KAFP 6445 - The Topology of Social Relations : Identities, Boundaries, and Political Membership

Our collective political and social grammar is at once territorial and cultural. From the biggest

to the smallest entities, they shape our sense of membership. Descriptively, Nation-states are territorial entities with a distinctive jurisdictions, citizenship

rights and duties. Communities rather refer to kinship groups, bound by a common culture, sometimes a common faith or language, and shared understandings. As individuals, we navigate different scales of belonging: families, peer groups, clubs, neighborhoods, or even cities. As groups we are often drawn to exclusionary practices between insiders and outsiders. We generally believe that belonging is a private emo*on rather than a social construction.

Membership on the other hand escapes us, the group, however big or small, has the monopoly to include or exclude. The overarching question guiding this class is the following: how do these collective entities coalesce? How are they sustained? And how do we manage our multiple belongings and identities?

My claim is that most of our social and political activities pertain to boundary drawing. We may think of boundaries as lines of separation, markers of disjunction. But boundaries also protect and grant rights, and while boundaries organize space social relationships,

they also reflect what two entities have in common: boundaries connect, shape social

relationships and spaces of encounter. They generate specific practices and create distinctive identities. They can be crossed, they may be blurred, dynamic, contextual,

and change over time.

In short, we will look at identities and identity politics, at strategies and tools of inclusion and exclusion, at the languages and meanings of poli*cal membership; and the sense of community-building and community-keeping.

Students will take away from this class an understanding of the social mechanisms of

inclusion and exclusion in small scale communities as well as in large polities and institutions;

to learn to think critically about boundaries and borders in different private, social and political

settinngs; to think in time, to compare differing approaches in the literature, and to apply this

knowledge to new, contemporary situations.

None

The class will contain both lecture and seminar components.

The class format is a mix between a lecture session (introductory part) and a colloquium part

with presentations and debates.

Presentation of the readings, discussion and participation in class debates

One group project

Bonus for creative and active participation