First-Year Research Seminar: Space, Place, and the Body: From Gentrification to Climate Justice

Catalog description

In an increasingly virtual world of Zoom classes, Tiktok performances, and political speeches on Instagram Live, this research seminar raises questions about embodiment in physical space and place. How do we map and navigate space and place in our daily lives, and how do we negotiate the official paths we are expected to take with the scenic routes, shortcuts, or desire lines of our preferred, or "delinquent," personal imaginaries? Is there a place for sidewalk culture, public characters, and queer space in increasingly gentrified urban landscapes? How do we decolonize the institutions complicit in the displacement of Black, indigenous, immigrant, and other underserved and overpoliced communities? And how do we reverse a process that may drastically change the stakes of these questions in a few decades, if cities are under water? How do we demand large-scale action in the face of an ever-worsening climate crisis while engaging in multispecies solidarity that makes the world livable for everyone, human or otherwise? Authors will include Frantz Fanon, Jamaica Kincaid, Sara Ahmed, Jane Jacobs, Samuel Delany, Claudia Rankine, Zoe Todd, Neel Ahuja, The Red Nation, Timothy Morton, and Sylvia Wynter.