PA 5490 & SOC 8790: Contemporary Social Theory and Public Policy
Joshua Page & Joe Soss
Spring 2016
Joshua Page
Office Hours: 935 Social Sciences Bldg, Th 2-4 and by appointment
Contact: (email), 4-9333 (campus phone), 510-703-3523 (personal phone)
Joe Soss
Office Hours: 261 Humphrey School, Th 10-12 and by appointment
Contact: (email), 6-9865 (campus phone), 651-207-5876 (personal phone)
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Course Overview
This seminar invites advanced Masters and Ph.D. students to pursue an intensive analysis of contemporary social theory and its relationship to public policy. No semester-long course can provide a comprehensive tour of contemporary social theory. The field is far too large, rich, and diverse. Thus, rather than offer a broad but thin and necessarily partial survey, we will pursue a small but critical set of questions in a more focused and sustained way. Students should also note that few of the readings for this course are drawn from the “canonical” original texts of major social theorists. Instead, we focus on scholarship that addresses key questions related to policy and governance and does so in direct dialogue with the ideas of significant contemporary social theorists.
Public policies are, first and foremost, deployments of state power and authority, deeply entwined with the terms of power relations and social hierarchies. Thus, in the first half of the course, we focus on efforts to theorize the state in relation to various social structures, social constructions, and axes of domination. Working in a more reflexive vein, we also focus in this section on the ways these same social forces shape contemporary social theory as a field of practice and organize its hierarchies of intellectual status and influence. In this sense, we intend for the title of this section, “The State of Social Theory,” to convey a dual agenda: (a) comparing and contrasting alterative accounts of “the state,” particularly as it operates in the neoliberal era, and (b) pursuing a critical, reflexive approach to the forces that have shaped the contemporary “state” of social theory as an intellectual field.
In the second half of the course, we shift from sessions that focus on one theoretical tradition at a time (e.g. scholarship working in dialogue with Du Bois, Pateman, or Foucault) to sessions that offer varied perspectives on one or more key concepts in contemporary social theory. These class meetings will allow us to deepen the dialogue among theorists covered in the first half of the course, introduce additional theoretical approaches, and sharpen our understandings of foundational concepts in the field.
Requirements
Attendance and Participation: We expect each student to attend and participate in every seminar. If you must miss class, please let us know in advance. If you have a last-minute emergency, please let us know as soon as possible after the class meeting.
Reading Memos: Students are required to submit THREE reading memos. Each memo should be 1.5-2 single-spaces pages. In the memos, students should accomplish the following three tasks:
i. Elucidate key arguments and concepts in the week’s readings.
ii. Critically engage the texts and draw connections among the authors’ core ideas, methodologies, and (where relevant) empirical analyses. Here, you may explore in a paragraph or two how certain concepts, methodological approaches, et al. relate to your current or future research.
iii. Propose clear questions and issues for seminar discussion.
Students will post their memos to the class listserv by Sunday at noon (24 hours before class) and are expected to read all submitted memos prior to class. (Please bring copies of your colleagues’ memos to class, so you will have them available for discussion.) We also invite you to respond to your classmates’ memos on the listserv prior to class, as a way to “prime the pump” for conversations in person. Thus, by the start of class each week, we hope to have already completed a round-plus of highly engaged discussion on the readings and comments, and we will be ready to engage each other and the texts even more thoroughly and creatively, building upon each other’s ideas.
Please note that the class listserv is also intended as a site for open-ended conversations between class meetings. You might continue a discussion from our most recent class or pose a fresh question. You might raise issues or perspectives that have not been addressed in the readings or in class. You should feel free to post links to articles, studies, websites, news stories, and other materials you think are helpful or provocative. Be creative. Question what you read. Ask for help thinking something through. Make trouble. Give us reasons to be persuaded; direct us to evidence; challenge our consensus; question the statements that we have made to one another. But please bear in mind that the classroom and the discussion board are public academic forums. Please be respectful and follow standards of ethics and courtesy appropriate to such a setting.
3. Final Paper: Each student will submit a 20-25 double-spaced paper at the end of the semester. You are required to meet with either or both of us to discuss paper topics no later than February 29. All paper topics must be approved by the instructors.
Your grade for the course will be based on three components: Memos (20%), Seminar Participation (in-class and online, 20%), Seminar Paper (60%).
Reading Materials
Five books have been ordered for purchase:
Fred Block and Margaret R. Somers.2014.The Power of Market Fundamentalism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Wendy Brown. 2015.Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution.Brooklyn, NY: Zone Books.
