Peqod :: Classes - Columbia University Catalog of Classes

This interdisciplinary course grapples with nation-states and cities at its margins, exploring the exclusions, oppositions, silences and, in particular, the 'Others' or 'in-betweens' of the nation-state as an organizing tool. ‘Illegal migrants’, ‘refugees’, ‘asylum seekers’, ‘exiles’, ‘nomads’, ‘aliens’, and other ‘Others’: these are all in-between figures, exceptions to a political order defined by membership in the city, borders, sovereignty and nation-states. In their very existence, they represent a challenge to this political order, as social and political theorists have long recognized. This seminar explores the dynamics, contradictions and politics surrounding nation-states and their Others with particular attention to the responses to them on the part of ostensibly liberal-democratic states. We examine the relationship between citizenship, statelessness, refugee-hood and migration as exceptions to a political order defined by membership in the city, borders, sovereignty and nation-states. Students will engage with film, fiction, visual animations and displacement maps to examine key theoretical and critical interventions by scholars who examine nation-states and cities at their margins. To this end, participants will examine key theoretical interventions by Hannah Arendt, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Giorgio Agamben alongside scholars who have grappled with, contested, and developed their ideas, such as Étienne Balibar, Didier Bigo, Jacques Rancière, and Seyla Benhabib. With these texts, the participants will attempt to explore non-national or post-national alternatives to the nation-state and citizenship as a tool for planning and organization of people and space.

Taken together, this course provides an alternative to conventional scholarship on this subject. It engages with and provides an alternative to the mainstream literature to take for granted the inclusive and integrative character of nation-states and its respective memberships in the form of refugees, citizens and migrants.
At first glance, the course may appear highly theoretical, but not to worry—we will move slowly through the texts and concepts together. The instructor will also ensure that we apply the ideas discussed in class to concrete and tangible case studies with examples given to enable easier access and collective learning.

Department: Institute for Study of Human Rights
M 10:10 a.m.-noon
Instructor: Shourideh Molavi
Info
3 points

Details

HRTS GU4970

Queer Theory

This course surveys the relationship between sociology as a discipline and the body of thought, action and critique that coheres under the term queer theory. Many people understand these two projects to be constitutionally at odds. Sociology as a discipline concerns itself with the empirical study of, as Norbert Elias wrote, “the problem of human societies.” How we do this is distinct. Sociologists have a defined set of technical skills that make use of social categories and classifications. We organize individuals by behavior and identity, document diverse cultural milieus, and even attempt to quantify the demographic details of sexual identities, practices and communities. Queer theory, on the other hand, emerged as a field of academic thought in the early 1990’s, at the apex of the HIV/AIDS epidemic. The urgency of the political moment demanded new analytical tools for thinking about gender, sexuality, medicine and bodies. Queer theorists took to task the restrictive categories of gender and sexual life that relegated gay men and lesbians to sociological studies of “deviant” people and practices, in favor of rich and pointed critiques of the organization of culture, institutions and politics that renders some people and practices deviant in the first place. Queer theorists document their suspicion of methods, of categories, and of knowledge practices themselves. Social science is often the target of such critiques.

So, is there actually a way to do something we might call queer sociology? Or is it, fundamentally, an oxymoron? As what we think of as data becomes “bigger” and ever more categorically precise, what use has sociology for queer theory? How can a body of thought that operates from an anti-categorical impulse inform empirical work that seeks, at least in some part, to identify and observe particular types of people and particular forms of social life? In this course, we will read a set of foundational texts in the queer theoretical tradition alongside sociology that makes use of queer phenomena, frameworks and world-making projects. Expect to cover topics like ephemera, ghosts, messy affect, political lesbianism, perversion and a variety of other things you don’t typically see on a sociology syllabus. Each week, we will survey a select set of orienting ideas from queer theory–the heterosexual matrix, heteronormativity, antidisciplinarity, and homonormativity–and examine the ways in which sociologists of sexuality aim

Department: Sociology
T 10:10 a.m.-noon
Instructor: Tey Meadow
h-index: 8 Info
4 points

Details

SOCI GU4984