ADMI 861 (Ir)responsible Organizations and Disclosures

Offered: 2019 /2
Credits: 3

What do Hydro Québec and Enbridge have in common? Both are among on the 2018 list of “The 50 Best Corporate Citizens in Canada”, a ranking released by Corporate Knights. Hydro Québec is leading the list (ranked 1st) whereas Enbridge is at the tail end (ranked 47th).

This course provides an overview of organizations and responsibility, including organizational disclosures. What is organizational responsibility? How is organizational responsibility linked to the environment in which firms operate, to their governance, and to the individuals who are embedded in the organizations? How is organizational responsibility linked to disclosures? To answer these questions, the course builds on economics, sociology and philosophy. Philosophy offers useful tools for conceptualizing and understanding responsibility. Economics emphasizes the role that individual actors (e.g., organizations and their employees) play in responsibility. Sociology highlights the environment in which actors are embedded and on how this environment helps or makes it difficult for actors to be responsible. Philosophy, sociology and economics complement one another to jointly offer a deep understanding of the role that actors and their environment play in responsibility.

This course develops your ability to explore (ir)responsible organizations and enhances your knowledge of economics, sociology and philosophy. It offers a space where new and fruitful questions regarding (ir)responsible organizations can be explored. It provides you with a solid foundation for conducting independent research in this field.

Course outline: ADMI 861

Prerequisites: This is a doctoral course; only graduate students can register. There are no other prerequisites. 

Contact: Claudine Mangen

ARTH 801/4 Somewhere Between Local and Global

Offered: 2020 /4
Credits: 3

It is a commonplace that nationalism as a suitable companion or container for art has been under review since the relationship first developed, neither “nation” nor “art” being particularly precise, transparent, or stable, concepts and both, as rallying points, being highly susceptible to, and productive of, propaganda and economic opportunity. Any drift in global politics, economics, or technology causes ripples in cultural activity; the seismic shifts since 1989 have had their effects as artists and art historians – citizens after all – have been struggling to redefine their fields of operation.

But if national art history is headed for the junkyard, its replacement has not yet arrived. A productive uncertainty prevails. The global project is periodically announced and maintained by interim solutions of reorientation and classification that never quite pan out. Both hegemonic history and counterhistory are in trouble, as Terry Smith justly observes: “Globalization has recently reached the limits of its hegemonic ambitions yet remains powerful in many domains. The decolonized have yet to transform the world in their image” (“The State of Art History,” Art Bulletin, December 2010, 379). Almost a decade later, and we are still just getting started. Words matter, and any convenient shortcuts threaten to perpetuate prejudicial divisions. “The first thing,” said Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, in her 2017 keynote at the AICA (Association Internationale des Critiques d’Art) Congress in Paris, “The first thing is to stop thinking non-European.” Art history’s historiographical literature is shot through with speculation and paradox, which keeps the discussion lively, if sometimes disconnected. The big thinking that should be compatible with world-making sometimes falters before the scariness of the endgame – the prospect that real change, affecting more than curriculum and curatorial units, is taking place.

This seminar addresses the ongoing intra- and interdisciplinary debates over the legitimacy and function of national art histories, in relation to three factors: globalization, disciplinary redefinition, and methodological restlessness. It will make use of an edited collection, Narratives Unfolding: National Art Histories in an Unfinished World (2017) to extract and critically analyze the contributors’ methodologies, as applied to Canada, Egypt, Iceland, India, Ireland, Israel/Palestine, Romania, Scotland, Turkey, and the United Arab Emirates, as well as the so-called art cities, including Cairo, Dubai, New York, and Vancouver. These readings and other sources are intended to help members of the seminar to position their own research.

The “unfinished world” figured in the title of Narratives Unfolding is a plural concept: it captures the microscopic unit that is the field of art history today, as well as the macrocosm, a set of supranational conditions that elevate certain events of cultural practice, while abstracting them from place and time. On this phenomenon, we will pause and reflect, for however broad our perspectives, each of us is positioned “somewhere” between local and global, between the centre (as sensed) and all points imaginable. This seminar can be useful to any emerging art historian who wants to be reflexive about their place in the field, and in the world at large.

