Thinking Critically about Current Events

This course offers students the opportunity to think critically about current events through seminar discussion. Over the term students will select current events of interest to them which will be the focus of seminar discussion in conjunction with selected readings. Course materials will draw on work in the arts, humanities and interpretative social sciences (e.g. anthropology, literature, philosophy, feminist and postcolonial studies, and work in visual, music and performance arts). Individual and small group assignments will ask students to articulate questions, formulate arguments, and to respond to a variety of points of view. Possible topics of focus include: censorship; political violence; practices and politics of deportation; imprisonment; relations between art and politics; debates about freedom of expression; violence by and against the state; food insecurity; institutional responses to climate change; animal cruelty; labor organizing; racialized, economic, and gendered structures of subject formation; genocidal violence and relations between individual and group. Students will be invited to draw on social and news media, artistic and cultural products and practices, and personal experiences. In addition to material students bring to the course, readings will likely include work by Louis Althusser; Benedict Anderson; Walter Benjamin; Charisse Burden-Stelly, Jacques Derrida; Michel Foucault, Sigmund Freud, Rashid Khalidi, Ranjana Khanna, Karl Marx, and Gayatri Spivak. Student-selected topics will inform course assignments, which will include weekly reading responses, a letter to the editor, a short mid-term essay, and a final project.

Assessment will be based on work done in weekly reading responses; a letter to the editor; a short mid-term essay; and a final project. Students will be evaluated based on these assignments and class participation.