Course Descriptions

Fall Quarter

Dept	Course No and Title	Instructor
HUMAN (F24)	270 LAW IN THEORY	MOR, L
The law is a key organizing principle of our social existence, whose meaning and inevitability are often taken for granted. But what is “law”? How and when did it come into being and in what contexts? Is the law universal or does it operate differentially? What is its relationship to violence and in what ways might it be generative? Do its modes of operation change in the age of algorithms and preemption? And are there other historical normative orders or conceivable social frameworks beyond the juridical? In considering these and related questions, this seminar will explore the ways in which “the juridical” structures not only what is commonly regarded as the political sphere—the state, sovereignty, international relations—but also many other, supposedly unrelated, spheres of life that shape the fundamental coordinates of subjectivity itself, such as signification, space-time, identity, and even humor. Looking at various geographic contexts and stressing the colonial legacies of the law, we will investigate principal juridico-political concepts, procedures, and institutions, such as the social contract, international law, human rights and weaponized humanitarianism, property law and liberal “possessive individualism,” the state of exception and the role of the juridical in imperial, colonial, and racializing projects. Readings may include works by Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Walter Benjamin, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Sigmund Freud, Alenka ZupanÄiÄ, Saidiya Hartman, Samera Esmeir, Brenna Bhandar, Nasser Mufti, Timothy Mitchell, Eyal Weizman, Evgeny Pashukanis, Cedric Robinson, and Robert Knox. The final paper for this class will consist in a close, critical reading of a significant recent legal case of your choosing and its analysis in light of class readings and discussions.
HUMAN (F24)	260A CRIT THRY WORKSHOP: COSMOPOLITICS	COLMENARES GON, D.
CRITICAL THEORY WORKSHOP Cosmopolitics 2024 - 2025 Meetings on select Wednesdays, 10 am - 1 pm dhcolmen@uci.edu Instructor: David H. Colmenares Office hours by appointment MKG 546 If thinking is the art of discovering difference, “cosmopolitics” is the art of establishing relational grammars across species and determinations of being—a form of ontological diplomacy. In contemporary usage, it names the epistemic, political and legal strategies that seek to build human-non-human assemblages, coalitions contra naturam. Hijacking “cosmopolitics” from Kant, Belgian philosopher of science Isabelle Stengers adopted the ancient notion of kosmopoliá¸—tÄ“s (Diog. Laert 6.63) as a leitmotif. She proposed moving beyond the universal triumphalism of the history of science into an “ecology of practices of knowledge,” drawing inspiration from William James’ pluralism and Ernst Mach’s phenomenological constructivism. For Stengers, the ‘cosmos’ in cosmopolitics does not allude to the unified objective world of modern science, the bedrock grounding subjective or culturalist representations, but to an “unknown, constituted by multiple, divergent worlds”; a relational field of non-equivalence in which relations need to be constantly created and re-established, not discovered. Brazilian anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro later called such an ontology, amply illustrated in Amerindian socio-cosmologies, “multinaturalism”. This workshop seeks to delineate a possible genealogy of cosmopolitics as an epistemic paradigm across the humanities and social sciences as much as a political strategy. Readings will include foundational texts, such as selections from Stengers’s seven-volume Cosmopolitiques; Donna Haraway’s When Species Meet and Staying with the Trouble; and Viveiros de Castro’s Cannibal Metaphysics. We then will revisit important essays on post-Humanism by Martin Heidegger and Peter Sloterdijk, and conduct a “conceptual history” of the categories that cosmopolitics calls into question. Thus, we will investigate the history of personhood and nature as “legal fictions” rooted in Roman law, according to French legal theorist Yan Thomas, as well as the notion of dignitas, from ancient Stoicism to the dignitiarian paradigm in contemporary bioethics. We will also examine some of the most successful anthropological theories of non-human agency—Bruno Latour’s Actor-Network Theory, Alfred Gell’s anthropology of art and Carlo Severi’s ritual action theory—as well as the emerging paradigms of perspectivism and multinaturalism in Amazonian (Viveiros de Castro) and Andean anthropology (Marisol de la Cadena). Readings might also include important books redefining the very notion of (inert) landscapes, such as Julie Cruikshank’s Do Glaciers Listen? and Eduardo Kohn, How Forests Think. Finally, we will consider the implications and limits of the recent trend of granting legal personhood to rivers and landscapes in Colombia, India, and New Zealand. The workshop will meet four times in Fall 2024 (Oct 2, 16, 30, Nov 13) and Winter 2025 (Jan 8, 22, Feb 5, 19) , and twice during the Spring 2025, including a guest lecture (details TBA).
HUMAN (F24)	270 DOCUMENT URBAN ECOL	PITT, J.
This seminar focuses on Tokyo as a case study for ""urban ecology"" and examines various media forms that look to document the complex entanglements of Japan's metropolis. We will read works from infrastructure studies, architectural history, critical plant studies, and ecocriticism more broadly alongside works of modern and contemporary Japanese literature and cinema to question what kinds of emergent ecologies can be found among the rubble and ever-changing landscape of modern Tokyo.
HUMAN (F24)	270 ON RESISTANCE	EVERS, K.
Recent theories of resistance direct their critique, even scorn, at Hannah Arendt’s concept of politics, foremost her analysis totalitarianism and theory of total domination (The Origins of Totalitarianism, 1951). Judith Butler criticized Arendt for defining politics “restrictively as an active stance” arguing that such a narrow definition excludes central aspects of the political from the discussion, in particular passive forms of resistance. Howard Caygill and Iris Därmann hold Arendt’s theory of total domination responsible for past disinterest and current misconceptions of resistance. Butler, Caygill and Därmann, among others, advocate for more inclusive approaches to resistance. Resistance studies should develop concepts and theories that take serious forms of resistance which avoid open confrontation, that make efforts to sustain life (Butler), take measures to preserve the capacity to resist (Caygill), that pay attention to „flat“ forms of resistance, as Därmann calls them. The course examines central theoretical, literary and historical writings (and films) on resistance-- Clausewitz, Nietzsche, Freud, Ghandi, Arendt, Fanon, Pasolini, Weiss, among them. These readings will be engaged in critical dialogue with recent proposals to revise our definitions and practices of resistance (Caygill, Butler, Malm, Därmann, and others).
HUMAN (F24)	270 MULTIMODAL ANTHRO	VARZI, R.
No detailed description available.
HUMAN (F24)	270 TOPC EPISTEMOLOGY	COLIVA, A.
Will address topics such as 1. the rejection of individualistic epistemology; 2. The nature of common sense and common knowledge; 3. Testimony and trust; 4. Deep disagreements and the genealogical challenge to the good standing of our philosophical, moral and religious convictions; 5. ""I am a woman/man"" - how family resemblance, the first-personal authority of avowals and hinge epistemology can make sense of gender self-determination
HUMAN (F24)	398B FOR LANG TEACH METH	STAFF
Introduces approaches and methods of foreign language learning and teaching, and the theoretical models of second-language acquisition and teaching. Focus areas include lesson planning, teaching vocabulary, grammar, speaking, reading, writing, listening, culture, task-based teaching, uses of digital media.
HUMAN (F24)	399 UNIVERSITY TEACHING	BEAUCHAMP, T.
Limited to Teaching Associates in Humanities Core course. Grading Option: Satisfactory/unsatisfactory only.
HUMAN (F24)	399 UNIVERSITY TEACHING	TORRES, J.
Limited to Teaching Associates in Humanities Core course. Grading Option: Satisfactory/unsatisfactory only.