Philosophy and Critical Theory (PHCRT) courses focus on developing critical reading and thinking skills, with an emphasis on learning to frame and explore meaningful questions. Students consider multiple perspectives and claims in the process of formulating independent, well-founded opinions.Section Description:Questions about the future have always been an integral part of our human condition. From oracles, diviners, and augurs to futurism, econometrics, long-term forecasting and planning, we are always trying to see past the non-linear abyss of the unknown. Today the ideal society, the democratic Utopia, promised by modernity and the Enlightenment or, more recently, by networked information technologies and neoliberal globalization, is nowhere to be seen. Enter science fiction and its novum or kehuan and Mo Biao as avenues to right what is wrong and to imagine possible neotopias. Some might be negative, dystopian, others more hopeful, in the tradition of former utopias and commons. They serve to explore and/or exploit the topologies of estrangement, magic, cognition, time, and the politics of nature, reality, and virtuality. They draw on the tradition of mechanical simulacra, retro and high-tech, science and critical imagination, to help us confront power, religion, environment, economy, beauty, gender, race, and sexuality. Drawing from film, graphic novels, theory, and literature, we search beneath the hidden recesses of middle earth, in quantum or warp space, in our puppets, zombies, and cyborgs, androids, robots and cyberpunks, in cities and hinterlands, for clues about our past and paths to our future. We travel from Atlantis to the New Atlantis, from Chimeras to Avatars, Metropolis to Neo Tokyo, Oaxaca, Soweto or Paris in 2054, to see if we can catch a glimpse of ‘sleep dealers’ and drones, of Clark Kents, Robins, and Tobey Maguires as they save the world. We use tools and works from literature, science and technology, social science, philosophy, ecology, history, cultural studies, and visual and literary criticism to suggest a post-futurist transversality that will help us interpret those imagined times-to-come and Worlds-Other.

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