Overview

Description

CALENDAR DESCRIPTION:

An examination of a range of theories of everyday language focused on specific forms of discursive practice, including gossip, humour, religion, and sarcasm. Writing.

COURSE DETAILS:

Everyday life is made up of the activities, routines, and habits that we are most familiar with. Our own daily habits take on a veneer of normality and yet everyone’s differ slightly, from our morning rituals, use of language, and how we are addressed as ideological beings. These differences help to inform the intersections of our social positionalities, where we fit in the social systems which comprise the everyday. As you, an individual who negotiates their identity against their social position, participate in daily life: where are the easy paths, where are choices, how do we negotiate liberation from and complicity in the reproduction of current forms of social domination?

This course empowers students to reflexively engage the composition of their everyday life from theories of space and time to the social justice intersections of cultural and political economic struggles. The course is broken up into three component sections: identity and action; space; and time. The first section, identity and action, addresses the possibilities, opportunities and barriers involved in realizing one’s identity and being able to perform it in daily life. The second section, space, investigates the how material culture provides a background for the ways in which we participate in daily life. This is followed up by taking time as an analytical unit to scrutinize how social power is enacted through temporal experiences.

While this is a lecture-based course, students will be expected to have read materials before class ready to ask questions, provide general accounts, and interpretations of the readings. As the course progresses there will be more seminar discussion to provide students with the opportunity to experiment applying theory to their daily activities and inform their writing activities. Each of the three sections includes a mini writing assignment and other activities meant to help you map out and identify various components of your daily life and the choices you make in (re)producing dominate social powers that we otherwise wish to critique. The final paper consists of a theoretically informed critique of one mundane (or not) aspect of your daily life.

COURSE-LEVEL EDUCATIONAL GOALS:

1. Awareness of oneself as an agent within wider social system and how individual practices can reproduce, critique and transform dominate power structures.

2. Familiarity with major theories of the everyday and critical approaches that confront everyday life.

3. Ability to discuss the role of various forms of social power in the production of everyday life.

4. Ability to debate cultural politics, social conflicts, and resistance in concrete historical, political, cultural, and socio-economic contexts.

Grading

Materials

REQUIRED READING: