Subjectivity

This seminar considers subjectivity as a central category of social, cultural, psychological, historical and political analysis. Through a critical and collaborative examination of ethnographic works and psychoanalytic theory, we will identify the processes by which subjectivities are produced, explore subjectivity as a locus of social change, and examine how emerging subjectivities remake social worlds. Some of the questions this seminar will pose include: what is the relation between subjectivity and subjection? How to account for the effects of the social in terms of subject formation without succumbing to social determinism? What else is the subject other than the outcome of a complex constellation of discursive, material, institutional, and historical factors?