Contemporary Social Sciences 1

This course is designed to reflect upon the contemporary movements of thought within the social sciences, while revealing about the making of various hierarchies of power built around social categories such as class, race, gender, sexual orientation, (dis)ability, ethnicity and age. The course seeks to enrich students’ understanding of these concepts through the lecture of fundamental texts that shaped critical theories  of  present day and the key concepts that still find echo in intersectional analyses of current sociopolitical phenomena. Although the course proposes a very large body of intellectual work, its aim is to provide students with an essential critical perspective on how to understand contemporary society, politics and economy; a perspective which would be later useful for their research projects and memoirs, but also for gaining an anti-racist, anti-sexist, decolonial, feminist and queer outlook in general.

The course is premised on the idea that to understand European/western modernity requires placing a specific interest in themes related to race, migration, (post)colonialism, multiculturalism, islamophobia, terrorism, identity politics, discrimination, precarity, heteronormativity, homonationalism, etc.