FALL TERM 2024
This Fall 2024 term, our visiting professor is Tyler McCreary. He will be teaching two courses, PECO 5501 and PECO 5503.
PECO 5000F [0.5 credit]
Theories of Political Economy
Instructor: Stacy Douglas
Students analyze and synthesize the core concepts and ideas proposed by both the founders and modern practitioners of political economy. The course focuses on theories of power relations and inequalities and assesses the consequences of these theories.
This seminar examines both foundational and contemporary theoretical perspectives of capitalism, settler colonialism, the modern state, and relations of power. Contending views of the dynamics governing economic, political, and cultural changes in the modern era, and of modernity itself, will be explored. What light do these theories shed on processes of socio-economic change and the complex relationship between the economic, the cultural, and the political? How ought we to identify the collective actors engaged in making these changes, the sites of their interaction, and the processes through which collective identities are constituted? What are classes, and are they important? What of sex and gender, race, and other bases of both identity formation and oppression? Is ‘capitalism’ still a discrete entity (and was it ever so)? How does it intersect with racism and settler colonialism in Canada today? What is ‘neoliberalism’, and is ‘globalisation’ a new phenomenon? How do we make sense of economic and social crisis?
Course Outline
PECO 5002F [0.5 credit]
Political Economy of Work and Labour
Instructor: TBA
Students analyze and synthesize key concepts and debates in the political economy of work and labour with particular attention to divisions of labour, power structures, and histories of struggle.
Students in this seminar will analyze the social, political and economic conditions within which capital and labour interact in Canada. Key events in the history of Canadian work and labour as well as current concerns and emerging challenges will be examined. Actions by trade unions will be central in this analysis. Through the readings and discussions, we will consider and assess organizing, bargaining and political action strategies focussing on core concepts of mobilization and solidarity. The theme of equity in work and in the labour movement will be woven into readings and discussions. We will develop intersectional analytical skills to note and address inequalities of class, gender, race, abilities and sexual orientation in work and labour. Particular attention will be paid to the public sector, to the role of unions in challenging the growth of inequality and precarious employment and to the future of work post-pandemic.
Questions for seminar discussions include: What are the elements of effective organizing and bargaining strategies? How can the union movement mobilize and build solidarity between workers and with other members of society? What are decolonizing and inclusive strategies for the labour movement? Why is intersectional analysis important and what difference will it make? Why is it important to recognize experience and build in reflective practices?
Course Outline
PECO 5501A (PSCI 5501/SOCI 5504) [0.5 credit]
The Political Economy of Technology
Instructor: Tyler McCreary
This seminar introduces graduate students to the interface between political economy and critical studies of science and technology. The aim of the course is to expose the mythologies of technological determinism and demonstrate the centrality of capitalism to the misdirection of technological development and its attendant injustices, and to reflect on how developments in science and technology are impacted by capitalist relations, and their inflection by colonialism, racism, patriarchy, ableism, heteronormativity, and anthropocentrism. To begin, the course will establish a historical materialist frame for analysis of technology within capitalism, particularly focusing on relationships between technological developments and strategies of accumulation, the role of technological changes in labour processes and increasing rates of exploitation; and the role of infrastructure in effecting spatial fixes for crises of overaccumulation. A second major theme will examine the intersection with biomedical science and political economy in genomic research and drug development. The third theme of the course is technologies of carcerality and surveillance. It will also highlight emerging the new economies around technologies of decarceration, such as electronic monitoring, The fourth unit moves to the political economy of big data.The course will close with a unit that addresses the intersection of the political economy and the environmental. Here will stress the links between the growth of fossil capitalism and accelerating ecological crises, which includes addressing the original foundations of capitalism in Indigenous dispossession, to confront the social and ecological injustices and crises of the world.
Course Outline
PECO 5501F (HIST 5315F) [0.5 credit]
State and Society in Canadian History – Natural Resources Extraction in Canadian History
Instructor: Dominique Marshall
An exploration of the complex history of the extraction of natural resources in Canada. It addresses Canada’s transnational relations of labour and business, Indigenous and traditional understandings of rights to the land at home and abroad, contrasting traditions and perspectives on the ecology and management of natural resources amongst users, activists, government agencies and civil society organizations, social and cultural histories of science and technology, questions of gender and generations, relations between humans and non-human inhabitants of the environment. It pays a particular attention to political and legal conflicts over the regulation of resources extraction, regulations of all sorts about use and preservation, contested or collaborative. The course features corresponding transnational perspectives, in conversations with African environmental/resource management experiences/practices from African and Latin American regions. The course also relies on the shared knowledge of an interdisciplinary group of students.
