Checking date: 15/06/2021


Course: 2021/2022

Culture and Power
(15421)
Master in Cultural Theory and Critique (Plan: 356 - Estudio: 253)
EPH


Coordinating teacher: VELASCO ARIAS, GONZALO

Department assigned to the subject: Humanities: Philosophy, Language, Literature Theory Department

Type: Electives
ECTS Credits: 6.0 ECTS

Course:
Semester:




Objectives
Competences: To kow how to establish the relations between cultural fields and forms of social and political power To acquire the necessary conceptual tools and theories to establish the former relations To acquire the necessary conceptual tools and theories to establish to analyze the temporal and historical dimensions of the relations between culture and power To master the analysis and critical thinking about the current debates on cultural studies To know the most relevant bibliography To know how to achieve an interdisciplinar study To know how to use verbal and written methods of study and criticism To be able to write scholar papers and oral expositions
Skills and learning outcomes
Description of contents: programme
Part I. CULTURE AND SUBJECTIVITY 1. Cultural production of subjectivity 2. Ideology, hegemony, social imaginaries, cognitive maps 3. The spatialisation of power 4. Practices of subjectivation: is resistance possible? Part II. THE COLONISATION OF THE SUBVERSIVE SELF 5. From discipline to affective self-exploitation: the Foucauldian genealogy of power, the spirit of '68 and its heirs. 6. Cultural neoliberalism: the passive revolution of '68? 7. The colonisation of the subversive self: desire, creativity, happiness, experience. Part III. THE GAZE OF OTHERS 8. Traditions of recognition and identity politics. 9. A critique of diversity: between the memory of harm and victimhood. 10. The (intersectional) critique of the critique of identity. PART IV. KNOWING AND TELLING ABOUT OURSELVES 11. Epistemic injustices 12. What is epistemic lucidity? 13. Towards a theory of solidarity in the society of diversity. Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)
Learning activities and methodology
The subject will be based on a theoretical part and a practical part in which relevant texts related to the subject contents will be discussed. The lecturer will present the general contents and the associated texts. Each session will end with one of several problems and research questions. The lecturer will point which texts are recommended to delve into those questions and problems. In the first hour of the next session, one or two students, in turn, will explain what readings and what reflection work they have done on the problems indicated by the lecturer at the end of the previous session. In the second hour, the lecturer will introduce a new topic and a new problem. In this way, each session begins with a presentation of the students that serves to link with the previous session, and ends with the introduction of a new topic. Discussions will be held with students to check the degree of understanding of the content and to help resolve the questions raised. The students will make a report for each of the oral presentations made and will participate in the debates generated around the texts.
Assessment System
  • % end-of-term-examination 50
  • % of continuous assessment (assigments, laboratory, practicals...) 50
Calendar of Continuous assessment
Basic Bibliography
  • Brown, Wendy. Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Identity and Empire. Princeton University Press. 2006
  • Hlll Collins, Patricia. Intersectionality as Critical Social Theory. Duke University Press. 2019
  • Jaeggi, Rahel. Alienation. Columbia University Press. 2016
  • Jaeggi, Rahel. Critique of Forms of Life. The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. 2018
  • Kollers, Avery. A Moral Theory of Solidarity. Oxford University Press. 2016
  • Medina, J.. The Epistemology of Resistance: Gender and Racial Oppression, Epistemic Injustice, and the Social Imagination. Oxford University Press. 2016
  • Scholz, S. J.. Political Solidarity. The Pennsylvania University Press. 2008

The course syllabus may change due academic events or other reasons.