Courses

Contexts of Victorian Science. This course focuses on nineteenth century British and European science and its social, political, cultural, and intellectual contexts. Adopting the contextualist approach to the history of science allows us to raise a series of provocative questions: in what way did all of these different contexts shape the nature of nineteenth century scientific thought? How were scientific facts socially constructed? What was it about the nineteenth century context that led many intellectuals to reject Christianity and embrace science as providing a new, privileged form of knowledge? Included among the topics to be covered are the discourse of natural theology, the politics of geological controversy, Scottish philosophy and phrenology, radical working class Lamarckianism in England during the 1830s, the plurality of worlds debate, science and gender, the professionalization of science, English scientific naturalism and German scientific materialism, the literary structure of Darwin’s Origin of Species, Darwinian theory and its ideological uses, and late nineteenth century physics and psychics. This course will be of interest to students of British, European, social, and intellectual history.

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.

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).

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.

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.

Explores research and practice at the intersection of education and cultural studies. Dynamics of production and signification, creativity and resistance are examined as contested grounds for learning within schools and informal cultural institutions.

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.

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

TBA

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 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.

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.