Prerequisites: the instructor’s permission. From its beginnings, film has been preoccupied with law: in cops and robbers silent films, courtroom drama, police procedural, judge reality show, or all the scenes that fill our media-saturated world. What do films and other audio-visual media tell us about what it’s like to come before the law, or about such substantive issues as what counts as murder, war crimes, torture, sexual abuse? How do films model the techniques that lawyers use to sway the passions of their audiences? How do they model the symbolism of their gestures, icons, images? If films and other audio-visual media rewrite legal events, what is their effect: on law? on legal audiences? How is the experience of being a film spectator both like and unlike the experience of being a legal subject? This course investigates such questions by looking at representations of law in film and other audio-visual media. We will seek to understand, first, how film represents law, and, second,how film attempts to shape law (influencing legal norms, intervening in legal regimes). The seminar’s principal texts will be the films themselves, but we will also read relevant legal cases and film theory in order to deepen our understanding of both legal and film regimes.

Instructors: Jonathan Cole and Akeel Bilgrami

Though this is a graduate seminar, undergraduate juniors and seniors are permitted to enroll. There are no pre-requisites for the course. The fourteen weeks of the course will consist of a combination of 1) lectures by the instructors followed by discussions, 2) discussions with guest visitors who are distinguished scholars in the field and whose work will be pre-circulated to the seminar, and 3) presentations by students on the readings on the syllabus.
Requirements: Strictly regular attendance, prior reading of weekly texts, and a term paper at the end of term of roughly 20-25 pages.

The concept of freedom is analytically complex and has a long and varied intellectual history. This course will focus on the concept as it emerged in the modern period (roughly since the seventeenth century in Europe) and focus in particular on three aspects of freedom. Though the primary interest of the seminar will be on political and academic freedom, it will be useful to begin with a very brief discussion of the most abstract dimension of freedom by asking what notion of freedom might individual human subjects be said to possess given the determinism that seems to be everywhere indicated by the comprehensive explanatory power of modern science.

Instructors: Jonathan Cole, Akeel Bilgrami

Though this is a graduate seminar, undergraduate juniors and seniors are permitted to enroll. There are no pre-requisites for the course. The fourteen weeks of the course will consist of a combination of 1) lectures by the instructors followed by discussions, 2) discussions with guest visitors who are distinguished scholars in the field and whose work will be pre-circulated to the seminar, and 3) presentations by students on the readings on the syllabus. Requirements: Strictly regular attendance, prior reading of weekly texts, and a term paper at the end of term of roughly 20-25 pages.

General Description: The concept of freedom is analytically complex and has a long and varied intellectual history. This course will focus on the concept as it emerged in the modern period (roughly since the seventeenth century in Europe) and focus in particular on three aspects of freedom.  Though the primary interest of the seminar will be on political and academic freedom, it will be useful to begin with a very brief discussion of the most abstract dimension of freedom by asking what notion of freedom might individual human subjects be said to possess given the determinism that seems to be everywhere indicated by the comprehensive explanatory power of modern science.

Because of advances in feminist theory, infant research, clinical practice attachment theory and historical scholarship, a consensus has emerged concerning Freud’s oeuvre over the past fifty years: the figure of the mother is largely absent from all aspects of his thinking. This includes his self-self analysis, case histories, theory of development and account of religion and civilization. This fact will provide our point of reference for examining the development of Freud’s thought. We will first explore the biographical roots of this lacuna in Freud’s thinking. We will then see how it played itself out as his long and abundant career unfolded. We will examine texts regarding all the aspects of his thinking and from the different periods of his life.

What does it mean to be 20 years old in our rapidly changing, interconnected world?  There are more youth (aged 15-25) in the world today than at any other time in history, approaching adulthood as the world confronts seismic shifts in the geopolitical order, in the nature and future of work, and in the ways we connect with each other, express identity, engage politically, and create communities of meaning.  What unique challenges and opportunities confront YOU after decades of neoliberal globalization?

“Global 20” students will also participate in a new research project of the Committee on Global Thought, “Youth in a Changing World.”  The course will serve as an undergraduate “lab” for the project, and among other involvements, students in the course will help conceive, plan, and take part in a NYC-wide “Youth Think-In” in the Spring 2018 semester.

Please get in touch with Dr. Laura Neitzel (lln5@columbia.edu) with any questions about the course

This seminar course takes concerns around rapidly diminishing language diversity as the starting point for an interdisciplinary, trans-regional, and trans-lingual investigation of the role of digital communication technologies in these global shifts. Digital technologies appear to be contributing to language extinction, with a potential for 50-90% loss of language diversity this century. While an increasing number of languages are digitally supported, this process is largely market-driven, excluding smaller or poorer language communities. This course investigates the role of digital design and governance in including or excluding languages from the digital sphere.

This course is also conceived as a more general introduction to theoretical perspectives on the intersections of literature and science. In our close readings we will examine how scientific concepts and ideals such as exactitude, objectivity, or the experiment play comparable roles in Goethe’s literary poetics. Instead of seeing literature and the sciences as delimited disciplines, we will instead scrutinize their a priori assumptions: the poeticization of knowledge, and literature as a form of knowing. In addition, we will study several theoretical texts and discourses as a potential toolbox for interdisciplinary inquiries in the humanities. This course thus also serves as a general introduction to some of the most influential theoretical reflections on literature and science.

This course is attentive to how social contexts shape the reception of ideas that are assumed to have universal purchase. The seminar adopts a historical mode of presentation, and locates social theory in its global contexts with a specific focus on the global South.We follow the itinerary of two concepts, equality and difference. Can we write a global history of social thought? How are ideas and contexts transformed when they encounter forms of social difference (e.g., race, caste, religion) that must be thought on their own terms? What is the relationship between commitments to equality, on the one hand, and the preservation of difference on the other? Readings for the seminar will include a mix of classic texts of social theory, and monographs in history and anthropology that seek to engage and redirect the energies of social thought toward questions of translation, commensuration, and alterity.

The principal texts of literary theory from antiquity through the 18th century, including Plato, Aristotle, Horace, Longinus, Augustine, Aquinas, Boccaccio, Sidney, and Kant.

Instructor: Elsa Stamatopoulou

Indigenous Peoples, numbering more that 370 million in some 90 countries and about 5000 groups and representing a great part of the world’s human diversity and cultural heritage, continue to raise major controversies and to face threats to their physical and cultural existence. The main task of this course is to explore the complex historic circumstances and political actions that gave rise to the international Indigenous movement through the human rights agenda and thus also produced a global Indigenous identity on all continents, two intertwined and deeply significant phenomena over the past fifty years. We will analyze the achievements, challenges and potential of the dynamic interface between the Indigenous Peoples’ movement-one of the strongest social movements of our times- and the international community, especially the United Nations system. Centered on the themes laid out in the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (2007), the course will examine how Indigenous Peoples have been contesting and reshaping norms, institutions and global debates in the past 50 years, re-shaping and gradually decolonizing international institutions and how they have contributed to some of the most important contemporary debates, including human rights, development, law, and specifically the concepts of self-determination, governance, group rights, inter-culturality and pluriculturality, gender, land, territories and natural resources, cultural rights, intellectual property, health, education, the environment and climate justice. The syllabus will draw on a variety of academic literature, case studies and documentation of Indigenous organizations, the UN and other intergovernmental organizations as well as States from different parts of the world. Students will also have the opportunity to meet with Indigenous leaders and representatives of international organizations and States and will be encouraged to attend the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues. Select short films will be shown and discussed in class.