Jason M. Kelly

AMST A601
THEORIES OF PUBLIC PROBLEM SOLVING
(FALL 2022)

This course examines theoretical approaches to the meaning of “America” by asking students to engage with theories central to the field of American studies, including post-structuralism, queer studies, and post-colonialism as well as race, gender, sexuality, class, and religion.

The purpose of the course is to introduce students to some of the key theoretical debates that have dominated social science and humanities scholarship over the past 150 years. We will read authors such as Karl Marx, Max Weber, W.E.B. Du Bois, Theodor Adorno, Antonio Gramsci, Frantz Fanon, Michel Foucault, bell hooks, Donna Haraway, Judith Butler, Alexander Weheliye, and more.

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About

This course is a graduate level survey of social and critical theory. Its purpose is to introduce students to many of the key theoretical debates that have dominated social science and humanities scholarship over the past 150 years. By the end of this course:

  1. Students will be able to outline the broad history of social and cultural theory since 1850.

  2. Students will be able to identify when and summarize how current literature in the social sciences and humanities uses and/or transforms social and cultural theories.

  3. By comparing and contrasting the philosophical and historical contexts of debates over social and critical theory over the past 150 years, students will be able evaluate the methodological and ethical implications of the various theoretical models.

  4. Students will be able to explain how theory is both relevant and responsive to applied practice. 

In a more general sense, students will develop and refine skills to comprehend, interpret, analyze, and compare scholarly writing.  

Readings

Week 1: American Studies, American Exceptionalism, and Social/Critical/Cultural Theory

25 August 2022

Shared Reading

Select One of the Following to Summarize for the Class

  • Christian, Barbara. “The Race for Theory.” Cultural Critique, no. 6 (1987): 51–63. https://doi.org/10.2307/1354255.

  • Butler, Judith. “What Is Critique? An Essay on Foucault’s Virtue.” Transversal Texts (blog), May 2001. https://transversal.at/transversal/0806/butler/en.

  • Duggan, Lisa. “The Theory Wars, or, Who’s Afraid of Judith Butler?” Journal of Women’s History 10, no. 1 (March 25, 2010): 9–19. https://doi.org/10.1353/jowh.2010.0547.

  • Friedman, Susan Stanford. “Both/And: Critique and Discovery in the Humanities.” PMLA 132, no. 2 (March 2017): 344–51. https://doi.org/10.1632/pmla.2017.132.2.344.

  • Latour, Bruno. “Why Has Critique Run out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern.” Critical Inquiry 30, no. 2 (January 1, 2004): 225–48. https://doi.org/10.1086/421123.

  • Jay, Paul. “12.2. Critique and Theory in the History of the Modern Humanities.” In Critique and Theory in the History of the Modern Humanities, 655–66. Amsterdam University Press, 2014. https://doi.org/10.1515/9789048518449-044.

Optional

  • Callinicos, Alex. Social Theory: A Historical Introduction, 1-77. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Polity, 2007.

Next Steps (Optional)

  • Noble, David W. Death of a Nation: American Culture and the End of Exceptionalism. Critical American Studies Series. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002.

Week 2: Paths in Social and Critical Theory

1 September 2022

Shared Reading

  • Marx, Karl. “The German Ideology: Part I.” In The Marx-Engels Reader, edited by Robert C. Tucker, 2nd ed., 146–200. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1978.

  • Durkheim, Emile. “What Is a Social Fact?” In The Rules of Sociological Method, 1–13. New York: Free Press, 1964.

  • Weber, Max. “The Three Pure Types of Legitimate Rule.” In The Essential Weber, edited by Sam Whimster, 133-45. London: Routledge, 2003.

  • ———. “Politics and the State.” In The Essential Weber, edited by Sam Whimster, 131-32. London: Routledge, 2003.

Optional 

  • Callinicos, Alex. Social Theory: A Historical Introduction, 78-178. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Polity, 2007.

  • Pecora, Vincent P. “Nietzsche, Genealogy, Critical Theory.” New German Critique, no. 53 (1991): 104–30. https://doi.org/10.2307/488246.

  • Leezenberg, Michiel, and Gerard de Vries. “Positivism and Structuralism.” In History and Philosophy of the Humanities, 241–72. Amsterdam University Press, 2018.

