Comparative Social Inquiry (CSI) is a Common Curriculum course that interrogates central questions about society, social change, and the human condition through the perspectives and methods offered by the social sciences.

Our vision and purpose are simple: the course seeks to heighten students’ shared awareness of important social forces, which often hide in plain sight, by comparing families, communities, countries, and other institutions across the globe and over time, and by demonstrating how empirical research grounds theoretical insights into the social world. We examine the different axes of individual and group identity and the role of individual agency amidst the larger societal forces and institutions, from race to gender to social class to religion. Weal so explore processes of socialisation and non-conformity, social change, and institutional evolution.  

The course was an integral part of the College’s Common Curriculum. Some of the pioneers and key architects of the course include colleagues like Anju Mary Paul, Jane Jacobs, Michael Maniates, Rene Saran, Guillem Riambau, and Rebecca Tannenbaum, among others.

Broadly speaking, the interdisciplinary course was divided into three core thematic units:  

• Individuals in groups/institutions;
• Identity and difference; and
• Social change & non-conformity

Within each theme, there are several week-long units with a set of readings assigned. Each unit begins with a Monday morning lecture led by one of the faculty in the CSI teaching team, followed by a seminar on Monday afternoon and another on Thursday afternoon. Most Thursday seminars include a short in-class quiz that covers the material introduced during that week, as well as student-led critiques and presentations on the readings.

This second-year Common Curriculum course introduced students to foundational figures of modern social thought and explored the ways in which their writings have been taken up in contemporary social analysis and political practice in different parts of the world. Students were introduced to one of the first works of social theory by Ibn Khaldun. Then then immersed themselves in the complex ideas and systematic visions of major social thinkers such as Alexis de Tocqueville, Karl Marx, Emile Durkheim, Max Weber, and Michel Foucault, theorists often acknowledged as exemplary of the explanatory power of modern social theory. However, this course was not about lionizing these figures. We critiqued these theories just as much as we learned from them. Thus, the course also grappled with several other characteristically modern developments including (a) the revolution in thought and practice ushered in by feminist activists and thinkers such as Mary Wollstonecraft, Simone de Beauvoir, and Saba Mahmood; (b) the critiques of the racism inherent in modernity by activists and thinkers such as Sojourner Truth, Frederick Douglass, and W.E.B. Du Bois; and (c) the provincializing of European understandings of society and the articulation of very different modes of modern social theory put forth by activists and thinkers such as Dadabhai Naoroji, Syed Hussein Alatas, Frantz Fanon, Fei Xiaotong, Edward Said, and Donna Haraway among others.

Modern Social Thought was one of the most challenging and beloved courses in the Common Curriculum. It compelled students to engage with critical issues of power and social inequality, including race, gender, class. The aim was to empower students to hone their own worldviews in the crucible of critical engagement with social thinkers, their fellow students, and the contemporary world. The course was designed to help cultivate students into informed contributors and visionary leaders for the twenty-first century, poised to address the world’s most pressing challenges.

Every week on Wednesday, the whole class of over 200 students would convene in the Performance Hall for the weekly lecture, delivered by one of the faculty members. They then split into small seminars, each guided by a faculty facilitator, to discuss the material in depth. Faculty members employed a wide range of engaged pedagogies, prioritising active participation, collaboration, and critical reflection. The students responded well to this approach, frequently testifying to how the course refined their worldviews and transformed their understanding of the world around them.

Modern Social Thought gave the students a unique experience because of the structure of the course. Unlike the other Common Curriculum courses that focused on teaching the students several different works and theories by canonical figures, Modern Social Thought had critique built right into the course. The students first learned the explanatory power of modern Western social theory and were thus able to explore the way these writings have been taken up in contemporary social analysis and political practices around the world. Yet already in the first part of the course, the major figures were followed by critiques of their positions; for example, Tocqueville’s Democracy in America was placed alongside critical analysis of his way of thinking about gender and race. Building on this juxtaposition of canonical thinkers with foundational critiques, the second half of the course contained extensive critiques and/or supplements to modern Western social theory as these have been articulated by feminist, postcolonial, and poststructural thinkers from various parts of the world in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.This allowed the students to see how to do critical analysis of great works in subtle and far-reaching ways.

Learning outcomes included the following:

• Mastery of the various different critiques of modern social theory made by feminist, anti-slavery, anti-racist, and postcolonial activists and theorists.
• Ability to read dense texts and discern their general arguments and important nuances.
• Ability to write papers that synthesise what the student learned in lectures, seminars, and via their own encounters with a text.
• Ability to put complex social theories into conversation with one another; for instance by making precise the grounds or structure of the disagreement between divergent views; partly or fully reconciling apparently incompatible views; or putting two thinkers into debate and adjudicating it.
• Ability to verbally articulate one’s own ideas and to debate these ideas with others.
• Understanding the pitfalls of modernist thinking and the proposed solutions to these pitfalls as articulated by various modern social theorists.
• Understanding the very different epistemological frameworks used by various social theorists.
• Understanding the historical context of works in modern social theory.
• Understanding key aspects of one’s own social world both in terms of its enabling character and its pressing problems.
• Mastery of key concepts in modern social theory in preparation for their use in the different social science majors.

