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Course Description

Summary

Who counts--and who does not count--as a rights-bearing member of a community? What criteria do communities rely upon to determine membership? These questions about inclusion, exclusion, and membership are familiar to students of the social sciences. In this course, we will move beyond the familiar categories of insiders and outsiders to investigate the “outsiders within,” those residing within a community whose demand for inclusion as actual or potential rights-bearing members is perceived as posing a fundamental challenge to the identity of the community itself. We will identify “outsiders within” in a various of contemporary contexts, such as homeless populations in business districts, animals in human societies, black bloc tactic adherents in social protest movements, religious groups in secular societies, and undocumented workers in the global economy. Using these and other cases, we will interrogate the limits and promise of theories of inclusion drawn from applied ethics, democratic theory, feminism, and liberalism.