  • Nietzsche, Friedrich. On the Genealogy of Morality and Other Writings. Edited by Keith Ansell-Pearson. Translated by Carol Diethe. 3rd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017.

  • Kim, Sung Ho, "Max Weber", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2021 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2021/entries/weber/>.

Week 3: The Black Radical Tradition

8 September 2022

Shared Reading

  • Du Bois, W.E.B. “Marxism and the Negro Problem.” The Crisis 40, no. 5 (May 1933): 103–4, 118.

  • ———. “Of Our Spiritual Strivings.” In The Souls of Black Folk, 5th ed., 1–12. Chicago: A.C. McClurg & Company, 1904.

Applied Discussion

Next Steps (Optional)

  • Robinson, Cedric J. Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. 3rd ed. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2021.

Week 4: Theory/Praxis

15 September 2022

Shared Reading

  • Gramsci, Antonio, and David Forgacs. “Hegemony, Relations of Force, Historical.” In The Gramsci Reader: Selected Writings, 1916-1935, 189–221. New York: New York University Press, 2000.

    ———. “Notes for an Introduction and an Approach to the Study of Philosophy and the History of Culture.” In The Gramsci Reader: Selected Writings, 1916-1935, 324–47. New York: New York University Press, 2000.

  • Rosa Luxemburg. “Speech: May 12, 1912 (at the Second Social Democratic Women’s Rally, Stuttgart, Germany).“ In Selected Political Writings, Rosa Luxemburg, edited by Dick Howard, 433-41. Monthly Review Press, 1971.

Optional 

Week 6: Anticolonialism

22 September 2022

Shared Reading

  • Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. Translated by Richard Philcox. New York: Grove Press, 2021.

Next Steps (Optional)

  • Aabaka, Reiland. “Amilcar Cabral: Using the Weapon of Theory to Return to the Source(s) of Revolutionary Decolonization and Revolutionary Re-Africanization.” In The Fanon Reader, 227–83. London: Pluto Press, 2006.

  • Armstrong, Elisabeth. “Before Bandung: The Anti-Imperialist Women’s Movement in Asia and the Women’s International Democratic Federation.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 41, no. 2 (January 1, 2016): 305–31. https://doi.org/10.1086/682921.

  • Cabral, Amilcar. “The Weapon of Theory.” Tricontinental Conference of the Peoples of Asia, Africa and Latin America, Havana (January 1966). https://www.marxists.org/subject/africa/cabral/1966/weapon-theory.htm

  • Césaire, Aimé. Discourse on Colonialism. Translated by Joan Pinkham. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2001.

  • Wright, Richard Williams. White Man Listen!. Anchor Books/Doubleday, 1964.

  • Memmi, Albert. The Colonizer and the Colonized. Boston: Beacon Press, 1991.

  • Women’s International Democratic Federation. The Women of Asia and Africa: Documents. Women’s International Democratic Federation, 1948.

Week 6: Critical Theory & The Frankfurt School

29 September 2022

Shared Reading

  • Horkheimer, Max. “Traditional and Critical Theory.” In Critical Theory: Selected Essays, 188–243. New York: Continuum, 2002.

  • Horkheimer, Max, and Theodor W. Adorno. “The Culture Industry.” In Dialectic of Enlightenment, edited by Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, translated by Edmund Jephcott, 94–136. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007.

  • Benjamin, Walter. “Theses on the Philosophy of History [1940].” In Illuminations. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1968.

Optional

Next Steps (Optional)

  • Jeffries, Stuart. Grand Hotel Abyss: The Lives of the Frankfurt School. London: Verso, 2016.

Week 7: Power/Knowledge

6 October 2022

Shared Reading

  • Stoddart, Mark C. J. “Ideology, Hegemony, Discourse: A Critical Review of Theories of Knowledge and Power.” Social Thought & Research 28 (2007): 191–225.

  • Foucault, Michel. “1 February 1978.” In Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France 1977-1978, edited by Michel Senellart, translated by Graham Burchell, 108–10. New York, NY: Picador, 2009.

  • ———. “Nietzsche, Genealogy and History.” In The Foucault Reader, edited by Paul Rabinow, 76–100. New York: Pantheon, 1984.

  • Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. “Introduction: Rhizome.” In A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, translated by Brian Massumi, 2nd ed., 1–25. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987.

  • Puar, Jasbir K. “Queer Times, Queer Assemblages.” Social Text 23, no. 3-4 (84-85) (2005): 121–39.

Applied Discussion

Optional 

  • Callinicos, Alex. Social Theory: A Historical Introduction, 258-298. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Polity, 2007.

  • Rabinow, Paul. “Introduction.” In The Foucault Reader, 3–30. New York: Pantheon, 1984.

Next Steps (Optional)

  • Althusser, Louis. “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes towards an Investigation).” In Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, translated by Ben Brewster, 127–86. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971.

Week 8: Gender

13 October 2022

Group 1

  • Crenshaw, Kimberlé. “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics.” The University of Chicago Legal Forum 140 (1989): 139–167.

  • hooks, bell. “The Oppositional Gaze: Black Female Spectators.” In Black Looks: Race and Representation, 115–31. Boston: South End Press, 1992.

  • Butler, Judith. “Subjects of Sex/Gender/Desire.” In Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, 6-16. New York: Routledge, 1990, 6-16.

Group 2

  • Lorde, Audre. “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House.” In This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, edited by Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa, 2nd ed., 94-101. New York, NY: Kitchen Table/Women of Color Press, 1983.

  • Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. "Queer And Now." In Wild Orchids and Trotsky: Messages from American Universities, 237-66. New York: Penguin Books, 1993.

  • Haraway, Donna. “A Cyborg Manifesto.” In Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, 149–82. New York: Routledge, 1991.

  • Lindsey, Treva B. “Post-Ferguson: A ‘Herstorical’ Approach to Black Violability.” Feminist Studies 41, no. 1 (2015): 232–37.

Optional

  • Bowell, T. “Feminist Standpoint Theory.” In Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Accessed January 23, 2022. https://iep.utm.edu/fem-stan/.

  • Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, or, You’re So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Essay Is About You.” In Touching Feeling, edited by Michèle Aina Barale, Jonathan Goldberg, and Michael Moon, 123–52. Duke University Press, 2003.

Week 9: Borderlands and Assemblages

20 October 2022 | Note that this week will be asynchronous. I will provide you with details.

Group 1

  • Anzaldúa, Gloria E. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. 4th edition. Edited by Ricardo F. Vivancos-Pérez and Norma Cantú. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 2012.

Group 2

  • Weheliye, Alexander G. Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human. Durham: Duke University Press Books, 2014.

Week 10: Empires and Resistances

27 October 2022

Shared Reading

Group 1

  • Spivak. Gayatri. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” In Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, edited by Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, 271–314. University of Illinois Press, 1988.

  • Smith, Christen, Archie Davies, and Bethânia Gomes, eds. “‘In Front of the World’: Translating Beatriz Nascimento.” Antipode 53, no. 1 (2021): 279–316. https://doi.org/10.1111/anti.12690.

Group 2

  • Sandoval, Chela. “U.S. Third World Feminism: The Theory and Method of Oppositional Consciousness in the Postmodern World.” Genders 10 (1991): 1–24.

  • Gilroy, Paul. “It Ain’t Where You’re from, It’s Where You’re At...” Third Text 5, no. 13 (1991): 3–16.

Next Steps (Optional)

  • Smith, Linda Tuhiwai. Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples. 3rd ed. London: Zed Books, 2021.

Week 11: Anthropocene/Capitalocene/Chthulucene/Plantationocene

3 November 2022

Shared Reading

  • Kelly, Jason M. “Anthropocenes: A Fractured Picture.” In Rivers of the Anthropocene. Oakland: University of California Press, 2017.

  • Moore, Jason W. “The Capitalocene, Part I: On the Nature and Origins of Our Ecological Crisis.” The Journal of Peasant Studies 44, no. 3 (2017): 594–630.

  • Murphy, Michael Warren, and Caitlin Schroering. “Refiguring the Plantationocene: Racial Capitalism, World-Systems Analysis, and Global Socioecological Transformation.” Journal of World-Systems Research 26, no. 2 (2020): 400–415.

  • Haraway, Donna J. “Making Kin.” In Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, 99–103. Durham: Duke University Press Books, 2016.

