Stephanie's Topics and Goals

Here are my topic ideas:

Culture: I present my students with several definitions of culture and we discuss the merits and limits of each. The goal here is not to arrive at an airtight definition (as if), but to get them thinking about what people actually mean when they invoke that concept, particularly the concept of “American culture,” and to understand that the meaning isn't fixed.

Power: In a Foucauldian sense, I suppose (sorry, he's on my desk at the moment)--I look for ways to make the normally invisible aspects of power visible and to give my students to tools to look critically at the discourses that prop up the order of things (yes, I told you it was Foucauldian).

I like power as a central concept for reasons similar to those that Pete brought up for the “race, class, gender” trinity; I'd like students to leave the class with the capacity to spot “naturalization” when it happens. I introduce a few power-related terms that I hope give them a few tools to do this; hegemony and normativity are the biggies.

Categories of difference: I think I got this straight off our AMS website at one point. Encompassed here are race, class, gender, sexuality, religious orientation, disability—which ones we emphasize the most probably depends to a large extent on the material that we choose.

I suppose a big goal here is to give them a vocabulary that allows them to talk meaningfully about these categories and how they create identity and experience, without resorting to essentialist ideas. I try to work against the tendency that some students have, once we start deconstructing and talking about social formations, to throw up their hands and decide that they have no means of talking about these categories without getting in trouble.