Courses

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.

This course is mandatory for all first year Ph.D. students in Social and Political Thought. Normally the course will be facilitated by the GPD of SPT, and will review a diverse variety of ideas, theories, methods and research approaches.

This course is mandatory for all third year Ph.D. students in Social and Political Thought, and must be completed prior to the dissertation proposal. Normally the course will be facilitated by the GPD of SPT, and will review a diverse variety of ideas, theories, methods and research approaches.

The aim of this seminar is to introduce students to 20th century revolutionary thought that was produced through black struggle against legacies of slavery, colonialism, and imperialism. It engages specifically with the ideas of C.L.R. James, Frantz Fanon, Claudia Jones, and Walter Rodney, all of Caribbean descent, whose intellectual and political work has had international impact.

The objective of this course is to provide students with theoretical and methodological tools to critically examine and explore how race and processes of racialization are constituted, exercised, lived and contested in law, through law and by law. This course examines the relationship between race, colonization and the contemporary legal order. The course will address the intersections of law, modernity and liberalism in order to address the role that law plays in the constitution of racialized, gendered and classed subjects. The course will address how legal processes of racialization contribute to the politics of nation-building and to the development of national subjectivities.

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 course examines key concepts, debates, methodologies, and theoretical directions in the history of women, genders and sexualities from a transnational and intersectional perspective. It focuses on the dialogue between gender history and social history and asks how social movements have shaped the questions historians ask and how gender articulates with major analytic categories including class relations and racial formation.

This advanced seminar will examine the emergence, in France, of a new theory of radical democracy born of the ruthless critique of totalitarian domination and of the discovery of a politics of emancipation in the wake of the events of May 1968. Inspired by Rosa Luxemburg's alternative 'Socialism or Barbarism', the anti-totalitarian left articulates a democratic project that remains critical of liberalism while rejecting vanguardism in the name of the political capacity of 'anybody and everybody' (J. Rancière).

Grounded in three interrelated foundations-dialectical materialist philosophy, historical materialist social theory, and political economy-Marxist theory forms an organic and coherent theoretical whole. This course provides an introduction to key ideas within the Marxist tradition. It is of interest to students in geography, environmental studies, sociology, political thought, international development, and other cognate fields. Crosslisted with GS/GEOG 5375 3.00, GS/ENVS 5475 3.00, and GS/SOCI 6794 3.00

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.

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 examines a variety of ways that space is created and experienced in film, television and video art with a consideration of themes such as the spaces of production and exhibition, location shooting and realism, cultural industries and real estate, special effects and virtual spaces, cognitive maps and habitus, and moving images as monuments. Featured theorists include Walter Benjamin, Siegfried Kracauer, Henri Lefebvre, Andre Bazin, the Situationists, Fredric Jameson, Laura Mulvey, Jean Louis Baudry, Stephen Heath, Paula Massood and David Harvey.

Focuses on contemporary black Canadian writing in English, investigating both the literature and theoretical frameworks for locating its concerns and impact.

This course engages the themes of the annual Alchemy Lecture, a public model of intellectual engagement that brings together Black and Indigenous thinkers to consider the critical issues of our times. Students engage the works of these thinkers and attend the annual lecture, as well as gaining understanding of the curatorial, planning, and publication process associated with the event.

This course examines the political history of African socialism and communism, with a focus on sub-Saharan Black Africa. In doing so, the course illuminates the political struggles of Black Africans to overcome imperialism by establishing socialist and communist societies. The course distinguishes between African socialism, which was founded on African political philosophy, and African communism, which was founded on Marxism-Leninism.

What can social justice mean in light of attempts to reconceptualize justice as an ethical and political relation to difference? This question is explored through diverse philosophical and educational writing across such themes as hospitality, promising, forgiveness, and the political uses and depiction of foreignness

About the meaning of power and violence as fundamental categories of modernity and human existence overall. The course is concerned with violence in many forms and manifestations, including: 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 Politics of Aesthetics develops an aesthetic framework from political and philosophical thinkers who have an aesthetic theory as part of their philosophy. These include Hegel, Kant, Heidegger, Vattimo, Badiou, Rancière and Zabala. 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 course introduces graduate students to the thought of French philosopher Gille Deleuze and his often co-author Félix Guattari. Some of the commonly used (and often misunderstood) concepts in Critical Theory were produced by the pair of French activists and intellectuals. This course surveys 12 among the most important concepts either created by Deleuze and Guattari or redefined by them. Course credit exclusion: GS/SPTH 6651 3.00

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

This course provides a comparative inquiry about the nature of transnational communal, religious, and political identities at the age of late capitalism. It puts emphasis on critical approaches to diasporas, their variant constructions of homeland and home, and their marked effects on the politics of the post-Westphalian state and international relations.