B. Ricardo Brown

B. Ricardo Looking for a map or a series of maps showing sea level changes over the last 300,00 years. I'm especially interested in the Mediterranean region. A google search did not turn up anything good, an... more 2010-12-26 15:58:57 -0800

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NODE801.org Ruins Until Darwin: Science & the Origins of Race

Teaching Documents

SS.330 Cultural Studies, Spring 2012

SS-330 Cultural Studies [General Catalog Description]
This course explores the relations of cultural artefacts in the contemporary world to their various social contexts. Culture is understood as the material expressions and images that people create and the social environment that shapes the way diverse groups of people experience their world and interact with one another. The course focuses on the critical analysis of these various forms of media, design, mass communications, arts, and popular culture.

Detailed Course Description & Objectives
The present era is often characterized as an age of global integration and a truly world economy as well as an era of social and environmental crises. In the midst of these changes we can often hear “culture” invoked as both a positive expression of this globalism and sometimes as something that opposes it. The full meaning of culture remains a topic of fierce debate. Indeed, we can find a range of conflicting views regarding the meaning and role of “culture” in everyday life. Even the place of culture in everyday life has been a topic of intense debate over the past few decades. The use of “culture” is not limited to any one part of the ideological spectrum. It is used as a political weapon, a claim of privilege, a rallying point for identity, a reservoir of resistance, or in regard to artifacts and practices that must be either preserved or destroyed.

Cultural Studies emerged from the attempts to understand the social complexity and political uses of “culture” to debates over “high & low” art, the value of the artifacts of popular culture (cinema, television, music, etc.), or the investigation of authority and power in the social relations of everyday life, Cultural Studies examined and intervened in some of the most pressing issues of its day. Your course of study will explore these moments in the genealogy of Cultural Studies. We will examine how Cultural Studies offered a critical understanding of what Max Horkheimer termed “life as it is lived.” Finally, attention will be paid to the fate of Cultural Studies as it became accepted and absorbed by various academic disciplines. In the final sessions, special attention will be given to the reception of Cultural Studies in the United States.

This course is designed to give you a foundation in the historical settings from which Cultural Studies emerged and it subsequent variations and lines of descent. You are not expected to already know this, nor are you expected to already be familiar with the texts we will use and issues that will be raised. You are expected to engage the course materials seriously. You will finish the course with an introduction to different ways of understanding the history of the present day and the social relations of everyday life.

BRBIII_CS_ss330_spring_2012_syl.pdf

SS. 490 Darwin, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud: the Sciences of Life & Society

The Sciences of Life and Society
We will examine the production of life and its relation to our concepts of society, power, and desire through reading selected works of Marx, Darwin, Nietzsche and Freud. It is important to remember that this course is only a single semester, it can only serve as an introduction to some aspects of what is an extensive and varied body of work. Many students do not have the opportunity to read any of these authors except for brief excerpts or secondary accounts. So the primary purpose here is to begin an engagement with these works that has, for many, lasted a lifetime.
You might want to begin thinking about the course in this way: Darwin placed us in the natural world and showed that we share a common origin in nature. Marx shows us how we have changed that nature and at the same time changed ourselves. Nietzsche raised the problem of what those changes have cost us in terms of what we have had to give up in order to have society. Finally, Freud sought to understand how we might deal the consequences of this civilization....

Syllabus: Darwin, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud: the Sciences of Life and Society

Darwin, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud Session I: Introduction to the course & Darwin in Context, I

Slides for the first session introducing the course and the first set of readings from Darwin

Darwin, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud Sessions II & III: Darwin in Context, II

