FYF@Innis Seminars

Cities have been described as places of desire and places of fear. They pulse with life, bringing together people from different class, gender, and ethnic backgrounds, simultaneously giving rise to a sense of freedom and oppression, a sense of belonging and alienation. This course will explore the city as a physical reality that shapes our lives, but is also a projection of our deepest imaginings. Through readings of philosophical and sociological texts by influential theorists of the city, we will consider various ancient and modern conceptions of urban space and subjectivity. Alongside these theoretical readings, we will also examine literary and filmic representations of the city as a space of desire, memory and power.

This course examines economic and social inequalities in the contemporary Americas. We look at the ways in which class divisions are represented in academic studies, literature, film, and television. From Mexican maquiladoras to Indigenous reservations, we consider the global poor and how recent changes in the character of work (automation, outsourcing, free trade zones) have had an impact on class divisions, especially for younger members of society. Can a renewed understanding of class and work help us to negotiate power, privilege, and inequality in this century?

This first-year seminar explores radical traditions of education beyond and in resistance to formal schooling. Transnational in scope—and journeying from the late nineteenth century to the present day—we will study the pedagogical innovations and grassroots struggles of anarchic youth, guerrilla intellectuals, and feminist revolutionaries who used education broadly, and historical inquiry in particular, as tools for empowerment and collective liberation.

Anthropology has examined various ways human beings imagine and engage with non-human beings in their everyday lives in particular social and cultural contexts. By using manga and anime — specific popular cultural expressive modes developed in Japan — this course examines social and cultural aspects of human relationship with other beings, including but not restricted to animals, plants, microbes, technological objects, and spirits from anthropological perspectives.

This course has two goals. It aims to familiarize students with current challenges and dynamics within Arab societies. It seeks to help students develop a critical perspective on prevalent analytical frameworks such as culturalist, orientalist analyses applied to the region. To achieve this, we will use a controversy, conflict, or current event as an entry point to illuminate one or more dimensions of the society we are studying. The countries studied will vary from session to session to reflect the socio-economic, cultural, religious, and political diversity of the region, as well as the common challenges facing these countries.

This course examines the meaning and mathematics of probabilities, and how they arise in our everyday lives. Specific topics may include: the nature of coincidences, the concept of luck, games involving dice and cards, long run averages in casinos, margins of error in polls, the interpretation of medical studies, crime statistics, decision making, pseudorandomness, and Monte Carlo algorithms.

This course examines the political geographies of transnational migration. It asks how spaces of migration and mobility are political, and how migration politics are tied to inequalities wrought through intersecting histories of race, class, and gender. It seeks to extend our understandings of migrants, borders, and mobility, and it explores the processes through which mobility is produced, delimited and structured. We will consider the transnational politics of migration, the militarization of border zones, and the political spaces of migrant displacement, dispossession, and dislocation. The seminar readings focus on classical paradigms as well as emerging approaches in immigration studies.

Understanding disability as a cultural concept — not a medical condition or personal misfortune — that describes how human variation matters in the world, this course asks: how do literary texts represent physical and intellectual disability?

This course will use an interdisciplinary perspective to explore the quirks, achievements, and puzzles of the human mind. Topics could include how technology and tools extend our minds, or the light that our ability (and inability) to reason sheds on human nature.

Art causes scandals for many reasons, provoking a range of consequences, including censorship, cuts to government funding of the arts or even destruction of the work in question. In this course we will consider a number of kinds of art scandal arising from exhibition in public galleries and urban spaces, including those that have to do with legal issues such as plagiarism and vandalism; aesthetic objections on the part of the public, ranging from perceived obscenity to simple resentment of abstract art; racism; sacrilege; and political subversion, amongst others.