ST 600: Debility and After/Alterlives 

Crystal Felima, Nari Senanayake, Karrieann Soto Vega, Anastasia Todd

Friday 2 - 4:30 pm; Gaines Center Bingham Davis House 101

We live in a moment where struggles over health and bodies are ubiquitous. In this course, we engage in scholarly conversations about bodies and health through the frameworks of debility and after/alterlives. We position these concepts as conceptual threads that cut across the seminar and allow us to envision productive interdisciplinary conversations between health geography, medical anthropology, decolonial feminist rhetoric, and feminist disability studies. Across these literatures, the seminar will pay close attention to how race, gender, class, nation, sexuality, and ability shape which bodies (both human and non-human) are rehabilitatable, which bodies are marked as contagious or toxic and in need of containment, and which bodies are consequently rendered disposable (Chen 2012, Fritsch and McGuire 2018; Taylor 2017). 

GEO 715: Seminar on Foucault

Michael Samers

Thursday 2 - 4:30pm; Whitehall Classroom Building 305

Michel Foucault was an historian, philosopher, and social thinker, and his work has fostered intellectual debates in anthropology, criminology and penal studies, gender and sexuality studies, geography, history, law, political science, psychiatry, and sociology, among many others. This course is designed as an advanced introduction to his work, from his earliest writings on madness and discipline to his later work on the state, security, governmentality, as well as the ‘care of the self’. The course reviews individual chapters, lectures, or major parts of his most celebrated texts, examining especially Foucault’s method and his critical insights, as well as additional texts by other authors that comment on or mobilize these insights.