Spring 2023 Syllabus — State Power

I plan to teach this seminar every spring (unless our (very awesome) current Associate Dean for Academic Affairs really needs me to teach something else), and I will probably update the reading list annually, in the service of keeping up with new and ongoing legal and political debates about the form and function of the state, and the rights and responsibilities of the people therein. For the first edition of the course, I began the class with “classical” European and Euro-American political theorists and their visions of state power before moving on to post-colonial, decolonial, and contemporary theories of state power. We discussed a range of topics — from labor, the role of rhetoric in state-building, American settler colonialism and the relationships between Indigenous nations and the US federal government, terrorism, state overthrow, and dissolution, and the right of self-determination, to biopolitics, social contracts, and methods and approaches to democratic participation and transformation. As you will see below, our discussions were theme-based, and the students really seemed to enjoy this. <a href="https://medium.com/@mimijay/spring-2023-syllabus-state-power-5951bc8d0092">Learn More</a>