The New Materialist turn has gripped the humanities and social sciences with its provocations around the human, non-human, and how matter shapes the world and its politics. Within the past few years, Black and Indigenous feminist scholars have challenged new materialisms by bringing critical race theory, Indigenous studies, settler colonialism, and women of color feminisms to bear on this burgeoning field. In doing so, their scholarship nuances and further expands understandings of the human, animality, bodies, objects, and life.

 This course explores the ways in which Black and Indigenous feminist scholarship engages with the field of new materialisms. Together, we tackle questions, such as: How is the human and non-human racialized, sexualized, and gendered phenomena? What does the posthuman mean when some remain dehumanized? What is a body and how is it constructed? What is the relationship between historically marginalized humans and non-humans? How can all of this help us make sense of an increasingly volatile world in both the political and ecological sense?