“The Philadelphia Center faculty and staff provided me with the steady support I needed to function in a drastically new environment, while simultaneously pushing me to see the world through a wider lens. The confidence I gained through my experiences in Philadelphia allowed me to overcome my fear of the unknown—opening wide the doors of the world.”
Abigail Stonerook, Kalamazoo College
Fall 2004
Women Organized Against Rape, Crisis Intervention Intern
City Seminars
Power and Authority
Mark Andrew Clark
Within the fabric of social relations lie the workings of power and authority. Think of your relationships with your parents, siblings, relatives, teachers, bosses, and best friends. When one of them asks you to do something or disagrees with you about some topic or issue, does your response have something to do with your notions of power and authority? For instance, do your responses of compliance, deference, defiance, inquiry, silence, or challenge depend on yours and/or others’ power and authority? By focusing on bodies of knowledge, constructs of place and space, and social group differences, we will explore what power and authority entail, what lends individuals power and authority, how power and authority are made, and how power and authority circulate among individual and group relations.
To provide an example, places of work are tied directly to a body of knowledge, like law, sociology, education, economics, business, etc. These bodies of knowledge get used in specific ways for particular reasons and can become ‘institutionalized’ over time and space. When students are in process of learning their major fields of study (at school) and/or join workplaces (at placements or internships), they begin to learn ways of knowing, perceiving, and doing things. Through observational and written contexts, specifically, we will analyze and critique issues such as organizational structures and systems, social group relations, the business environment, sexual harassment, psychiatric institutions, and structural inequity.
Also, we will explore the importance of site, examining how the meanings of place and space have a critical part in the makings of power and authority. And, we will look at how an individual’s social group differences are a part of power and authority (race, gender, socioeconomic class, etc.) and may challenge or conflict with ways of perceiving, knowing, doing, and writing at various workplace and institutional sites and among social groups.
This seminar explores power and authority from multiple perspectives (structural, systemic, collective, and individual) using various frames of analysis (site, difference, and discourse). The readings are organized around discourses (law, psychiatry/ psychology, social science, etc.), sites (the prison, the museum, the church, the bookstore, the workplace, etc.), and differences (age, race, gender, socioeconomic class, religion, privilege, etc.)