Core Courses

Spring 2010

Critical Social Thought 100s (01):   Experiments in Critical Social Thought
(First-year seminar)
This course will examine the relationship among the lives of thinkers who broke with their own worlds, the new visions of reality they created, and the historical context that provoked and in turn was provoked by their ideas. Readings will include short theoretical and fictional works, memoirs and biographies, historical narratives, and secondary critical commentaries.

C. Pleshakov

Critical Social Thought 248s (01):   Science, Revolution, and Modernity
Introduces critical analysis of science and technology by tracing the historiography of the Scientific Revolution. The significance of this extended intellectual episode has been assessed in radically different ways throughout the intervening centuries. As such, it provides a fertile ground on which to pose and answer important questions about science and its role in society. What does it mean to regard science as 'revolutionary'? How are scientific developments shaped by, and how do they shape, the social, economic, and political worlds in which they are embedded? How is our contemporary understanding of science and technology influenced by the stories we tell about the past?

D. Cotter

Critical Social Thought 254s (01): Postcolonial Theory: Postcolonialism/Postructuralism
(English 254)
This course will bring together theorists from different traditions-- postcolonial studies and European philosophy--who share a common project: (1) to identify the conceptual limits of modern or "Western" thought, and (2) to practice thinking beyond those limits. Their thought-experiments include imagining history beyond progress, politics beyond the state-system, and being beyond the self. We may read Cesaire, Said, Galeano, Spivak, and Mbembe, and Foucault, Derrida, Badiou, Rancière, and Agamben. We will try to pay as close attention to the texts in front of us as they do to their own subjects, in order to analyze the form of their thought and so to reflect critically on our own.

S. Ahmed