This course considers the challenge presented by disability to the way we think about democratic inclusion. What would it mean to achieve full inclusion on behalf of disabled people? Can we reconcile the demand for inclusion with the difference posed by disabilities that require more extensive support to realize their full potential? Is full inclusion possible for individuals with profound disabilities, and if so, what form might it take? This course satisfies the Race & Ethnicity Requirement. (Fall 2024)

This course introduces students to issues and approaches in contemporary feminist political thought, with a particular emphasis on the connection between feminism as a political movement and feminist theory. Taking up some of the central concerns within political theory— among them, justice, equality, freedom, domination, and the mechanisms of social and political change—we will consider how these issues and concepts are fortified, destabilized, or transformed through the adoption of feminist perspectives. (Winter 2023, 2025)

This course considers the challenge presented by disability to the way we think about democratic inclusion. What would it mean to achieve full inclusion on behalf of disabled people? Can we reconcile the demand for inclusion with the difference posed by disabilities that require more extensive support to realize their full potential? Is full inclusion possible for individuals with profound disabilities, and if so, what form might it take? (Winter 2021, 2023)

Description goes hereA formal legal status that confers membership in a nation-state, citizenship is often used more loosely to refer to the enjoyment of the rights and entitlements necessary for full inclusion in a community. This understanding of citizenship, articulated most forcefully by T. H. Marshall in his landmark 1949 essay, “Citizenship and Social Class,” captures the contradiction between the formal equality that citizenship is meant to secure, and the persistence of marked socioeconomic inequality. Elaborating upon Marshall’s analysis of the civil, political, and social dimensions of citizenship, more recent scholarship by Amy Brandzel, Kevin Bruyneel, Juliet Hooker, Cecilia Menjívar, and others has stressed its exclusionary—and even violent—core. This seminar will explore the many and varied meanings of citizenship and the controversies, debates, and challenges it provokes. (Winter 2024)

how did it come to pass that work—even menial, poorly paid work—became not just the core of moral life but also a means of securing political belonging? How have these beliefs weathered recent changes in the form and structure of work? Can we imagine a world in which work does not play such a central role in our lives? This class will address these and other questions, first, through canonical texts in political theory, and then through more recent efforts to challenge, refute, and/or expand their central assumptions. We will proceed by considering recent transformations in the form, availability, and organization of paid employment, before turning to efforts to rethink work as an organizing feature of our lives. (Fall 2022)

This course considers how might we conceive of the past—and the future—of feminism differently. How is our perspective on the past shaped by the desires and motivations of the present? If “the historical narrative is a particular bundle of silences,” as Michel-Rolph Trouillot alleges, how might we recover or otherwise give an account of those silences” (1995, 27)? And what, finally, would it mean to “construct genealogies of feminism for the future” (Boris 2010, 97)? (Winter 2022, Fall 2024)