Special instructions: Priority will be given to students in the inter-university PhD program in Art History. 

Contact: Kristina Huneault

GDBA 531 Professional Business Skills

Offered: 2019 /2 /3
Credits: 3

This course provides students with the necessary skills that help with successful interaction with others in business settings. Topics include designing and delivering effective written and oral messages from concept to delivery, working in groups, and negotiating and resolving conflict by using ethical communication tactics. Pedagogical methods include group-based work, in-class workshops, case studies, presentations and report writing.

Prerequisites: Must possess an undergraduate degree in any field.

Special instructions: Priority will be given to students admitted to GDBA, GCBA, GCQBS, and GCE. 

Contact: Karen Fada

CHME 6021 Advanced Chemical Engineering Thermodynamics

Offered: 2019 /2
Credits: 4

Topics include principles, concepts, and laws/postulates of classical and statistical thermodynamics and their link to applications that require quantitative knowledge of thermodynamic properties from a macroscopic to a molecular level; basic postulates of classical thermodynamics and their application; criteria of stability and equilibria; constitutive property models of pure materials and mixtures, including molecular-level effects using statistical mechanics; equations of state; phase and chemical equilibria of multicomponent systems; and thermodynamics of polymers. Applications are emphasized through extensive problem work relating to practical cases. A project is required.

Prerequisites: Knowledge of general thermodynamics expected. 

Contact: Alex Devisscher

CHME 6081 Advanced Separation Processes

Offered: 2019 /2
Credits: 4

Topics include a review of basic chemical and mechanical separations; multicomponent separations; membrane separations; adsorption; chromatographic separations; and ion exchange. A project is required.

Contact: Alex Devisscher

DART 631 Special Topics in Visual Communication

Offered: 2020 /4
Credits: 3

Topics may address a range of critical perspectives related to the use of signs, icons, and visual symbols to convey ideas and communicate information. This includes graphic design, typography, illustration, and photography, as well as applications in information design, wayfinding, advertising, packaging, and electronic media.

Contact: Martin Racine

APLI 604 Applied Language Studies

Offered: 2019 /2
Credits: 3

Applied Language Studies examines the different theoretical concepts and methods used to analyze and describe the linguistic structure of language (grammar), and it explores ways in which these can be applied to research in second or foreign language acquisition (SLA) and the teaching of second languages (L2s). The course introduces students to the key concepts that characterize the different components of grammar, namely phonology (and associated areas such as phonetics and speech perception), morphology, syntax and semantics, within an approach that recognizes that languages can be affected by the social, psychological, and pragmatic aspects of human behaviour.

Some of the topics covered in APLI 604 include: The physical and acoustic properties of the sounds of human speech (phonetics), the organization of phonological systems (e.g., features, phonemes, syllable structure), the word and sentence structures of languages (morphology and syntax), and meaning (semantics). The course emphasizes applied perspectives to the study of language, including sociolinguistic, psycholinguistic, and generative approaches to SLA. The ultimate goal of APLI 604 is to give future language researchers and teachers the tools necessary to make sound decisions in the analysis and teaching of linguistic structures.

Special instructions: Graduate students interested in the application of linguistic knowledge, particularly in language pedagogy (including computer-assisted language learning). The course targets current and future language teachers and researchers. 

Contact: Nadine Wright

ESTU 642 Selected Topics in Education Problem: Education Philosophy Born of Struggle

Offered: 2019 /2
Credits: 3

In this course we examine a) a series of seminal concepts and texts around which current discussions in Philosophy Born of Struggle (PBOS) revolve, and b) articles and works drawn from/inspired by these concepts in the field of education. The course encourages us to make use of different concepts of struggle to form ethical and transformative teaching philosophies.

Student Learning Outcomes

By the end of the course successful students will have:

• become familiar with and formed an understanding of the range of issues pertaining to EPBOS. worked collectively in order to obtain an in-depth awareness of the conceptual affiliations of two
• major themes in EPBOS.
• developed their personal standpoint on a few key concerns in PBOS as it extends to education.
   

