A living course

How you
were made.

A journey through the thinkers who revealed how the self is constructed — by story, by power, by language, by history, by everything you were told was simply the way things are.

Somewhere beneath the performance, beneath the roles, beneath the identities constructed by history and power — there is the space between who you need to be.

The destination this course is building toward

Begin the course
What this is

There is a version of you that was built. Brick by brick, by the culture you were born into, the stories you were told, the institutions that shaped you, the economy that decided your value. Most of us never stop to look at the construction.

This course is my attempt to look — honestly, deeply, and in public. It is a living project. I am reading these works as you arrive here. I do not have all the answers. I have a question I cannot stop asking.

We begin with the ancient world and move forward through philosophy, politics, economics, power, race, gender, and justice. Each thinker is a new lens. With each lens, the self you thought you knew becomes a little less fixed.

Where it ends, I will not say yet. It must be earned.

The course
Twelve modules. Each one a layer of construction. Read in order, or follow what calls you. This list grows as I read. Come back.
I
Before Philosophy
Homer, Sophocles, Thucydides — the heroic self, honour, duty, proto-justice in story and law.
Read now
II
The Rational Self
Plato, Aristotle — rational ethics, virtue as habit, justice as societal balance.
Coming soon
III
The Inner Self
Augustine, Descartes, Kant — conscience, guilt, moral law, the turn inward.
Coming soon
IV
The Fractured Self
Nietzsche, Sartre, Freud — anxiety, freedom, unconscious drives, self-overcoming.
Coming soon
V
The Political Self
Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau — authority, legitimacy, the social contract.
Coming soon
VI
The Economic Self
Smith, Marx, Weber, Polanyi — how material conditions shape identity, ethics, and power.
Coming soon
VII
The Surveilled Self
Foucault, Gramsci, Arendt, Scott — discipline, hegemony, institutions, social control.
Coming soon
VIII
The Performed Self
Mead, Goffman, Bourdieu — identity as performance, habitus, cultural capital.
Coming soon
IX
The Colonised Self
Du Bois, Fanon, Robinson, Quijano — race, empire, double consciousness, racial capitalism.
Coming soon
X
The Gendered Self
de Beauvoir, Butler, bell hooks — gender as construction, intersectionality, knowledge and power.
Coming soon
XI
Justice
Rawls, Sen, Nussbaum, Alexander — from theory to applied frameworks of freedom and equality.
Coming soon
XII
The Space Between
Where the course has been pointing all along. To be written last. To be earned.
Coming soon