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Affective Publics (CULS90009)
Graduate courseworkPoints: 6.25On Campus (Parkville)
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July
Overview
Availability | July |
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What theoretical and conceptual frameworks emerge when we stage conversations between the scholarship on publics and public cultures and the so-called “affective turn” in the social sciences and humanities? How do affective publics implicate discourses of belonging, citizenship, and minoritarian identity? How do the discursive, the performative, and the material generate affective publics? To what extent have postcolonial theorists, critical race theorists, and femiqueer scholars destabilized our thinking on publics and affect? And, most importantly, what happens when we diverge from Eurocentric theories to engage affective publics in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East?
Following a seminar format, this subject will be of particular interest to doctoral students interested in cultural and screen studies, performance, literature, anthropology, sociology, and political theory. Some of the scholarship with which we will engage includes work by: Jurgen Habermas, Nancy Fraser, Arjun Appadurai, Lauren Berlant, Judith Butler, Sara Ahmed, Charles Hirshkind, Saba Mahmood, Brian Larkin, and Rustom Bharucha.
Intended learning outcomes
On successful completion of this subject, students should have:
- enhanced knowledge of how contemporary public cultures are being constituted and reconstituted;
- an ability to reflect upon their own research work particularly in relation to questions of affect and public cultures;
- enhanced engagement with leading-edge research in transnational scholarship on knowledge, culture and affect; and
- an ability to engage with and contribute to accounts of belonging, citizenship and identity in comparative public cultures.
Generic skills
The subject will contribute, through teaching and discussion with academic staff and peers, to developing skills and capacities including those identified in the University-defined Graduate Attributes for the PhD, in particular:
- the capacity to contextualise research within an international corpus of specialist knowledge;
- an advanced ability to engage in critical reflection, synthesis and evaluation of research-based and scholarly literature; and
- an advanced understanding of key disciplinary and multi-disciplinary norms and perspectives relevant to the field.
Last updated: 3 November 2022