Contact: Mary Marciniak

ENGL 603 - Media Archaeology: Inscription Media edition

Offered: 2020 /4
Credits: 3

What is media archaeology? As Jussi Parikka describes, it is a subfield of media history that scrutinizes contemporary media culture through investigations of past media technologies and creative media practices. Media archaeology takes a special interest in recondite and forgotten apparatuses, practices and inventions. At an historical moment when our own media technologies become obsolete with increasing rapidity, the study of residual forms and practices provides valuable context for analysis, and perhaps the possibility for the emergence of something new.

This course deals with the theory, current practice, and possible trajectories of media archaeology as a discipline. Our chief resource will be the research collection of the new Residual Media Depot of the Media History Research Centre at the Milieux Institute. Work will consist of a mix of writing, thinking, talking, and hands-on encounters with materials from the collection, according to student skills and interests.

This course has been taught twice as an intensive one-week graduate course for the Concordia International Summer Schools -- in 2016, as the pilot for the Summer Schools program itself, and again in 2017. It has been extremely successful on a global scale, drawing students from countries including Canada, China, Sweden, Finland, Spain, Mexico and the USA. For the first time, I am proposing to run it as a full-semester course in winter 2020, and I expect a large cohort of students from departments across Concordia and elsewhere.

I run this course on a "flipped" model, meeting one per week in a 3-hour block. A large amount of additional critical discussion will take place on the class website (see residualmedia.net) in the form of weekly individual blog posts that help to structure conversation.

The first hour each week follows a seminar model. We will make frequent use of breakout groups of various kinds, concept mapping and. In order to provide further context, all seminar members will also spend time locating media examples for in-class screenings in order to provide further contextual information.

The remaining two hours each week consists of work time for an individual or collective project in applied media archaeology. Students must propose their project after the second week of the course. Students will have access to the Depot collection, some support from Research Assistants, plus any other necessary supplies that Milieux can provide (after a student is accepted, the instructors will determine what we can supply and what students will have to supply themselves). Students will also be able to book additional work time on the Depot, according to the availability of my Research Assistants each week.

Projects might include, but are not limited to, the following:

• visual studies of the collection’s hardware
• readings of boxes, manuals and other textual materials
• platform studies of individual consoles in the collection
• media archaeologies, genealogies or geologies of particular consoles
• software studies of particular programs supported by the Depot’s machines
• modding of a particular console (either supplied by the student or purchased for them to work on while here)
• experiments with the Depot's upscaling and signal processing equipment and displays - fieldwork (e.g. a trip to the old Coleco factory, which is now an office loft, or trips to local retro stores, or arcades)
• white papers on the use of particular equipment in the Depot (e.g. how to set up RF consoles like the Atari 2600 or 5200 for classroom use)
• databasing the Depot collection (now underway)
• use the collection to test media-archaeological theory against real technology
• build an emulator, like a Retropie
• build an upscaler
• do some online bibliographic work around retro media collections, archives and labs Students will have access to a full range of Milieux workspaces and equipment during this period.

Readings will be circulated before the course begins. All seminar participants will arrive having completed the readings in advance. The readings themselves will consist in part of major texts from media archaeology, material media studies, cultural technique theory and articulation theory, and in part of new work that the instructors are preparing.

This particular session of the course will focus on inscription media -- forms of analog media that are created as one physical process leaves a trace on the other (e.g. handwriting, typewriting, phonography, film-based photography, etc.). In addition to providing literary graduate students with a much-needed introduction to material media theory, it will provide them with an introduction to media-archaeological methodology and history, paying particular attention to the field's historical relationship to literary studies. (Key authors on the syllabus may include, but are not limited to, Nathan Altice, Wendy Chun, Wolfgang Ernst, Lisa Gitelman, John Guillory, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Stuart Hall, Friedrich Kittler, Eric Kluitenberg, Carolyn Marvin, Shannon Mattern, Jussi Parikka, Bernhard Siegert, Vanessa Schwartz, Jonathan Sterne, Cornelia Vissmann, Raymond Williams, etc.).

