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WGSS S2255 (CRN: 30169) | Syllabus | Learn More
Instructors: Eda Pepi
Dates: Session B, June 29 - July 31, 2026
Course Mode: Online
Meeting Times: MW 9.00-12.15
Distributional Requirements: Social Sciences
Eligibility: Open to pre-college and college students
Online Course. This seminar plunges into the unruly life of power: how it inhabits laws and states, moves through gendered and racialized bodies, and conceals itself in the seeming neutrality of words. What makes a rule feel legitimate? Political & Legal Anthropology asks what it means to live under rules we did not write and what happens when people decide to rewrite them. What does it mean to be governed, to obey, to resist, to persuade, to endure? When does order become coercion, or violence pass as justice? Ethnographies of political emergency, prisons, war, counterterrorism, bureaucracy, and secrecy reveal what “law” names when it lives in gesture, silence, confession, or refusal. Across worlds—colonial and postcolonial, democratic and authoritarian, across the Global South and North—societies create and contest authority as law and politics spill beyond the state, where taboos, norms, and desires unsettle the old faiths in freedom and civility. Reading canonical and contemporary works side by side, we explore how legality becomes aesthetic, how emotions become rights, how evidence becomes story, and how dissent takes shape as both art and argument. 1 Credit. Session B: June 29 – July 31. Tuition: $5480. Technology Fee: $85.
