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2008-09: The Culture of Rights/The Rights of Culture
This seminar will explore the tensions and questions raised by the linkage of “rights” and “culture,” and their associated discourses, practices and assumptions. “Rights,” whether environmental, human, indigenous, children’s or women’s, are often perceived as global or transnational discourses that are produced and circulated by international institutions such as the United Nations, then imposed on “local” communities. Moreover, rights, especially those deemed “universal,” are assumed to be ahistorical and acultural, despite the long histories of struggle over the meanings, classification, and consequences of certain rights at many scales. In contrast, “cultures” are seen as fundamentally local, moored to specific places, people and times. Culture (or at least so-called “third world culture”) is often attacked as the obstacle to rights, the impediment to human progress and prosperity. But such views of social progress are themselves predicated on static, ahistorical definitions of cultures. By considering the local-global articulations of rights and cultures through a comparative lens, seminar participants will explore the specific social histories, political struggles and cultural assumptions that have produced certain rights and/or reframed long-standing debates in the language of rights.
2009-10: Gendered Agency
Although the term agency has become increasingly popular in contemporary scholarship, the concept remains underspecified and often misused. Yet recent work has shown the centrality of gender to understandings of agency, including the extent to which agency is gendered. Are there specifically gendered forms of agency? How do women and men act in response to conditions such as impoverishment and globalization in ways that are gendered, creative, complicit, resistant, effective, or self-destructive (perhaps all at the same time)? What can attention to language, biology, food, material culture, embodiment, performance, spirituality, media and other domains tell us about the modes, forms and perhaps origins and motivations of gendered agency? How does attention to gender challenge and complicate contemporary understandings and uses of agency, especially theories of individual and collective agency? These questions raise epistemological, methodological, and theoretical issues for us as feminist scholars: what evidence “counts” as reflective of gendered agency and how do we read and/or interpret how and why certain forms of agency are gendered?
2010-11: The Art and Science of Happiness
What are the biological, physiological, psychological, emotional, social and cultural factors that contribute to making a person “happy”? Do these factors vary by gender, age, class, ethnicity, nationality, or sexuality, and if so, how? What does it mean to be “happy”? How do humor, laughter, economic security, political stability, friendship, family, children, careers, health, hobbies, community involvement, sex, personal fulfillment, social connections, and other domains contribute (or not) to one’s sense of being happy? Does the discourse of happiness inevitably pit individualism against communitarianism? What does the comparative study of “happiness” across time and space tell us about commonalities and differences in the human experience? Attention to “happiness” includes but also moves us beyond “desire” and “pleasure” as defining tropes in studies of women, gender and sexuality to consider other motivations, emotional states, and ways of being.
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