Courses

This interdisciplinary course examines fault lines of contemporary collective life from a theoretical and ethnographic perspective. We will explore theoretical approaches to ‘the social’ and how different theorists envision it to come into being. Drawing from political anthropology, urban studies, sociology and cultural studies, we will interrogate what is at stake when terms like the collective, community and solidarity are invoked and trace changes over time and across geographical places and political formations. As a microcosm of society, cities are a crucial site of analysis in this course. We will be attuned to the way social difference structures visions of collective life and ideas of who can and who cannot belong. The course emphasizes the political relevance of emotions: emotions both reflect and transform social relations. This appears particularly important as we are observing a shift from liberal democracy towards more authoritarian forms of government in many places of the world. Public spheres saturated with intense emotional states figure prominently in this context. We will examine a range of feelings (including hate, anger, contempt, and fear) and ask how they (re)structure the relation between the individual and the collective and of collective life more broadly. Which modes of social interaction do they give rise to and which do they foreclose?