What are the details of our daily existence? What systems dominate our lives? What meanings can we make of our situation?

This social studies/humanities course will steal from various disciplines - including anthropology, critical theory, cultural studies, economics, futurology, history, philosophy, political science, psychology, and sociology - to help us make sense of our situation.

A major goal of the course will be to focus your attention on your own life. Together we will investigate major systems that create and rule our lives including capitalism, school, family, popular culture, and the US government. And we will figure out how to interpret our lives, and these systems, and the collision of our lives and these systems.

We will detour into the future and the past but our journey will be primarily contemporary.

Friday, April 30, 2010

HW 52 - Initial Theories of Human Relationships

Your assignment, a ridiculously impossible one, includes sketching out your best insights and theories into why and how humans do what we do - in all forms of relationships.

Not just your theories of human motivation (what we're trying to do and why) but also your theories of love, your family theories, your theories of friendship, power, social structures, roles, nations, ethnicities, genders, and every other aspect of humanity. Please also extend your thoughts in the direction of ethics, of how we should live, of the meaning and value of human life, how we should act with other people.

You can pose questions too - not just simple lists of simple questions - but questions that you think could offer insight if complexly worked with. Elaborate what the question asks and states and assumes.

Look, on the one hand this assignment could define "overwhelming". But on the other hand, we all act in the human world, we all deal with each other every day. So you've already had to evolve these theories in order to navigate your world. This assignment merely asks you to write down some of those theories that you already live by.

5-12 paragraphs due Monday, May 3 @ 9pm.

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