Course info

This course will offer a comparative overview of the social processes through which diverse types of human communities historically emerged, while influencing the social, political, and cultural lives of their respective inhabitants. In so doing, this course will explore the structural dynamics that bond people to each other within different types of communities, as well as the forms of social inequality, identity construction, and overall power management emerging from them. In the first part of the course, we will trace the genealogies of thought through which the social sciences historically interpreted communal processes of human solidarity. We will then in-depth examine various types of human communities, as well as the linguistic, affective, economic, and geographical, variables that contextually characterize them. Finally, we will devote the remaining classes to debate how and why contemporary human communities are systemically intersected by issues of gendered, racial, and class-based inequality. As such, we will also interrogate ourselves on the role played by individual forms of decision-making and overall social agency in the way how current human communities react to such inequalities, thus engaging with ongoing processes of historical change.