Dr. Ghassan Moussawi

Mondays, 3:30-6:20pm 

This seminar will introduce you to the wide-ranging scholarship on power, empire, and coloniality. We will unpack transnational and colonial structures of domination, while centering the intersections of race, racisms, and racializations, ethnicity, gender and (un)gendering processes, sexuality, and nation and nationalisms. To do so, we will ask the following questions: What is empire? What is coloniality? How does the study of empire help us better understand our contemporary moment? What is at the center of colonial projects and technologies of power? How does empire feel, for those who are colonized and colonizers? And how does empire shape research agendas and knowledge production? We will address a range of topics and theoretical perspectives including: settler colonialisms, comparative empire, south-south solidarities, indigeneity and indigenous studies, racial capitalism, queer theory, decolonial sociology, postcolonial feminist sociology, emotions and affect, territory and land, and migration. Throughout the course we will think about the potentials of having an anti-colonial sociology, what that might look like, and how it impacts our scholarly and public facing work.