Informations du cours

This seminar will seek to introduce students to the critical issues and analytical possibilities of an era that we will refer to as “the long 1980s.” Our investigation will range between the early 1970s, when the country was reeling from the Watergate scandal, stagflation, a generalized state of urban crisis, and the fall of Saigon, and the mid 1990s, when Democratic President Bill Clinton signed laws that dramatically cut welfare programs and greatly increased funding for the construction of prisons and the enhancement of law enforcement capacities. But at the heart of our reflection lies the so-called “Reagan Revolution” and the neoliberal turn it managed to bring to fruition—an event that not only transformed approaches to governance, but also the ways in which Americans make sense of their world.

Public policies, political movements, and political discourse will of course concern us, but our objective will be to understand how political events and circumstances were lived and understood at the grassroots by average residents. We will take an interdisciplinary approach that will seek to fit the political, cultural, social, and economic into the same frame in order to better understand the political cultures that have shaped the ideas, sensibilities, political activities, and passions of urban, suburban, and rural communities. Methodologically speaking, the class will seek to bring historical and sociological scholarship into dialogue with a broad range of primary sources, including extracts from movies, television shows, music videos, newscasts, popular novels, comic books, underground and mainstream newspapers and magazines, etc.