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Semester 2

Understanding Race and Colonialism (SSPS08013)

Subject

Social and Political Studies

College

CAHSS

Credits

20

Normal Year Taken

1

Delivery Session Year

2023/2024

Pre-requisites

Course Summary

Understanding Race and Colonialism is a University-wide course open to all pre-honours students. It engages with critical approaches to the study of race, racism and colonial formations from a multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary approach. It provides a theoretical and methodological foundation for understanding race as a dynamic socio-historical phenomenon, organizing principle of power that governs institutions, structures and everyday life, and contested site of domination.

Course Description

Why do ideas about race feature in social relations today? What structures of knowledge do ideas about racial difference rely upon? How do historical projects of race-making come to be refashioned in contemporary social life? This course engages with such questions by examining the provenance of race and its defining role in the formation of colonial modernity. It provides an overview of key theoretical approaches and methodological debates in the study of race, racism and colonial formations across various disciplines and intersecting sites of modern power. This course is a University-wide introductory course and open to students across the University. This course is intended to serve as an introduction to race and colonial studies. It traces the relationship between race and colonialism across a number of central concepts and theoretical approaches. These include: Power/Knowledge: Locating Race and Epistemology; Intersectionality and Its Counter-Parts; Whiteness; Islamophobia and Antisemitism; Transatlantic Slavery and Its Afterlife; Decolonization; Feminist Debates; The Politics of Solidarity; Art, Aesthetics and the Politics of Refusal. Understanding Race and Colonialism is taught through weekly lectures and tutorial classes. This course holds one long length lecture (100 minutes) + one 50-minute tutorial each week. The aim of the lecture component is to further introduce and distil the key concepts and lessons from the assigned readings. These lectures will go over the main ideas from the readings, introduce other empirical context or examples and provide a scaffold of each weekly topic. The lectures are aimed to provide general guidance for what to take from each week's set of readings and to allow for students to engage more deeply in the material and think more critically about what is at stake in study of race, racialization and colonial studies. These lectures will undergird, not substitute the reading or tutorial participation. Students will be asked to complete the readings ahead of the scheduled lecture presentation. Lectures will be delivered through the use of slides and at times other audio/visual materials. Tutorial sessions will be held weekly, with the first one commencing in week one. During the tutorial sessions, various methods will be adopted to facilitate group discussion including: group discussion; in-class presentations and reflection exercises and engaging with supplementary material (e.g. film, audio texts, news and social media etc.). Students will be expected to show up to the tutorials having done the readings and attended the lecture.

Assessment Information

Written Exam 0%, Coursework 85%, Practical Exam 15%

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