questions it presupposes, questions that are critical to the study of the humanities: (1)
Who am I? (2) How should I encounter you? (3) How should we arrange our lives
together? Of course, no class can answer that first vital question for a student, but it can
give the resources and offer the interlocutors that can help a student explore that question
for herself. Studying political theory, this meant that we needed to examine different
ways of thinking about political action and political actors by reading texts that have been
important points of reference for political theorists. Beyond introducing students to key
texts, the aim of this course was always to proliferate, diversify, and complicate the
questions students ask about politics (I have attached a sample list of questions students
formulated at the end of the course.) I take this project of helping students ask more
interesting questions to be at the core of an introduction to political thought. Long after
the semester has ended and the details of specific texts have faded, they will hopefully
remember the critical questioning skills that drove our discussions and readings of the
texts.
Before we could even contemplate the question ‘What should we do?,’ we had to
ask, ‘What is political action?’ At first, this was a perplexing question for students
because they assumed I would give them the answer. In fact, we needed to start our work
together by understanding the importance of definitions and the variety of possible
answers to any given question. In this vein, I imagined the whole course of the semester
as an example of how to answer a complicated or complex question. By encouraging the
students to create their own definitions and concepts, I gave them a lens through which to
read the texts in this course. Naturally, they were also text-specific questions, but the
overarching project of the course was, both individually and collectively, to theorize
political action.
2
Convention