What's this course about?
“Many words are walked in the world. Many worlds are made. Many worlds make us. There are words and worlds that are lies and injustices. There are words and worlds that are truthful and true. In the world of the powerful there is room only for the big and their helpers. In the world we want, everybody fits. The world we want is a world in which many worlds fit.”
- Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional, “The Fourth Declaration of the Lacandón Jungle”
The course will be run as a reading seminar and survey course looking into the constitution, scale, and many dimensions of the modern\colonial world-system. The texts are merely a tiny fraction of the work done by non-Anglo-European, non-white scholars and activists in articulating the origins, development, and hegemony of the modern world-system, the hope is that these will act as sparks for curious minds and a place within which to situate oneself and start from. The course was created keeping design students in mind, so there will be a few choice readings connecting coloniality to technology, but really, anyone can and should take this!