PECO 5503F (SOCI 5503/ PSCI 5504) [0.5 credit]
Colonialism and Racial PetroCapitalism
Instructor: Tyler McCreary
Fossil fuels are regularly imagined to fuel the global economy, shaping its politics, and as a political curse that enriches elites while driving racial inequalities, ethnic conflicts, imperial wars, and expanding climatic crises. This course will trace the political economy of fossil fuels. critically querying these relations. To do so, the course takes a materialist lens to examine the relationship between energy and society, studying the social, political, economic, and environmental impacts of hydrocarbon development within a global capitalist society at multiple scales.
Course Outline
PECO 5900 [0.5 credit]
Tutorial in Political Economy
Directed readings on selected aspects of political economy, involving preparation of papers as the basis for discussion with the tutor. Offered when no regular course offering meets a candidate’s specific needs.
Prerequisite(s): Permission of the Director.
Form: Tutorial Approval Form
WINTER TERM 2025
This Winter 2025 term, our visiting professor is Sumeet Mhaskar who will be teaching PECO 5502 and PECO 5504.
PECO 5001W [0.5 credit]
Methodologies of Political Economy
Instructor: David Hugill
Students conceptualize and design an interdisciplinary research project in political economy, using an appropriate methodological approach. Methodological alternatives are compared.
This seminar prepares students to undertake a significant independent research project at the graduate level. Designed largely as a workshop, the course provides hands-on training in how to design, conduct, and produce scholarly research. Course materials provoke students to think critically about methodology and their own methodological choices as researchers. Topics include the relationship of methodology to matters of theory and evidence, as well as to epistemology and the ethics and politics of knowledge production. These concerns will also be linked to more nuts-and-bolts issues, including how to turn a broad project topic into one or more researchable questions. It sets out to expand students’ awareness of the range of methodologies they might enlist in their work and provide them with tools for evaluating the research methods best suited to their own questions, training, and objects of inquiry.
Course Outline
PECO 5502 Y (PSCI 5502 W/SOCI 5505 W) [0.5 credit]
Coolies and Capitalism
Instructor: Sumeet Mhaskar
The word coolie evokes images of the porters that one still continues to encounter at the railway stations across South Asia. The word coolie has its origins is the Tamil language word ‘kuli’ which referred to wages for the hired work and acquired a pejorative character for an “unskilled” low-wage manual labour. While examining the category of coolie this course will explore the rich body of literature on South Asian labour, from diverse theoretical and methodological positions. This course will look at the category of coolie how this figure fits within capitalism especially in the South Asian context. The course examines various forms of work regimes in colonial and post-colonial South Asia such as in the indentured migration, maritime labour, agricultural and artisanal work, and the factory labour. While exploring the category of labour from various vantage points, this course will specifically look at the construction of concepts such as the formal and the informal labour, and its relation to the social structures of accumulation such as gender, caste, race and religion. Following this, the course revisits important debates around the questions of ‘free’ and ‘unfree’ labour; and investigates how the social bonds around caste, community and kinship are configured and re-configured in various historical contexts. While looking at the questions of gender, masculinity and the family, this course will examine the ways and spaces in which gendered identities—both female and male—are produced and reproduced. Finally, this course will explore workers’ subjectivities through their own voices and how they are made and unmade in the changing socio-economic contexts.
Course Outline
PECO 5504W (SOCI 5502/PSCI 5505) [0.5 credit]
The Economic Sociology of Labour Regulation
Instructor: Sumeet Mhaskar
This course explores the interplay between law, economy and society and its implications for the regulation of labour. The British colonial state introduced various laws to regulate the labour. The labour laws include regulating the age of workers in the factories, providing health care facilities , introduction of maternity benefits, setting up crèches inside the factories, to banning bonded labour, regulating wages and other social security benefits. While most of these laws were introduced to cater to the needs of the capital, some of them were introduced due to the demands from the labourers themselves. The course will examine the social, political, and economic conditions that influenced the making of the past and present labour legislation, with examples from India and parallels drawn to other Commonwealth states, including Canada.
Course Outline
PECO 5900 [0.5 credit]
Tutorial in Political Economy
Directed readings on selected aspects of political economy, involving preparation of papers as the basis for discussion with the tutor. Offered when no regular course offering meets a candidate’s specific needs.
Prerequisite(s): Permission of the Director.
Form: Tutorial Approval Form
PECO 6000W [0.5 credit]
Political Economy: Core Concepts
Instructor: Laura Macdonald
Students analyze and synthesize the historical evolution of, and contemporary debates in, political economy through interdisciplinary dialogue. Students develop knowledge of political economy theories compatible with their own research interests.
Course Outline