Within the fabric of social relations lie the workings of power and authority. Think of your relationships with your parents, siblings, relatives, teachers, bosses, and best friends. When one of them asks you to do something or disagrees with you about some topic or issue, does your response have to do with power and authority? For instance, do your responses of compliance, deference, defiance, inquiry, silence, or challenge, depend on yours and/or others’ power and authority? By focusing on bodies of knowledge, the role of place and space, and social group differences, we will explore what power and authority entail, what lends individuals power and authority, and how power and authority circulate among individual and group relations, specifically through writing and writing practices.

This seminar examines power and authority through the notions of site, difference, and discourse. The readings are organized around discourses (medicine, social science, law, psychiatry, and religion), sites (the prison, the museum, the mental hospital, the workplace, the church, the fraternity), and differences (age, race, gender, sexuality, socioeconomic class, and religion), focusing on such topics as incarcerations, institutionalization, mental illness, rape, Catholicism, and medicine.