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