My teaching and research are grounded in the recognition that the discipline of philosophy has historically been—and continues to be—implicated in the production and maintenance of white supremacist structures of power, whether political, psychological, ideological, cultural, or economic. I thus approach the study of philosophy from a historical and material lens that takes the positionality of philosophers (as well as our positionality as readers) as fundamental for understanding the social and political stakes of philosophical arguments and texts. No matter the course, my pedagogy is grounded in decolonial, antiracist, and anti-imperialist commitments that bring global and historically marginalized perspectives to bear thereupon.
Courses Taught
Honors Seminar: Foucault: Genealogy & Power
The French philosopher Michel Foucault is widely regarded as one of the most important thinkers of the 20th century, and his thought continues to influence scholarship across the humanities and social sciences. This honors seminar provides a comprehensive introduction to Foucault’s critical method of genealogy and its role in the development of his political thought. While we will spend the majority of the semester reading Foucault’s work, we will devote some attention to the thinkers and traditions of thought—those pioneered by Marx, Nietzsche, and the critical theorists—from which Foucault directly and indirectly drew inspiration. We will engage with these texts alongside Foucault’s own writings on knowledge, power, and subjectivity in order to better understand the centrality of genealogy in Foucault’s interrogation of the “history of the present.” In the final section of the course, we will focus our attention on contemporary scholars who have taken up, reimagined, and applied Foucault’s concepts and method to 21st-century questions of power, domination, and freedom.
Honors Seminar: Social & Political Philosophy
In the history of Western philosophy, the state has been the privileged object of philosophico-political analysis, serving as both the theater of human sociality and the primary instrument of domination over man and nature. From the contractarian vision of the state as the product of rational consensus to the Weberian idea of the state as the entity with a claim to the legitimate use of force, however, there is no unified conception of what, precisely, the state is or should be. This honors seminar will take up the concept of the “state” from a historical and material perspective by examining the foundational modern and contemporary theories of the state as a form of organized political power. Readings may be drawn from works by Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Immanuel Kant, Karl Marx, Max Weber, Carl Schmitt, Michel Foucault, Charles Mills, and Wendy Brown, among others.
Critical Philosophy of Race
This course seeks to critically understand “race” as a historical construction and discursive practice that functions in social and political domains as well as in individual modes of embodiment and identity. Rather than analyze the viability of “race” as a category of human differentiation, we will approach the concept of race with a historical consciousness that is attentive to its enablement of domination and systemic oppression. Some of our themes of analysis may include the social construction of race, the phenomenology of racial embodiment, the carceral state as an apparatus of racial control, and the complex entanglements between race and (neo-)liberalism. Insofar as we are approaching race from a social and political lens, we will draw from a range of philosophical traditions spanning Marxism, existential phenomenology, feminist studies, and social epistemology.
Marx, Marxism, & Race
Few figures have inspired as much admiration and detestation—and even fewer have had as global a reception—as Karl Marx. Movements for justice and emancipation throughout the 20th century embraced Marxist ideals as alternatives to the hegemonic and totalizing logics of capitalism and liberalism that had (and has) kept the majority of the world’s population in chains, both literally and metaphorically. A study of Marx’s core insights—that the contradictions inherent in capitalism will lead to its (and perhaps our) eventual demise—remains critical if we are to interrogate the resurgence of white supremacist fascism, the logics of neocolonial exploitation, and the origins of the looming climate catastrophes that define our present moment. In this course, we will interrogate the philosophical assumptions regarding history, subjectivity, and alienation that underpin Marx’s critique of capitalism, and assess the many ways these ideas have been taken up, challenged, and reimagined by thinkers working in the service of antifascist, antiracist, and anticolonial struggles for liberation. Alongside those of Marx himself, we will engage with the writings of such thinkers as Antonio Gramsci, W.E.B. DuBois, Amílcar Cabral, Vivek Chibber, Silvia Federici, and C.L.R. James, as well as several contemporary reflections on racial capitalism.
Social and Political Philosophy: Founding Philosophies
This course understandings “founding philosophies” in two senses. On the one hand, it refers to the texts that are said to constitute the canon of “Western civilization”: the philosophies of ancient Greece and Rome, the scholastic theology of Medieval Western Christendom, and the revolutionary thought of the Enlightenment era. On the other hand, it refers to those thinkers and texts that most inspired the radical vision of the American founders and which continue to shape conversations about what it means to be “American” today. To varying degrees, the thinkers in our syllabus explore the following questions: what is the purpose law? How should a state be organized? Who counts as a member of the political body? Importantly, our list of readings is populated by figures who have historically defined the “Western canon,” for which reason there is a stark lack of non-European and non-male thinkers in the syllabus. Our responsibility is to be cognizant of these omissions both by keeping in mind those whose voices are conspicuously absent and, more importantly, by appraising what these absences mean in the context of the texts themselves. The hope is that a close engagement with these writings and ideas will not only allow us to better understand the development of Western political thought, but also identify the deficiencies and gaps in the system that we have inherited so that we are better equipped to critique it.
First-Year Seminar: Aesthetics & Political Resistance
This first-year seminar critically examines the entangled relations between culture, politics, and society in order to appraise the revolutionary potential of aestheticsfor challenging hegemonic structures of (neo-)liberal modernity. While the philosophical discipline of aesthetics has traditionally confined itself to questions of beauty, judgment, and taste, we will approach “aesthetics” as a fundamentally socially and politically mediated, experiential relationship between the individual and the external world. Some of the themes we will explore might include the relationship between beauty and ideology, the limits of radical art under capitalism, or the capacity of aesthetic objects and experiences to challenge how we inhabit in and move through the world. Our objects of study will comprise philosophical texts from the subdisciplines of critical theory, psychoanalysis, feminist studies, and philosophy of race, which we will read in conversation with a variety of aesthetic productions spanning music, film, performance art, and visual artwork.
Introduction to Philosophy: Subjects & Selves
In the canon of modern Western philosophy, the subject takes the form of an autonomous, self-determining, rational individual, an actor with agency and conscious experience opposed to an external world comprised of objects to be perceived and known. Amidst the atrocities of the World Wars, waves of anticolonial struggles for national liberation, and the rapid emergence of new forms of control in the 20th century, however, thinkers have increasingly recognized that the “subject” is fundamentally inseparable from power: it is not a fixed and stable entity, but a site of struggle and contestation—an always-shifting terrain of meaning in which the dichotomies between self and other, inclusion and exclusion, and freedom and responsibility come into focus. This course takes up the question of the subject by examining how different philosophical traditions—including but not limited to critical theory, phenomenology, psychoanalysis, existentialism, and critical race theory—have put this subject in question.
For information on syllabi or course readings, please contact me.
Dr. Sabeen Ahmed 