The beginning of Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish is grim. Its vivid portrait of the torture and execution of Robert François-Damiens illustrates just how much the modern penal system has come. The bulk of the reading is about the panopticon, an architectural design for a prison in which every cell is visible from a central tower. What does Foucault contend is the major effect of the panopticon? What do you think Foucault means when he writes that “our society is one not of spectacle, but of surveillance”?

Foucault contends that Western civilizations produced a science of sexuality through the confession. How does the confession “unfold within a power relationship”?  Online communication offers countless outlets for confession. Describe a concrete example from the news, popular culture, or your own experience in which a confession was made online (such as on Twitter or Facebook). According to Foucault, how did power operate in your example?

1. Patricia Hill-Collins is perhaps best known for her concept of “intersectionality” in which multiple systems of oppression, or what Collins calls the matrix of domination, overlap to create systematic inequality that each of us faces in our own unique way. Draw upon your own lived experience to describe a concrete situation in which you found yourself at the center of a matrix of domination, either as a victim or as an oppressor.
2. In The Souls of Black Folk, W. E. B. Du Bois expresses what it was like to live as a black man in early twentieth-century America. In the chapter we read, he introduces readers to his concept of the veil, a metaphor that captures how the conflict of racism is experienced at the interpersonal level. What does Du Bois mean by “double-consciousness” and how does this concept play out in his own experience?
3. Mead suggested that the self emerges through social interaction, particularly when we are able to take on the roles and perspectives of others. More generally, his pragmatist approach centers on practical ways we build and acquire knowledge, and his interest in everyday experience is evident in his writings and lectures. What do you think Mead means when he writes that the self is “an object to itself”?  According to Mead, the last stage of the development of the self is when we are able to take on the attitudes and expectations of the broader social world. Keeping this in mind, what role might mass media play in developing the self?