Course Description

This cross-disciplinary course will explore and evaluate various forms of violence: physical, psychological, everyday, structural, symbolic, and ethical. We will critically plumb the depths of an expanded violence—beyond the folk notion of violence as synonymous with physical force—to determine whether an enlarged understanding of violence offers analytical value. Taking violence to task will allow us to interrogate the fertility and futility of potentially substituting violence for ethnoracial domination, gender domination, transphobia, colonial domination, poverty, state abandonment, and other categories of social coercion and inequality.

The course will be divided in four sections. The first section will focus on charting theoretical territory. The next three sections will foreground violence in relation to the body, space, and the state, respectively, by navigating more concrete empirical cases while continuing to broaden our theoretical terrain. The sequence from the ostensibly specific and personal body to the seemingly remote and impersonal state will guide us into rendering visible otherwise invisible forms of violence. Finally, this course will appraise whether an expanded notion of violence can be traced on and through the body as a social object available for social scientific inquiry and analysis.

The ultimate goals of the course are to familiarize students with various theories on violence, to introduce students to the violence literature, and to provide students with an enriched social scientific vocabulary to question and critique multifarious forms of coercion.