WesMaps - Wesleyan University Catalog 2023-2024       Summer Session       Winter Session       Home       Archive       Search
CS92PROD
Bored in the House: Work, Leisure, and the Domestic Mundane
SOC 277
Spring 2024
Section: 01  

For many of us, the Covid epidemic fundamentally changed our relationship to the home: extended periods of isolation and social distance have crystallized an understanding of the domestic as undergoing a period of flux or perhaps even crisis. This course considers the boundary problems of labor, home, relationships, and free time while doing historical and contemporary research on boredom, disassociation, and play.

More than ever we must engage with the vanishing material and psychic separations between work and leisure, the badly needed reimagining of public and private not anchored in a spectral domestic privacy, and the foundational dynamics of class, race, sexuality, gender, capacity, and institutionalized violence that structure where we can live, work, and play. Special topics of focus will include boredom as a technique of torture, social media and the gamification of leisure, content moderation of sex and violence, and the domestication of travel and tourism.

We will also use this course as an exercise in boredom praxis. We will do a bit of thinking about what we do when we are bored, and why, and will try to sit with and direct our boredom in gently experimental ways. This also extends to critically thinking about how we do work in this class, and our techniques and tactics of maintaining leisure time in academia.
Credit: 1 Gen Ed Area Dept: SBS SOC
Course Format: DiscussionGrading Mode: Student Option
Level: UGRD Prerequisites: SOC151
Fulfills a Major Requirement for: (SOC)
Past Enrollment Probability: Less than 50%

Last Updated on APR-29-2024
Contact wesmaps@wesleyan.edu to submit comments or suggestions. Please include a url, course title, faculty name or other page reference in your email ? Wesleyan University, Middletown, Connecticut, 06459