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| 2006/07 Undergraduate Courses |
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TechnoPolitics 3070 3 F
Technology and Politics
Class Time: Wednesday 2:30-5:30
Class Location: 010 Accolade East
Technology and politics have always been intertwined. This course examines the technopolitical convergence in selected works of Marx, Deleuze, Derrida, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Steigler, DeLanda, Latoure, McLuhan, Virilio and Kroker.
The thread that links these political philosophers and social theorists is a convergence in the belief that technology alters existence in terms of self and other, essence, agency, consciousness, intimacy, intelligence, reason, life, embodiment, identity, and gender.
The teleology of humans defining their world through fabrication, the instrumental direction of tools and technology, is altered in what Steigler calls ‘originary technicity’: in the human/ technological interface there is no obvious distinction between doer and means; technology and human endeavor are coupled in a manner in which technology constructs the human, as much as, perhaps more than, the human constructs technology.
This course has three objectives: 1) To determine how key thinkers in the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries have constructed the techno-human interface. 2) To determine how these same thinkers have derived not simply a politics of technology but a new political genre: technopolitics. And, 3) To examine the terrain of technopolitics as a contested terrain. |
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POLS 3070 3 F
Psychology and Politics
Tues & Thurs 10:00-11:30
This course involves the use of psychoanalytic and psychological
concepts in contemporary and post contemporary political thought.
After outlining key psychological theories, beginning with
Freud, the focus is on themes such as ideology and freedom,
democracy and paranoia, sexual repression and desire, patriarchy
and gender, power and resistance, schizophrenia and politics,
the colonized body and (imperialist) psychology, the post
psycho-body and cyber psychology.
POLS 3011 3. W
Politics of Sexuality \ Sexual Politics
Tues & Thurs 10:00-11:30
Human sexuality has become a contested site of political
and social conflicts. Since the 1980’s research has
challenged popular conceptions of sex as a natural and biological
force. The course explores the socio-political construction
of sexualities through the fields of psychoanalysis, law,
sexology, and popular culture.
Focusing on Canada, the United States and Britain from the
nineteenth century to the present, the course investigates
a range of subjects: gender identity, heterosexuality, homosexuality,
transsexuality, bisexuality, ‘femininity,’ ‘masculinity,’
transgender, sexual representation, pornography, and disease. |
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| 2003/04 Honours and Masters Courses |
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POLS 4670 3 W
GS/POLS 5670 3 W
Politics of Cyberspace
Wed. 10:30-12:30
As a component of the information revolution and globalization,
the internet has since 1989 rapidly emerged as a feature of
contemporary politics. The internet is subject to competing
claims regarding its positive and negative impact on power
relations and individual identities.
This course focuses on a variety of interpretative methods
that are applied to the internet – communication theory,
Marxism, feminism, postmodernism, international relations,
identity theory, information theory, technological determinism,
political economy.
The characterization of the internet as a new medium and
its political significance will be emphasized. The course
will examine the influence of “non-place” communication
on democratic development, social power and interaction as
well as identity formation. |
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| 2003/04 Graduate Courses |
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GS POLS 6085 3 F
GS SPTH 6033 3 F
The Politics of Identity
Tues: 14:30-16:30
This course probes identity/difference, post identity, self
and other, human and post human, public and personal, gender
and post gender, masochist and sadist, east and west. The
aim is to problematize both sides of the identity/difference
divide, looking at the ways in which identity is consolidated
through the constitution of difference and how difference,
as a category and practice, in late modernity has been politicized
and depoliticized as a site of resistance.
The course will examine how the politics of identity has
simultaneously politicized and depoliticized the public and
personal facilitating a potential for both radical democracy
and neoconservatism in the public, and a possibility for extreme
activism, passive indifference, radical indifference and engaged
endeavor in the personal.
Key concepts include power, resentment, responsibility,
representation, gender, race, ethnicity, community, citizenship,
class, labor, mobilization, sovereignty, neoimperialism, neocolonialism,
virtuality, performativity, indifference, and endeavor.
Three questions structure the course: what is left of the
concept of citizenship in the political scape of identity
and post identity politics, how can the public be reclaimed
as a site of action, and how can living be a process of endeavor
rather than excess and labor. The course ends by examining
performance, specifically post human performance, as a site
of endeavor.
GS\POLS 6086 3 W
GS SPTH 6632 3 W
Thinking Power and Violence
– co-taught with Professor Gad Horowitz (University
of Toronto)
Tues.14:30-14:30
In the twentieth century there have been numerous attempts
to think seriously about the meaning of power and violence
as fundamental categories of human existence.
‘Thinking Power and Violence’ is concerned with
violence in many forms and manifestations: violence at the
foundation of human community, conservative violence, ‘divine
violence,’ redemptive violence, self as violence against
self and other, exclusionary violence, the violence of liberal
freedom and the commodity, counter-hegemonic violence, the
violence of the spectacle, the violence of outsiders and gender
violence.
The objectives of ‘Thinking Power and Violence’
are first, to develop an appreciation of the elusive multidimensionality
of violence as a phenomenon and second, to heighten awareness
of the risk of violence implicit in the textualization of
violence. |
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