Prerequisites: Permission of instructor.

Contact: Andre Dubois

ENGL 608 - Protocol, Hierarchy, the Virtual, Code: Medievalism in Digital Culture

Offered: 2020 /4
Credits: 3

This course studies the afterlife of medieval literary and cultural forms in digital media through an analysis of four key words. Since the twelfth century, “protocol” has evolved from the name for an authenticating portion of an official papyrus record into a name for predefined strategies for making choices in response to contingent circumstances. “Hierarchy,” a name for angelic and ecclesiastic orders first attested in the work of Pseudo-Dionysius, became both a structural logic for databases and a derogatory term for unequal distributions of power. “Virtual” is a post-classical, scholastic adjectival form of virtus (“virtue”), which carries forward this term’s gendered connotations of “manliness” into its framing of ideal potentiality. Finally, “code” is a term whose English use derives ultimately from the corpus iuris civilis of Roman law, a text whose monolithic value hearkens back to the original root of Latin codex in caudex: not only the stump of a tree, but a large block of wood attached to the feet of slaves as a form of punishment. The semantic range of caudex / “code”—running from mute, material marker of abjection to a rule-based but theoretically limitless path to virtual freedom—nicely encapsulates the larger contradiction that these keywords each reveal, and that the medievalism of digital media serves to express.

To trace the history of these words and concepts, this course course will pair theoretical readings by Foucault, Derrida, and Deleuze and Guattari with studies of primary evidence taken from medieval historical documents and philosophical texts, and from contemporary digital media and media studies scholarship. Each keyword will be paired with an analysis of a text from that key literary tradition and narrative structure, the grail quest: “protocol” will be paired with Chrétien de Troyes’ Conte du graal, “hierarchy” with the selections from Malory’s Morte d’Artur concerning the Round Table, the “virtual” with Phil K. Dick’s Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch and Ursula Leguin’s The Lathe of Heaven, and “code” with the adventure game Skyrim and its mods.

Prerequisites: Permission of instructor.

Contact: Stephen Yeager

ENGL 616 - “The World” of Eighteenth-century British Literature

Offered: 2019 /2
Credits: 3

“What is a World?” asks Pheng Cheah in the title to his 2016 book investigating the nature and politics of novelistic discourse. Yet his argument takes the canonical “rise of the novel” narrative for granted. So does Amitav Ghosh in his treatment of the limited capacity of the novel to represent climate change in The Great Derangement. Others have problematized the critical intersections of postcolonial, global, and environmental studies with the history of the novel as a genre and with literature more generally most notably Srivinas Aravamudan in Enlightenment Orientalism: Resisting the Rise of the Novel and Siraj Ahmed in The Archeology of Babel. In this course we will read three or four early novels and/or oriental tales that deal with “the world” including Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko, Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, and Beckford’s Vathek, to investigate what novel history (pace Aravamudan) and literary critical methods deriving from philology (pace Ahmed) can tell us about the world-making as it is currently construed.

Prerequisites: Permission of instructor.

Contact: Marcie Frank

ENGL 662 - Digital Archives and Alternative Canadian Literatures 1750-1980

Offered: 2019 /2
Credits: 3

This course will introduce students to the use of digital resources as an important element of Canadian print culture studies. Beginning with a survey of Canadian print culture, including neglected periodicals and unexamined authorship, students will be invited to contribute to the opening of a Canadian studies with a wider focus than has been possible in the past. The course will present units on the print culture of the underground railway and the abolition movement, on sources for the study of early indigenous records and print, and on early women’s writing drawn from a spectrum of early Canadian communities. Canadian regional print sub-cultures and their predominant genres will also be considered.

