Professor: Tobin Hansen

4.00 credits

• CRN 15678: Monday & Wednesday, 10:00-11:20am @ CHA 201

This course examines close human relationships through social scientific perspectives. We will question how people make their lives together—or desire to—through sharing or longing to share living spaces, things, emotions, and familial or other relationships. We will examine the following questions (and others): How do relationships emerge, change, become remade, strengthen, drift, and fray? How do social identities—e.g., race, gender, sexuality, and social class—and regional contexts shape people’s understandings and experiences of close human relationships? And what are the implications of human relationships for the legal and political structures within which, or outside of which, they exist?

We will explore care and intimacy in a variety of cross-cultural social domains and institutions, in situations of physical proximity or across regions and nations, including in families, domestic work, the military, gangs, and in the context of migration. We will consider human intimacy through written and visual texts and engage concepts, in discussion and writing, within and across scholarly disciplines such as anthropology, sociology, and philosophy and the multidisciplinary fields of cultural studies and gender studies.