This seminar invites students to explore the politics of life and death (human and other-than-human) in the contexts of settler colonialism, environmental justice, war, transitional justice, race, indigeneity, gender, and extinction. Drawing on scholarly, literary, and visual texts, we will think together about rage, grief, memory, love, and more. How are we entangled with histories of coloniality, slavery, patriarchy? Why and how should we think “beyond the human” in a world where so many continue to deny the humanity of Black, Brown, Indigenous, Queer and disabled bodies? What happens when we consider the possibility that plants can be elders, rocks might listen, and “earth-beings” (such as rivers and glaciers) speak? It is my hope that our rigorous examination of these and other questions will serve as windows through which we can view the workings of alterity, marginalization, and vulnerability, as well as survey pathways to alternative and better futures.
As the Junior Colloquium in the Comparative History of Ideas, CHID 390 emphasizes intentional engagement with the politics of knowledge: How do we come to know what we know? What counts as knowledge? Whose knowledge matters? To what end? Throughout the quarter we will consider these questions, placing them in conversation with the thematic concerns that anchor this class.
You can find the full syllabus for our course here.