Course Details
Course offered Winter 2020
HONORS 231 A: Contested Commodities (SSc, DIV)
HONORS 231 A: Contested Commodities (SSc, DIV)
SLN 15382 (View UW registration info »)
Email: wmck@uw.edu
Credits: 5
Limit: 35 students
A middle-aged homeless woman takes the bus to Ballard twice a week to sell her blood plasma. A Zanesville, Ohio man releases fifty-six exotic animals out of captivity. Thousands of Indian farmers march carrying Neem tree branches to protest ‘biopiracy.’ This course explores these and other cases of ‘contested commodities’ – social, biological, immaterial entities whose entry into (and exit out of) capitalist markets has raised ire, conflict, and conceptual confusion. Through weekly discussions, written reflections, experiential site visits around Seattle, guest speakers, and a final project, students will learn to understand commodification as a socially situated process fraught with relations of power, difference, and value. Course discussion will engage a range of issues related to contested commodification, including labor, race, class, the human/nonhuman divide, gender, sexuality, the state, biology, and political resistance. Readings will draw from a range of historical and contemporary case studies including early modern Europe, colonial India, and present-day Seattle, as well as a variety of media and genres. By the end of the course, students will learn to appreciate their own relation to (un)contested commodification, to unpack the politics surrounding these conflicts, and to imagine alternative ways of making and remaking value.