Structuralism: Resistance, Change, Politics

How do your actions impact the structures and conditions within which you exist? How do these structures impact you? How are they made? Where do you locate yourself within the structures of which you are part? With whom are you in relation? How can we think about the idea of “agency” in conditions made by economic, political, material and social forces beyond our control? What is structural change? This course examines questions about change, resistance to change, choice, power, responsibility, politics and difference through an introduction to structural and post-structural thought. Structuralism and post-structuralism are modes of thinking that posit that the parts of a structure (e.g. of a society, of a text, of an institution) are made through their relations in that structure. This course will draw on structural and post-structural work in anthropology, literature, science and technology studies (STS), in postcolonial, gender and feminist studies, as well as in deconstruction and psychoanalysis, to investigate the significance of structures of kinship, economy, and language, as well as of institutions such as the school, the military, the state and the corporation. Students will be asked to consider the relation between individual and group, material, economic, racialized and gendered conditions of existence, and notions of agency, responsibility, the individual and the human. In addition to seminar discussions of texts and short writing assignments, students will select a structure within which they are located through which to investigate the central questions of the course. Authors we read will likely include Louis Althusser, Emily Apter, Tarek El-Ariss, Charisse Burden-Stelly, Judith Butler, Jacques Derrida, Emile Durkheim, Frantz Fanon, Michel Foucault, Sigmund Freud, Stuart Hall, Donna Haraway, Ranjana Khanna, Claude Levi-Strauss, Karl Marx, Edward Said, Ferdinand de Saussure, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, and Anna Tsing. Films and television series we watch may include The Matrix, Blade Runner, Madam Secretary (selection) and Poor Things. Students will be evaluated based on class participation, reading responses and individual and small group assignments.