Please consult the New School Course Catalog for a full list of current courses. Fall 2024 courses that count for the Gender and Sexuality Studies Graduate
Certificate are listed below; view an archive of past courses.
Fall 2024 Courses
Radio & Podcasting From the Margins, NMDS5449
Cassius Adair, Assistant Professor of Media Studies
Ever since broadcast radio ushered in a new era of mass media, audio storytelling has been a force of social power and persuasion. Radio– and now, podcasting– has the ability to transmit messages across huge geographic areas, reaching those without formal literacy and at a lower cost than television or film. On the one hand, the low barriers to entry and lack of formal media gatekeepers has allowed the circulation of misinformation and even outright bigotry in the podcasting space. Yet podcasting also has the potential to allow marginalized people to tell their own stories, directly into the microphone. In this class, we'll build audio stories that can push back on established norms, unsettle mainstream formats and genres, and bring new voices into the mix. As we learn together how to build podcasts from scratch– building skills in storytelling, scripting, interviewing, field recording, digital audio editing, sound design, scoring, and distribution– we’ll also ask critical questions about how and why certain genres and formats of audio production are more valued in the contemporary podcasting landscape. Guest audio producers, editors, and designers will join us throughout the semester as we grapple with how to understand, and maybe even join, this changing industry. Assessment will include written reflections and production of a short fiction or nonfiction podcast series. No prior production experience is required or expected, but students should have access to basic digital audio recording and editing tools (i.e a cellphone and laptop). Students with hearing or audio processing disabilities are welcome; please reach out in advance if you have specific access questions or suggestions. Our listening syllabus will center audio stories by queer and trans people, people of color, indigenous people, disabled people, and others who have been historically marginalized within the audio industry.
Blackness Through Dress, UTNS5549
Luciana Scutchen, Associate Professor of Fashion Design
This course examines the history of African American women’s subsistence ethos as it has been sustained and curated through dress as a reaction to systematic barriers. Through historical and material culture, this course will investigate African American women’s aesthetic practices as influencers and makers in response to institutional racist-sexism during the Jim Crow era through the present context of dressing for the corporation, purposefully obfuscated by the privilege of choice. This course will also examine queer African American cis and transwomen’s, and non-binary African American people’s dress aesthetic as cultural resistance and a provocation for hate violence. Black subsistence in the penal system will also be explored as an identity and cultural preservation practice through dress within a system designed to strip identity and the impulse to resist authority.
Future of Work & Labor, UTNS5154
Scott Martin, Part-time Associate Teaching Professor
The technological and spatial foundations of work are rapidly being transformed across the globe through ongoing changes in capitalism and globalization, reconfigured global value chains, platform-mediated work, and artificial intelligence-driven algorithms for worker recruitment, evaluation, management, and surveillance. What is the nature of the interplay between these structural changes and socio-demographic changes in the workforce that heighten intersectionality and impact workers quite differently depending on gender, race/ethnicity, immigration status, and other categories and bases of identity? This course will examine these challenges for what worker rights and labor and class identities mean and how they are being reconfigured through a global and comparative international lens that interrogates both North and South.
Gender, Genre, & Lang in Korea, NMDS5350
Margaret Rhee, Assistant Professor of Writing Across Media and Chair of Arts Writing
The course engages with the ever-growing field of Korean cinema and television studies as we examine contemporary film and serialized K-drama across diverse genres from science fiction to horror to romance to road movies. Drawing from media and cinema studies, Korean Studies, Asian American Studies, and other related fields, our study of Korean film and TV interrogates race, gender, nation, ability and class with attention to media specificity and historiography. Some guiding questions include: How does engagement with genre enable a transgressive consideration of class, gender, and queerness? What is the role of language, such as subtitling and transpacific distribution in the reception of Korean cinema and television transnationally? How does Korean cinema and TV drama shape new directions in media studies, Korean Studies, ethnic studies, gender and sexuality studies, and other fields? By the end of the course, students will have a better understanding of the history and complexity of varied currents in Korean film and TV and will be able to critically read, analyze, and write about Korean film and television from a variety of perspectives.
