HIS 271 SOCIETY OF CONTROL

How does a society that prides itself on liberty justify incarcerating over 25 percent of the world's prisoners? Are schools for learning and liberation or for social management and control? To what ends does modern medicine heal and cure? The course prepares students to answer these questions by grappling with whether and how relations of power condition how knowledge is produced. Students will consider each discipline's history and methods and learn the concepts of discipline, power, knowledge, subjectification, and normalization, as developed by Michel Foucault and his interlocutors. The course also foregrounds the way interdisciplinary and anti-disciplinary fields such as area studies, queer studies, rhetoric, ethnic studies, and cultural studies have attempted to challenge canonical, Eurocentric, patriarchal, and hetero-normative ways of knowing.