Prof Chetan Bhatt

This course is available on the MSc in Culture and Society, MSc in Human Rights, MSc in Human Rights and Politics, MSc in Political Sociology and MSc in Sociology. This course is available with permission as an outside option to students on other programmes where regulations permit.

The course is not an introductory course in social theory. It is ideally suited to students familiar and comfortable with advanced modern social and political thought, philosophy, and political philosophy, including complex, advanced, and challenging readings in these areas.

This course has a limited number of places (it is controlled access). Places are allocated based on a written statement, with priority given to students on the MSc in Culture and Society, MSc in Human Rights, MSc in Human Rights and Politics, MSc in Political Sociology and MSc in Sociology. This may mean that not all students who apply will be able to get a place on this course.

Contemporary Social Thought covers several areas in contemporary social theory and links these areas to several traditions of Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment thinking. This includes critical assessment of Enlightenment philosophers such as Kant and Hegel, and also more recent thinkers, including Michel Foucault, Gayatri Spivak, Jacques Derrida, Achille Mbembe, Donna Haraway, Jean-Francois Lyotard, Stuart Hall, and Walter Mignolo.  The course also aims to link theoretical areas with new and emerging social and political issues – for example, how theoretical approaches can be used to analyse a contemporary phenomenon. The substantive topics covered in the course vary by year, but may include: technology and transhumanism, politics and violence, the new identity politics, transformations in the far-right, authoritarian populism, decoloniality,  global or world sociology, wars and technology; and violent religious movements.

This course is delivered through a combination of lectures, online materials and seminars totalling a minimum of 20 hours in the AT.

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

An essay outline of 1,000 words to be submitted in Autumn Term.

A. Loomba (2015), Colonialism/Postcolonialism [Third Edition], Routledge.

A. Elliott (2014), Contemporary Social Theory: an introduction [Second Edition], Routledge.

J. Wolff (2015), An Introduction to Political Philosophy [Third Edition], Oxford University Press.

Essay (100%, 4000 words) in the WT.

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