Human Rights in Global Fashion, NINT5112
Sakiko Fukuda-Parr, Professor of International Affairs
This course provides an introductory overview of the key obstacles, actors, rules, and methods for crafting innovative solutions in social mobilization, legal intervention, and design with the aim of creating a more socially sustainable and economically inclusive fashion – a fashion that fulfills the human rights and labor rights of workers in the supply chain. The course achieves this aim by analyzing (i) actors, power, and finance in the global value chain in the fashion industry; (ii) international and local standards and institutions - including workers’ human rights and labor rights, corporate obligations and accountability; (iii) social movements and international networks mobilizing worker power; (iv) monitoring and labeling schemes mobilizing consumer power; (v) and finding design solutions and technological systems that fulfill worker rights amidst new conceptions of industry design. The course will include lectures by faculty from across the university.
Gendered Ecologies, NEPS6003
Abigail Perez Aguilera, Assistant Professor of Environmental Policy and Sustainability Management
What connects the depredation of nature to gendered violence and social plundering? What links the dominant governance and corporate policy and management frameworks to gendered environmental destruction and violence against women land defenders and environmental activists? What actions are being taken by grassroots groups against these violences and transgressions? How can we build sustainable alternatives centered on depatriarchalization and based on freedom and liberation? How can we imagine and materialize alternative futures that challenge hegemonic structures of oppression? In this seminar, we draw on gendered and feminist political ecologies, anti-patriarchal decolonizing theory, Indigenous feminisms, ecofeminsm, queer ecologies, black studies, environmental humanities, memory studies, diasporic thought, and critical science and technology studies to deploy a critical gendered approach to environmental politics/policy and sustainable socioecological transformations. We will examine what connects gender coded experiences of human and non-human precarity, premature death, marginalization, and forced displacement to hegemonic governance frameworks of policy and corporate management practices. We will critically examine and challenge how gender is factored and 'mainstreamed' into state, intergovernmental and corporate apparatuses, discourses and policy frameworks around issues like environment, climate, development and the rights of women and marginalized populations. We pay particular attention to alternatives to gendered violence and patriarchy built on responses from below, and their radical imaginations and embodiments of counterhegemonic gendered ecologies. This class is an online seminar. We will have a discussion-based class with small breakout rooms, presentations, the creation of a class blog, guest speakers, discussions on texts, public policies, social movements, and case studies.
Enlightened Exchanges, GLIB5829
Gina Walker, Professor of Women’s Studies
This course reads published, private, and inter-textual conversations between select male and female thinkers to recover and assess more accurately women’s participation in the project of Enlightenment. While most of these exchanges and conversations will have been between contemporaneous figures, we will also consider some that have gone on across centuries, like the conversations Italian Renaissance humanists conducted with their antique predecessors. Machiavelli returned home in the evening, changed his clothes, and conversed with ancient authors by reading their books.[1] We ask whether there were any texts by women on his list? Why is female epistemological authority always contested so that accounts of the past are either ignorant or dismissive of named women’s contributions? We consider female thinkers’ ideas in the context of traditional Intellectual History and their interactions with their male contemporaries and each other. We draw on new research about “Revolutionary Women” Phillis Wheatley (1753–1784), learned enslaved poet, and Suzanne Sanité Belair (1781–1802), a young free woman of color who became a lieutenant in Haitian revolutionary leader Toussaint Louverture’s army, to interrogate women’s resistance to canonical knowledge-ordering systems and their proposals for alternative structures and actions. We examine the conflicts and convergences between women and men’s theological, epistemological, political, and affective understanding; women’s networks and misalliances; the new knowledge that femmes philosophes produced; and, consequently, the volatile public reception to Poullain de la Barre’s Cartesian argument that “the mind has no sex” and his promotion of “the equality of the sexes.” We interrogate individual men’s and women’s responses to the ongoing Slave Trade and the concept of Enslavement. We map the female texts that consider gender and race as inextricably interweaved, and men’s resistance to or acceptance of this premise and practice. We speculate about how sixty years of feminist historical recovery has or has not made done more than just “add women into conventional historical narratives and stir.” In our discussions and presentations, we model what Enlightened Exchanges could look like. Finally, we ask what might a knowledge-ordering system that includes a female dimension look like? We ask whether and how the inclusion of previously eclipsed women thinkers or people of various races and nationalities in a reconceived canon transform the nature and history of Western thought. The set of “enlightened exchanges” we will investigate can be understood as part of a project of redressing epistemic injustice, defined by the philosopher Miranda Fricker as “a wrong done specifically to someone in their capacity as a knowerOne of the two types of epistemic injustice Fricker analyses, testimonial injustice, occurs where a speaker’s report is taken less seriously by its hearer because of a dimension of that speaker’s identity such as gender, race or class. The women thinkers in these enlightened exchanges have largely been victims of the testimonial injustice Fricker thematizes. Beyond this dimension, however, we believe that Western thought and society have been epistemically injured by the testimonial injustice shown to these thinkers: the canon and its contents have been distorted and impoverished through the systematic exclusion of women’s voices. We hope in this course to begin to correct some of the damage.
