We started this group in the summer of 2010 after two of us had taken Mark’s “Urban Democracy” course. Over the past two years we’ve had quite a few participants from within the two Ph.D. programs in the College of Built Environments, but have also had participants from Geography, Education, and Nursing.
One of the challenges facing us is to figure out how to be inclusive but also to not let the number of participants reach a point where it begins to feel like an overcrowded seminar Then, of course, there is the perennial challenge of scheduling a time that works for everyone. Earlier this quarter, another professor offered to set up an alternate time for other willing participants who could not meet with the larger group. No one took him up on the offer this time around, but what seems important now is that these types of alternatives are beginning to emerge. And it may sound simple, but I’ve never been involved with trying to self-manage a small group of people with diverse and overfilled schedules, and I think the fact that we’ve done it with some degree of success for two years is noteworthy.
Summer 2010
Lefebvre, The Urban Revolution
Autumn 2010
Lefebvre, State, Space, World
Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator
Winter 2011
Arendt, The Human Condition
Spring 2011
Hardt and Negri, Empire
Plato, The Republic
Summer 2011
Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus
Autumn 2011
Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus
Winter 2012
Aristotle, The Politics (we had planned to read this after Plato, but shifted it to accommodate interested students and two of us who had D&G on our general exam bibliographies)
Spring 2012
Harvey, Social Justice and the City
Summer 2012
The Invisible committee, “The coming insurrection”
Agamben, The coming community
Nigel Thrift, Non-representational theory: space, politics, affect
Autumn 2012
Latour, Reassembling the Social
Holland, Nomad Citizenship
Winter 2013
Virno, “Virtuosity and Revolution: The political theory of exodus”
Benjamin, “Critique of violence”
Becoming Poor 