What is Power?

Catalog description

What is power? Do we have it or does it have us? Can we understand it to be the ability or capacity to do something, to be something, to resist something, to destroy something, or to change something? Is power always about politics and is politics always about power? Is power what makes us who we are, and if so, how does it intersect categories of personal and collective identity like race, gender, economic class? Taught from a multidisciplinary perspective, this essential questions seminar will investigate these questions through intensive discussion emerging from careful engagements with both contemporary and historical works of philosophy, literature, film, history, and social-political theory.