Course info

This course will offer a critical overview of the various processes through which structural conditions of social inequality have been historically produced, replicated, and reinforced in Canada, North America, and internationally. In so doing, this course will in-depth examine how gendered, racialized, and class-based dynamics of socio-economic exploitation and privilege contextually (re)produce social hierarchies, which in turn legitimize hegemonic forms of economy, public relationality, identity construction, and overall power management. By the same token, we will look at the ways in which gendered, racialized, and class-based social hierarchies intersect the lives of variously oppressed individuals and communities seeking to access improved conditions of life, opportunities for socio-economic mobility, and (either individual or collective) possibilities to publicly express their political agencies. As such, this course will ultimately interrogate how the ongoing (re)production of social categories of difference end up furthering systemic processes of politico-economic inequality, while addressing the pivotal roles played by capitalism, patriarchism, and post-colonialism within current dynamics of social oppression, resistance, and change.