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Cultural, Social & Political Thought

Course offerings

Cultural, Social and Political Thought (CSPT) students are required to take the core course, CSPT 501/601, offered every fall semester. They are required to choose between offered seminars (CSPT 500/600) taught by CSPT faculty from across the participating departments.

The seminars are offered both in fall and spring semesters. They widely vary in terms of their topics, themes and disciplinary orientation from year to year.

Find the current course offerings and timetable information in the Academic Calendar.

Below are themes and topics of selected CSPT 500/600 in past years.

2024-25 course topics

CSPT 501: Contemporary Cultural Social and Political Thought: I

Instructor: Dr. Sara Ramshaw (Law)

An exploration of contemporary themes and issues in cultural, social and political thought, with an emphasis on thought that crosses traditional cultural and disciplinary boundaries.

CSPT 601: Contemporary Social and Political Thought: II

Instructor: Dr. Sara Ramshaw (Law)

A continuation of CSPT 501, this seminar is designed for students proceeding to a doctoral candidacy examination in Cultural Social and Political Thought. The focus will be on themes and thinkers important to contemporary cultural social and political thought.

Spring 2025 seminars

CSPT 500/600 A01: Current Issues in Social Theory: Contemporary Materialisms

Instructor: Dr. Steve Garlick (Sociology)

Social theory has always been informed by different materialisms, and this course examines how materialist theories have persisted and re-emerged in different forms through the linguistic and cultural turns of the late 20th century, with particular concern for how these shifts inform our understandings of key sociological concepts such as power, order, freedom and social change.

The course is divided into 2 parts. The first part focuses on key 20th-century theorists whose work has implications for materialist theorizing. The second part takes up recent developments in new materialist social theorizing. The course offers students the opportunity to engage with some of the most important and influential social theories and theorists of recent decades.

CSPT 500/600 A02: Current Issues in Ecology, Global Sociology and Social Movements

Instructor: Dr. Martha McMahon (Sociology)

This course takes up some current issues in ecology, global sociology and social movements by inviting you to engage with alternative ontologies and epistemologies as keys to personal and social transformation in these troubled times.

Course outcomes/objectives

The first part of this course will be organized around the ethical, intellectual and political projects identified by some contemporary feminist theorists and the challenges to dominant ways of knowing and being raised by Indigenous knowledge, and non hegemonic forms of social organization: the challenges of how to live well with others—including with our multispecies kin—in late modernity or capitalism.

The second part asks what modes of life can guide us in living ethically with diverse humans and more-than-humans so as to find new ways to live and thrive in what seems like social and planetary ruin. We will look always for possibilities, not just problems.

This graduate course challenges students to develop pedagogies of praxis, as well as undertaking an area of independent research building on, but going beyond the material provided. Given the wide range of different substantive issues students are interested in, or working on, the course is designed to give participants resources that can be widely used in very different kinds of work.

CSPT 500/600 A03: Advanced Research Seminar in Visual Anthropology and Materiality

Instructor: Dr. Alexandrine Boudreault-Fournier (ANTH)

In-depth and critical survey of current issues, topics, theory and method relating to visual anthropology and materiality in historical and contemporary contexts.