Prof Paul Apostolidis CBG 3.07

This course is available on the MSc in Inequalities and Social Science and MSc in Political Theory. This course is available as an outside option to students on other programmes where regulations permit.

This course engages students in the study of ‘critical theory’ in a broad and inclusive sense, with a special interest in exploring how theory can inform and be shaped by political practises. Students first will consider formative texts and ideas in twentieth-century critical theory from Gramsci and the Frankfurt School, confronting issues such as the relation between advanced capitalism and popular thought-forms, the critique of positivism, and philosophy’s entanglement with material, cultural and political history. Next, we turn our attention to late twentieth-century writings that attune critical theory to dynamics of race and the intellectual agency of dominated groups. We take up the Birmingham School’s critical development of Gramscian theory to analyse racial power and resistance in Britain as well as Paulo Freire’s theory of popular education and related Latin American movements among the impoverished. The course’s final phase examines more recent writings in Marxist feminism, critical race theory and critical political economy. We consider the mutual imbrication of work-related values, practises and institutions with norms that govern gender and sexual relations, with attention to how these inter-relationships have changed with the rise of social precarity and popular struggles against these conditions. We also engage writings on racial capitalism and probe how precarity in the global north is embedded within histories of racial domination, linked to colonialism and (perhaps) contestable through a race-critical ‘politics of precarity.’

20 hours of seminars in the MT.

There will be a 2-hour seminar each week, with a combined lecture and discussion in that time-block.

There will be a reading week in Week 6 of the Michaelmas Term.

Students will be expected to produce 1 essay in the MT.

One 1,500-word formative essay will be due in MT Week 8. The essay will mainly provide preliminary examination of a question or debate in critical theory but also will include a brief proposal for a contemporary political phenomenon to analyse in the summative research essay.

Essential readings will be drawn from the following texts:

• Gramsci, Antonio. 2001. Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci. Edited and translated by Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith. London: Electric Book Company.
• Adorno, Theodor W. 1973. Negative Dialectics. Translated by E. B. Ashton. New York: Continuum.
• Hall, Stuart. 1988. The Hard Road to Renewal: Thatcherism and the Crisis of the Left. London: Verso.
• Freire, Paulo. 2000. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Translated by Myra Bergman Ramos. New York: Continuum.
• Dussel, Enrique. 2008. Twenty Theses on Politics. Translated by George Ciccariello-Maher. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
• Weeks, Kathi. 2011. The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics, and Postwork Imaginaries. Durham: Duke University Press.
• Federici, Silvia. 2004. Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation. London: Penguin Random House UK.
• Butler Judith, and Athena Athanasiou. 2013. Dispossession: The Performative in the Political. Cambridge: Polity Press.
• Gonzales, Alfonso. 2014. Reform without Justice: Latino Migrant Politics and the Homeland Security State. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Robinson, Cedric J. 1983. Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

Essay (100%, 4000 words) in the LT Week 1.

One 4,000-word essay due after the term’s completion (i.e., in January, LT Week 1, given that this is an MT course). The essay will analyse a contemporary political practise or movement that has a popular or mass base, chosen by the student, using key concepts drawn from the course’s main readings.

The summative essay will account for 100% of the course mark.