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 Content

Syllabus Plan

Whilst the module’s precise content may vary from year to year, it is envisaged that the syllabus will cover some or all of the following topics:

Introduction to Biopolitics.

Governmentality: Understanding the ‘conduct of conduct.’
Creating Bare Life and States of Exception: Understanding life reduced to nakedness.
Regulating Death.
Surveillance and Control: Understanding how societies are governed and regulated.
Resistance to Biopolitics.

Learning and Teaching

This table provides an overview of how your hours of study for this module are allocated:

Scheduled Learning and Teaching Activities	Guided independent study	Placement / study abroad
22	128	0

...and this table provides a more detailed breakdown of the hours allocated to various study activities:

Category	Hours of study time	Description
Scheduled Learning and Teaching Activities	22	11x 2 hour seminars
Guided Independent Study	50	Seminar preparation through directed reading
Guided Independent Study	6	To complete the formative essay plan
Guided independent study	24	To complete the review essay
Guided independent study	48	To complete the critical research paper.

Online Resources

This module has online resources available via ELE (the Exeter Learning Environment).

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)