Cities After Society: Description (Fall 2009)

Description

What implicit sociologies inform urban studies? Has urban studies developed theories of social relations and social action that are adequate for making sense of the 21st century? In this seminar, we examine recent scholarship and current events that challenge the increasingly outdated understanding of the city as a social, political, and geographic creature of the larger 'society' containing it. Issues include:

the transnational circuits of capital, information, and population attributed to globalization;
the structural weakening of the welfare-state and other collective institutions that gives rise to the "do-it-yourself" biographies and affiliations associated with individualization;
the historical significance of travel, networks, and other modes of mobility that complicate classic social theory's view that 'civilization' involves the spatial centripetalization and settlement of human activity;
the reterritorialization of nation-state power onto non-national scales, including the urban;
and the emergence of a cosmopolitan public sphere from which to assert universal civil rights and criticize the authoritarian impulses of the nation-state.

This seminar is intended to offer a graduate school-level experience of scholarly engagement and classroom participation. As we explore a diverse set of theoretical works from a range of disciplines and intellectual concerns, not all of which are focused directly upon the urban, our goals are to interrogate the paradigmatic premises of urban studies and to develop a new conceptual vocabulary and theoretical framework for understanding and intervening in the city today.

Expectations for this course: (1) to read advanced-level literature in urban and social theory; (2) to develop an aptitude for grappling with difficult ideas and unfamiliar concerns; (3) to give regular presentations on the readings and events that illustrate them; (4) to collaborate with classmates on group writing and research; and (5) to develop the course ideas and concerns into an original term paper.