclerationism. Using these theorists the course will grapple with Heidegger's two conflicting tendencies in technology: the dominant tendency of instrumental technology (the danger inherent in technology) and second, the tendency toward poeisis (the revealing and saving potential inherent in technology). The course is presented in blended(BLEN)format that includes in-class, on-line and print EE components: seminar presentation, seminar participation, interactive on-line discussion forum, one minute film, plus paper abstract and essay. The aim is for the student to be able to interact proficiently and seamlessly both online and in person to meet the requirements of a networked world.

This advanced seminar seeks to understand the origins, ideas, and problems of the return to political philosophy in contemporary French thought. This multifaceted intellectual phenomenon presents a particularly rich and intense debate on the fundamental issues of political life such as freedom, democracy, conflict, domination, and social division.

This course explores the different historical and contemporary varieties, senses, and figures of ignorance, and its overlap with other concepts. It will focus on the main ways in which ignorance has been analyzed, thematized, valorized, and employed heuristically, and introduce students to the emerging scholarly field of agnotology.

This course is intended as an in depth study of major theoretical schools and debates within contemporary film theory. The course is divided into three key units, each of which will focus on the historical development, methodological principles and philosophic underpinning of a specific school. This is a required course for all Critical and Historical Studies students.

This course examines the impact of international economic integration on Latin America and the Caribbean. It focuses on the social impact of globalization and the responses that these changes call forth: state policies, the rise of new political parties, unions and grassroots organizations and, in particular, international migration and transnationalism.

The course will explore key concepts, texts and debates in the field of contemporary cinema and media studies. While maintaining a focus on the intellectual and material histories of cinema studies and media studies as disciplines (and their recent convergence), including epistemological and ontological fr ameworks, methodological approaches, and institutional and technological supports, the course will emphasize recent developments in cinema and media studies. Three broad areas of study will structure the course: cinema and cultural theory; national and transnational cinema; cinema and technologies of the image.

This course develops a sociological analysis of the economy in a global context. The social organization of capitalist markets, the social implications of economic processes, and the sociological bases of economic power are explored through Marxist, world systems, institutionalist, network, feminist, and postcolonial perspectives.

This course introduces students to the critical study of race, psyche and sexuality in psychoanalytic perspective. The primary theoretical lens is shaped by psychosocial-studies. It appeals to students interested in how psychoanalysis (a) gives rise to racist and colonial thinking and (b) how it can be used to critique and better understand racist social and political formations.

The course is an overview of the field Black Studies. The focus of the course is, as much as possible, to provide both an international and historical view of these fields.

This course engages a critical examination of Transatlantic slavery and its afterlife, and the ways in which the imagination functions in the articulation of a desired, but always elusive, Black freedom.

Provides a close reading of the writings of Frantz Fanon. The principal aim is to assess Fanon's status as a major thinker of the twentieth century. This requires, first, examining the formal characteristics and substantive ideas of Fanon's texts; and, second, reading his work with major intellectual currents such as post-war Hegelianism and Marxism, Existentialism and psychoanalysis, Negritude and African philosophy.

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Despite the apparent 'presentness' of contemporary society, these are memory-obsessed times. The function of memory in individual and collective identity has become an object of inquiry in many academic disciplines, introducing reflexive analysis of archiving processes into the long-standing evidentiary function of the archive in the historical study of empirical reality. The advent of digital technologies with their shift in the techniques of conservation and classification and a consequent rhetoric of instantaneity and simultaneity, has provoked a sense of imminent breakdown in the protocols of transmission of the traces of the past, even as digitization renews the utopian impulse of the archive in its embodiment of desire for mastery of a quasi-infinity of cultural materials. The dialectic of accumulation and dissemination-of hierarchization and destabilization--is only one of the paradoxes generated by the archive. Both a physical site--an enclosed institutional space--it is also an imaginative site, a conceptual space of changing limits. The physical space that contains them, the archive is also the material traces of the past so contained. Additionally, noun metamorphoses into a verb, associated with the ensemble of operations within this space that confers order on the contents in the creation of a system of classification so as to sift, interpret and transmit material traces. To archive documents is to enclose them in a myriad of complex containers--stone, metal, acid-free folders, or even electronic pulses--that structure the archiveable content as it comes into existence and in its relation to the future. Archiving contributes thus to the transformation of documents into monuments with symbolic functions. Yet despite its etymology that signifies both origin and command, the archive confounds beginnings and order alike as it exceeds the logic of historical temporality: its teleological function and claims to universality are short-circuited in its un

Subjectivity, the first-person perspective in the conduct of everyday life, has become an interdisciplinary topic in the social sciences, humanities, and psychology. In this course we discuss (a) theories of subjectivity that include the notion that individual subjectivity is embedded in social, cultural, and historical contexts and that economy, politics, and society are interwoven with the very fabric of subjectivity. (b) We analyze critical theories of subjectivity that reflect on Western biases as well as the processes of subjectification by which we consider ourselves subjects. (c) Finally, this course focuses on opportunities of resistance in the context of subjectivity. The course provides an overview of the debates that exist on the topic.