Gender, Culture & Media, NMDS5117
Brittnay Proctor-Habil, Assistant Professor in Race and Media
For historian Joan Scott, gender is a useful category for historical analysis. For transactivist Leslie Feinberg, gender is poetry. For Black feminists, such as Angela Davis and Kimberlé Crenshaw, gender is inextricable from race, class, and sexuality. This course examines the complex and fluid concept of gender as it manifests in media forms of the widest sense (including human and cyber bodies, print and online news, graphic novels, movies, television, web series, and performing arts). We will study the ways in which gender identities are imposed, resisted, and lived, focusing on the role of media in transmitting, shaping, maintaining, and transforming representations of gender. Students will analyze gendered and racialized language and embodiment within the fields of art, activism, popular culture, and the law, and will consider how the intersection of gender and race impacts the construction of media. The course provides an introduction to feminist approaches to media studies, drawing on Black feminism, queer theory, disability studies, psychoanalysis, memoir, and journalism. NOTE: This course was formerly titled "Gender & Visual Culture" in Fall 2019. The content overlaps significantly. Please email the instructor for more details.
Black Feminist Media Methods, NMDS5030
Brittnay Proctor-Habil, Assistant Professor in Race and Media
This course explores the various methodologies used in media studies at the nexus of sound studies and visual culture. The course is taught from a black feminist episteme, meaning, we will center the work and scholarship coming out of black feminism (in its many variations and pluralities). During the duration of the course, we will address the context, historicity, and politics surrounding media studies, sound studies, and visual culture, as well as, the antagonisms and tensions that have emerged in black feminist approaches to these fields of inquiry. We will survey an array of methods and approaches used in black feminist approaches to media studies, sound studies, visual culture, which include, but are not limited to: black feminist theory; black Marxist critiques of capital, black performance theory, listening, discourse analysis; "viewing/looking;" the process of description, sound art, the use of sound in black literature, archival research, ethnography, etc. The seminar will be organized around guided discussions, lectures, seminar papers, selected readings, and intermittent praxis exercises.
Wardrobe Studies, PGHT5518
Christina Moon, Associate Professor of Fashion Studies
This course explores the worlds of clothing through the interplay of image, clothing, and text. It is inspired by the only photo I have of my grandfather as a child standing between his two brothers, taken in the early 20th century during the Japanese occupation of Korea. The three brothers wear Korean, Japanese, and Western formal dress in recognition of the competing colonial empires of that era. Just like photographs, through clothing we seek connections to our present, past, and future. Closets too, reveal other lives lived. Wardrobes are portals that lead us into other worn worlds and dimensions. This course seeks “another way of telling” (in the words of John Berger) to make visible obscured histories, forgotten dreams, and reimagined possibilities. We will explore photography, art, performance, film, digital media and technology alongside ethnography, memoir, essays, and poetry. We will study the work of artists, writers, and thinkers who explore clothing in relation to cultural identity, the body, gender and sexuality, class, race and ethnicity. Together, we will find creative ways to locate and narrate the constantly shifting tempos, maps, and borders of our lived experience and memory through stories of the wardrobe
Feminist Political Thought, GPOL6921
Rose Owen, Politics Postdoctoral Fellow
Previously maligned as embarrassing and problematic, second-wave thought has recently garnered renewed attention. Feminist political theorists today find that second-wave texts offer resources to rethink sexual violence, economic domination, the institution of the family, dilemmas of intersectionality, and the very definition of politics itself. In this course, we will revisit second-wave texts, alongside contemporary readings, to consider this project of canonization. The course will raise the following questions: Why, in our moment, have contemporary feminists found it fruitful to return to the 1970s and 80s? What resources do second-wave texts offer for thinking perennial political problems anew? And how should we periodize the second wave? Assigned authors include Simone de Beauvoir, Andrea Dworkin, Shulamith Firestone, Silvia Federici, Audre Lorde, and Angela Davis, as well as Amia Srinivasan, Sophie Lewis, Kathi Weeks, and Jennifer Nash. This course would serve as an excellent introduction to feminist political theory.
