Social Work: Transforming Rage & Grief

See Schedule of Courses for specific titles.

SPMSW Students ONLY Synchronous online

In this course, we will treat rage, and the expression of rage, as intricately tied with grief as outlined by Judith Butler in her now iconic speeches and writings on the subject (see 2014 and 2023). More so we will consider how to account for rage inside this intricate connection to explore grief in relation to rage and complicate the typification of subjects and their behavior. The purpose for this is twofold. First, we are interested in understanding people as they understand themselves, that is, less in terms of some extra-local sense-making ordered way and more in terms of how people experience themselves (commonly, in more complex ways). Second, by refusing to speak categorically or in simple prescribed ways about people and their actions, we make standing suppositions about people and divisions between them less clear, the methods of power less efficient and the targeting of others more difficult. In all, these more complex ways of making sense of rage disrupt the inevitable conclusion of rage and violence (to power and dominance). Instead, there may be a reckoning with and acceptance of one’s vulnerability in context and a commitment to more compassionate ways of responding to yet inevitable, common human suffering. But, returning to Butler, exposed is the sanctioned practices of one group forcing on another what they cannot bear themselves. We will look at readings, speeches, and interviews of Butler and others that may help us consider these statements about rage and grief to our intentional practice of complicating discourses and bodies, and taking a relational, profound and generative stance to knowledge. As much as we will reference various works, the focus of this summer course will be on generating questions from works and writing responses for discussion each session.