Theoria

I’ve put titles, abstracts, and affiliations of the participants in my “Pirate (and Other Nomad) Studies” session at the 2006 Congress of the Canadian Sociology and Anthropology Association online here.

And (finally!) a chunk from my second comprehensive examination entitled “Being Critical”. I’ve opted to do the second exam as “syllabus”, which is intended to (1) expedit the process of completing the examinations compared to writing a research paper and (2) force the student to have a “teachable” at the “senior undergraduate” level. This chunk is the “syllabus” part. Next I have to write the “academic rationale” (an introduction to administrative procedure?) and “the complete text of the final lecture” (an introduction to publishing what you’ve already said to hundreds of undergraduates). Incidentally, this is my first attempt at designing an “original” course. The course itself has a highly original title: “Advanced Introduction to Critical Social Theory”. Not that I intend to teach this (or anything else!) in the near future. [pdf]

Reflecting on the attempt to design the syllabus, it is surprisingly difficult to come up with (1) a topic for each week that (2) fits into a two or three hour lecture and (3) that has a reasonable amount of reading. I decided that for senior undergraduate students taking an elective that, on average, one and fifty pages isn’t too much to ask. Some weeks (collapsing Zizek and Deleuze into one week!? or realist epistemology!) are harder than others (say, The Second Sex — I’m not cruel enough to assign (in a fake course!) Hegel’s master/slave dialectic and Kojeve’s reading of it).

I’ve said it before a number of times, but I hope to have the essay on ‘the political and the social’ (my first comprehensive) finished one of these days. Problem is, in retrospect I don’t like much of what I’ve written! Not especially surprising, of course. Who actually likes what they write? Especially in retrospect?