Lower-Division

Investigates the politics of identity and recognition as the basis for claims about institutional legitimacy and social struggle. Examines such diverse figures as Sartre, Fanon, Bataille, Foucault, Lacan, Levinas, Derrida, Deleuze, Zizek, and Badiou.

Although democracy is generally accepted as the best and most legitimate form of government, there is little agreement on what it means and how it should function. This course explores the concept and theories of democracy, with a focus on the “People”—who constitutes the people, how popular will is embodied, and how it may be expressed. Course explores debates about different models of democracy and examines how alternatives to democracy, such as dictatorship, autocracy, and tyranny, have been conceptualized. Also studies democracy and its “others” in relation to a constellation of concepts including power, equality, participation, accountability, resistance, legitimacy, and the rule of law.

Focuses on moral, metaphysical, and epistemological issues using classical texts along with some contemporary readings on related philosophical problems. Plato, Kant, and Sartre provide the central readings on ethics, while Descartes, Hume, Kant (again), and Wittgenstein provide the central metaphysical and epistemological discussions. Issues of philosophy of language and method are highlighted throughout.

Studies the modern concept of revolution. Course proposes to inquire into the concept of revolution, insurgency, revolt and resistance in theory and practice. The course aims to analyze thinkers such Thomas Hobbes, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Immanuel Kant, G.W. F. Hegel, Karl Marx, Carl Schmitt, Hannah Arendt, V.I. Lenin, Rosa Luxemburg, and the revolutionary declarations from the French Revolution to the Zapatista insurgency.

Explores the politics of resistance and how different thinkers have conceptualized what it means to resist, why it is necessary, and with what methods it should be done. Side by side with the theorists of resistance, the course analyzes examples of resistance from around the world, traversing different time periods, geographies, and cultures. Examples range from peasant revolts to labor movements, feminist struggles to anti-war mobilizations, prisoner uprisings to anti-colonial wars and contemporary forms of corporeal, self-sacrificial resistance. Relying upon the concrete political problems posed by each historical instance as springboards into larger theoretical concerns, the course focuses on questions such as the nature of power relations, different forms of political organization and representation, the relationship between means and ends, the role of violence, and the function of different media, especially as they become manifest in the complexity of real politics.

Explores the historical and political conditions in which “belief” has come to characterize people’s relationships to a nonmaterial, spiritual, or supernatural reality. Analyzing the historically recent genesis and differentiation of categories like “religion,” “politics,” and “science,” course examines how the rise to prominence of “belief” is constitutive of modernity as a whole. From these theoretical-historical foundations, course goes on to explore the realms of so-called belief themselves, through case studies on the bodily practices of mystics, prophetically inspired peasant uprisings, and the uncanny reality of UFOs. (Formerly offered as HISC 123, What is Belief?  Mystics, Heretics, and Aliens.)

Places the anti-imperial radical and thinker Mohandas Gandhi in the context of twentieth-century global politics, philosophy, and history. Studies political and philosophical history through the global prism of empire and modernity.

From climate change to the Sixth Great Extinction to the threat of nuclear warfare, we live in a time of growing ecological devastation and peril. As a result, the very meaning of human societies’ relationships to the ecological worlds they inhabit is increasingly up for question. What is the proper role of humans in nature? How are we to live, and who are we to become, in an age of ecological unraveling? What is to be done in the realms of politics and culture to ensure a livable future? Course examines histories of freedom as both a concept and practice, giving particular focus to forms of collective liberation that consist in acting together with the earth and the other creatures with whom we share this world.

In the core of a London slum, with wars raging all around him, the printer William Blake sounded the trumpet of prophecy. This course channels Blake's war-time revelations, laying bare the antimonies of imperial violence and the prophetic tradition.

Students develop the skills necessary to analyze popular music. First, challenging common-sense understandings of how music functions. And second, understanding how history works its way into musical forms.

Examines the history and theory of the Black Panther Party (BPP). Texts situate the historical conditions leading to the BPP's rise; theoretical inspirations and contributions; national and international reach; and decline following state repression, electoral campaigns, and guerrilla warfare.

Examines space as it relates to questions of politics, philosophy, and everyday life. Space, rather than a neutral background or setting, is socially produced, making it a site of constant struggle. Course studies space in its relationship to class conflict and racialized violence, but also as a terrain of collective dreams, experimentation, and political possibility. Themes include: questions of orientation and disorientation, production and annihilation, city and hinterland, interior and exterior, subjection and liberation. Also focuses on problems of race and class as they inform capitalism, and experiments with practices of psycho-geography on walks or "drifts" across campus. Thinkers discussed include Benjamin, Bachelard, Merleau-Ponty, Lefebvre, Debord, Harvey, Jameson, Gilmore, and others. (Formerly offered as Urban Consciousness: Life, Inequality, and the City.)

