The Theory and Practice of Radical Democracy

Catalog description

This course explores scholarly debates about communities and justice. Course material covers longstanding themes such as state-society relations, democracy and political participation, emergence of political identities, grassroots and netroots, community organizing and urban governance, and social movements. Students will acquire critical literacy in social studies, including the bodies of literature mentioned above that draw on anthropology, political theory, geography and sociology. These insights should be able to inform students’ further critical engagement in the world. Particular attention will be paid to 1) how political problems both reflect and help constitute social practices, identities and inequalities, and 2) how this complex relationship between the ‘social’ and the ‘political’ is manifested on a variety of levels, from global networks and nation-states to cities, regions and local neighborhoods.