Dr Sumi Madhok

This course is available on the MSc in Gender, MSc in Gender (Research), MSc in Gender, Development and Globalisation, MSc in Gender, Media and Culture, MSc in Gender, Policy and Inequalities, MSc in Human Rights, MSc in International Relations, MSc in International Relations (Research), MSc in International Relations Theory and Master of Laws. This course is available with permission as an outside option to students on other programmes where regulations permit.

A background in the Humanities and/or the Social Sciences.

This course will provide the students with a transnational gender perspective on contemporary theories and practices of rights/human rights and humanitarianism. It brings together different sets of scholarship: gender theories, queer and  postcolonial scholarship, theoretical perspectives on human rights along side with legal and policy perspectives - and will be of interest to students wanting to study the question of human rights in an interdisciplinary manner but also one that is crucially sutured to the question of gender. Consequently, the course will introduce students to several key theorists: Hannah Arendt, Girogio Agamben, Jacques Rancierre, Gayatri Spivak, Judith Butler, Christine Chinkin, Catherine MacKinnon, Wendy Brown among others while drawing attention to the evolution and working of international legal frameworks for securing women's rights and other marginal groups. The course will pay special attention to the struggles over 'humanity' and 'civilisation' as well as to tensions between citizenship rights (now thought in terms of global citizenship.) and human rights, and the transformation of the former in the light of the latter. It will also focus on feminist demands and struggles over rights such as those to sexuality, sexual rights, bodily rights, culture and citizenship; entitlements to material resources; to gendered protections in conflict, peacekeeping and war; and to vulnerability and precarity under neoliberal economic and political regimes.

10 hours of lectures and 10 hours of seminars in the LT.

Students on this course will have a reading week in Week 6, in line with departmental policy.

Review of a key theorist that students have read on the course.

Weekly Learning Diary.

Essential readings:

Abu Lughod, L. (2013) 'Do Muslim Women Need Saving', Harvard University Press.

Agamben, Giorgio. Homo sacer: Sovereign power and bare life. Stanford University Press, 1998.

Arendt, Hannah. The Origins of Totalitarianism. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1973.

Balibar, Étienne. Equaliberty: Political Essays. Duke University Press, 2014.

Butler, Judith, and Athena Athanasiou. Dispossession: The performative in the political. John Wiley & Sons, 2013.

Douzina, C and Connor Gearty. ( 2014) 'The Meanings of Rights', Cambridge University Press.

Fassin, D. ( 2012) 'Humanitarian Reason', Harvard University Press.

Freeman, M, C. Chinkin and B. Rudolf eds. ( 2012) The UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women : A Commentary, Oxford University Press.

Moyn, Samuel ( 2010) 'The Last Utopia', Columbia University Press.

Sonia Correa, Rosalind Petchesky and Richard Parker (eds.) Sexuality, Health and Human Rights (New York: Routledge, 2008).

Richardson Diane, “Constructing Sexual Citizenship, Theorising Sexual Rights”, in J. Shaw and I. Stiks, ed. The International Library of Essays on Rights: Citizenship Rights. London, UK: Ashgate, 2013.

Recommended readings:

Feldman, Ilana, and Miriam Ticktin. ( 2010)  'In the name of humanity: the government of threat and care'. Duke University Press.

Brown Wendy ( 2015) 'Undoing the Demos'.

Chatterjee, P. ( 2004) 'Politics of the Governed'.

Essay (100%, 4000 words) in the ST.
One essay (4000 words) to be submitted in week 3 of ST, 8th May.