MDED 505: Intersubjectivity

This graduate course examines the human fact of our dependence upon others, particularly in situations of physical, social or emotional vulnerability and precariousness. We will consider specifically how people’s lives, hopes and fragilities are shaped by the experience of chronic illness or disability.

To better understand the vulnerabilities and possibilities of human experience in such complex circumstances, we focus on the notion of the body, not just from a traditional clinical perspective (that is, one that sees a body as “diseased” or “broken”), but as a body that is lived in and through: the body that is the core of experience itself.

At the center of our inquiry is a philosophical and theoretical question that has been taken up in a wide range of disciplines: What does it mean to think of human experience as something relational, created in and through our interactions with others? Drawing from key works in philosophy, anthropology, sociology, and feminist and postcolonial theory, we will examine the situation of intersubjectivity as the core of all human experience.