Power

Course Overview

This short course Power, offers you the chance to develop an understanding of how power operates. This understanding is crucial in the field of psychosocial studies for example, and in particular those views on power which go beyond forms of coercion, repression and external domination, and acknowledge the productivity of power and the subjective attachment to it.

In this short course we introduce you to key psychosocial theories of power and key sites of its production. We will cover:

• Intersectionality: an analysis of structures of power and domination, in particular ways in which class, sexism and racism are interconnected and co-constitutive of any social formation; a review of the historical and spatial trajectory of the concept of intersectionality and its political significance for the analysis of systems of privilege and oppression
• Language and symbolic power: views of power which move beyond its reduction to ‘physical forces’ and focus instead on the analysis of systems of representations and the relation between power and broader cultural processes of meaning formation
• Subjective attachments to power: an introduction to notions of 'misrepresentation', 'misrecognition', 'identification' and 'interpellation', drawn from psychoanalytic and political literatures; how these notions address the paradoxes of power, as subjects, in their processes of identity formation, inevitably attach themselves to systems of representation (or open social/political formations) which locate them in positions of subordination or exclusion

This short course is assessed via a 500-word formative coursework assessment (20%) and 2000-word essay (80%).

This can be taken as a standalone short course or as part of:

• Politics and International Studies (Certificate of Higher Education)

Credits: 30 credits at level 4