https://at-ceu.studyguide.timeedit.net/modules/SOCL5150?type=COREThis course introduces students to a set of theoretical traditions that have profoundly reshaped how the humanities and social sciences think about meaning, power, subjectivity, and knowledge since the late twentieth century. Rather than approaching theory as a collection of self-contained "schools," the course traces a series of methodological displacements: away from meaning and intention, away from stable subjects and identities, away from experience as evidence, and away from society as a bounded object of explanation. Across the semester, we follow a couple of central questions: How are subjects, truths, and political realities produced? The texts assembled here share a refusal to treat concepts such as identity, experience, culture, gender, race, or power as given. Instead, they analyze the historical, discursive, affective, and material conditions through which these categories emerge, stabilize, and become politically operative. The course begins with poststructuralist critiques of authorship, meaning, and representation, introducing discourse as a key analytical concept. From there, it moves to genealogical approaches that foreground bodies, power, and historical contingency. Subsequent sessions examine psychoanalysis and ideology as theories of subject formation, postcolonial and feminist interventions that expose the limits of universalism, and cultural studies and hegemony theory as analyses of consent, media, and everyday life. The latter part of the course turns to science and technology studies, feminist standpoint theory, queer epistemology, and affect theory, expanding the analytic focus to non-human actors, situated knowledge, and emotional attachment. 2 Again, as during the first sequence of the theory class, our emphasis is on discussing and distinguishing how "to think" the social in different ways. And, while not applying directly, to reflect on how these different thinking styles inspire different ways of researching the social and what kind of approaches to analysis they might inspire.