Authors to be treated include Mary Ann Shadd, Henry Bibb, Laura Smith Haviland, George Copway, Orenhyatekha, Kahkewaquonaby, David Thompson, Anne Grenfell, and also figures drawn from the more standard history of Canadian literature, including Emily Pauline Johnson, Susanna Moodie, Catharine Parr Traill, Archibald Lampman, Charles Sangster, Marjorie Pickthall and Nellie McClung. This will be a very “hands on” course, and will invite consideration of the material-cultural implications of book history and semiotics. The final units of the course will extend this treatment to small press publishing and the “little magazine” and will be asked to consider the role of such publications in supporting communities of writers in Canada. In this context students will also examine the rise of Canadian modernism in the work of A. M. Klein, Michael Ondaatje and Margaret Atwoo.

Prerequisites: Permission of instructor.

Contact: Daniel O'Leary

ENGL 665/800 A - Postcolonial Environmental Humanities

Offered: 2019 /2
Credits: 3

Environmental humanities can be broadly defined by its focus on cultural, political, and historical dimensions of climate change, resource extraction, and human/nonhuman relationality. Postcolonial studies has long been engaged in articulating transnational approaches to understanding the entanglement of nature and culture in the history of empire. Working primarily in the fields of world literature and postcolonial studies, scholars such as Edward Said and Rob Nixon have brought these areas of inquiry together, arguing that “because of the presence of the colonizing outsider, the land is recoverable at first only through the imagination” (Said 1993). The entanglement of nature and culture is intensified in the present through the dramatic effects of human-induced climate change—or what is being referred to as the era of the Anthropocene. These activities are interwoven with the history of global networks established since the Industrial Revolution, as well as colonial empires, traders and capitalists. Theorizations of the Anthropocene within the humanities (Chakrabarty 2006; Haraway 2016; Latour 2017; Morton 2016; Moore 2015) foreground the global character of this history, and dovetail with postcolonial approaches to the study of the environment. Described by Nixon as “slow violence,” this kind of environmental change is “neither spectacular nor instantaneous, but rather incremental and accretive, its calamitous repercussions playing across a range of temporal scales” (2011).

This course will examine how human/nonhuman relationality and representations of the environment are addressed in postcolonial writing. Through attention to writing about exploration, natural history, travel, eco- tourism, gardens, and memoirs of settlement, this course will investigate how colonial ways of knowing and perceiving the environment have contributed to the discourse of human ascendency over nature. In additional to postcolonial approaches to the environmental humanities (Glissant 1989; Pratt 1992; Mukherjee 2010; Nixon 2011; Carrigan 2011; DeLoughrey et al. 2015; Huggan et al. 2015), we will examine theorizations of the Anthropocene and the posthuman that foreground the global character of environmental history. We will ground these theoretical debates in discussions of literary works by writers such as Anita Desai, Amitav Ghosh, Nadine Gordimer, Helon Habila, Jamaica Kincaid, and Arundhati Roy, Eden Robinson, Ken Saro-Wiwa, and Indra Sinha.

Prerequisites: Priority will be given to PhD students in cognate disciplines and related research interests (Humanities, INDI, Communication Studies, History, Cinema, Art History, Religion Culture and Society). Admission to this course requires permission of the instructor.

Special instructions: Please contact Dr. Jill Didur with a statement of your interest and background in this area. Priority will be given to PhD students in cognate disciplines and related research interests (Humanities, INDI, Communication Studies, History, Cinema, Art History, Religion Culture and Society). Admission to this course requires permission of the instructor.

Contact: Andre Dubois

HIST 670 AA Recent Trends in Global History

Offered: 2019 /2
Credits: 3

Course outline: HIST 670

Prerequisites: Some sense of modern history would be helpful but there is no expectation of having knowledge about specific content. 

Special instructions: The readings for the first week, which are very light, should be completed in advance. However, starting the second week is also an option if serious.

