Prof Chetan Bhatt

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

This course has a limited number of places (it is controlled access). 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.

This interdisciplinary course focuses on selfhood, personhood and identitarian thinking from the start of the modern period until today. It draws on social and political theory, Western and non-Western histories of ‘the self’, and it considers contemporary manifestations of identity and rights conflicts emerging from identity claims.

We will examine historical and theoretical approaches to modern selfhood, including a range of ideas of self, identity, and ‘personhood’ emerging from the early modern period in the West, their proliferation during the rise of urban industrial capitalism, their further transformations after the late 1950s, and their contemporary forms in a period dominated by technofinancial capitalism and ‘hyperindividualism’. We consider a range of personhoods that developed in the West – for example, the ‘freeborn’, rational, or individual person. Many such personhoods provided ‘templates’ for various identitarian projects in the late modern period. We will examine how 19th century ethnonationalism can be seen as an original form of identitarianism that affected many unrelated identity projects. Identity is about the individual, but it is also about the group. We will therefore explore the theoretical tensions between individual and group-based approaches to identity.  We also consider the tensions of hyperindividualism and ‘moral excellence’ that are relevant to some contemporary identity groups. The body is also relevant to many identity claims, so we also consider its significance for several identity and rights conflicts.

During the course, we consider the social, institutional and corporate forces that help explain why questions of identity have taken such sharp political forms today. A broader sociological approach also helps us see how identity politics on the left reflects the sensibilities, interests and concerns of a new liberal middle class, emerging after the 1990s, that mainly inhabits academia and education, NGOs, the public sector, the liberal corporate sector, the creative and cultural industries, and other employment sectors that have undergone significant transformation in recent decades. We will consider these areas in relation to debates about class transformations, the ‘corporate capture’ of social movement politics, and claims about the elite class basis of much identitarian thinking.

In the latter part of the course, we consider themes that will vary by year, but can include: right-wing and left-wing identitarianism, identity politics and the ‘culture wars’, international human rights conflicts related to identity, disputes about religion and secularism, sex and gender, and cultural authenticity. We will consider the distinctions between middle class identitarianism and the politics of social movements arising from ordinary, often working-class communities. We will engage a range of alternative approaches to the socially-embedded self, its personhood and identity from non-Western and Western sources.

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

This course is delivered through a combination of lectures, seminars, workshops and online materials, totalling a minimum of 20 hours in the WT. Teaching arrangements may be adjusted if online teaching is required at any point.

Weekly 60-minute lectures will focus on key debates and concepts relevant to the theme, provide overviews of these debates, and elaborate on their historical or contemporary importance.

Weekly 60-minute seminars will generate interactive discussion and participation, apply conceptual areas to empirical examples, bring student ideas and relevant experience to bear on the topics discussed, and explore potential or novel approaches to conceptual difficulties. During seminars, students will have to opportunity to undertake weekly structured interventions or intellectual ‘provocations’, engage in group and class debates around a given theme, and undertake small group analysis of written or visual material.

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

Students will be expected to produce 1 essay in the WT.

One 1000-word draft essay plan due at the start of Week 7 based on a list of essay titles.

• Appiah, K.A. (2018) The Lies That Bind: Rethinking Identity, Profile Books.
• Campbell, B. and Manning, J. (2018) The Rise of Victimhood Culture: Microaggressions, Safe Spaces, and the New Culture Wars. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan.
• Giddens, A. (2009) Modernity and self-identity: self and society in the late modern age. Cambridge: Polity.
• Gilroy, P. (2001) Between Camps: Nations, Cultures and the Allure of Race. London: Penguin.
• Haider, A. (2018) Mistaken Identity: Race and Class in the Age of Trump. London ; Brooklyn, NY: Verso.
• Kitcher, P. (ed.) (2021) The Self: A History. Oxford University Press
• Liu, C. (2021) Virtue hoarders: the case against the professional managerial class. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
• Ransby, B. (2003) Ella Baker and the black freedom movement: a radical democratic vision. Chapel Hill, N.C.: The University of North Carolina Press.
• Seigel, J.E. (2005) The idea of the self: thought and experience in western Europe since the seventeenth century. New York: Cambridge University Press.
• Taylor, C. (2010) Sources of the self: the making of the modern identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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

The course is assessed by a 4,000-word essay due on the Department’s deadline following the term’s completion. The essay will be based on a title agreed with the course convenor that draws on various parts of the course, both conceptual and empirical. The summative essay will count for 100% of the assessment for the course.