GI411 Half Unit
Gender, Postcoloniality, Development: Critical Perspectives and New Directions
This information is for the 2017/18 session.
Teacher responsible
Dr Sumi Madhok Tower 1, 11.01N.
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, MSc in Gender, Policy and Inequalities and MSc in Women, Peace and Security. 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 gender and developmentalism at various postcolonial sites. It provides an opportunity for students to encounter and engage with canonical works within postcolonial theory alongside those of gender and feminist theory in order to examine the historical and contemporary policy and practices in relation to gender and development. 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 developmentalism, subalternity, orientalism, representation, agency, neoliberalism, globalisation, human rights and humanitarianism. Finally, the course also introduces students to new directions in contemporary theoretical thinking that are either explicit critiques of postcolonial scholarship, i.e. texts such as ‘Empire’ and ‘Ethics’ or are critical engagements and even critical extensions of postcolonial thinking into new directions e.g. Transnationalism.
Teaching
15 hours of lectures and 10 hours of seminars in the MT.
In line with departmental policy, there is a reading week in week 6.
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 LT.
Key facts
Department: Gender Studies
Total students 2016/17: 36
Average class size 2016/17: 15
Controlled access 2016/17: No
Value: Half Unit
Personal development skills
- Leadership
- Self-management
- Team working
- Problem solving
- Application of information skills
- Communication
- Specialist skills