Knowledge, Power and Inequality

Catalog description

This course examines the evolutionary origins, historical trajectory and contemporary dynamics of inequality as a product of power relations rooted in human cultural knowledge and practice, with emphasis on modes of power defined by gender, age, sexual violence, education and cultural sovereignty, ethnic and racial identification, globalization and economic inequality, political polarization, and mobility and immigration. Examples primarily from North America from pre-Columbian to contemporary times and the perspectives of anthropologists, historians, fiction writers and poets, artists, educators, human rights activists, memoirists, politicians, economists and more are studied to untangle the dialectic of cultural-cognitive "ways of knowing" and the embodied experience of power and inequality.