SOC-358 Time and Temporal Experience
Time. The lifeblood for everything we do in this life and potentially the next. It is the distance between you and me. It is the only thing we all have and can never regain. In our very finite lives, we are constantly working against the clock in an attempt to find meaning, love, and purpose. Our daily lives are calculated by the clock, calendars, and other measures of time blocks. Our mental processes (memory, consciousness, etc.) are steeped in temporal terms as we consolidate our present on the basis of our pasts and potential futures. Time is everything – the only thing. The goal of this course is to expose you to the funky concept of time and how it orders and informs our daily lives. You will be grounded in interdisciplinary understandings of time, particularly pulling from sociology, anthropology, philosophy, and feminist literature. We will explore how the clock came to dominate our modern world and the hegemony of western time. We will look at alternative understandings and social orderings of time. We will look at how time is a marker and maker of difference and how time is racialized, gendered, classed, etc. We will study how time is experienced in disjunction with the clock and how we attempt to manipulate time in given spaces. We will look at unique and telling experiences of time, such as imprisonment, terminal illness, and waiting in general. By the time you leave this course, you will have a complicated, nuanced, and frustrating understanding of time in our globalized world.
Seminar (12)
Credits
1
Prerequisite
One 100-level SOC course