Centre for Citizenship and Public Policy

2012 COURSE OUTLINES

The PhD in Political and Social Thought begins with one year of advanced coursework, consisting of two courses per semester each of which meets once a week for 3 hours. In 2012, the Centre will offer:

HUMAN, NON-HUMAN, POST-HUMAN: Nikolas Kompridis

What does it mean to be a human being, and what is it about our lived answers to this question that frames our relation to non-human beings, animate and inanimate. Much has been written of late about the moral status of animals, questioning our human “right” to eat them, to hunt them, to use them for experiments that benefit human beings, and to expropriate their habitats for human use. This has led to further questions about whether animals have a moral status, which status would provide moral protection from human instrumentalisation. What would it mean for us to share the normative space of reasons with non-human animals, giving non-human animals a human-like status in moral space? How would such sharing affect our understandings of what it means to be human, and how we frame our relation to non-human animals?

HISTORICAL INJUSTICE AND MEMORY: Magdalena Zolkos

History is rife with examples of state sanctioned violence, including mass killing, slavery and political repression, but what seems specific to our current political moment is the significancethat the question of redressing past injustice acquired for democratic state formation.  This course addresses the normative and theoretical questions of reconciliation and restitution after ‘unjust past’ in reference to the emergence of  institutions and discourses of transitional justice in the last decades, including public apologies and truth commissions. It also situates the project of historical justice vis-à-vis categories of psychic and physical experience of violence (as trauma or memory) in order to elucidate connections and tensions between politics and subjectivity in that field.

RETHINKING ECONOMY FOR THE ANTHROPOCENE: Katherine Gibson and Gerda Roelvink

How might we reclaim the economy as a space of political decision in our new geological epoch, the Anthropocene? This course critically explores how different ways of thinking about economy shape the worlds we inhabit. We focus attention on contemporary economic experimentation and more-than-human assemblages that are making ‘other worlds’ possible, from the Mondragon Cooperative Corporation in Spain to farming collectives centred on landscape repair in New South Wales, Australia. The course asks how our conception of the economy changes when we consider the more-than-human participants in our world.

INDIGENEITY AND MODERNITY: Tim Rowse

After surveying some European theories of human universality, diversity and progress, this course formulates a body of social and political thought that Indigenous intellectuals produced in response to the assertion of colonial authority over them in Australia, Fiji, New Zealand, Canada and the USA. Readings will include texts by Peter Jones, Charles Eastman, Gertrude Bonnin, Ratu Sir Lala Sukuna, Apirana Ngata, William Cooper and Noel Pearson.