Upcoming Courses
Spring 2025
Climate, Coloniality, and Sustainable Futurity with Malcolm Sen (English) and Rob DeConto (Earth, Geographic, and Climate Sciences): Friday, South College E 370, 1.00 – 3.30 pm. Register under either English (ENG 890N) or GeoSciences (GEO-SCI 890N)
Course Description The climate catastrophe has been termed as a polycrisis for good reason. It is a biosphere crisis, a hydrosphere crisis, a crisis of clean, breathable air, a crisis of the Earth’s carbon cycle, a crisis of the imagination, and a civilizational crisis. Despite these labels, which would lead one to think that all geopolitics should be focused on solving such cascading calamities, the response from national governments and international organizations (such as the United Nations), has been feeble to say the least. Market mechanisms and “green capitalism” aimed at correcting global trade’s exorbitant carbon emissions, an odd gamble with futurity, have also been deeply unsuccessful in any meaningful action. Coupled with these are two realities: the climate crisis has long been defined as a scientific, political, and economic problem with technological and market-oriented fixes, and the fact that, climate breakdown’s impacts are notably harsher and more lethal in the global South. The limited landscape of epistemological methods and the uneven geography of climate change impacts, unsurprisingly, also mirrors the epistemological and geopolitical landscape of colonial empires. Empire, as most decolonial and postcolonial thinkers have long argued, actively facilitated large scale capitalist extractivism, embedded regimes of monoculture farming, and notoriously invisibilized indigenous knowledge practices. To make matters more complex, the relationship between fossil fuel driven economic growth, the hyperconsumerism of late capitalism, and the militarization of global politics, are all implicated in the existential challenges “humanity” faces in this century. For these reasons alone, climate catastrophe can appear too daunting to contemplate. Taken together, however, the polycrisis of climate change ultimately points towards a culture of crisis that has dominated the neoliberal era and a crisis of culture that has ushered in the Anthropocene.
Radical in its conception, this course, guided by a humanist and a climate scientist, offers students an opportunity to engage in interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary modes of critique in the context of the most urgent story of our times, the story of climate change. We will engage in robust discussions surrounding the intersections of empire, climate, and capital; we will learn about the birth of climate and environmental sciences, their relationship to ecological imperialism, and also think through why the humanities and the sciences need to work in tandem to address the most pressing problems of climate breakdown. We will gain a better understanding of how imperial processes continue to dominate climate politics, what the racial and gendered implications of the crisis are, and what a politics that sustains life might entail. Despite the big picture problems, we aim to arrive at a place of radical and life-affirming politics of hope and sustainability for the future.
Fall 2024
SPAN 790D/ECON 790D: Decolonizing Child-Raising: Public Narratives of Parenting, Care, and Gender with Meghan Armstrong (LLC) and Katherine A. Moos (Economics): Wednesdays 9.15-11.45 am. Register under either Economics or Spanish.
Bringing together economics and linguistics, this course will critically examine public narratives around parenting and the raising of young children in a global context, drawing from intersectional, decolonial feminist political economy as well as a new line of linguistic inquiry examining the relationship between language and attachment. We will explore the theories from three distinct but overlapping feminist epistemologies: intersectionality, decolonial feminism, and social reproduction feminism. These traditions will be put into conversation with one another to highlight potential synergies. We will draw on feminist political economy which emphasizes how the care of future generations of workers represents a source of working-class women’s exploitation, as well as their revolutionary potential. From the language side, students will be introduced to attachment theory, exploring to the various roles that language plays in attachment. We will explore the ontogeny of language with respect to attachment, the role of language in the survival of human infants and caregiver response to language, and the role of specific “niches” (e.g. breastfeeding, sleeping) in language development, paying attention to fundamental differences between Western and non-Western societies. Within this context, students will take a critical look at public discourses around childcare (including language development) and parenting advice by “experts”.
Class discussions will encourage students to consider implications for both disciplines as each topic is explored.
Recent Courses
Spring 2024
WGSS 795D: Critical Decolonial Gender and Sexuality Studies (DGS Core Course) with Svati Shah (WGSS) and Corine Tachtiris (LLC): Thursday 2:30-5, Herter 546. Register under either WGSS or LLC.
As Talal Asad and Gayatri Spivak have argued, to translate another culture’s practices into the language of the scholar involves not only a linguistic shift, but an epistemological one as well. This course asks students to think critically about how those practices become subjects of scholarly knowledge production, particularly with respect to questions of gender and sexuality. Gender and sexuality have often been central to producing comparative perspectives on civilization that place the West ahead of the rest of the world. This course unpacks hierarchies that arrive in the form of “the woman question” and “homonationalism” in Western academic discourses, with a view to expanding how we may critique and undermine the uneven developmentalist ethos embedded within them.