Deep Futures: Feminist Ecological Imaginaries From Latin America, GANT6079
Columba González-Duarte, Assistant Professor of Anthropology
In this course, we address socio-environmental questions through the lens of feminist ecological imaginaries. Drawing on political ecology, Latin American feminist thought and practice, and subaltern socioecological struggles, we will build a theoretical and methodological toolkit for imagining, creating, and enacting ""Deep Futures""; nonlinear, relational timescales centered around life-affirming human-nature relations. The class engages with the ecological “uncanny” from a feminist pedagogy to foster collaborative learning process. New Latin American feminisms have emerged from environmental and ecological movements, initially linked to resistance against capitalism and modernity. Increasingly, Latin American feminist voices also challenge coloniality and patriarchy, and call for a reimagination of theory, methods, and everyday practice to address socioenvironmental issues. This feminism is committed to linking theory, research, and pedagogy with the responsibility to enable other possible futures for human and more-than-human communities. These Latin American feminists address justice as simultaneously ecological and social, viewing care for all lifeforms as an urgent task. They also draw attention to how violence transverses ecologies, just as it transverses racialized, disabled, nonbinary, and/or colonized women’s or feminized bodies. Together, these feminist voices are opening new horizons for Deep Futures. Inspired by this Deep Futures framework, we will endeavor in this course to cultivate intersectional engaged methods with humans and more-than-humans as a sustained daily practice.
The Making of the Modern World, GLIB5542
Dominic Pettman, University Professor of Media and New Humanities
This course will introduce students to some of the most significant and influential critical contributions to common understandings of love and desire, from classical times to the present. Through readings from a range of disciplines, we will investigate how changing conceptions of Eros, broadly conceived, have shaped key social, psychological, political, philosophical, aesthetic, and economic formulations about history and culture in the West. These readings will form the basis of class discussions designed to help students think through major critical paradigms and a variety of methodologies associated with Liberal Studies at the New School: an intrinsically interdisciplinary approach to intellectual history and critical thought. Tracing the long arc of significant statements on love and sexuality will serve to highlight certain continuities and ruptures in our own self-portraits concerning human nature and culture. Specific themes, topics, and key terms will include mythopoetic origin stories of love, courtly love, strategies of love, seduction, auto-affection, Eros/Thanatos, melancholia, ars erotica/scientia sexualis, libidinal economies, fetishism, the repressive hypothesis, gendered dialectics, jouissance, queer love, liquid love, mediated desire, and desiring machines. Readings will likely include Plato, Ovid, the Marquis de Sade, Søren Kierkegaard, Sigmund Freud, Marcel Mauss, Georges Bataille, Wilhelm Reich, Michel Foucault, Susan Sontag, Simone de Beauvoir, Lauren Berlant, Luce Irigaray, Zygmunt Bauman, and others.
Historiography & Historical Practice, GSOC6054
Oz Frankel, Associate Professor of History
This course focuses on US history to explore current permutations of historiographical interests, practices, and methodologies. Over the last few decades, US history has been a particularly fertile ground for rethinking the historical although many of these topics and themes have shaped the study of other nations and societies. American history has been largely rewritten by a generation of scholars who experienced the 1960s and its aftermath and have viewed America's past as a field of inquiry and contestation of great political urgency. Identity politics, the culture wars, and other forms of organization and debate have also endowed US historiography with unprecedented public resonance in a culture that had been notoriously amnesic. We examine major trends and controversies in American historiography, the history of the historical profession, the emergence of race and gender as cardinal categories of historical analysis, popular culture as history, the impact of memory studies on historical thinking, the recurrent agonizing over American exceptionalism, as well as the current efforts to break the nation-state mold and to globalize American history. Another focus will be the intersection of analytical strategies borrowed from the social sciences and literary studies with methods of historicization that originated from the historical profession. This course should be taken during a student's first year in the Historical Studies program.