Kimberly Kay Hoang. 2015. Dealing in Desire: Asian Ascendancy, Western Decline and the Hidden Currencies of Global Sex Work. Berkeley, CA: Univeristy of California Press.
Aldon Morris. 2015.The Scholar Denied:W. E. B. Du Bois and the Birth of Modern Sociology.Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Carole Pateman and Charles W. Mills. 2007. Contract & Domination. Malden, MA: Polity Press.
All other readings are available as pdf files via e-reserves at the course Moodle site, which can be accessed at https://ay15.moodle.umn.edu/course/view.php?id=9628
READING SCHEDULE
I. The State of Social Theory
Week 1, Jan 25. In Dialogue with Du Bois
Aldon Morris. 2015.The Scholar Denied:W. E. B. Du Bois and the Birth of Modern Sociology. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Entire.
Week 2, Feb 1. In Dialogue with Marx
Fred Block. 1977. “The Ruling Class Does Not Rule: Notes on the Marxist Theory of the State.” Socialist Revolution.33(May-June): 6-28.
Theda Skocpol . 1980. “Political Response to Capitalist Crisis: Neo-Marxist Theories of the State and the Case of the New Deal.”Politics & Society.10(2): 155-201.
Paul Cammack.1989.“Review Article: Bringing the State Back In?”British Journal of Political Science.19(2): 261-90.
David Harvey. 2005. “Introduction” and “The Capitalist State.”A Brief History of Neoliberalism. New York: Oxford University Press. Pp.1-4, 64-86.
Kevin Fox Gotham. 2011. “Cascading Crisis: The Crisis-Policy Nexus and the Restructuring of the U.S. Housing Finance System.”Critical Sociology.38(1): 107-22.
Week 3, Feb 8. In Dialogue with Polanyi
Fred Block and Margaret R. Somers.2014.The Power of Market Fundamentalism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Entire.
Week 4, Feb 15. In Dialogue with Foucault
Timothy Mitchell. 1991. “The Limits of the State: Beyond Statist Approaches and their Critics.” American Political Science Review.85(1): 77-96.
Wendy Brown. 2015.Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution.Brooklyn, NY: Zone Books. Entire.
Week 5, Feb 22. In Dialogue with Bourdieu
Pierre Bourdieu, “Rethinking the State: Genesis and Structure of the Bureaucratic Field.” Sociological Theory 12(1): 1-18.
Kimberly Morgan and Ann Orloff. Forthcoming. “Introduction: Many Hands of the State.” The Many Hands of the State: Theorizing Political Authority and Social Control.
Loïc Wacquant, “The Wedding of Welfare and Prisonfare in the 21st Century.” Journal of Poverty 16: 236-249.
Jamie Peck. 2010. “Zombie Neoliberalism and the Ambidextrous State.”Theoretical Criminology.14(1): 104-10.
Rohit Chopra. 2003. “Neoliberalism as Doxa: Bourdieu’s Theory of the State and the Contemporary Indian Discourse on Globalization and Liberalization.Cultural Studies.17(3-4): 419-44.
Week 6, Feb 29. In Dialogue with Pateman and Mills
Carole Pateman and Charles W. Mills. 2007. Contract & Domination. Malden, MA: Polity Press. Entire.
II. Focal Concepts for Social Theories of Policy, Politics, and Governance
Week 7, Mar 7. Power and Empowerment
Jane Mansbridge. 1996. “Using Power/Fighting Power: The Polity.” In S. Benhabib, ed., Democracy and Difference: Contesting the Boundaries of the Political. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Pp. 46-66.
Steven Lukes. 2005. “Power: A Radical View.” Power: A Radical View. 2nd Edition. Palgrave. Pp.14-38.
Frances Fox Piven. 2006. Challenging Authority: How Ordinary People Change America. New York, NY: Rowman & Littlefield. Pp.1-54.
Clarissa Rile Hayward. 2000. De-Facing Power. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. Pp.1-39, 161-78.
Barbara Cruikshank. 1999. “The Will to Empower: Technologies of Citizenship and the War on Poverty.” The Will to Empower: Democratic Citizens and Other Subjects. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Pp.19-42, 67-86.
Week 8, Mar 21. Compliance, Ideology, and Resistance
Louis Althusser. 1971. “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses” Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays. New York, NY: Monthly Review Press.
Michael Burawoy. 2012. “The Roots of Domination: Beyond Bourdieu and Gramsci.” Sociology. 46(2): 187-206.
James C. Scott. 1990. Domination and the Arts of Resistance. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Pp. 1-44, 70-107.
Monica Bell. Forthcoming. “Situational Trust: How Disadvantaged Mothers Reconceive Legal Cynicism.” Law and Society Review.
