Not available in 2015/16
GI411 Half Unit
Gender, Postcoloniality, Development: Critical Perspectives and New Directions
This information is for the 2015/16 session.
Teacher responsible
Dr Sumi Madhok COL.5.04A
Availability
This course is available on the MSc in African Development, MSc in Development Management, MSc in Development Studies, MSc in Empires, Colonialism and Globalisation, MSc in Gender, MSc in Gender (Research), MSc in Gender, Development and Globalisation, MSc in Gender, Media and Culture and MSc in Gender, Policy and Inequalities. This course is available with permission as an outside option to students on other programmes where regulations permit.
Pre-requisites
While there are no specific requirements, it is preferred that students have a background in social science or the humanities.
Course content
The aim of this course is to introduce students to the growing body of scholarship that critically interrogates contemporary gender relations at various postcolonial sites. . It provides an opportunity for students to encounter and engage with canonical works within postcolonial theory alongside those of gender, feminist and critical theory in order to examine the historical and contemporary policy and practices in relation to gender. As such, the course combines a study of the historical/textual/cultural/political and philosophical in relation to and alongside the political-economic in order to explore questions of development, subalternity, orientalism, neoliberalism,, globalisation, human rights, humanitarianism, representation, agency and globalisation. Finally, the course also points to new directions in contemporary theoretical thinking that have arisen in the wake of and in response to postcolonial scholarship for e.g. writings on Empire and Multitude, Cosmopolitics/Cosmopolitanism, Ethics and Transnationalism with a view to explore how these might open up new ways of conceptually capturing and imagining our present.
Teaching
30 hours of combination lecture/seminar sessions in the LT.
Formative coursework
Essay (1500 words) to be presented in a workshop.
Indicative reading
- Mohanty, Chandra Talpade. (2003) Feminism Without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practising Solidarity, Duke University Press, Durham
- Bhabha, Homi, Location of Culture (1994) Routledge, London: New York
- Escobar, Arturo, (1995) Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World, Princeton, N.J, Princeton University Press
- Kapoor, Ilan, (2008) The Postcolonial Politics of Development, Routledge, London: New York; Mignolo, Walter, (2000), Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges and Border Thinking, Princeton University Press, Princeton, N.J;
- Said, Edward. (1985, 1995) 'Orientalism', Penguin, Harmondsworth;;
- Spivak, Gayatri. Chakravorty (1999) A Critique of Postcolonial Reason, Harvard University Press.
- Grewal, Inderpal and Caren Kaplan ( 1994) Scattered Hegemonies
- Mbembe, Achille ‘Postcolony’, University of California Press, Berkeley.
- Comaroff, Jean and John L. Comaroff ( 2012) Theory From the South’, Paradigm, Boulder, London.
- Butler, Judith and Athena Athanasiou ( 2013) Dispossession: The Performative in the Political, Polity.
- Lughod, Lila Abu. Do Muslim Women Need Saving ( 2013) Harvard University Press.
Assessment
Essay (100%, 4000 words) in the ST.
Key facts
Department: Gender Institute
Total students 2014/15: 15
Average class size 2014/15: 15
Controlled access 2014/15: No
Value: Half Unit
Personal development skills
- Leadership
- Self-management
- Team working
- Problem solving
- Application of information skills
- Communication
- Specialist skills