This course comparatively reads the melodramas of Douglas Sirk, Todd Haynes, and Ranier Werner Fassbinder alongside the concept of dispositif (apparatus, or concrete social formation) in the social theory of Michel Foucault and Giorgio Agamben.

This 10-week course studies the relation between pornography and thought in a historical, cross-cultural, and comparative context. 

This course studies the cultural life of the city from its days as a Spanish settlement named Yurba Buena to the present. It treats the historical and cultural life of the city as coextensive with modernity (modern capitalist development, including "progress" and its ideologies, which we generally refer to today as globalization). Because the city of SF is bound-up with modernity, it is something that is still happening, something that we are all participating in and working through. This course thinks the city as a history of the present. 

The philosophy of Rick and Morty is an experiment in learning as radical as cartoons themselves. In this course, we will think seriously about philosophy (Nietzsche, Baudrillard, Deleuze), social theory (In the Dust of This Planet, Gamer Theory, Enjoying It: Candy Crush and Capitalism), video games, comics, and various forms of popular culture through the show Rick and Morty.