Los Altos Institute Archive

Once again, there is a lecture, followed by a wide-ranging discussion about working class social conservatism and consequent views about marriage, homosexuality and trans identities. 

This episode of the class focused on Carol Stack's 1970s anthropology of poverty, All Our Kin and its applicability to Sunnyvale Trailer Park. Stack argued that Fuck Community College; Let's Get Drunk and Eat Chicken Fingers was an economically rational position. 

This is the class about the finest episode of Trailer Park Boys, the Kiss of Freedom. It also features an extended background in the corpus of Saint Augustine of Hippo and ends with a rambling anecdote about ending up in a virtual reenactment of the show in the instructor's apartment in Surrey.

Like other episodes, there is some hacksaw editing here but it begins with a solid 25-minute lecture on season eight, its distinctive features and how the show reflects and represents Canada post-Stephen Harper. It is followed by a lively discussion that goes to lots of weird places, like Yale, BC.

This episode covers the original black and white unaired pilot episode made in 1999 in which things are a little different and which appears to be an adaptation of Fyodor Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment. As with the previous episode, the second half is a little choppy because of participant anonymization requests but, after about fifteen minutes, the second half becomes more coherent as non-ano...

Students are introduced to the course and to the Halifax Regional Municipality's demographics, geography and history.  As some students did not wish to be identified or have their voices represented on this recording, there are some slightly choppy edits in this and future episodes.

We talk about intellectual property rights, narcissistic personality disorder, the Germanic common law and the logic of rape in tying together the conclusions of the course.

In this penultimate class, we examine the key difference between progressive and conservative identity politics: whether one believes in ideas of conversion or whether one believes in an unchanging and permanent essence. We also return to the open letter in Harpers' Bazaar, neotraditionalism and other favourite subjects of the course.

This rambling lecture covers many bases concerning disability, neo-traditionalism and postcolonial theory. But its core is about the left's slow embrace that knowledge, itself lives in the blood and is inscribed upon the body.

Recorded months before the instructor was canceled, this lecture talks about how processes of liberal self-fashioning sit at the foundation of our present cancel culture moment. 

This is probably the best of the shows so far. The lecture discusses the history of conspiracy theory and its interactions with Identitarianism and other aspects of authoritarian and neo-fascist movements. It also considers the interactions between technology, religion and theories of the self. The question and answer session is also superior in that students delve into the history of Christian an...

This lecture talks about the putative three waves of feminism and puts forward the under-represented idea that the so-called "Third Wave" has not yet taken place, that much of what we call the Third Wave is actually part of the backlash against the second.

This episode of the course will likely be one of the more controversial. While its larger thesis is that transgender people have always existed and deserve social accommodation and legal equality, it challenges many of the ideas common in the transgender rights movement by historicizing gender and suggesting that a society's order with respect to gender non-conformity arises from specific historic...

There is a long digression about the rise of the US Republican Party and its institutional importance in modern politics of identity in a a fairly Eurocentric narration of the history of homosexual identities. 

In this class, we discuss the Marxian fundamentals of oppression: gender, class and race. The lecture proceeds from the understanding that forms of oppression linked to systems of labour structure human experience in ways mere bigotry does not.

In this episode we apply commodity fetishism and other Marxist ideas to major cultural, economic and political developments of the long twentieth century, including the rise of sexual orientation as an identity category, the formation of white settler states and the commodification of culture. We also reveal the strange origins of the IGA grocery chain.

The lecture discusses the film Being John Malkovich and then engages with major Western Canon thinkers, Thomas Hobbes, Plato, Sigmund Freud and Julian Jaynes, as well as Sufi mystic Idries Shah.

Our first real lecture follows the rise of modern identity categories and practices, tracing their beginnings to the rise of conspiracy theory during the Black Death, plantation race slavery on Crete and Cyprus by the Genovese and Venetians, the Spanish conquests of the Granadans, Mexica and Inca and the rise of the Inquisition.

Identitarianism is a new way of doing identity politics taking the world by storm. To understand and define it, we must look at the history of politics of identity since the 1300s. This episode sets up the course and its objectives. 

Stuart Parker was the instructor for Los Altos Institute's online course on global economic history, delivered in the spring of 2020.

Stuart Parker was the instructor for Los Altos Institute's online course on global economic history, delivered in the spring of 2020.

Stuart Parker was the instructor for Los Altos Institute's online course on global economic history, delivered in the spring of 2020.

Stuart Parker was the instructor for Los Altos Institute's online course on global economic history, delivered in the spring of 2020.

Stuart Parker was the instructor for Los Altos Institute's online course on global economic history, delivered in the spring of 2020.

Stuart Parker was the instructor for Los Altos Institute's online course on global economic history, delivered in the spring of 2020.