Module POC3106 for 2020/1
- Overview
- Aims and Learning Outcomes
- Module Content
- Indicative Reading List
- Assessment
Undergraduate Module Descriptor
POC3106: Biopolitics of Security
This module descriptor refers to the 2020/1 academic year.
Please note that this module is only delivered on the Penryn Campus.
Module Aims
The module aims to enable you to develop a critical understanding of contemporary security events, formulate new research insights and understand issues of International Relations, Security and Migration studies through a biopolitical lens. The module will help you to understand the techniques and rationales used by the nation-states to decide who shall live and who shall die, who shall be counted and who should be disappeared out of sight, and how to make such management acceptable to public morality and reason. The module will also prepare you for academic and other careers in the field of critical theory and security studies.
| On successfully completing the programme you will be able to: | |
|---|---|
| Module-Specific Skills | 1. Understand and explain, in-depth, contemporary and emerging challenges to security. 2. Demonstrate a critical and reflexive approach in assessing academic and policy debates on security |
| Discipline-Specific Skills | 3. Show awareness of key perspectives and debates in Biopolitics and their interface with critical theory. 4. Apply Foucauldian methodology, abstract theoretical perspectives to actual events of security. |
| Personal and Key Skills | 5. Develop critical arguments and offering alternative means of thinking. 6. Construct a reasoned and logical argument supported by evidence. 7. Work independently within a limited timeframe to complete a specified task |
Indicative Reading List
This reading list is indicative - i.e. it provides an idea of texts that may be useful to you on this module, but it is not considered to be a confirmed or compulsory reading list for this module.
Basic reading:
- Lowe, Lisa. The intimacies of four continents. Duke University Press, 2015.
- Foucault, Michel. " Society Must Be Defended": Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975-1976. Vol. 1. Macmillan, 2003.
- Foucault, Michel. "The history of sexuality: An introduction, volume I." Trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage 95 (1990).
- Nishiyama, Hidefumi. "Towards a global genealogy of biopolitics: Race, colonialism, and biometrics beyond Europe." Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 33, no. 2 (2015): 331-346.
- Foucault, Michel. Power: the essential works of Michel Foucault 1954-1984. Penguin UK, 2019.
- Davis, Angela Y. Are prisons obsolete?. Seven Stories Press, 2011.
- Wacquant, Loïc. "Slavery to mass incarceration." New left review 13 (2002): 41.
- Mamdani, Mahmood. "Making sense of political violence in postcolonial Africa." In War and Peace in the 20th Century and Beyond, pp. 71-99. 2003.
- Roberts, Dorothy E. Killing the black body: Race, reproduction, and the meaning of liberty. Vintage, 1999.
- Guru, Gopal. "Introduction: theorizing humiliation." Humiliation: claims and context (2009): 1-22.
- Jaaware, Aniket. "Eating and Eating with the Dalit: A Reconsideration Touching upon Marathi Poetry." Indian Poetry: Modernism and After (2001): 262-93.
- Agamben, Giorgio. Homo sacer: Sovereign power and bare life. Stanford University Press, 1998.
- Agamben, Giorgio. State of exception . Vol. 2. University of Chicago Press, 2005. (Selections)
- Butler, Judith. Precarious life: The powers of mourning and violence . Verso, 2006. (Selections)
- Mbembé, J-A., and Libby Meintjes. "Necropolitics." Public culture 15, no. 1 (2003): 11-40.
- Basaran, Tugba. "The saved and the drowned: Governing indifference in the name of security." Security Dialogue 46, no. 3 (2015): 205-220.
- Ticktin, Miriam. "Policing and humanitarianism in France: immigration and the turn to law as state of exception." Interventions 7, no. 3 (2005): 346-368.
- Doty, Roxanne Lynn. "Bare life: border-crossing deaths and spaces of moral alibi." Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 29, no. 4 (2011): 599-612.
Films
Modern Times. Directed by Charlie Chaplin (1936)
Lemon Tree. Directed by Eran Riklis (2008)
The Battle of Algiers. Directed by Gillo Pontecorvo (1965)
The Architecture of Violence. Directed by Ana Naomi de Sousa (2014)
