Hierarchies of World Politics: The Role of Materialities, Knowledges, Subjectivities - Not offered in AY 2022-23
Undergraduate Program Status
Elective | 4th year |
The course proposes wide-ranging readings on historical and contemporary orders of (racial, class, gender, ethnic, sexual, cultural, …) inequality/hierarchy across different domains of colonial and postcolonial political and personal life. It privileges a humanities (as opposed to a positivistic/scientistic) perspective with a view to offering new intelligibilities, via the destabilisation of everyday, commonsensical and dominant scholarly knowledges, of OUR experiences (in our everyday lives and in our scholarly work) related to power, truth, subjectivity, identity, freedom, ethics and so on. We will be reading texts that are aimed at disassembling dominant understandings of the present, injecting anxiety and uncertainty into dominant forms of engagement and expertise, and at opening them up to alternative modes of thinking and making the world.
By the end of the course the students will: be familiar with major themes, concerns, concepts, epistemologies, methodologies in diverse critical approaches aimed at unsettling states of inequality; have enlarged their conceptual and methodological repertoire for analysing relations of power; have acquired the intellectual means to detect relations of inequality in the most unsuspecting places and spaces; be able to critically evaluate (broadly defined) postcolonial inflections of critical engagements with power hierarchies; have learned to situate their own research in relation to the discussed themes, concerns, concepts and so on.