Language and Thought, GPSY6107
Ruthe Foushee, Assistant Professor of Psychology (CSD)
This course surveys research on psycholinguistics, cognition, and the relation between language and thought. Topics include the psychological reality of grammars proposed by linguists; individual and dyadic processes in language planning, production perception, and comprehension; meaning, categorization, and knowledge representation; universals in language and thought.
International Trade, GECO6252
William Milberg, Professor of Economics
This course will cover the theory of, and empirical evidence on, the relation between trade liberalization on the one hand, and income distribution, economic growth, employment and economic development on the other. We review the positive and normative theories of trade, and then consider the limits and alternatives to the general competitive, neoclassical model. We focus on such issues as increasing returns to scale, trade in intermediates, monopoly product markets, oligopsony, gender-segmented labor markets, global value chains and unequal exchange, foreign direct investment, profit reinvestment and financialization. We then analyze the relation between trade protection and economic growth and development, with an emphasis both on theory and policy considerations in contemporary trade relations (in the WTO, multilateral, and bilateral agreements) related to labor and environmental standards, investor protections, intellectual property, deindustrialization and supply chain resilience.
Labor Economics 1, GECO 6270
Teresa Ghilarducci, Schwartz Professor of Economy and Policy Analysis
Labor Economics I is a graduate survey course in labor economics. The course aims to survey the classic topics in labor economics to prepare students to engage in original research and teach labor economics in several economic traditions. The successful student will be able to distinguish between several schools of thought in labor economics: neoclassical, institutionalism and radical political economy. Specific objectives include understanding modern research methods in labor economics and the dominant and heterodox models of labor markets. Students will be able to explain the most important labor market outcomes using various analytical frameworks including ones that assume varying degrees of market power, full employment, and constraints on choice. Some labor union history, regulatory issues will also be covered. Modern capitalism distributes resources in such a way that living standards, not only in terms of material wellbeing, but also in terms of security, dignity, safety, and longevity, have never been more unequal. We cover how markets, institutions, and rules affect the power balances between capital and labor, employers and workers and determine the value of people’s time and life, and working conditions and wages and salaries.
Japanese Pop Culture, NJPN5104
Makiko Dixon
An advanced conversation and writing graduate course in Japanese popular culture. Designed for students interested in furthering the development of their oral and written proficiency in Japanese. The course offers a panoramic overview of Japanese pop culture and media including, advertising, anime, manga, fashion, and music. Current events topics include ethnic, gender, socio-political and cultural realities. Students will engage in lively class discussions and conduct presentations, writing assignments, and creative projects. [In Japanese] Proficiency: intermediate-high or advanced level proficiency in Japanese is required. This course counts toward the completion of the Graduate Minor in Language Studies in Japanese studies.
Animating Resistance: The Subversive Art of Experimental Animation, NMDS5446
Melissa Friedling, Director of Graduate Program and Associate Professor of Filmmaking
The heterogeneous set of practices and complex blend of visual art and (post)cinema that has informed the work of experimental animation since the early 20th century continues to open ever-expanding possibilities for understanding and making media. The animated image offers the potential to subvert, disrupt, distort, destabilize and critique categories of human and non-human; defying and expanding limits of perception and material existence; challenging categories of gender, sex, race, nature, nation, labor, and self; and breaching boundaries of movement in time, and space. Throughout this hybrid seminar/studio class, we study experimental animation as an historically and culturally situated varied form, genre and social practice while working through creative prompts that combine materials, processes, and approaches, exploring both digital and analog techniques.
Management & Social Justice, NMGM5104
Nidhi Srinivas, Associate Professor of Management
The course facilitates an examination of how and if management and managers can be vehicles to advance social justice in different forms - ecological, economic, racial, sexual or gender, design etc. Grounded in critical social theories, it explores how and if someone interested in using management ideas to generate social justice inhabits a contradiction. And is it possible to think of management in terms of larger questions of social justice, to create workplaces and organizations in general that are more democratic and inclusive? The course requires students to attend or view recordings of the Management & Social Justice Conversation Series, ground them in the literature and take an actively engaged and critically reflective stance towards the topics and organizations we study. We will look at themes such as emancipatory management practices, forms of inclusion in workplaces, intersectional management practices, indigenous knowledge/politics, and ecological activism, and organizations. Students are encouraged to submit their final products to be featured in the conversation series for the following year.
