Process and Difference in the Pluriverse
PARP 6135 | Spring 2018 (Jan-May)| 3.00 Units | Online
Matthew T. Segall, PhD | msegall@ciis.edu |415.575.6104
This course aims to address the challenge of thinking and acting with creativity and compassion in an increasingly complex and pluralistic set of social and ecological contexts.
It draws upon an array of diverse process, post-structuralist, and pragmatist thinkers, including William James, WEB DuBois, Gilles Deleuze, Michel Weber, William Connolly, Catherine Keller, Isabelle Stengers, Bruno Latour, Timothy Morton, and Donna Haraway.
The ideas and methods of these thinkers provide a means of reimagining classical liberal constructs (like atomistic individualism) by offering a more relational form of identity and a more receptive and participatory way of encountering difference (whether based in race, class, gender, religion, or political ideology).
Course Texts and Reading Materials:
Required texts*:
William Connolly, Facing the Planetary: Entangled Humanism and the Politics of Swarming (Duke University Press, 2017).
Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Duke University Press, 2016).
Catherine Keller, Cloud of the Impossible: Negative Theology and Planetary Entanglement (Columbia University Press, 2015).
Bruno Latour, Facing Gaia: Eight Lectures on the New Climatic Regime (Polity Press, 2017).
Timothy Morton, Humankind: Solidarity with Non-Human People (Verso, 2017).
*As of October 2017, all required texts are available online for between $15 and $25, cheaper if used.
Selections of texts to be provided electronically include:
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (University of Minnesota Press, 1987).
W.E.B. DuBois, selected essays
Shamoon Zamir. Dark Voices: WEB Dubois and American Thought, 1888-1903.
Michael Halewood, Rethinking the Social Through Durkheim, Marx, Weber, and Whitehead (Anthem Press, 2014).
William James, The Principles of Psychology, Volume 1, Ch. 10: “The Consciousness of Self” (1890, http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/James/Principles/prin10.htm).
____. A Pluralistic Universe.
Keenan Ferguson. William James: Politics in the Pluriverse (Rowman and Littlefield, 2007).
Catherine Keller and Anne Daniell, Process and Difference: Between Cosmological and Poststructuralist Postmodernisms (State University of New York Press, 2002).
Email me if you’re interested in auditing or enrolling in this course as a special student.
