Dennis Fox’s Weblog

Thanks to a Fulbright award, I’ll be teaching at York University in Toronto for the fall 2009 semester, doing some other talks, and fitting in some Ontario travel. I’ve only been to Toronto a few times for conferences, so I’m looking forward to more extensive wandering.

My seminar, for graduate students and advanced undergraduates, is called Psychology and Society in Critical Perspective. It’s interdisciplinary, so I hope non-psychology students also sign up. Limited to 15 students, it should be informal and flexible, maybe even fun. If you’re in the Toronto area or know anyone who might be interested, you can read the preliminary details

The seminar expands on various courses I’ve taught in the past and combines many of my long-time interests, some of them touched on in this blog but more often in articles on my regular website. Here’s the core of the description:

This advanced interdisciplinary seminar explores interactions among individuals, the community, and the larger society. It builds especially on challenges to basic assumptions posed by critical psychology and anarchist theory. Interpreting social psychology broadly, we examine material from anthropology, sociology, politics, law, education, philosophy, and other fields. Student input is central as we try to make sense of topics such as these:

• everyday choices about the things we take for granted;
• the tension between autonomy and community within corporatized and globalized societies, especially those whose individualistic ethos conflicts with indigenous, egalitarian, environmental, and other subcultural values;
• the influence of institutions such as schools, universities, corporations, legislatures, courts, religious bodies, and the media;
• law’s assumptions about human nature, the implications of legal thinking and the rule of law, the sources of legal and political legitimacy, and the link between law and justice;
• social scientists’ ideological and methodological assumptions, especially social psychological approaches to power, hierarchy, competition, values, justice, group dynamics, aggression, conflict resolution, and similar subjects;
• mainstream psychology’s societal role; and
• prospects for achieving mutuality and liberation.

If you do live in Toronto and know a place I could rent for four months, preferably closer to downtown than York, please let me know!

This entry was posted on Monday, May 11th, 2009 at 12:31 pm and is filed under Anarchism, Critical Psychology, Law/Justice, Social Psychology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.