The original rationale for Modern Social Thought was twofold: to provide the students with social theories that would allow them to understand and critique the world around them and to teach the various social theories that would be used or challenged in the subsequent courses students take in the Social Science majors. The first iteration of Modern Social Thought that was produced by the end of the incubation year at Yale fulfilled these two criteria but was primarily a course in Western social thought very similar to the Social Studies10 course offered at Harvard University. At the beginning of the second year (and the first year at Yale-NUS College) the Modern Social Thought team decided to make the course a truly global social thought course. They invited various speakers specialising in feminist and subaltern theory and over the course of the year they created a course with a third rationale: to use feminist and postcolonial theorists to challenge modern Western social theory and the colonial practices that had sometimes been supported in the name of these theories. By the end of the second year of development, Modern Social Theory included first, second, and third wave feminism as well as postcolonial critiques of Western social theory as articulated by Dipesh Chakrabarty, Ashis Nandy, and Arjun Appadurai. The first iteration of Modern Social Thought thus included these thinkers in the second half of the course, after the students had studied the canonical modern Western social theorists: Alexis de Tocqueville, Karl Marx, Emile Durkheim, Max Weber, and Michel Foucault. In the second iteration of the course the team decided to decenter the course further by starting with a pre-modern non-Western social theorist and so for this and all subsequent iterations, Modern Social Thought began with readings by Ibn Khaldun, often understood to be the true father of social thought.

Over the next seven years, the readings by Western canonical social theorists did not change very much, but the second part of the course was continually refined to better express the full range of contemporary social theories from around the world. In the third iteration of the course, it was decided that the first, second, and third-wave feminisms needed to include the experiences of non-Western women. The first two years of the course used Judith Butler or Kimberlee Crenshaw to articulate third-wave feminism, but starting with the third iteration of the course, pieces by Joan Scott and Saba Mahmood were introduced to show how the experiences of non-Western women could serve as the basis for critiques of Western feminism. In the fourth year a decision was made to expand the non-Western social theorists to include thinkers from Southeast Asia. This was done by including speeches from non-Western leaders at the Bandung conference and speeches by Lee Kuan Yew. It was also during this year that a decision was made to read Frantz Fanon’s anti-colonial theories.

It was also during this year that a decision was made to have a mid-term examination inModern Social Thought. This set it apart from the other theoretical Common Curriculum courses like Philosophy and Political Thought, which had common essays rather than a common exam. The rationale for the midterm was twofold: It was necessary that the students have a solid grasp of the Western canonical social theorists so that they could fully understand the critiques made of these theories, which often borrowed concepts from these theorists even as they criticised other elements of their theories. The second reason was that a number of professors in the Social Sciences complained that students did not seem to know the theories of Marx, Durkheim, and Weber as well as they should given that they had studied them in Modern Social Thought. The midterm was instituted to ensure that students had a grasp of all the thinkers studied in the first half of the course.  

During the fifth year, students and MST professors became dissatisfied with the non-theoretical character of the Chinese and Singaporean social theory. A number of different more academic articles were tried over the course of the next two years, but it wasn’t until the seventh year that the theoretical work, From the Soil: The Foundations of Chinese Society by Fei Xiaotong was introduced as the reading in Chinese social thought. Another reading by Syed Hussein Alat as was also added to give the students a piece that covered the colonial experiences of Malaysia. The seventh year also saw the introduction of readings on race to complement the readings on gender and first-wave feminism that the students did after reading Alexis deTocqueville. These readings on race included works by Frederick Douglas andW.E.B. DuBois, and the course incorporated an Indigenous social thinker, Tatanka-Iyotanka or Sitting Bull. Finally, this year saw the introduction of readings on climate change and post-humanism as a way of ending the course. These readings gave students an opportunity to see what becomes of social theory when humans are seen as agents who threaten not master the earth or when the human perspective is expanded to include other species. During the last two years of the course, a decision was made to drop the piece on climate change because students study it intensively in their Science Common Curriculum courses and so variants of post-humanism by Anna Tsing, Donna Haraway, and Sophie Chao were used to end the course.

As the complex history of Modern Social Thought’s evolution shows, the course was always a work in progress. The faculty constantly strove to improve the syllabus through engagement with one another, the students, the theories, and the contemporary social world. A key component of this engagement was how faculty, themselves social thinkers, integrated the syllabus into their work as researchers and brought insights from their research into the construction of the syllabus. The aim of the faculty was never to reach the destination of a perfect syllabus but rather to strive continually towards the goal of empowering twenty-first century citizens and leaders to respond critically to the challenges of the era.

This course, taught over two semesters, introduces students to transformative examples in the history of philosophy and political thought. It addresses fundamental and recurring questions about the nature of reality and how we know it—the nature of the self, consciousness, the gods or God, happiness, moral conduct, and the character of law, justice, and political order—as these questions have been asked and answered in classic works from different civilisations. Students persevere through difficult texts to read these works carefully, to dissect arguments into their constituent parts, to understand them in their various contexts, and to assess their truth. Students learn to persevere through difficult texts and search for insights in ideas that might at first seem strange.

The first iteration of PPT was crafted in AY2012-2013 by (in alphabetical order): Andrew M. Bailey, Sandra Field, Taran Kang, Cathay Liu, Neil Mehta, Nico Silins, Christina Tarnopolsky, and Mathew Walker.
One of our very earliest and most important design goals was to disrupt student sleep. The thought here wasn’t to keep students from good health; it was to put texts and assignments together in a way that would shake them from dogmatic slumber, challenge assumptions, and prompt deeper reflection than they ever knew was possible.

Semester One came together quickly enough, and was quickly embraced by students and instructors alike. Its basic structure was three traditions, in dialogue: Classical China, Classical Greece and Rome, and Classical India. This tripartite division worked well, and served another important goal: to build a Common Curriculum module that didn’t centre any one tradition in particular.
Semester Two was a harder nut to crack. But in the fullness of time, we did it, and eventually landed there on another tripartite structure—this one was thematic, rather than geographical.