Contact: Anya Zilberstein

HUMA 887 - Social Semiotics and Discourse Analysis

Offered: 2019 /2
Credits: 3

This seminar will introduce students to some of the main traditions and practices in semiotics and discourse analysis. Students will engage with metatheoretical issues (such as theoretical influences across different traditions), as well as opportunities to apply different frameworks through concrete examples (e.g., semio-linguistic analysis, the circulation of visual signs, semiotic and the non-verbal, political discourse analysis). Specific topics to be covered may include: Saussurean semiotics; the semiotics of Charles Sanders Peirce; the notion of value and the sign as elaborated by Rossi-Landi and Ponzio; systemic functional grammar; the utterance (énonciation); studies in discourse and ideology; intertextuality; francophone discourse analysis (Pêcheux, Maldidier, Robin); the archeological tradition of Michel Foucault.

Prerequisites: Doctoral students only. This is an interdisciplinary course; doctoral students from all disciplines are welcome.

Contact: Anna Ramos

MSCA 672-B / ADMI 832-B Qualitative Research Methods in Marketing

Offered: 2020 /4
Credits: 3

This seminar style course is designed to familiarize students with the philosophy and method of qualitative research. It aims to cultivate skills to develop relevant and feasible research questions and carry out tasks to tackle these questions. Beyond scholarly research, the course will also cover applied uses of qualitative methods. Other topics to be covered are research ethics in qualitative methods, research project management, online data, presenting research findings, data collection aids, and multi-method inquiry. The seminar aims to address the needs for MSc and PhD students in Marketing who seek to utilize qualitative methods in their research projects or theses, and incorporate these methods in their future teaching. It is also valuable for graduate students from other departments who would like to incorporate qualitative research training to their studies.

Contact: Maria Dolores Mosquera

MAST 679-H Topics/Stats & Probability: Statistical Learning

Offered: 2020 /4
Credits: 3

This course is an introduction to statistical learning techniques, which is a subdomain of machine learning. Topics covered include:

• Cross-validation
• Regression methods (Linear models, Variable selection, Shrinkage)
• Classification methods (K-nearest neighbors, Linear and quadratic discriminants, Logistic regression, Support vector machines)
• Decision trees
• Unsupervised learning (Clustering, Principal component analysis)
• Neural networks.
  

Prerequisites: 

• Linear Regression
• Elementary linear algebra
• Elementary calculus
• A first course in probability
  

Contact: Frédéric Godin

FMST 801 Epistemology of the Film and Media Archive

Offered: 2020 /4
Credits: 3

The objective of the course is to explore the changing role of the archive in audio-visual culture, as it intersects with a wide range of media technologies and emergent histories. What kind of knowledge is produced by different kinds of archives, and how does that knowledge shift with changes in media and technologies of storage and access? How have archives served (or not served) different constituencies in Canada and globally? How are archives funded and supported and how does that support influence the kinds of knowledge, research, and historiography thereby produced?

The class will include weekly readings and screenings with which students will be expected to engage critically. Students will be asked to identify an existing archive, and produce a critical analysis of that archive based on research questions developed in class from the assigned readings. An alternative assignment is to produce a work of media archiveology, for those students who have the appropriate media-making skills, in which they will use film extracts in order to analyze a specific archive—again using research questions developed from course readings.

The course will also lead towards a symposium in Spring 2020 involving researchers affiliated with the Archive/Counter Archive Research consortium. Students in the class will be involved in the planning of the conference and will be invited to participate.

Prerequisites: Prerequisite for students not enrolled in the PhD in Film and Moving Image Studies program: enrollment in a doctoral program; previous courses in film and/or media studies; permission from the Instructor.

Special instructions: Priority will be given to students in the PhD in Film and Moving Image Studies Program. Students in other doctoral programs should email the instructor Catherine Russell for permission to register with a copy to the Graduate Program Assistant. Please explain your interest in the course and relevant background in your email.

