As part of the ongoing programming for the Center for the Advancement of the Humanities, we will be hosting special topic, non credit seminars open to all students, faculty, staff, and community.

 

Postcolonial Studies Non-Credit Seminar 

The Postcolonial Studies Non-Credit Seminar is a semester-long non-credit course sponsored by the Center for the Advancement of the Humanities. The course will serve as both a continuation of the seminar offered during the fall of 2019 and an opportunity for new members to join our discussion. Our aim is to bring together an interdisciplinary group of students, staff, faculty, and community members to discuss scholarship within the field of postcolonial studies. We will cover a wide variety of topics, including the work of theorists such as Homi K. Bhabha and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak as well as new and emerging debates from various disciplines.  

Meetings will be held every other Thursday beginning January 16th. Access to our WordPress site, which contains the Fall reading list and information for the Spring semester, is available upon request. For more information, please contact Jackielee Derks at Jackielee.derks@marquette.edu.  

Schedule:  

Every other Thursday, Spring 2020  

11:00am-12:00pm, beginning January 16th

Lalumiere 222

 

Beyond Postmodernism Non-Credit Seminar 

This zero-credit seminar asks what is the lasting influence, or perhaps continued existence, of postmodernism. While the theorists increasingly proffer the emergence of a new era, they often wrestle with postmodernism as either a dark age of simulation, gross abstraction, and perverse diffusion of meaning, or as a generative, if also somewhat misguided, set of principles with the opportunity for ethical praxis. But what were the political, historical, and cultural conditions that prompted the onset and development of postmodernism, and what is its status today? This seminar will spend a short time posing and developing those and similar questions before moving to focus on different conceptions of how to diagnose, and name, our contemporary moment. We will assess possibilities such as metamodernism, post-postmodernism, digimodernism, renewalism, altermodernism, and more. What features and values do these theories share? How might we begin to live authentically and ethically in a completely connected, and ensnared, world driven by digital forces and predatory capitalism? What contemporary history and sociopolitical context drives the anxieties present in theorizations of life beyond postmodernism? Must we move far beyond the individual and consider the likes of posthumanism, transhumanism, and theories of the Anthropocene as the only viable ethical way forward? To register, or for more information, please contact Matthew Burchanoski (Matthew.burchanoski@marquette.edu)  

Schedule: 

Every other Thursday, Spring 2020 

10:00-11:00AM, beginning January 23rd 

Lalumiere 198 

 

Previous Seminars

 

The Grundrisse by Karl Marx Non-Credit Reading Seminar 

In this zero-level course we will read and discuss selections from Marx’s Grundrisse. We will expect some background knowledge of Marx – having read Capital: Volume 1 will be a benefit but is not required. We will consider Marx's method of abstraction, objectification and alienation, exploitation, dispossession and uneven development, freedom and social relations, individuals and community, necessity and contingency in history, and the fragment on machines and cognitive capitalism. Because it is a zero-level course there are no requirements. We just ask that participants come having read the sections with (1) a sense of what Marx was trying to say and (2) some thoughts about it.  Hosted by Michael McCarthy and Michael Wert 

Postcolonial Studies Non-Credit Seminar (Fall 2019)

The Center for the Advancement of the Humanities is sponsoring a semester-long non-credit seminar devoted to postcolonial scholarship from across the disciplines. Our aim is to bring together an interdisciplinary group of students, staff, faculty, and community members to discuss scholarship within the field of postcolonial studies. We plan to begin with foundational texts and move chronologically through contemporary and emerging work in the field.  Hosted by Jackielee Derks (Jackielee.derks@marquette.edu) 

Transhumanism: Narratives and Implications

This zero-credit seminar is offered to explore one of the most generative and widely influential ideas of our time: transhumanism. Although it has various expressions, transhumanism in general refers to the idea that human evolution is incomplete and will soon take an unprecedented turn at the Singularity, the point at which humans develop a technologically enhanced intelligence that far surpasses their own cognitive powers. This could be a biological being sufficiently enhanced to count as a different species, an artificial intelligence, or some combination of the two. This imagined future poses several urgent questions for humanities scholars. Hosted by: Drs. Katherine Hayles, visiting AMUW Chair, and Gerry Canavan, English

Bob Dylan Seminar

This seminar is open to all Marquette students, staff, and faculty with an interest in Bob Dylan and the question of his cultural importance. This seminar runs from February 16th until May 7th. Those who are interested in participating should contact Dr. James South.