Examines how histories of war are inextricably tied to histories of media, with a focus on the global War on Terror. Interrogates dominant media and policy approaches to terrorism and their construction of the Islamist "enemy" through tropes of backwardness and fanaticism. Seeks instead to situate Islamist movements historically and politically, and in doing so, to consider how Islamist radicalism is deeply intertwined with capitalist modernity, mutually constitutive with contemporary militarism and imperialism, and might darkly mirror other key aspects of contemporary political life.

What is the witch? A historical person? A vestige of pre-colonial European ancestry? A cultural object whose image and identity are shaped by film, paintings and literature. Class considers the witch's development in Europe. Also reviews the witch as a tool of racial, economic and social stratification in society. By looking at how the witch is represented through visual and literary culture, students develop an understanding of the witch as a historic symbol of shifting relations of gender, class and power.

Taking a long view of globalization from the 19th century to the present, course offers a historical survey of how strained trade routes, production networks, and supply came to be, by focusing on the workers, labor processes, and labor regimes that produce and reproduce this gargantuan "factory without walls." Explores what concepts should be used to define globalization, must capitalism be global, and how many "globalizations" have there been since the 19th century, and what distinguishes them? What forces have caused and maintained inequalities in labor forces across the globe? How does global production isolate, divide, and separate workers from one another? How does it bring them together?

The goal of this course is to introduce students to the thought of Karl Marx and some of the major thinkers working in the Marxist tradition. The majority of the course centers on Marx's writing, though students also read texts that extend and develop Marx's ideas into areas that Marx himself did not explore. Course addresses questions central to the Marxist tradition: What is capital? What is capitalism? What is a capitalist state? How did Marx understand colonialism and national liberation struggles? What is the specific nature of gendered oppression and exploitation under capitalism? What is the relationship between capitalist production and cultural production?

Course takes, as its starting point, the formation of the Marxian concept of imperialism in the early 20th century, in the context of centuries of colonialism and the late 19th-century scramble for Africa. Course surveys debates about imperialism in the post-World War period, particularly as they relate to the history of capitalism in the Global South and developments in world trade, finance, and production, leading to consideration of the present moment and grappling with what is novel in global capitalism today.

Pink Floyd's album, The Wall, guides us into exploring what the walls are that make up our world, what they divide and imprison, and how they perpetuate power, but also limits that protect us. From the borders that enclose nation-states to the bodies that give us the illusion of contained selves, students encounter, build or tear down the walls that define knowledge, human, or nonhuman experience. By reading "the wall" as a metaphor through a range of texts and media, course investigates the meaning of place, consciousness, and objectivity, while critiquing power structures and systemic oppression in our society.

Survey course of antiracism literatures in the U.S. that introduces students to critical whiteness studies, a field of research, thought, and embodied antiracist practice that emerged in the 1980s and 1990s and is currently provoking renewed interest. Students think through the genealogy of whiteness studies and its origins in Black studies and movements to gain ethnic studies programs on campuses in California. Also considers the position of whiteness studies within the fields of critical race and ethnic studies, gender and sexuality studies, and political economy. It is important to note that this course is less a critical response to whiteness studies than an introduction to and survey of the field.

Considers both the religious sources of political ideas and the political sources of religious ideas, addressing topics, such as sovereignty, justice, love, reason, revelation, sacrifice, victimhood, evil, racism, rebellion, reconciliation, and human rights.

Starting from Donna Haraway's "A Cyborg Manifesto," course explores theoretical and myth-making texts that articulate visions of a future beyond humanity. Examines manifestations of the posthuman in film, fiction, and scholarly work. Readings include Haraway, Plato, Descartes, and others. Explores the concept of artificial intelligence as a fascination of science fiction, an engineering objective, a field of study, a philosophical problem, etc. Discussions on: (a) the figure of the thinking machine, its promises and attendant anxieties; (b) the history of ideas leading up to the birth of the field of artificial intelligence in the early 20th century; and (c) the philosophical roots of underlying concepts, such as intelligence, artificiality, agency, mechanism, identity, rationality, logic and free will.

Utopia translates to "no place" though it sounds identical to another Greek word, "eutopia," or "good place." This double meaning speaks to the desire for the ideal society coupled with the very impossibility of its creation. While the term utopia originated in the tradition of political philosophy, this course opens up discussion to a range of utopian thinking in the domains of literature, philosophy, and theory. Some of the questions students tackle are: What are some common elements of utopian imaginaries? Are utopias always already dystopias? How is the concept of utopia connected to the way we shape and experience space? Close reading and discussion of written and visual texts is complemented by analytical and creative writing exercises that engage the themes.