What Do You Desire? What Do You Fear? Theorize it! Teaching Political Theory through Utopian Writing

Abstract

In teaching writing we are tacitly teaching a version of reality and the students' place and mode of operation in it." James A. Berlin~1996, 557! Khristina Haddad is assistant professor, department of political science, Moravian College. She teaches a writing-intensive course on visionary political writing and is affiliated with German Studies and Women's Studies. Her research interests include politics of time and temporality, Hannah Arendt, political action, fear, feminist theory, women's studies, and, in particular, the politics of women's health. PSOnline www.apsanet.org

Seeding a Black Feminist Future on the Horizon of a Third Reconstruction: The Abolitionist Politics of Self-Care in Octavia Butler’sParable of the Sower

“…Where Du Bois used archives to excavate this past in order to build his insurgent politics (Burden-Stelly and Horne 2019), others have turned to the literary and a variety of fiction writers who build new worlds that transcend while also paying homage to the historical trajectories of our collective empirical world. Butler is one such writer of the seemingly unlikely genre of science fiction that has broken open the scholarly imagination even in the field of political theory, but of which has left out an analysis of the Black feminist intellectual trajectory in which she is situated (Coles 2005;Curtis 2012;Haddad 2005). Octavia Butler's insistence that we sow the seeds of liberatory thought in and beyond the Earth grounds us in a soil that we all share, allows us to extend ourselves collectively and in solidarity toward a horizon of liberation, and ultimately to build a world where institutions of oppression have not just vanished but will no longer re-appear.…”

Popular culture as pedagogy in the political theory classroom: reflections from higher education

“…The teaching of political theory is, therefore, a public good because it helps us understand how the world is and how the world should be (Editorial 2014), which is perhaps more important than ever before. A wide range of techniques have been employed in the teaching of political theory including metaphor (Best 1984), designing Tumblr output (Kohen 2014), utopian writing (Haddad 2005), simulation (Glasgow 2015), virtual learning environments (Collins et al 2006), and problematising and teaching outside of the canon (Parrish 2007;Ramgotra 2015).…”