12 courses with the subject CPLS GU, each shown exactly as we captured it from the college's catalog, with every element we hold. Where the wording looks broken, that is our reading of the catalog, not the college's text.
CPLS GU4095Mobility and Enclosure, Statelessness and Democracy4.00
The volume and intensity of human mobility from the Middle East and North Africa to Europe remains dramatically increased nowadays, despite the overall restrictions in mobility imposed by the pandemic conditions worldwide. During the last decade refugee statelessness has evolved into as a quasi-permanent liminal condition of being within the political body of western societies, especially in so called border countries of the European periphery. The continuous expansion and multiplication of camps and hot-spots in countries such as Turkey, Greece, Italy, Spain, etc. has created different states of existence within the national territories, raising a wide range of issues that concern statehood, political rights, the right to equal treatment and access to public goods (i.e., health, education, safety, representation etc.), which concern the core social and political demands of a democratic polity. However, the antinomies and aporias related to refugee statelessness within the nation state are nowadays further aggravated by the pandemic conditions of the last two years. The pandemic has opened up a new space of unprecedented state intervention in the public and private lives of citizens, while reconfiguring the meaning of globalization. Questions of democracy, statehood and statelessness, mobility, access, restriction and enclosure are now re-conditioned under the two-fold historical contingency of refugee life and citizen life in a pandemic. In this course we address these emerging issues through theoretical, literary, legal, historical texts that highlight how long established social and political problems, imbedded in existing structures since the late 20th century, are currently intrinsically re-conditioned. Our intention is to serve a pedagogy that is alert to how the present time affects the social and intellectual life of people across borders and cultures, while retaining deep historical learning that establishes connections between radical new occurrences (such as the Covid pandemic or the refugee problem in the Mediterranean) and long term hard structural patterns
CPLS GU4162Transnational Feminisms-China and Beyond3.00
This is an interdisciplinary seminar for graduate students and advanced undergraduates to explore transnational feminisms, gender politics in China, and the movement of feminist (and anti-feminist) ideas across borders. We will read some translations of primary works by Chinese writers, as well as feminist scholarship in English to gain insight into the following areas: social movements; gender, race, ethnicity and class; global capitalism and inequalities; sexualities; identities; digital activism; nationalisms; marriage and families; and the politics of reproduction. Although the course has no formal prerequisites, it assumes some basic knowledge about Chinese history and intersectional approaches to gender. If you have never taken a course on China before,please ask me for guidance on whether or not the course is suitable for you
This seminar will concentrate on close readings of four key texts: Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious; Mourning and Melancholia; Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety; and one additional text to be chosen by the class. These texts are chosen in part to not overlap with those covered in CLPS GU4200. Key supplemental readings will explore aspects of the text’s historical, cultural and intellectual context, contemporary reception, and influence on psychoanalytic theory, philosophy, and beyond
CPLS GU4227Blood, Guts, and Lancets: Anatomy in Nineteenth-Century Fiction3.00
This seminar serves as an introduction to the historical rise of anatomy and pathology (the branches of medicine focused on the study of the human form and on the study of the diagnosis of disease, intimately connected with forensic science), by examining how medicine is represented in the prose fiction of the Romantic and Victorian periods. Together, our class will look at how anatomy became the basis of modern Western allopathic medicine, and why laboratory medicine emerged as a crucible for medico-scientific progress during the nineteenth century. As the physician’s practice turned away from concocting tinctures and remedies, medicine would now become grounded in scientific reasoning based on the mechanistic study of the human body—and its key procedure, the postmortem examination. In the nineteenth century, a historical period that saw the first uses of the terms “autopsy” and “scientist,” literary writers were deeply engaged in the rise of anatomy, pathology, and forensics. Novels and short fiction served as a testing-ground for working out ideas about life and death in the complex sociocultural world of the Romantic and Victorian eras. In this course, as we read works by authors like Mary Shelley, Edgar Allan Poe, Sheridan LeFanu, Emile Zola, H.G. Wells, R.L. Stevenson, Bram Stoker, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Agatha Christie, we will consider the strange history of how “genre fiction” (gothic novels and detective stories) became a way of exploring the pathological in literary writing—while also containing its threats. By reading the medical writings of Humphry Davy, Matthew Baillie, Luigi Galvani, Claude Bernard, and Rudolf Virchow alongside these novels, we will see how the tropes we usually associate with literature fundamentally shaped the rise of laboratory and forensic medicine. And as we read the historical lifewriting of Robert Voorhis and Mary Seacole, we will think, too, about how the rise of anatomy in nineteenth-century medicine was tainted by the influence of (what was then called) “race science.” Ultimately, we will consider why anatomy became a dominant motif in nineteenth-century fiction, and why genre fiction is still the “outhouse” (in Amitav Ghosh’s phrase) that keeps the pathological well apart from high realism. Along the way, a pathologist from the New York Medical Examiner’s Office will visit the class to talk about the legacies of the nineteenth century in modern pathology and forensic medicine
