Courses
Theories of Social and Political Change: On Blackness and Indigeneity (Graduate)
This course examines social and political change within the longue durée of antiblack racism, settler colonialism, and entanglements of the two. Blackness and Indigeneity are primarily explored as critical lenses into what is meant by and what counts as “social and political change.”
MOdern Political Thought: On the Human (Graduate)
This course is a critical exploration of various imaginations of the human. It examines recent texts from a variety of disciplinary fields and lines of thought that engage the human with respect to race, gender, sexuality, Indigeneity, materiality, species, and ecology.
Gender and Politics: Affect (Undergraduate and Graduate)
This course explores affect as it has been theorized from, with, and apart from gender in its intersections with race, class, sexuality, and coloniality. Rather than pinpointing a definition of affect, we will trace its iterations, inflections, and transformations.
Modern Political Thought: On the Human (Undergraduate)
What does it mean to be human when the planet may no longer sustain human life? This course engages the ecological implications of anthropocentrism in its intersections with capitalism, racism, and colonialism. It also considers nonanthropocentric imaginations of the human.
Poetics and Politics of Sex: Intimacy and Its Discontents
What happens when politics authorizes certain forms of intimacy but not others? Where might one turn for intimacy if its available forms are dissatisfying? This course explores monogamy, family, and intimate publics across issues of ambivalence, trauma, queerness, war, and longing. It also explores intimacy through different genres, such as poems, aphorisms, novellas, and essays.
American Political Thought (Undergraduate)
This course develops a critical understanding of American Political Thought by exploring historically marginalized voices at the intersections of race, gender, sexuality, and Indigeneity.
Impasse Matters: The Politics of Unmaking Lives
How might we understand situations wherein letting go of hopes, relationships, and attachments is so hard or painful that we cling to them and risk being destroyed? What might we do so that the unmaking of our lives becomes preferable to keeping a damaging one? This course explores such impasse matters, where political and personal life meet in struggles to endure, change, and thrive.
The Bad Good Life: Cruel Optimisms, Bad Romances, and Other Political Depressions
What if the good life that we desire turns out to be bad? This course explores the intersection of personal and political life when our hopes are damaging to ourselves and to others.