Autumn Semester 2014

What is “culture” and is the concept useful to understanding what people do, say, and think? Is it to be located in ideas, in materiality, in discourse, or in practice/performance? We will think about how the cultural dimensions of human existence are variously involved with tactics of power; with conflations of race, nation, and territoriality; with shaping agency and articulating voice; with universalistic claims and particular politics. 

 

Readings are centered on ethnographies that plumb specific cases and simultaneously theorize subjectivity, knowledge, representation, gender, identity, embodiment, space, networks, colonialism, complexity, the state, the global, etc. We will consider these case studies with respect to perspectives from cultural anthropology, human geography, linguistic anthropology, urban studies, cultural studies, science studies, history, political science, and sociology. Students from all disciplines are very welcome in this course. The central position of the class is your semester-long essay on a topic of your choice (perhaps a piece for your future thesis) in light of perspectives of the course. The course’s seminar/lecture format involves close engagement among students and with me. There will be a mini-conference where students present their own work to the class for feedback.
Prereq: Grad standing or permission of instructor. Not open to students with credit for 716.

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Comparative Studies 8865 Seminar in Critical Trauma Theory
Professor Maurice Stevens
R 9:10-11:55AM

This seminar will examine the intersections between religion and sexuality in a variety of historical examples and from a range of critical theoretical perspectives. Topics will include: marriage and gender in 19th century American movements such as the Mormons, Shakers and the Oneida community; the contemporary Christian ex-gay movement; sexuality and gender in contemporary Islam; transformations of sexuality in Hindu and Buddhist Tantra; the role of sexuality and feminism in modern new religious movements such as the Raëlians and Neopagan witchcraft; and other topics to be decided by class interest. Each of these topics will be accompanied by discussions of contemporary theoretical approaches to religion and sexuality, including the work of Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, Gilles Deleuze, Sudhir Kakar, and others.

 

The seminar will be a collaborative effort, based on close reading of texts and student-led discussions. Students will be expected to pursue an original research project on a topic of their own choosing which will be presented to the class for constructive feedback from the group.  Each student will also be partnered with one or two others in order to read and comment on one another’s projects as they develop over the course of the semester.  

Comparative Financialization: Global and Individual Impacts of Credit and Finance in a Cross-National Perspective

 

Since the 2008 financial crisis, and through the protests of groups such as Occupy Wall Street, more theoretical and empirical work has been focused on financialization and indebtedness as a site where the consequences of globalized finance and social precarity are most widely and personally experienced. This course is a comparative look at credit and financial incorporation of the poor, and others defined as “vulnerable” consumers.  As in the US, in countries such as South Africa, Brazil, and India, financial incorporation and credit innovation is experienced as representing a type of recognition and inclusion for the marginalized, as well as renewed exploitation through financial extraction of fees and interest for those who can least afford it.  We will begin by reading recent major works that look at financialization as a key site where global capital becomes most consequent with individuals and local experience, as more individuals turn to the discipline of credit and finance to manage personal risk.  Second, we will look cross nationally at credit and financial incorporation in several countries, examining it as a project shaped by historical exclusions and popular aspirations, state policy, global financial interests seeking new markets, and “third sector” NGOs that see financial access as a means to remediate global inequality.  As a third element to this course, we will be undertaking a service learning component with a Columbus based housing organization, which seeks to incorporate a financial literacy curriculum with its credit and homebuyer programs.