STS 279 - Pandemic, Politics and Theory

Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)

(Same as POLI 279) Who knew that a virus could so radically interrupt, accelerate, damage, mobilize humans and nonhumans? In a context which reads increasingly like a tragic dystopia, this course explores theoretical texts that engage the current pandemic and its effects on power, discipline, and control. We discuss how the virus has transformed our relationship to temporality, the recognition and erasure of care work, the microbe’s relation to ecology and disaster capitalism, the pandemic’s effects on borders, immunity, community, and confinement, masks, faces and screens, mutual aid and abandonment, neoliberal austerity and public health, epidemiology and epistemology, the unknown and uncertainty, etc. Slavoj Zizek immediately described the “PANdemIC” as “a moment when the greatest act of love is to stay distant from the object of your affection.” While Paul Preciado has argued that the lockdown has entrenched a biopolitics of “pharmacopornographic production,” Nick Mirzoeff has described New York City as a “necropolis” that should be transformed into decolonial networks of care. Wendy Brown, Lauren Berlant, Brian Massumi each reflected upon the quarantine. We attempt to ride the prolific wave of writings that came out of COVID19 and its biopolitics, for collective catharsis and in hopes to be better equipped to face this faceless event. Claire Sagan.

One 2-hour period.

Course Format: INT