Please note:  This is a tentative schedule.

Core Courses

CQ600 Colloquium [0.5 credit]
Offered: Fall 2012 and Winter 2013 (bi-weekly, two-term course)
Instructor: Dr. Andrew Herman (CAST Director)

All students are required to attend this bi-weekly colloquium during fall and winter semesters. The colloquium includes such activities as talks by visiting scholars and CAST faculty, workshops to develop scholarly skills and student research presentations. Credit will be established on a pass/fail basis. 

CQ601 Cultural Analysis and Social Theory [0.5 credit]
Offered: Fall 2012
Instructor: M. Sweedler

This course reviews important issues in cultural analysis and social theory, such as the politics and practices of representation, the relationship between knowledge and power (both within and between cultures), the relationship between race, class and gender, discourse and the production of alterity and difference, ethnographic authority, instrumental reason and modernity, relativism versus universalism, hegemonic and counter-hegemonic forces in both the mass media and everyday life.

CQ602 Approaches to Cultural Analysis [0.5 credit]
Offered: Fall 2012
Instructor: Dr. Andrew Herman

This course examines various concepts and methods of qualitative research and analysis. These include but are not limited to discourse analysis, narrative analysis, semiotic analysis, visual analysis, and ethnographic practice and representation. It explores issues arising from questions of positionality, reflexivity, ethics and responsibility, and writing. The course begins from the assumption  that theory and method are inextricably tied and that doing cultural analysis fully engages the researcher in (self)reflection on the symbolic-expressive dimensions of social life.

Elective Courses

The elective courses in each field are listed below as is their availability. Note that based on student interest, the Spring course offering will be confirmed in the Fall.

Field One:  Globalization, Identity and Social Movements

CQ610 Race, Gender and Imperialization [0.5 credit]
Offered: Winter 2013
Instructor: Dr. Jasmin Zine

This course critically examines the historical and discursive practices through which racialization developed within colonial relations and contestations with particular attention to the intersection of gender and racialization in various literary, visual and ethnographic colonial and post-colonial narratives. Using an anti-colonial framework, this course also examines how race and gender are constituted within contemporary imperialist practices such globalization and the current “war on terror.” 

Field Two:  Body Politics: Gender, Sexuality and Embodiment

CS641 Special Topics in Body Politics
"Thinking through the Self: Embodiment, Affect and Subjectivity" [0.5 credit]
Offered: Fall 2012
Instructor: Dr. Patricia Elliot
Course Outline:  http://www.wlu.ca/documents/51436/CQ641_Fall_2012.pdf

This course will examine theories of embodiment and subjectivity that prioritize the concept of affect in order to better understand its potential for analyzing contemporary issues in social and cultural theory and their political ramifications. Beginning with psychoanalysis, we develop a basis for thinking the relationship between embodiment, affect and the subject. Theorists to be considered may include: Elizabeth Grosz, Margrit Shildrick, Teresa Brennan, Sara Ahmed, and Brian Massumi.

Field Three:   Cultural Representation & Social Theory 

CQ631
Cultural Studies in Theory and Practice
[0.5 credit]
Offered: Winter 2013
Instructor: Dr. Herbert Pimlott

Cultural studies has been the most contentious field of study in the late 20th century because its subject matter and approaches challenge the academy's traditional disciplinary and institutional modi operandi, and because its proponents also see it as a form of political engagement. This course combines an introduction and overview of cultural studies during its formative period, 1950s-1990s, highlighting key innovations and ruptures in its development as a form of knowledge production and of politics, of its institutional locations and social formations, and of cultural studies practices.

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CQ650 Directed Study [0.5 credit]

The study of a special topic under the guidance of a CAST faculty member. Directed study topics must be approved by the program.

CQ695 Major Research Paper [1.0 credit]

Under the supervision of a faculty member, students will complete a paper in which they engage in original research on an approved topic. Typically, papers will be between 50 and 70 pages in length, excluding bibliography.