  • Whyte, Kyle. “Indigenous Climate Change Studies: Indigenizing Futures, Decolonizing the Anthropocene.” English Language Notes 55, no. 1–2 (2017): 153–62.

Week 12: The Right to the City in the Anthropocene

10 November 2022

Shared Reading

  • Harvey, David. 2008. “The Right to the City.” New Left Review, II, , no. 53: 23–40.

  • Pulido, Laura. 2016. “Flint, Environmental Racism, and Racial Capitalism.” Capitalism Nature Socialism 27 (3): 1–16.

Group 1

  • Haderer, Margaret. “Revisiting the Right to the City, Rethinking Urban Environmentalism: From Lifeworld Environmentalism to Planetary Environmentalism.” Social Sciences 9, no. 2 (2020): 15.

  • Mokhles, Sombol, and Kathryn Davidson. “A Framework for Understanding the Key Drivers of Cities’ Climate Actions in City Networks.” Urban Climate 38 (July 1, 2021): 100902.

Group 2

  • Obringer, Renee, and Roshanak Nateghi. “What Makes a City ‘Smart’ in the Anthropocene? A Critical Review of Smart Cities under Climate Change.” Sustainable Cities and Society 75 (December 1, 2021): 103278.

  • Shingne, Marie Carmen. “The More-than-Human Right to the City: A Multispecies Reevaluation.” Journal of Urban Affairs (2020): 1–19.

Optional

  • Certeau, Michel de. 1984. “Walking in the City.” In The Practice of Everyday Life, translated by Steven F. Rendall, 91–110. Berkeley: University of California Press.

  • Rosol, Marit. 2015. “Governing Cities through Participation—a Foucauldian Analysis of CityPlan Vancouver.” Urban Geography 36 (2): 256–76.

  • Avila, Eric. 2014. “L.A.’s Invisible Freeway Revolt: The Cultural Politics of Fighting Freeways.” Journal of Urban History 40 (5): 831–42.

Next Steps

  • Lefebvre, Henri. Key Writings. Edited by Stuart Elden, Elizabeth Lebas, and Eleonore Kofman. Bloomsbury Academic, 2017.

  • Soja, Edward W. 2010. Seeking Spatial Justice. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Week 13: Environmental Justice and the City

17 November 2022

Shared Reading

  • Dorceta Taylor. 2014. Toxic Communities: Environmental Racism, Industrial Pollution, and Residential Mobility. New York: NYU Press.

Week 14: Fascism, NeoFascism, and Democracy

1 December 2022

Shared Reading

Week 15: Conclusions and Futures

8 December 2022

Assignments

Weekly Assignments

Each week you will be assigned a group of required readings. On most weeks, everybody in the class will be reading the same texts. For some weeks, however, I have broken up required readings into multiple group readings. You will be responsible for reading only the texts of the group to which you are assigned. 

In addition to required readings, you may also be assigned a reading as discussion leader. Your responsibility as discussion leader is to:

  • do any necessary background reading that might help you better understand the text

  • prepare a literature worksheet to share with the class (you will prepare and share this worksheet with fellow students via our Zotero group)

  • prepare questions to help guide discussions

Participation

This class is premised on the idea that we all learn best when we engage in dialogue (both with the texts we are reading and with each other). Consequently, your participation in class conversations will constitute your primary grade for this course. 

In order to participate in the class, you should be prepared to do a few things:

  • Read all of the assigned readings thoroughly.

  • I know that some weeks have somewhat heavy reading loads, but I nevertheless expect you to thoroughly engage with each assigned text. You should look ahead at which weeks might have a heavier reading load and make sure that you read ahead if you have a busy calendar.

  • Participate actively in classroom discussions. This is a small class at the PhD level, and conversation, questioning, and sometimes (polite) disagreement should be expected.

  • It’s often not enough to read a text (especially when leading discussions); you will need to read around the text. By this, I mean that you should do background research to better understand who the author is; their intellectual, social, and historical context; and what intervention (intended or otherwise) their text has made to social and critical theory.

One final suggestion…if you have not read something thoroughly, you won’t be able to discuss it. Please don’t try (I will usually ask you follow-up questions, which you won’t be able to answer, and the whole process will just waste time). Instead, simply say that you didn’t get a chance to read the text. Then, come back the following week extra prepared to participate in discussion. 

