Seminar in Social and Cultural Studies:

A graduate seminar that treats cultural studies from "below" — through the critical philosophy and social theory that actually power its analyses, from Kant and Nietzsche through structuralism, Bourdieu, Adorno, Foucault, and actor-network theory. You read a dense weekly text, write short response papers (ten of them), and build toward a term project plus a final workshop presentation where participants bring in recent work the syllabus didn't cover. It assumes you can already handle theory at a serious level, and it's where political science students learn to do the kind of conceptual analysis that grounds later research on power, discourse, and modernity.