Emancitopia

Introduction

This summer, I have the pleasure of teaching POLS 1000 Tutorial 2: Introduction to Politics – Exploring the Democratic Experience at York University. I have the honour of assisting Professor Sergei Plekhanov in teaching this course.
Professor Plekhanov’s syllabus—shaped by his many years of teaching Introduction to Politics and International Politics—provided a rich and thoughtful foundation. Building on his extensive work, I reconfigured and deepened the syllabus by integrating my own research specialization as a PhD candidate focused on the Politics of Utopia. The result is a course that remains rooted in classical political theory while expanding into cultural storytelling, myth-making, and the political imagination. Rather than approaching politics as a distant, abstract discipline, this course invites students to encounter politics where it most deeply lives: in our myths, cultural products, bodies and lived experiences, struggles for justice, and narratives of power.

Through the imaginative worlds of Star Wars, Dune, Harry Potter, The Lord of the Rings, Django Unchained, House of Cards, and Game of Thrones, we explore how core political concepts—such as legitimacy, sovereignty, violence, authority, revolution, democratic backsliding, and imperialism—take on life and urgency. At the heart of this course is a simple but powerful belief: Politics is not only made in parliaments and wars. It is also made in the stories we tell.

Course Design: Bridging Theory and Storytelling

The syllabus pairs foundational political theories with cultural products to create dynamic, critical encounters between texts and imagination. Students engage with thinkers such as Plato, Aristotle, Max Weber, Frantz Fanon, Thomas Hobbes, Niccolò Machiavelli, John Locke, Hannah Arendt, Michel Foucault, alongside entries from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

Through these encounters, students analyze how political crises, collapses, myths, and ideals are dramatized in fiction, while deepening their understanding of real-world political structures and transformations. Students learn to recognize politics as a field shaped not just by institutional processes but also by bodies, symbolic systems, narratives of legitimacy, resistance movements, and cultural imagination.

Our core objectives are:

• Understand fundamental political concepts: power, authority, legitimacy, democracy, violence, revolution, political culture, and utopia.
• Apply classical and modern political theories to real-world events and fictional narratives.
• Analyze how myths, ideologies, and fantasies sustain or challenge political authority.
• Develop critical thinking, scholarly writing, and oral presentation skills.
• Reflect on how political communities are imagined—and reimagined—through cultural works.

Weekly Themes

Each week, students investigate a political concept through both theoretical readings and cultural artifacts.
Some of the central explorations include:

• State and Sovereignty: How the collapse of the Galactic Republic in Star Wars reveals the fragility of political legitimacy when constitutional norms erode, and how Game of Thrones dramatizes the brutal fragmentation of sovereign claims during civil war.
  In both worlds, we see that when foundational institutions weaken—whether a galactic senate or a royal lineage—political authority becomes contested, leading to violence, succession crises, and the breakdown of collective order.
• Democracy and Resistance: Civil disobedience at Hogwarts (Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix) as a model for understanding authoritarian creep and civic courage.
• Imperialism and Resource Politics: Dune (both the 1984 and 2021 films) as a powerful allegory of colonial domination, ecological exploitation, and imperial control over strategic resources.
• Violence and Justice: Django Unchained as a meditation on revolutionary violence, the ethics of vengeance, and the pursuit of justice in the aftermath of oppression.
• Corruption and Power: The Lord of the Rings‘ Ring of Power as a metaphor for how institutional decay and ambition corrode political leadership and collective solidarity.
• Myth of the Chosen One:
  • In Star Wars, Anakin Skywalker’s destiny raises urgent questions about prophecy, manipulation, and the tragedy of failed saviors.
  • In Dune, Paul Atreides is shaped into a messianic figure, exposing how myths of salvation are often politically constructed to consolidate power.
  • In Harry Potter, Harry’s reluctant status as the “Boy Who Lived” shows the burden of symbolic leadership and the complicated relationship between myth, agency, and collective resistance. These case studies invite students to question how myths of exceptionalism legitimize power—or challenge it.
• Realpolitik and Bureaucratic Power: House of Cards illustrates how Machiavellian strategies, manipulation, and institutional inertia govern political life behind closed doors.
• National Identity and Myth-making: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows explores how myth-making and underground resistance become essential in combating authoritarianism.
• Democratic Backsliding and Institutional Capture: Yes Minister and Game of Thrones offer satirical and tragic portrayals of how bureaucratic inertia and elite power struggles erode democratic accountability.

Each theme challenges students to critically map political theory onto real and fictional worlds, sharpening their analytical abilities while expanding their political imagination.

Why Cultural Products Matter

Cultural products—films, novels, television series, and myths—are not mere entertainment.
They are political laboratories where ideas about power, legitimacy, identity, and justice are created, tested, and transformed.

Before constitutions are written or revolutions are fought, societies narrate themselves through cultural works. They shape collective memories, national identities, and visions of utopia or dystopia.

By critically engaging with cultural products like Star Wars, Dune, Harry Potter, and The Lord of the Rings, this course challenges students to see that politics is not confined to parliaments and armies.
It lives equally in the myths of chosen heroes, the portrayal of tyrants, and the cinematic dreams of liberation, collapse, and rebirth.

We ask critical questions:

• How do myths of the “Chosen One” legitimate authority—or destabilize it?
• When does revolutionary violence become necessary, and when does it perpetuate cycles of domination?
• How do cultural narratives sustain imperialist ideologies—or imagine alternatives?
• How does political culture influence the rise and fall of democratic institutions?

Students are encouraged to see cultural products as political acts—vital sites where hopes, struggles, and power are imagined, contested, and reinvented.