Contact: Catherine Russell

FMST 635 / 835 Technology and Intimacy

Offered: 2019 /2
Credits: 3

This seminar examines contemporary forms of technological intimacy, drawing on approaches from digital media, cultural theory, feminist science and technology studies, and disability studies, among other fields. From “the cultural politics of emotion” (Ahmed), “ugly feelings” (Ngai), and “surplus life” (Cooper) to “emotional capitalism” (Illouz), “habitual new media” (Chun), and the “political economy of intimacies” (Lowe), we will trace a wide range of debates related to changing conceptions of technological and human relations. Of particular interest is the intersection of bio-technologies that now command an increased capacity to extract and harvest, alter and optimize, patent and monetize “life itself.” The course will give specific attention to debates about behavioral economies, data intimacies, algorithmic identity, network aesthetics, smart media, privacy and publicity, enhancement technologies, shifting habits and sociality, and experimental embodiment.

Special instructions: Priority will be given to students in MA Film Studies and PhD in Film and Moving Image Studies Programs. Students in other master’s and doctoral programs should email the instructor Joshua Neves for permission to register with a copy to the Graduate Program Assistant. Please explain your interest in the course and relevant background in your email. 

Contact: Joshua Neves

FMST 635 / 835 Queer of Colour Film and Media 

Offered: 2020 /4
Credits: 3

This seminar explores the formation and circulation of the category of queer of color and its relatives—such as queer diaspora and queer Indigeneity—and their significance for studying film and media. We will consider the separate but related genealogies of these terms, as we historicize the category of “queer” vis-à-vis frameworks such as diaspora, blackness, settler colonialism, indigeneity, and postcolonialism. Of especial interest will be how queer of color audiences and mediamakers have responded to hegemonic constructions of race, gender and sexuality through practices of critical spectatorship and production. Film and media to be examined include works by Kent Monkman, Cheryl Dunye, Dee Rees, Paul Wong, Thirza Cuthand, Isaac Julien, Pratibha Parmar, Aurora Guerrero, Adam Garnet Jones and Vivek Shraya.

Special instructions: Priority will be given to students in MA Film Studies and PhD in Film and Moving Image Studies Programs. Students in other Master's and doctoral programs should email the instructor Dr. Beenash Jafri for permission to register, with a copy to the Graduate Program Assistant. Please explain your interest in the course and relevant background in your email. 

Contact: Beenash Jafri

Note: Priority will be given to students in the Political Science PhD and MPPPA programs. Interested students must obtain permission to enroll from the professor.

POLI 683/POLI 815 - Democratic Governance, Public Policy & Research Methodology

Offered: Summer, Fall, Winter (2019)
Credits: 3

This course provides a unique opportunity for students to take a selection of the Workshops on Social Science Research (WSSR) offered by the Department of Political Science for credit.

The WSSR are intensive short learning experiences designed to enhance your knowledge and skills in the areas of democratic governance and public policy. These workshops are led by highly reputable and insightful guest lecturers from well-known academic institutions and/or well-qualified and distinguished backgrounds. For this course, you must select, register in, and attend six workshops, as well as complete all the requirements listed in this outline below.

Prerequisites: Graduate students from all faculties are welcome to take the WSSR for credit. Be sure to consult with your Graduate Program Director (GPD) in order to confirm that you are eligible to receive credit toward your degree. Please email confirmation of eligibility from your GPD to wssr@concordia.ca once you have completed and submitted your "Permission Request" form (see below). See a list of Concordia GPDs and GPAs.

Special instructions:

• To apply for permission to register for this course, students need to complete the Permission Request Form on the website.
• To earn credit for this course, students will select, register in, and attend six days-worth of workshops (9:00am-4:30pm). The listing of workshops can be found on the website.
• For information about how the course works, download the course outline.

PSYC 734 - Multivariate Statistics (aka Latent Variable Modelling)

Offered: 2020 /4
Credits: 3

This course covers the analysis of continuous and categorical latent variable based on continuous and categorical indicators, taking into account the nesting of information units within individuals (longitudinal) and groups (multilevels). As such, we will cover: Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA), Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA), Path Analysis, Mediation, Structural Equation Modeling (SEM), Exploratory and Bifactor SEM, Multi-group analyses and tests of measurement invariance, Moderation, Autoregressive cross lagged models, Latent change models, Latent curve models, multilevel analyses, and doubly latent multilevel analyses. Emphasized for these topics are the correct estimation of models, the correct interpretations of the results, and the ability to pursue autonomous learning thereafter.