Amy Lerman and Vesla Weaver. 2015. “Protest is Democracy at Work.” Slate.
Deva Woodly. 2015. “Black Lives Matter: The Politics of Race and Movement in the 21st Century.” Public Seminar. January 18.
Week 9, Mar 28. Constructing and Contesting Social Kinds
Margot Canaday. 2009. “‘Most Fags are Floaters’: The Problem of ‘Unattached Persons’ in the Early New Deal, 1933-35.” The Straight State: Sexuality and Citizenship in 20th C. America. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton U. Press. pp.91-136.
Loïc Wacquant. 2005. “Race as Civic Felony.” International Social Science Journal. 57(183): 127-42.
Andrew Dilts. 2014. “Fabricating Figures” and “Civic Disabilities.” Punishment and Inclusion: Race, Membership, and the Limits of American Liberalism. New York, NY: Fordham University Press. Pp. 27-50, 170-200.
Cristan Williams. 2014. “Gender Performance: The TransAdvocate Interviews Judith Butler.” http://www.transadvocate.com/gender-performance-the-transadvocate-interviews-judith-butler_n_13652.htm
Christina Beltrán. 2010. The Trouble with Unity: Latino Politics and the Creation of Identity. 56-74, 157-70.
Week 10, Apr 4. Care, Justice, and Democracy
Evelyn Nakano Glenn. 2010.Forced to Care: Coercion and Caregiving in America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Pp.1-41, 152-82.
Joan Tronto. 2014. Caring Democracy: Markets, Equality, and Justice. New York: New York University Press. pp.1-66, 95-138.
Week 11, Apr 11. Deviance and Social Control
Frances Fox Piven. 1981. “Deviant Behavior and the Remaking of the World.” Social Problems. 28(5): 489-508.
Heather Love. 2015. “Doing Being Deviant: Deviance Studies, Description, and the Queer Ordinary.”differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies.26(1):74-95.
Joan Higgins. 1980. “Social Control Theory and Public Policy.” Journal of Social Policy. 9(1): 1-23.
Katherine Beckett and Steve Herbert. 2008 “Dealing with Disorder: Social Control in the Post-Industrial City.” Theoretical Criminology. 12(1): 5-30.
Kimberle W. Crenshaw. 2012. “From Private Violence to Mass Incarceration: Thinking Intersectionally about Women, Race, and Social Control.” UCLA Law Review 59.
Week 12, Apr 18. Embodiment and Politics of the Body
Michel Foucault. 2015. [Brief excerpt on habit and power] In Francois Ewald and Bernard Harcourt, eds. The Punitive Society: Lectures at the College de France, 1972-1973. New York: Palgrave MacMillan. Pp.236-41.
Michel Foucault. 1995 [1977]. “Docile Bodies.” Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Vintage Books. Pp.135-169.
Anne Witz. 2000. “Whose Body Matters? Feminist Sociology and the Corporeal Turn in
Sociology and Feminism.” Body and Society 6(2): 1-24.
Irene Costera Meijer and Bauke Prins. 1998. “How Bodies Come to Matter: An Interview with
Judith Butler.” Signs 23(2): 275-286.
Loïc Wacquant. 1998. “The Prizefighter’s Three Bodies.” Ethnos: Journal of Anthropology. 63(3-4): 325-352.
Walter Johnson. 2001. “Reading Bodies and Marking Race,” in Soul by Soul: Life Inside the
Antebellum Slave Market. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, pp. 135-161.
Week 13, Apr 25. Desire and Exchange
Kimberly Kay Hoang. 2015. Dealing in Desire: Asian Ascendancy, Western Decline and the Hidden Currencies of Global Sex Work. Berkeley, CA: Univeristy of California Press. Entire.
Week 14, May 2. Predation and Extraction
Richard Young and Jeffrey Meisner. 2008. “Race and the Dual State in the Early American Republic.” In J. Lowndes, J. Novkov, and D.T. Warren, eds. Race and American Political Development. New York, NY: Routledge. Pp.31-58.
Mehrsa Baradaran. 2015. How the Other Half Banks: Exclusion, Exploitation, and the Threat to Democracy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. pp.1-63.
Mary Fainsod Katzenstein and Maureen R. Waller. 2015. “Taxing the Poor: Incarceration, Poverty Governance, and the Seizure of Family Resources.” Perspectives on Politics. 13(3): 638-56.
Walter Johnson. 2015. “What do we mean when we say 'structural racism?' A walk down West Florissant Avenue, Ferguson, Missouri.” Manuscript.
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