Slides for Sessions 2 and 3: Darwin in Context

SS.490 Foucault & Critical Theory: Critique of Enlightenment

Course Description
This course will prepare you to undertake your own study of the works of Michel Foucault and of Critical Theory. No one can expect to grasp the wide ranging significance of this work in only one semester, and so instead it will focus on shorter essays and interviews. Learned essays and aphorisms in the form of “philosophical fragments” were, after all, considered the special forms of Critical Theory. In this sense, “critical” and “critique” do not refer to opinion and the passing of judgment, but to the turning of ideology against itself so as to bring about the demystification of the existing order and perhaps to even further its collapse. The purpose of critique is to expose the social relations of power so that everything that is considered natural or “just the way the world is” can no longer be assured of general submission. This critique has its own context and comes, of course, precisely when the relations of power have taken on the form of the “totally administered society,” a society and a process of submission that increasingly makes such critiques ever more difficult and yet ever more important to undertake.

Syllabus for Foucault & Critical Theory, SS.490, Pratt Institute, Spring 2010

SS.490.07 On the History of Science & the Origins of Race

We often try to understand race as it confronts us today, either as a source of diversity and multiculturalism or as a social problem. This is not surprising given the fact that racism is a historical production and so today we still exist amidst its' vast accumulation. But racism presupposes the existence of Race, of something so essential to us that it is visibly manifested by our bodies, and these manifestations fall into a limited number of scientifically defined types. Race began as a scientific concept within the discourse of Natural History, but with far reaching connections to nationalism, sexuality, industrialism, and authoritarianism. To place our contemporary discussion of human variety into a historical context, this class will investigate the history of scientific discourses on race from Blumenbach’s classification of humanity into the five familiar races, to Gobineau’s Essay of the Inequality of Human Races, the Social “Darwinists”, and Dugdale’s classic study of degeneration The Jukes. Along the way, we will examine the debate on the origin of species, whether races represent different species of humans (the monogenesis/polygenesis dispute in Antebellum America), phrenology, intelligence testing, criminal anthropology, the culture of poverty, and degeneration. Throughout the semester, you will be prompted to apply what we are learning to the discussion of contemporary ideas and conflicts regarding race and racism. At the same time, these readings should encourage you to rethink your basic assumptions about authority and domination, and the relations of the production of scientific knowledge both in the past, and in our own time.

BRBIII_History_of_Science_race_syll_s...

SS. 200.01 Introductory Sociology: the "Ends and Uses of Society" (2000)

Before an introduction to sociology can occur, it is important to note that two contrary positions/questions arise when anyone is asked to introduce a discipline as important as sociology. The first, “What is Sociology?” and the second, “What is Society?” What is it that sociologists spend so much of their lives studying? What are some of their concerns and how does the discipline of sociology effect the society that it studies? What does this problem mean?

For this class, the question before us is “What is society?” We will approach the subject of sociology through its object of study. The concept of society defines the field of sociology. Sociology, because of its ties to public policy formulation and government, helps determine to what ends and uses we put society. In order to understand sociology and its objects in context, we will be following a thematic approach, stressing some of the key concerns of sociology: power, the state, self, authority, family, race, gender, social evolution, and of course, society.

"The Ends and Uses of Society" was perhaps the first sociology course taught in the United States at the College of Philadelphia in 1754.

Sociology as a discipline begins in the United States as the field of Moral Philosophy. Many believed that the basis for human interaction was to be found in the moral and ethical code of a civilization. But since civilizations had such varying codes of conduct, sociology turned towards the contemplation of the unchanging aspects of human interaction, as a Positive (predictive and causal) study of society (Comte). As such, its third aspect was soon apparent: sociology is a means of producing knowledge for the sake of governing (Spencer). For if the teleological goal of biology is the power to govern nature, the goal of sociology is to gain the means of governing humans. Just as it has always been close to morality, sociology has been just as close to government and power.

The study of society is closely tied to the classification of types of society and the use of this classification to determine the correct form of society and its associated laws, or what Hegel called our “Philosophy of Right”. But in many ways, this returns us to the problem of sociology as the study not just of society, but of the ways in which we attempt to conform to the duties and obligations that society imposes.

BRBIII_Intro_Soc_ends_uses_society_F2...