CPLS GU4325Abolition Medicine: Medical Racisms and Anti-Racisms3.00
In 1935, WEB Dubois wrote about abolition democracy: an idea based not only on breaking down unjust systems, but on building up new, antiracist social structures. Scholar activists like Angela Davis, Ruth Gilmore and Mariame Kaba have long contended that the abolition of slavery was but one first step in ongoing abolitionist practices dismantling racialized systems of policing, surveillance and incarceration. The possibilities of prison and police abolition have recently come into the mainstream national consciousness during the 2020 resurgence of nationwide Black Lives Matters (BLM) protests. As we collectively imagine what nonpunitive and supportive community reinvestment in employment, education, childcare, mental health, and housing might look like, medicine must be a part of these conversations. Indeed, if racist violence is a public health emergency, and we are trying to bring forth a “public health approach to public safety” – what are medicine’s responsibilities to these social and institutional reinventions? Medicine has a long and fraught history of racial violence. It was, after all, medicine and pseudoscientific inquiry that helped establish what we know as the racial categorizations of today: ways of separating human beings based on things like skin color and hair texture that were used (and often continue to be used) to justify the enslavement, exclusion, or genocide of one group of people by another. Additionally, the history of the professionalization of U.S. medicine, through the formation of medical schools and professional organizations as well as and the certification of trained physicians, is a history of exclusion, with a solidification of the identity of “physician” around upper middle class white masculinity. Indeed, the 1910 Flexner Report, whose aim was to make consistent training across the country’s medical schools, was explicit in its racism. From practices of eugenic sterilization, to histories of experimentation upon bodies of color, medicine is unfortunately built upon racist, sexist and able-ist practices. This course is built on the premise that a socially just practice of medicine is a bioethical imperative. Such a practice cannot be achieved, however, without examining medicine’s histories of racism, as well as learning from and building upon histories of anti-racist health practice. The first half of the semester will be dedicated to learning about histories of medical racism: from eugenics and racist experimentation to public health xenophobic fear mongering. The second half of the semester will be dedicated to examining medical and grassroots anti-racist practices: from the free health clinics and hospital takeovers of the Black Panther and Young Lords Parties, to environmental activism in Flint and the Sioux Rock Reservation to antiracist AIDS and COVID activism
This seminar explores the intersections between Ludwig Wittgenstein's philosophy and key developments in artificial intelligence. We will examine how Wittgenstein’s later philosophy challenges contemporary debates about the capabilities and limitations of machine intelligence. We will also learn how AI practitioners actively engage with Wittgenstein’s ideas, developing innovative methods in machine translation, semantic networks, or natural language processing (NLP) in general
Typically, a course in social theory or political philosophy might be taught with two different emphases—as intellectual history, or as a theoretical tradition. In the first approach canonical texts are examined in relation to their political, social, economic and cultural contexts. In the second approach “classic” texts are systematically compared to one another to show both similarities and differences in their approach, and to place them in some developmental sequence. In either case, the textual corpus tends to focus on the historical experiences of the North Atlantic as both normative and universal. Instead, this seminar focuses not merely on the placement of social theory in global contexts but rather, has as its explicit focus texts generated by thinkers who seek to theorize the geohistorical complexities of modern worldmaking through social forms and lifeworlds that stand askew to dominant approaches to the study of capitalist modernity. The South is conceived here as a set of relations and not as a place, less as a geographical location than a heuristic tool that might reorient discussion on fundamental questions about equality and difference, politics and personhood as these have taken shape as world historical questions of our time. The seminar is particularly interested in the interface between subaltern and minority pasts as these confront material contexts of resource extraction and labor exploitation, and the distinctive manner by which embodied difference intersects social inequality. That is, we will think about the relationship between historical identities and their material