Spanish in the Media, NSPN5020
Raul Rubio, Associate Professor of Hispanic Studies
An advanced graduate level conversation and writing course focusing on film and media, designed for students interested in furthering the development of their oral and written proficiency in Spanish. The course offers a panoramic overview of Spanish-language media from Latin America, Spain, and the U.S., and covers topics related to current events spanning ethnic, gender, socio-political and cultural realities. Students will engage in lively class discussions and conduct presentations, writing assignments, and creative projects. [In Spanish] Proficiency: intermediate-high or advanced level proficiency in Spanish is required. This course counts toward the completion of the Graduate Minor in Language Studies in Spanish studies.
Fashion Writing, PGHT5554
Alexis Romano, Part-time Lecturer
Alongside its material and visual forms, our collective notions of fashion have largely been shaped through language. Throughout time and place, writers have probed clothing’s numerous aspects, using it to augment their individual narratives. This writing-intensive course will explore a range of current and historical fashion writing, from memoirs and criticism to editorial and copywriting, in order to develop an understanding of fashion writing as a varied set of genres, under the wider areas of fiction, non-fiction and fashion work. This course welcomes guest speakers to share a diversity of perspectives and stylistic approaches, including novelists, fashion industry professionals and fashion studies scholars. In reading, we will question how language shifts and hinges on industry and cultural developments; and address themes such as gender and the body; and clothing’s links to art, identity-building, geopolitics and activism. Through a series of workshops, students will experiment with voice, style and form as they build a portfolio and hone their understanding of what writing does and can do, in relation to their own professional goals, interests and values. Students will also have the opportunity to contribute the work undertaken to BIAS: The Journal of Fashion Studies for publication in Spring 2024.
Advertising as Representation, PGHT5718
Marilyn Cohen, Part-time Associate Teaching Professor
In June 2020, after over one hundred years, the Aunt Jemima brand name was finally recognized and removed as derogatory. This course examines advertising in the United States historically and thematically, paying particular attention to how race, ethnicity, and difference are represented in American society. From the late 19th century on, we analyze advertising in relation to changing technologies; we study trade cards, print advertisements, posters, and radio and television commercials, from the perspectives of racism, feminism, gender, sexism, capitalism, modernism, etc. The aim is to understand how people construct, apprehend, and consume objects as forms of identity and meaning in the United States. The course is run as a seminar with readings from cultural studies, material culture studies, advertising histories, and contemporary news and magazine essays. Students will make presentations and write papers with class discussion essential to how the course works.
Equity in Pop Culture: Villains, UTNS5132
Juliet Gomez, Associate Director, Curriculum, Instruction, and College Access
In this three credit media elective course, students will use a critical eye to examine race, gender, class and power structures through an often overlooked pop-culture archetype: The female villain. From Batman’s Harley Quinn to Rose from Jordan Peele’s Get Out, we will not only examine the ways in which female villains get written, but how we, as pop-culture consumers, view them.
The Basic Works of Freud, GPHI6072
Alan Bass, Part-time Faculty
This course covers the major concepts in Freud, stressing their revolutionary nature. Topics include trauma, defense, wishes, dreams, unconscious processes, infantile sexuality, perversion, narcissism, identification, life and death drives, anxiety, disavowal, and ego-splitting.
