Upper-Division

Introduction to the relationship between philosophy and poetics in some major 19th- and 20th-century poets and thinkers.

From Muir Woods to Hollywood and Silicon Valley to the Central Valley, California has been a path breaker that has shaped politics and cultural production. The state's rich diversity makes it an especially exciting site for studying the relations between divergent social, economic, cultural, political, and ecological forces. Course investigates the histories, cultures, and geographies of California by exploring relations between power and place through ethnographic, archival, critical, and aesthetic lenses. Also examines the role of identity within constructions of inequality and struggles for political change. Course fulfills one upper-division course requirement for the minor in the history of consciousness.

Explores the politics of writing by moving beyond rehearsals of established form into an analysis of the politics of writing, asking: What are the philosophical and political implications of the writing forms we choose?

Provides an introduction to critical scholarship on media infrastructures with a focus on cybernetic systems, internet protocol, surveillance, logistics, and finance. It explores how these configurations of power are reorganizing our societies and restructuring our subjectivities.

Analyzes films and images to consider how the genre of horror has screened the problems, expectations, and fantasized afterlives of racism, labor exploitation, ruin, and war.

What are we asserting or seeking when we make a claim about reality? What criteria divide the real from the unreal, what authorities have power to make this designation, and under what conditions, if any, can the boundary be crossed? Course explores the idea of reality and resonances between writing and films ranging from the serious to the whimsical. Through these juxtapositions course explores what underlying concepts, if any, could unite political "realism" with realism in art, or what common qualities these realisms might share with the "real number system," virtual reality, or reality TV.

Takes up the literary form of the parable to illuminate a pressing and complex problem: the threat of global climate change. How can the simplest of stories help us to explore our options for a planetary future?

Explores the meanings of modernity, religion, and violence and examines the conceptual status that war and sovereignty, long associated with religious belief, have since been accorded within the modern humanist and secular tradition. Also explores aspects of this tradition and their relationship to questions of morality and violence and how violence-and its relationship to secularism-can be better understood today as a mode of negotiating human existence in a world dominated by technology and its myths.

This interdisciplinary course considers the atom in four respects: as philosophical idea, as weapon, as catastrophe, and as clock. Students will learn about ancient atomisms, radiometric dating, the Manhattan Project, the bombing of Hiroshima, and the Chernobyl nuclear disaster.

Survey of seminal work on ancient origins of the state, diverse geo-political systems of war and diplomacy, and consequences of the formation of the world market on the evolution of geo-political systems up to and beyond the wars of today.

Concentrates on the Marxist tradition of critical theory, centering on classical texts by Marx and by writers in the Marxist tradition up to the present.

Surveys major developments in the capitalist world economy from the 13th century to today. Topics include: the transition to capitalism in Europe; the emergence of banking; colonization, slavery, and uneven development; industrialization; and globalization.

Examines the history of the idea of "miseducation" through a transnational lens. Focuses in particular on histories of the (mis)education of people of African descent, drawing on historical cases and theorizations from both the Continent and the diaspora. This class will trace the emergence of the concept and proximate theorizations of "education" itself through an array of different social movements, institutional formations, and texts.

Provides the historical context and the theoretical tools necessary for understanding today's radical right. Specific focus on considering the far right in the context of radical constructions under conditions of late capitalism.

Studies the multiplicity of meanings of the word "species" explored in Donna Haraway's "When Species Meet," including its use in biology, racial and gendered uses, religious and economic meanings. Examines discourses surrounding species from the ancient Greeks through the present.

Examines the material, discursive, and racialized conditions that have produced refugees in the last century. Also examines the social claims made by refugees, institutional responses to them, and political alternatives to state belonging

Explores what happens if money is examined as a material and politically contingent phenomenon in its own right, rather than assuming the classic "three functions of money" (unit of account, means of exchange, and store of value). Students examine these functions separately with an eye to the tensions that arise between them, and trace a deep history of monetary systems as the outcome of a process of negotiation and contestation. Topics considered include palace economies, cowrie shells, metallic coinages, the modern monetary revolution, and contemporary struggles over student debt.

Course touches on the philosophical roots of Hegel's text, starting from the pre-World War II rereading of Hegel's master/slave dialectic that became the kernel of postwar thought arising from struggles over capitalism, communism, fascism, racism, colonialism, and feminism.

Examines the modern concept of state, its anthropological assumptions, categories, its critique, and its crisis. Inquires into the concept of representation, borders, security and control in thinkers, such as Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Immanuel Kant, G.W.F. Hegel, Karl Marx, Carl Schmitt, and Lenin.

Gives students a grasp of different definitions and uses of the concept queerness in its relationship to race and how it's tied to the politics of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) identity.

Inquires into the relationship between politics and violence as articulated by early modern, modern, and contemporary political theorists. Investigates the role of violence in the constitution and maintenance of sovereign power and the construction of the modern subject of politics.

How postcolonial thought occasions the reconsideration of the Western tradition of political philosophy and the discovery of alternative pathways of modernization within it.

Seminar in modern political thought. The focus and outcome of the course is developing the skill of analytical thinking and clear formulation of concepts in writing. Raises and discusses a set of fundamental questions around the method and methodology of moral and political thought, to which every member in the seminar contributes.

Introduces the histories of exploration, museum collection, and photography that shape historical and contemporary ideas about race, culture, and place in Africa.

Provides an introduction to classical and contemporary texts of radical political theory, a body of work that critically examines fundamental premises of politics. Addresses the question What is the 'political?'

Provides students an opportunity for in-depth analysis of advanced topics within the history of consciousness arena. Course topic changes; see the Class Search for current topic.

The development of Freud's concept of mind. Extensive reading tracing the origins and development of Freud's theories and concepts (e.g., abreaction, psychic energy, defense, wish-fulfillment, unconscious fantasy, dreams, symptoms, transference, cure, sexuality) and emphasizing the underlying model of the mind and mental functioning.

Introduces the comparative study of world religions and provides critical entry points toward the understanding of its history as a discipline. Special emphasis on the troubled history of imperialism, orientalism, and facile generalizations that have always accompanied the attempt to understand foreign or dead cultures.

Critically engages with feminist-Marxist perspectives on social-reproduction. Introduces the foundation of Marxism and feminist-Marxist critique while examining the international feminist struggle historically from the origins of capitalism to the present moment.

Examines the socio-political and cultural origins of early 20th-century avant-garde movements focusing on the vanguard movement of futurism, the roles played by the disenchantment of the world, and technological rationalization as it relates to warfare and aesthetic production.

A program of individual study arranged between an undergraduate student and a faculty member. Students submit petition to sponsoring agency.