Proseminar: Culture and Society: A Seminar on Cultural Political Economy

Semester and Year	SP 2010
Course Number	CORE-GG2017
Section	001
Instructor	Ali Mirsepassi
Days	Thu
Time	3:30 PM - 5:30 PM
Units	4.0
Level	G
Foundation Requirement

Description

This interdisciplinary seminar will examine a critical debate on culture and society. We will explore theories emphasizing structural or "material" determinism, as well as intellectual currents privileging "cultural" explanations. Excessive emphasis on the cultural unhelpfully blurs the economic and other aspects of social life, while reductive fixation on economic moorings suggests subordination of social life to the structural imperatives of the market. The course proposes the conceptual exploration and development of an integrative middle way, toward a more dialectically nuanced understanding of human behaviors, social interactions and their forms of subjectivity. The central question will be: how are hegemonic meanings produced and made to become a "normal" part of our political, intellectual, and moral life? And how do such meaning-making processes shape the organization of spaces, policies and population within dominant discourses of modernity and development, as well as the emergence of forms of resistance to these economic imaginaries and practices. We will analyze the 'cultural political economy' problem, or culture and society, within four possible analytical frameworks: 1. The problem of nationalism and religion. 2. The problem of everyday life. 3. The problem of culture and human rights. 4. The problem of state theory. Reading will include selections from the works of Antonio Gramsci, Eugen Weber, Michel Foucault, Talal Asad, Michel de Certeau, Amartya Sen, James Scott, Max Weber, Emile Durkheim and Karl Marx. This course is a seminar and active student participation in the course is required.

Course Type

Graduate Core (CORE-GG)