(New) Blueprints for Counter Education: Final Assignment

The central assignment for this course will be responding to and participating in (New) Blueprints for Counter Education—an exhibition that centers on the questions and texts associated with this course. 

About (New) Blueprints for Counter Education

In 1970, Maurice Stein and Larry Miller published Blueprint for Counter Education. With design work by Marshall Henrichs, it consisted of a cardboard slip case containing three posters and a book, which they called the “Shooting Script.”

Developed while they were at Brandeis University in 1968, Blueprint for Counter Education was an experiment in radical pedagogy — one that emphasized interdisciplinary and collaborative learning. The design of the posters encouraged users to pursue non-linear learning paths, making new connections and additions as their understanding grew. The overall emphasis of the project was to challenge the top-down pedagogies of the universities and to respond to the socio-political and cultural landscape in which they found themselves.

(New) Blueprints for Counter Education responds to the participatory spirit of the original by asking IU faculty members to develop new posters, multimedia projects, and curricula that complement and expand Stein and Miller’s project.

The objects in the exhibition (26 January to 15 February 2022 at the Herron School of Art and Design; 15 June 2022 to 1 May 2023) are the result of this work. While Stein and Miller used the writings of Herbert Marcuse and Marshall McLuhan to orient their project, the new blueprints are thematic in focus: anticolonialism, racial justice, gender, and environmentalism expand the original and explore how critical theory has developed over the past fifty years.

By design, (New) Blueprints for Counter Education does not propose a single, unified approach. Instead, it offers multiple ways to read the past, participate in the present, and approach the future.

For more information on the original installation of (New) Blueprints for Counter Education, visit https://jasonmkelly.com/new-blueprints-for-counter-education

(New) Blueprints for Counter Education and AMST A601: Theories of Public Problem Solving

AMST A601: Theories of Public Problem Solving engages with many of the theories, questions, and challenges of Blueprint for Counter Education and (New) Blueprints for Counter Education. And, throughout the course, we will engage in a dialogue with the posters and supplementary materials of both the 1971 and 2022 projects. In fact, we will be holding class surrounded by the (New) Blueprints for Counter Education exhibition, at the IUPUI Arts and Humanities Institute. We will refer back to them, critique them, and even revise them in situ. 

Your assignment for this course will be to study the exhibition and related materials and connect them to the readings for this course by creating your own blueprint for counter education poster. Like the posters in the exhibition, the poster may stand on its own, exploring a specific theme, or it may develop an idea in an already existing poster, extending one of its arguments. Your poster should be accompanied by a paper or podcast that explains its significance, argument(s), and thematic details (keeping in mind, of course, that the posters are meant to open up new avenues for thought rather than serve as linear, didactic exercises). 

Design Details:

  • You may design your poster by hand or using a program such as Adobe InDesign.

  • Your poster should match the scale of the original.

  • While nobody expects you to be a professional designer, the poster should demonstrate a clear intent to use aesthetics to convey an idea through the visual mode. This should be explained in your paper or podcast.

  • There are no minimum number of items that you must include in your poster. The idea is to demonstrate the work that you have done in the course (both through our readings and through your own research) in a way that thoughtfully clarifies an idea or theme.

  • You should include a short 250 word (or less) summary that serves as a wall label for your poster.

  • The accompanying paper or podcast should be equivalent to a minimum of 1250 words.

  • You do not have to print your poster.

Evaluation:

You will be evaluated on:

  • The thoroughness with which you engage with your chosen topic.

  • The extent to which your accompanying paper or podcast clarifies the ideas and themes of your paper.

  • Your attention to writing in the form of grammar and spelling.

  • Your attention to visualization in the form of logical juxtaposition of image, text, and concept.

  • The extent to which the theme of your poster engages with the themes of the course, clearly articulating what you have learned and providing insight on ways to engage with the material.

  • Your attempt to extend what you have learned by integrating new authors and ideas.

Deadline:

Your assignment is due on week 14 so that we can discuss it as a group at our final meeting in week 15. I highly recommend that you engage with this project at least once per week throughout the semester, drafting ideas and making visualizations as your understanding develops.