Seminar on Global Society IV

This course examines violence not as a spectacle, but rather in its operation through the everyday. It seeks to understand how violence relates to the very institutions that govern modern life and how that forms the basis of how we ‘see’ violence. Using the three categories of populations, logistics and violence, students will be asked to engage various theoretical texts in order to explore and push the limits of how they conceptualize violence in the world today. Critical theorists such as Paul Virilio, Deborah Cowen, Walter Benjamin, Frantz Fanon, Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, Achille Mbembe, Karl Marx, and Slavoj Zizek, will help to frame class discussions. Students are encouraged to engage the material through their own academic interests. To facilitate this, a third of the course will be devoted to case studies in order to allow students the opportunity to articulate how the concept of violence relates to their own research.