CSCL 3425W is also offered in Spring 2025
CSCL 3425W is also offered in Fall 2024
CSCL 3425W is also offered in Spring 2024
CSCL 3425W is also offered in Spring 2023
CSCL 3425W is also offered in Spring 2022
Spring 2022 | CSCL 3425W Section 001: Critical Theory and Social Change (56091)
- Instructor(s)
- Class Component:
- Lecture
- Credits:
- 3 Credits
- Grading Basis:
- Student Option
- Instructor Consent:
- No Special Consent Required
- Instruction Mode:
- In Person Term Based
- Class Attributes:
UMNTC Liberal Education Requirement
- Times and Locations:
Regular Academic Session
Mon,
Wed 11:15AM - 12:30PM
UMTC, East Bank
Nicholson Hall 145
- Enrollment Status:
Open (29 of 30 seats filled)
- Also Offered:
- Course Catalog Description:
- This course introduces influential thinkers in the field of Critical Theory who wield theory to document and drive social change. As philosopher James Bohman notes, critical theory "has a narrow and a broad meaning." Narrowly, the term designates twentieth-century German theorists "in the Western European Marxist tradition known as the Frankfurt School," who define "a 'critical' theory [as] critical to the extent that it seeks human 'emancipation from slavery,' acts as a 'liberating … influence,' and works 'to create a world which satisfies the needs and powers of' human beings." So conceived, critical theory is intimately entwined with an anti-slavery, emancipatory politics. This twining anticipates a second, broader compass of critical theory, as Mark Christian Thompson and others argue, in which U.S. and global Black, Indigenous, and other thinkers of color marshal theory to decode and dismantle power and to articulate anti-racist visions of social justice and social change. This course braids these strands of twentieth- and twenty-first-century critical theory to examine the ways in which our lives are conditioned by systems, ideologies, and histories of power relations that reflective critique can illuminate. We begin by reading pivotal theorizations of culture (Georg Simmel), critical theory (Max Horkheimer), and intersectionality (Patricia Hill Collins): the notion that race, class, gender, sexuality, and other social determinants are mutually constitutive and thus produce ever-shifting dynamics of power and oppression. Unit 1, "Symptom and Structure," draws on the work of Jackie Wang, Angela Y. Davis, Malcolm X, Sheldon George, Alfredo Carrasquillo, and Joshua Javier Guzman to look under the hood of the carceral and mental health systems and see how the structural logics of these institutions engender racial disparities and psychic trauma. With the psychoanalytic theory of Sigmund Freud, we explore - via Willy Apollon, Jean Rouch, and Michael Taussig - how spir
- Class Description:
- Student may contact the instructor or department for information.
- Textbooks:
- https://bookstores.umn.edu/course-lookup/56091/1223
ClassInfo Links - Spring 2022 Cultural Stdy/Comparative Lit Classes