CONTEMPORARY

SOCIAL THEORY

SOCIOLOGY 7716

Spring 2023

Units: 3.0

Mondays | 3:30pm to 6:00pm

Location: McGuinn Hall 415

JOSH SEIM

Boston College

This is a graduate-level course on "contemporary social theory." Learning the arguments made by some of sociology's most popular theorists is an important goal, and it’s one that we’ll seriously pursue. However, we’ll also read works historically excluded from courses like this in an effort to question and broaden our understandings of “theory,” “theorist,” “the canon,” and more. I ultimately hope that you end this course with increased confidence in your ability to consume, critique, and craft social theory.

We will focus on 12 theorists that span a range topics and traditions: Antonio Gramsci, Frantz Fanon, Michel Foucault, Pierre Bourdieu, Zygmunt Bauman, Ann Swidler, Cedric Robinson, William Julius Wilson, Maria Mies, Catharine MacKinnon, Angela Davis, and Patricia Hill Collins. We will put each of these "contemporary theorists" in conversation with a "classical theorist" (e.g., Gramsci in conversation with Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Bourdieu in conversation with Èmile Durkheim, and Collins in conversation with Anna Julia Cooper).[1]

Professors who teach theory classes like this one are forever vulnerable to an easy student critique that we might call the “omitted theorist bias.” It tends to go something like this: “How can we seriously learn theory without reading (insert any popular theorist)?” There are certainly some big names missing from this syllabus (e.g., Erving Goffman, Stuart Hall, and Jürgen Habermas). This seems to be an unsolvable problem since we can’t read everything, and we want to sufficiently engage the texts we do read. Nevertheless, we’ll attempt to alleviate this issue with “excluded theorist” projects. You’ll be tasked with reading and writing about an unassigned theorist of your choice.

This course adopts a “cartographical approach” to teaching and learning social theory.[2] We’ll rely heavily on “theory maps,” here understood are visuospatial representations of dense written works. In simpler terms, you will use, critique, and make diagrams. Theory maps won’t replace the important tasks of reading, writing, or discussion, but they are essential tools in this class.

This is a sequel course to a particular version of Classical Social Theory (SOCY 7715). However, you are not required to take that other course in order to participate in this one.

[1] I didn’t reinvent the wheel. This syllabus is inspired by a two-semester “History of Social Theory” course taught by Michael Burawoy at the University of California, Berkeley. The particular version I assisted in 2013-2014 included many of the same readings by Gramsci, Foucault, Fanon, MacKinnon, and Collins. However, Burawoy did not include works by Bourdieu, Bauman, Swidler, Robinson, Wilson, Mies, or Davis. Our course stages some of the same conversations as Burawoy’s (e.g., Gramsci and Fanon with Marx and Engels), but most of the conversations are unique.

[2] Estefan, Michel and Josh Seim (equal authors). 2022. “Teaching Social Theory as Cartography: Toward a Pedagogy of Radical Accessibility.” Teaching Sociology (online first).