Teaching

SLST 6028: NEOLIBERALISM: GOVERNMENTALITY IN THEORY AND PRACTICE

What is neoliberalism? The word is everywhere, but what does it mean? Is it just a new word for capitalism or does it indicate a specific kind of capitalism? This course will start with the proposition that neoliberalism involves a fundamental reconfiguration of the field of regulation that entails a reengineering of the state and a transnational field of market-oriented ‘regulatory transfer’. Regulation is shaped by law and state initiatives, but it is also “a social activity that includes persuasion, influence, voluntary compliance and self-regulation” (Braithwaite 2006: 19). This is especially the case under contemporary conditions of neoliberal ‘governmentality’, in which non-state actors (international institutions, NGOs, public-private partnerships, religious institutions, and corporations) increasingly engage in activities which govern populations and encourage people to adopt new forms of self-regulation.

ANTH 5180: Commodifying Culture: Ethnographic Explorati ons in Knowledge Economies from Global Intellectual Property to Moral Economies of Exchange

This course addresses the ethnographic exploration of the implications of the global expansion of intellectual property (IP) into new regions, new subject areas, new fields of technology, and new areas of human life since the 1990s. We explore how the field of anthropological research and practice has been transformed by these developments, considering all areas of IP and drawing examples from societies around the world, including our own. The course will begin by providing an interdisciplinary sociolegal framework to introduce students to the Western philosophical rationales for protecting IP and the significance of corporate interests and technological developments in consolidating what is variously known as “informational capitalism,” the ‘knowledge economy,” or “cognitive capitalism” in global trade regimes through the Trade Related Intellectual Property Agreement (TRIPs). These changes in the global political economy set the stage for an ever-increasing expansion of IP rights into new countries and new fields — from human cells to plant genetic resources, traditional cultural expressions and heritage foods, hip hop music and new dance forms, biotechnologies and digital software – as well as new social movements of resistance to this encroachment of the commodity form. We will then turn to ethnographically-based scholarship to show how anthropologists have explored the impact of IP in field-sites as various as open-source software development hubs, pharmaceutical firms, social movements for food sovereignty, and museums and indigenous cultural heritage centres.

SLST 7100: PHD SEMINAR: GETTING TO THE DISSERTATION PROPOSAL

The course is designed as a collaborative professionalization seminar for SLS doctoral students. Its primary purpose is to familiarize you with the various bodies   of study which constitute the interdisciplinary field of Sociolegal Studies and to ethnographically understand the historical currents of scholarly activity and the institutional topography of the field, and its major forms of expression (undergraduate and graduate programs, conferences, associations, journals, book series). This is terrain that we will map together; no authoritative summary of the field and its history exists. Scholars disagree about the field’s parameters, depending upon their own disciplinary backgrounds, nationality, teaching experiences, and mentors.

ANTH 6011: THEORETICAL CONCEPTS IN ETHNOGRAPHIC INQUIRY

The course covers concepts of key significance to contemporary anthropological theory and is designed to address current student interests, exposing you to the history of the concept in anthropology and considering the way it has been taken up in and informed by ethnographic research. The course is open to non-Anthropology graduate students interested in contemporary social theory informed by ethnographically grounded research.

ANTH 4410: The Anthropology of Human Rights

This fourth-year seminar surveys anthropology’s attempts to confront, analyze, and reframe claims about the nature of human beings implicit in the discourse of human rights.

SLST 6010: ADVANCED CRITICAL ISSUES IN INDIGENOUS PEOPLES AND LAW

The course will explore the law and politics focusing upon indigenous peoples in law and anthropology. Who are indigenous peoples? How is this question addressed, in law, in anthropology and by indigenous peoples themselves? We will focus primarily upon the concept of sovereignty, the historical formation of modern states, the emergence of international law, and changes in international capitalism to address these issues over time.

CMCT 6301: Theoretical Approaches to Cultural Policy

This course of reading provides graduate students with an introduction to theoretical concepts and approaches to the policy dimensions of culture. Theoretical approaches that have shaped critical scholarly discourse on cultural policy are studied, drawn from disciplines of social science and the humanities. The course of reading will examine the origins, development and paradigmatic shifts within cultural policy studies and its relationship to cultural studies. Key theoretical perspectives on cultural policy and on the study of policy will be presented, particularly the tension between conceptual and applied perspectives. We consider how policy perspectives contribute to the analysis of culture—whether the arts, ways of life or cultural heritage, as well as visions of ‘community’ and citizenship—and how the management of culture operates as a form of power under conditions of neoliberalism and how globalization has transformed the way we understand cultural policy and provoked its ‘transnationalisation.’

CMCT 6318: Owning Culture – Intellectual Property as Cultural Politics

The course explores the ways in which law shapes popular culture, with emphasis upon the intellectual property regimes of copyright, publicity rights, and trademark, with final reference to some new forms of intellectual property that are still matters of political negotiation. Copyright will serve as our primary area of extended study but materials are provided for doing a similar study in trademark. We consider how law creates rights to control meaning and effect forms of censorship, while provoking particular forms of resistance and the emergence of alternative community norms. We work with the constructivist assumption that law is a socially productive force and so begin the course by addressing particular themes, such as the subject positions that law constructs, affords and invites, as well as the politics it engenders.

CMCT 6116: [Trans] National Identities: New Media/tions and their Publics

The course will explore changing relationships between communications technologies and national identities paying attention to challenges that Canada faces along with other multicultural states under conditions of neoliberalism, globalization, and the intensification of migration and cultural flows. We consider key concepts such as the nation, national territory, the mediation of personal and social identity, publics and public spheres, globalization, cosmopolitanism, transnationalism, and diaspora. The course readings employ and elaborate theories derived from Benedict Anderson, Benjamin, Butler, Calhoun, Gramsci, Habermas, Jameson, David Morley, and Michael Shapiro.

CMCT 6308: The Politics Of Intellectual Property, Human Rights And Development

The expansion of intellectual property rights (IPRs) has become a major area of international controversy and global resistance as these properties come into conflict with broader public interests and, arguably, often violate human rights. The course explores the new regimes of trade that are expanding the privatization of more and more areas of human life, and the drive to develop new IPRs to recognize more areas of human effort in the context of the emergence of informational capitalism and neoliberal environmentalism.

CMCT 7000: Perspectives in Communication and Culture

After consultations with students, it was decided to make this course an opportunity to read key texts, to cover canonical concepts by way of refreshing students for their comprehensives, and to introduce concepts not generally covered in the existing graduate curriculum. The course is NOT meant to cover material already covered in the MA core and foundations courses and students are expected to have taken those courses before this if they don’t have a background that has introduced them to this material. Although the MA core courses may differ between instructors, I would suggest that students look at the table of contents of Meenakshi Gigi Durham and Doug Kelner, Media and Cultural Studies: Key Works (Revised Edition, Blackwell, 2006) and re/read any of those essays that they haven’t otherwise read as a way of getting up to speed. Colin Mooers is using this book as the core text in his Cultural Studies course this semester. Any student who has NOT got a background in communication or cultural studies should have been encouraged to take the MA core course (s) as a prerequisite to this course.