Prof Suki Ali

This course is available on the MSc in Culture and Society, MSc in Inequalities and Social Science, MSc in Political Sociology and MSc in Sociology. This course is available as an outside option to students on other programmes where regulations permit.

This course has a limited number of places (it is controlled access). Places are allocated based on a written statement. Priority will be given to students who have this course listed in their programme regulations. This may mean that not all students who apply will be able to get a place on this course.

The course introduces theoretical debates and contemporary issues in the study of identity, identification and subjectivity. Using a range of analytical approaches which draw on, but are not limited to, decolonial, psychoanalytic, feminist, queer and queer of colour theoretical interventions, the course will explore how social differences are produced, maintained and challenged within and through formations of identity. The course will consider the ways in which allegiances to particular identities can be a site for dismantling or entrenching social and political divisions, violences and inequalities within contemporary societies.  The course is transdisciplinary and will use a range of materials such as academic, fictional and visual texts. Indicative topics include femininities/masculinities; sexualities; post and anticoloniality, racialisation, performativity, affect, memory, melancholia, trauma, autobiography/autoethnography, alterity, positionality, politics, representation. NB while core themes will remain the same, topics may change slightly from year to year.

30 hours of teaching/seminars in the AT.

Reading Weeks: Students on this course will have a reading week in AT Week 6, in line with departmental policy

Students will be expected to produce 1 in class presentation with submission of slides in the AT.

Fanon, Frantz, 1967 Black Skin/White Masks, New York: Grove Press, Treacher, A 2007 ‘Postcolonial Subjectivity: Egyptian Men, Shame, Memory and Forgetting’ Special Issue of Ethnic and Racial Studies Feminism/Postcolonialism: Knowledge Politics 30/2, Tummala-Narra, P (2022) ‘Can We Decolonize Psychoanalytic Theory and Practice?’, Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 32:3, 217-234,  Ahmed, S. 2014 (2nd Edition) The Cultural Politics of Emotion, University of Edinburgh Press, ‘Queering Memory’ 2023 Special Issue: Memory Studies 16 (1) Narayan, U and Harding, S 2000 Decentering the centre: philosophy for a multicultural, postcolonial and feminist world Bloomington: Indiana University Press 2000; Hall, S and du Gay, P (eds.) (1996) Questions of Cultural Identity. London and New York:  Sage, Verges, Francoise, and Ashley J Bohrer. 2021. A Decolonial Feminism. Pluto Press, Lugones, M 2007 ‘Heterosexualism and the Colonial / Modern Gender System’ in Hypatia 22 (1), Writing Against Heterosexism, pp. 186-209, Muñoz, J. E. (2020). The Sense of Brown Durham, NC: Duke University Press, Butler, J 1993. Bodies that Matter London and New York: Routledge Kaplan, C, Haley,S, and Mitra, D (eds.) 2021 The Rage Special Issue Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society  46:4, Haraway, D.J., & Goodeve, T. (2018) Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium. FemaleMan_Meets_OncoMouse: Feminism and Technoscience (2nd ed.). Routledge. Tamale, S (2022) Decolonization and Afro-Feminism Daraja Press, Anderson, D. Jenson, & R. C. Keller (Eds.),2011 Unconscious Dominions: Psychoanalysis, Colonial Trauma, and Global Sovereignties Duke University Press. Denzin, N. K., Lincoln, Y. S., & Smith, L. T. (2008). Handbook of critical and indigenous methodologies. SAGE Publications, Inc.

Essay (90%, 4000 words) in the WT.
Essay plan (10%) in the AT.

Attendance at all seminars and submission of all set coursework is required.