Encountering the Stranger

Think for a moment of a time when you met a stranger's gaze and felt as if something passed between you. In this class, we will seek to understand just what it is that passes between strangers; what binds or repels them; what relationship such a moment establishes between two people and what sort of world is constructed by the myriad other stranger interactions that are constantly unfolding all around us. What would be lost in a world where facial recognition and AI technologies have made encountering the stranger a thing of the past? Might we even have a right to be a stranger? This seminar examines fundamental questions of ethics, politics, and self-knowledge through the figure of the stranger. Topics will include anonymity and the life of the city; trust, hospitality, and the ethics of encounter; recognition and belonging in democratic life; the stranger in the digital era; and, as points of contrast, related figures such as the outsider, the foreigner, and the migrant. Our readings will draw equally on the theoretical and the empirical: political theory and philosophy, on the one hand, and ethnographic, historical, and literary accounts of strangers, on the other. Students will complete two major assignments, which follow this same pattern. For the midterm, each student will choose a setting or question having to do with strangers, which they will seek to understand by conducting a mini-ethnography (using one of a variety of qualitative research methods to be discussed in class). For the final project, students will compose a theoretical reflection on what their observations revealed.