Courses

The course covers the themes of critique, 'negative' thought and utopian possibility in the works of Frankfurt School Critical Theorists Adorno, Herbert Marcuse and Max Horkheimer. We will explore their critiques of western philosophy, Reason, consciousness, ideology, capitalism, mass consumer/popular culture, aesthetics, mass psychology and authoritarianism, as well as their philosophical, historical, social, cultural and political contexts and the implications of their distinctive analysis. Course credit exclusion: Political Science 6070 6.0 and Social & Political Thought 6600 6.0

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.

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.

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.

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 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).

This course engages selected texts by Walter Benjamin and those of some fellow intellectuals of import for literary and cultural criticism and theory. Particular attention is paid to Benjamin’s thinking on history, language, criticism or critique, translation, and media.

The course examines how empire has figured in the works of dominant seventeenth eighteenth and nineteenth century ‘Western’ social and political thinkers. Issues about race, civilization, progress and modernity, and imperialism, colonialism, etc., are critically assessed discursively, ideological, sociopolitically.

Examines the politics of utopia within the realm of everyday life. It provides historically nuanced discussions on the utopian impulse, and, critically examines totalitarianism, current revivals of sacredness, and secular messianic thinking as utopian moments of contemporary significance.

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 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 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.

This graduate seminar introduces students to indigenous and postcolonial perspectives in the study of science, technology, nature and medicine. Interdisciplinary perspectives are explored as the course considers the intersections of the political, scholarly, and creative through science and technology stdies, and postcolonial/subaltern studies, examining the unique ways in which science, medicine, and technology are taken up, created, contested, and circulated in postcolonial/indigenous settings.

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 a selection of black women's writing from four geographic locations in the African Diaspora: the Caribbean, United States, Canada and Britain. The texts, written after the 1970s, cover a wide generic range including novels, poetry, theoretical and autobiographical texts.

This course engages a critical examination of writing by Black people in English or in translation. What does it mean to write black life? What forms does that work take? We will read short fiction, novels, poetry, essays, experimental works and theoretical writing. The majority of the works that we read will be contemporary (mid twentieth century to the present). This course wants to familiarize students with the rich and varied materials of Black writing, with form, and style and argument.

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

This seminar engages some key concepts in psychoanalysis to investigate learning and contemporary psychoanalytic debates in education. Foundational methodological writings in the interdisciplinary field of education and psychoanalysis and some contemporary debates posed by more recent pedagogies on education as symptomatic of crisis are considered.

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 stages an encounter between the work of Martin Heidegger, Emmanuel Levinas, and contemporary Black thought (Wynter, Wilderson, Moten, Farred, among possible others) on the questions of being, alterity, politics, and race.

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 sorts through the various, often discordant, ideas and practices gathered under the umbrella of environmentalism. It considers conservative, liberal, and radical framings of environmental protection in tension with demands for, and projects of, liberation (racial, sexual, disability, and working-class) within industrial societies.

This course tracks the concept of 'alienation'-the state or experience of being estranged from others, or oneself-across key scenes, including capitalism and slavery, psychiatry and psychoanalysis, as well as aesthetic theory and artistic practice. Philosophical/theoretical and aesthetic works guide a geological inquiry into alienation as both an existential and a historical condition.