Courses Taught:
SJE The Politics of Truth and Justice: Contesting Discourses, Disciplines, and Histories
This course examines how discourses and rhetoric of truth, truth claims, and epistemologies have changed over time in Western thought and culture. The survey will include examination of how scholarly disciplines such as history, science, and philosophy, and feminist theory have developed their conceptions of truth claims, evidence, and epistemology. We will explore popular conceptions of truth, in the context of contemporary journalism, media, and digital media politics, from the rise of photojournalism to deep fakes. We will examine such events as epidemics, Truth and Reconciliation in Canada, slave narratives, and legal conceptions of testimony. We will also consider how binaries of reason and emotion shape perceptions and experiences of truth in a more subjective sense, attending to questions of trust, belief, and skepticism. Readings will draw on thinkers including Hayden White, Donna Haraway, Sandra Harding, Karl Popper, Jeff Corntassel, Paulette Regan, Frederick Douglass, Primo Levi, and Shoshana Felman.
SJE6002: Philosophy of Emotions
This course offers an overview of feminist theories and philosophies of emotion and affect, focusing particularly on the shift from locating emotion as private and individual, instead to feminist and poststructural accounts that understand emotions in their socio-cultural, historical, and political contexts. Questions include: How have emotions, affect, and feeling been defined and theorized? How might theorizing emotion and affect inform new accounts of the public sphere and political philosophy, ethics, and epistemology? What is at stake in how we conceptualize emotions and affect in relation to subjectivity, public and private, race, class, gender, and agency?
SJE5008: Media and Social Movements
This online course explores the changing relationship between contemporary social movements/protests and news media, the role of the press and media within political democracies, and the significance of independently-produced media from the birth of the camcorder in the 20th century, to the contemporary explosion of user-generated content and the rise of the participatory web. The course is structured around three key questions: How does traditional media report and represent social movements? How do activists use the media as a tool within social movements or protests? What are the relationships between media and social movements? The course situates social movements in three primary media eras: Pre-internet; Alternative Media; and Internet. To illustrate these three epochs, the course will draw primarily on examples from the 1960s Civil Rights and SDS Movements; the 1990s Movement for Global Justice, and the 2010-2012 Occupy Movement and Arab Uprisings.
SJE3417: Feminist and Critical Pedagogies
This course provides an overview of contemporary and historical debates about diverse progressive and radical pedagogies including “feminist” and “critical” pedagogies. Students will become familiar with the different theoretical and philosophical conceptions that frame diverse educational aims, philosophies, and purposes, and visions of education. Focus will be on progressive, critical, and liberatory educational theory and praxis. Seminar readings, lectures, and discussions will raise questions such as: Who decides what counts as “progressive” or “radical” educational aims? Can pedagogy ever be neutral? What theoretical notions support such educational aims as growth, social justice, transformation, or critical consciousness? Who evaluates “liberation” and “growth” of students given progressive educational aims? How have historical debates about feminism and critical race commitments been influenced by contemporary debates within radical and progressive social movements and histories, and by identity politics?
SJE1959: Theoretical Frameworks in Communication
This course examines a range of arguments concerning the ways in which theories of culture, communication and education impact our understanding of the everyday world. The course attempts to survey literature which place discussions of culture, communication and education in the foreground. The course will attend to the ways in which culture, communication and education are not settled terms but are terms deeply implicated in how we maneuver the everyday social world.
Previously Offered Courses:
TPS1465: Concepts of Community
TPS 1436: Modernity to Postmodernity
TPS1465: Deleuze and Poststructuralism
TPS 1447: Technology and Education
KMDI: Social Contexts of Technology and Media
SJE 1903: Major Concepts in Social Justice Education
School and Society (Initial Teacher Education)