“Decolonialism” is presented here as the term through which counternarratives to this ethos are being made legible in Euro-American academic contexts. We present a key set of these counternarratives by introducing students to how categories, subjects, and debates are both produced in postcolonial worlds, and how they are translated into particular conceptualizations and objects of study. We take gender, racialization, and sexuality as the key sites of inquiry in an interdisciplinary exploration of robust postcolonial and decolonial critique from Asia, Africa and the Americas.
In building the critical language to address these developments, students develop their ability to think through how ideas move, via language, across, out, and through postcolonial worlds. In this light, the course will pay particular attention to the way language shapes discourse about racialized, sexual, and gender identities as well as shapes those identities themselves.
Offered next in Spring 2026.
SOCIOL 791D: Social and Political Theories of Decolonization (DGS Core Course) with Agustin Lao-Montes (Sociology/Afro-Am) and Adam Dahl (Political Science): Monday 2:30-5:00, Thompson Hall 420. Register under either Political Science or Sociology
This graduate seminar will serve as an advanced introduction to political and social theories of coloniality and decolonization. Reading key texts within an enlarged conception of what constitutes postcolonial and decolonial thought, the seminar will address some of the most fundamental questions in social, political, and cultural theory (e.g. patriarchy, globalization, the state, racial capitalism, subjectivity, knowledge production, democracy, nationalism) from a transdisciplinary lens. Foregrounding the intersections of our own disciplinary perspectives – political theory and historical sociology – the seminar will provide an opportunity to foreground how decolonial perspectives orient both distinctive modes of critique and the search alternative possibilities to the nation-state form oriented around patriarchal domination, territorial sovereignty, capital accumulation, and rights-based individualism.
Toward this end, the seminar will seek to provide frameworks of critique and to move beyond dominant frameworks in international politics and historical sociology that have envisioned decolonization primarily as a transition from a condition of colonial subjection to nation-state independence. Our focus will seek to disrupt the methodological nationalism of dominant accounts of decolonization in order to explore how dismantling coloniality also entails experimentation in non-state, transnational, cosmopolitan, and post-national forms of social, economic, and political organization.
Instead of restricting our view to the period of decolonization after World War II when European colonial possessions attained formal sovereignty, we will center on the 500-year struggle of Indigenous and Afro-descendant peoples against the capitalist world system in the Americas. And rather than view decolonization solely as a struggle for national independence, we will emphasize its transnational and comparative dimensions, how ideologies and practices of decolonization travel across boundaries of race, nation, and empire and in doing so transform global power relations. Consistent with a relational and dialectical approach, we will situate our analyses in the interstices of different framings of the colonial situation (e.g. coloniality of power, neocolonialism, postcolonialism, settler colonialism). Through historically and geographically specific analyses of these concrete colonial forms, we will also examine forms of transnational anti-colonial solidarity that have taken root across different imperial contexts.
Offered next in Spring 2026
Fall 2023
Eng 891LD/Econ 891LD: Decolonial Reconstellations: Reframing the Present with Mwangi wa Gĩthĩnji (Economics) and Laura Doyle (English)
This interdisciplinary seminar serves as a core course of the proposed Decolonial Global Studies Certificate (DGS). Students from all disciplines are welcome, whether or not you plan to pursue the Certificate.
Focusing on non-eurocentric, non-androcentric analyses of world political economy and culture, this course will engage with diverse emancipatory and critical approaches, including decolonial, postcolonial, Indigenous, environmental, intersectional, queer, Marxist, speculative, transnational, and inter-imperial. We will particularly tackle the Eurocentric paradigm of “modernity,” which has severely distorted historical legacies and narrowed conceptions of past, present, and future. Several readings will address long-historical data, deep-time perspectives, and pluriversal epistemologies.
As we will explore, decolonization is not simply a removal of European colonial forms and a return to prior practices or to a golden period, as was sometimes envisioned in the process of political decolonization. While many hierarchies of gender, race, class, nationality, and religion were formed by European colonization, some versions of them predate the rise of European hegemony and have later co-evolved or interacted conjuncturally with European formations. In this context, we will highlight long-historical practices of ethical relationality as we also critique power configurations in whatever era or form they appear. Close study of these dynamic processes allows for a deeper overturning of the Eurocentric, androcentric points of view that pervade much of our understanding of the contemporary world. Some class projects will therefore invite students to situate their more contemporary research projects or interests within a longer history.
The course will also emphasize decolonial and relational practices. Co-taught by a Humanities and a Social Science professor, the seminar aims to model decolonial interdisciplinary methods while widening the horizons within which students conceive their research and their aspirations. The course will encourage collaborative thinking and invite experimental or creative projects, including some in teaching, research, activism, art, or other engagements. We anticipate that the interdisciplinary mix of students in the class will also enable students to widen their campus community and enhance their understanding of decolonial practices.
Offered next in Fall 2025