Ways of Knowing: Knowledge and Power

In this class we engage with texts in a variety of disciplines and genres that stage inquiries into power, privilege, and knowledge. Analyzing novels like Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye, theory like Karl Marx's The Communist Manifesto, and films like Jordan Peele's Get Out, we examine how power and social identity shape the way that knowledge is produced, manipulated, disseminated, and consumed. The course offers an epistemological framework that links our liberal arts education with pressing issues of inequity and injustice in the world, like racism, gender disparity, classism, and sexism.