substrate. Broadly speaking, the seminar will bring into conversation work generated in the Americas, especially African American scholarship that engages questions of slavery and subjectivity, black vitality, and Afropessimism together with approaches addressing problems of anticolonial politics, postcolonial sovereignty, ideas of Islamic universality, and global Marxisms. That is, we seek to direct the energies of social thought toward questions of translation, alterity, and historical comparison. A broad familiarity with colonial histories, anticolonial thought, and/or with canonical texts of social theory would be helpful, but not necessary. The seminar will focus on key concepts such as anticolonial thought; racial capitalism, primitive accumulation; caste-race comparison; political aesthetics; and left and right populism. Readings for the seminar will include a mix of recent texts of social theory and political philosophy, and monographs in history, sociology, and anthropology
The contemporary world is arguably characterized by relations of property, ownership, and dispossession. Modernity, capitalism, colonialism, and decolonization are intertwined. In this upper-level seminar, we interrogate the connections between personhood and possession in modern Europe and former European colonies. We examine theories, philosophies, and works of literature that establish, represent, challenge, or critique the various meanings and embodiments of possession and dispossession in modern societies. With authors including Rainer Maria Rilke, Èdouard Glissant, Ghassan Kanafani, Yuri Herrera, and Clarice Lispector as our companions, we chart an itinerary among possessive and dispossessive paradigms of subjectivity from Hegel and Proudhon to Fanon and Butler, with the aim of fathoming anew older and more recent alternatives to possession
Should we read important classical texts to use from the planetary perspective? We will read six texts to consider answering this question. We will read: Hegel, Phenomenology of the Mind, selections; Marx, 1844 Manuscripts and Primitive Accumulation; Du Bois, Black Flame Trilogy, selections; Ranajit Guha, A Rule of Property for Bengal; Marguerite Duras, The Sea Wall; Alain Robbe-Grillet, Jealousy
CPLS GU4802Contradictions of Care: From Intimacy to Institution3.00
Care is central to the interpersonal claim that is made by the other. It is a response that recognizes and satisfies a need. Care can be motivated by pain and sorrow, but also by desire and the desire for recognition. But while care is a fundamental aspect of healing, it can also be a demand that extracts obligations and liabilities. Care is an ambiguous concept that always already contains or is determined by its oppositions; we will begin by analyzing the concept of care itself, drawing on resources from the history and philosophy of medicine as well as literary sources. Ideals of care that many of us have for our loved ones are difficult to render at scale, and are often in tension with the for-profit motivations behind the development of medications, the administration of healthcare services, and the distribution of goods. We will consider the sorts of compromises that are made every day through readings in literature, history, political science and philosophy and also through first-person experience in the form of a practicum that that will run parallel to the course
This seminar will revisit some major texts and concerns in the theoretical humanities that develop genealogical, psychoanalytical or political theories of the subject, roughly from Marx until today. The goal is to come to a critical understanding of the centrality of this notion of the subject as one of the founding concepts of modernity, as well as to draw out all the consequences of its crisis in radical humanistic (or even so-called posthumanist) thought today. Thinkers to be discussed further include Freud, Foucault, Badiou, Butler, Althusser, Rozitchner, Žižek and Zupančič. Portuguese
Since the financial crisis of 2007-8, a growing body of interdisciplinary work in the social sciences and humanities has worked to situate the timeless logics of economics within processes of governing that constitute economic space, time and subjects. This 4000-level graduate seminar, open to senior undergraduates, brings key themes and methods in this literature on processes of ‘economization’ into conversation, streamlining prominent genealogies. Informed by attention to links across British imperial and contemporary neoliberal formations, the course highlights legal-governmental imaginaries and media that convey and create market value. Working in-between the study of practices of capitalism (formal and vernacular) and theories of capital, we will consider infrastructures that frame the drive for perpetual profit. After a review of foundational literature, the syllabus will foreground processes of financialization or the bolstering of financial value as primary means for profit-making. Reading capitalism as governing project with attention to subject-formation and sign-value, the course weaves the analysis of governmentality, legal and financial fictions, finance and society, approaches from the historical anthropology of economy and media, and science and technology studies. Themes will include: “the economy” as governing imaginary; the performativity of economics; incarnations of homo economicus; risk, speculation and the commodification of futurity; uncertainty and the “spirits” of capitalism; virtual value and instruments of securitization; money, the semiotics of value, and monetization. The course assumes basic background in social and political theory, and political economy