Scholar Activist Methodologies, NEPS5024
Faculty TBA
Due to its past and present complicity in colonialism, imperialism, and capitalism, Eurocentric academia has a complicated relationship with oppressed populations around the world. Given this relationship as well as the ever-mounting crises of late capitalist modernity, how can critical and radical scholar-activists sensitively yet effectively engage these populations? How can they balance methodological rigor, conscientious self-reflection, and their political commitment to progressive social, environmental, and global transformation? How can they make their work both accessible and actionable for communities, organizations, and movements marginalized or altogether disregarded by the transnational academic-industrial complex? This course addresses these pressing questions by attempting to re-frame research as accompaniment. Drawing inspiration from the Oaxacan Indigenous concept of acompañamiento (“accompaniment”) and the Zapatista concept of preguntando caminamos (“Questioning, we walk”), it invites students to consider how intellectuals situated within the neo-colonial and neoliberal university can, through their research, forge concrete and mutually beneficial bonds of affinity and solidarity with frontline and fenceline actors fighting capitalism, state violence, colonialism, heteropatriarchy, ecological collapse, and other interlocking oppressions. This course asks students to contemplate how they can accompany their interlocutors at every stage of the research process, from project design to field or archival research to the interpretation and dissemination of results. Students will review a range of texts on scholar-activist, decolonial, Indigenous, feminist, and other critical and radical approaches to research. Course materials will equip students with methodological frameworks that challenge the epistemological and axiological foundations of the typically depoliticized, extractivist research process as well as with particular methods that they can use in their own research projects. Students will have the opportunity to develop not only articles for scholarly publications but also editorials, policy proposals, creative interventions, and other research outputs that befit their personal, political, and intellectual goals.
Political Ecology/Economy, NEPS5028
Faculty TBA
This course provides the foundational knowledge for the study of political ecology and political economy from a critical, interdisciplinary, global and Earth system perspective. It proceeds from the question: What background and tools are necessary to rigorously examine the intertwined ecological and economic crises of late capitalism and to substantiate viable alternatives? By critically intervening at the intersections of political ecology, political economy, environmental science, development studies, environmental geography, and subaltern history, it provides the theoretical, historical and empirical basis to analyze how resoure extraction and transnational capital circulation disrupts Earth system processes (geosphere, biosphere, cryosphere, hydrosphere, and atmosphere). Yet in analyzing the making of the world-system economy/ecology of Euroamerican colonial capitalist modernity, it also charts the histories of alternative social ecologies. On the one hand, the course traces the genealogy of dominant ideas, theories, texts and institutions, where the colonial capitalist and imperial reorganization of world ecology is enabled by epistemological, governance and management systems that undermine Earth processes, ecosystems, biotic and human communities, thereby creating an ecological rift. This provides the background knowledge and conceptual tools needed to substantiate a rigorous critique of dominant ideas, institutions, theories, texts, models, institutions and assumptions. Assumptions subject to critique include, for instance, the human/nature divide, nature as resources, the rational actor model, the naturalization of self-interest, scarcity, and endless growth, utility maximization, technocratic management, and the supposed inevitability of modernization and developmentalism. This in relation to historical and contemporary issues like the coloniality of mainstream conservation and natural resource management, the extraction and plantation economy, the industrialization (and green industrialization) of economic sectors, the recursive expansion of extractivist frontiers, and the proliferation of commodity and supply chains at the expense of biogeochemical cycles and diverse biotic and cultural communities. Grounded in interdisciplinary Earth systems complexity science and radical ecological economics, the course thus deconstructs the genealogy of mainstream paradigms like (neo)classical political economy, modernization, ecological modernization, neoliberalism, green neoliberalism, and developmentalism (including sustainable development). On the other hand, the course foregrounds the subjugated histories of ideas and movements that in defending territories and communities, have sought to repair ecological rifts upon principles of regenerative and cooperative place-based autonomy, dignity, equity, and resilience. This is a living history that serves to substantiate viable alternatives and transformative paradigms like (eco)feminism,(eco)Marxism; postcolonialism, decolonialism, Indigenous, post-development, degrowth, post-extractivism, and environmental/climate justice.
Reimagining Security, NINT5142
Peter Hoffman, Associate Professor of International Affairs and Director of the Julien J. Studley Graduate Programs in International Affairs
What is security? The concept is dramatic enough to warrant the use of military force and declare states of emergency, and malleable enough for political rhetoric and fashion marketing. This course will critically explore the concept, discourse, and practice of security as a central organizing principle, reality, and relationship of the modern social-political order and its contemporary trajectory. Topics include the fundamental interrelation between security and order, including classic political, sociological and psychological approaches that look at processes of state-making/war-making and identity as a driver; critical assessments of conventional security frameworks, such as Securitization models, and feminist and post-colonial perspectives; terrorism and exception; technologies of control and surveillance; privatization and commodification; livelihoods, environment, migration and diseases as security issues; the shifting nature of emergencies and intervention; and, security knowledge as a form of power.