See the 2019 course outline. The 2020 version will follow the same sequence.

Prerequisites: PSYC 601 (or any equivalent graduate class in statistics covering the basics of analysis of variance, correlation and regression, and hypothesis testing).

Special instructions: Priority will be given to psychology students. Students from other departments should first contact the instructor to make sure that they meet the prerequisites.

Contact: Alexandre Morin

RELI 6004 / 839A - Power & Religion in South Asia

Offered: 2019 /2
Credits: 3

This course examines the intersection of power and religion with a primary focus on early modern and contemporary South Asia (India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Sri Lanka...). With a long history of religious pluralism and diversity, the region is home to Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, Jains, Buddhists, Christians, and Jews. Among the themes to be explored are: the religious undergirding of social hierarchies of gender, caste and race; religious ritual and power; pre-colonial, colonial and post-colonial ideas of sovereignty and the state; “religious movements” and justice; and politics and religious identities. Many of these themes will be relevant to a broader analysis of religious dynamics and power relations, which students may wish to undertake, outside of the confines of this region.

Prerequisites: Permission of instructor.

Special instructions: Open to MA & PhD students.

Contact: Leslie Orr

RELI 823 - Historiography, Religion and Power

Offered: 2019 /2
Credits: 3

In this course, we will track three themes. We begin with a brief examination of the history of the disciplines of the History of Religions, and of Comparative Religion. This leads us to the second theme we will be concerned with: historiography. We will consider the character of the sources we can use for making histories, and the nature and value of different approaches to historical study, especially in terms of their value for elucidating religious change and processes of religious interaction. The third theme is an extended treatment of colonialism, globalization, post-colonialism, decoloniality, and secularism as elements in or perspectives on contemporary religions and cultures.

Prerequisites: Open to PhD students only, with approval of instructor.

Special instructions: Course of interest to students in the Humanities and Social Sciences.

Contact: Leslie Orr

SCPA 503 - Compétences de base en développement économique communautaire

Offered: 2019 /2
Credits: 3

Dans un contexte de crises politiques, économiques et écologiques, on se doit d’expérimenter des pratiques économiques post-capitalistes pour la justice sociale et environnementale. Ce cours sera l’occasion de recadrer notre compréhension de ce qu’est l’économie et de découvrir un langage économique d’émancipation basé sur des pratiques éthiques, l’être-en-commun, l’horizontalité, l’affect, le “care” et l’action collective. Il s’agit de s’approprier le travail (mieux survivre ensemble), l’entreprise (distribuer les surplus pour le bien-être des humains et de la planète), les transactions (aller à la rencontre de l’autre), la propriété (élargir les communs) et les finances (investir dans des futurs meilleurs). Il s’agit d’interdépendance et de création de vivre-ensembles écologiques pour tout·e·s.

Le contenu de ce cours est basé principalement sur le corpus de J.K. Gibson-Graham et le Community Economies Collective. Méconnue au Québec, cette école de pensée regroupe aujourd’hui plus de 170 chercheur·e·s-engagé·e·s et bon nombre de communautés de par le monde. Elle cherche à contribuer à l’émergence d’une économie politique centrée sur la pratique de l’auto-détermination économique, orientée vers une vision qu’un « autre monde est possible » et dévouée à des futurs économiques post-capitalistes.

L’approche participative oblige, les étudiant·e·s jouent un rôle actif dans la salle de classe; chacun·e doit avoir lu les textes à l’avance et être préparé·e à intervenir lors des discussions. Un mélange d’outils pédagogiques sera utilisé par la professeure, notamment l’atelier, la présentation magistrale, le visionnement de films, des présentations par des personnes invitées, les discussions en petits groupes suivis d’une plénière.

Course outline: SCPA 503

Prerequisites: Expérience en économie sociale, organisation communautaire ou d'autre types d'engagement social.

Special instructions: The course is in French, thus students must be able to understand verbal and written French; assignments can be produced in English.

Contact: Anna Kruzynski