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Module details for 2022/23.

30 credits

FHEQ Level 6

Module Outline

What lay behind the rise in right-wing nationalist movements and regimes across the world in the late
2010s including in India, the UK, the US, the Philippines, continental Europe and Brazil? Why did the
UK vote to leave the EU in 2016 and then to ‘get Brexit done’ in 2019? What caused the emergence of
the ‘Make America Great Again’ movement? What are the implications of these developments for the
direction of human travel beyond the pandemic and in the face of the climate emergency? How much
does it help to think conjuncturally about these questions building on the Gramscian methods of
Stuart Hall and Gillian Hart? This module will create a collective, interdisciplinary learning
environment which will pay attention both to critical analysis and to praxis. The analytical content will
be centrally concerned with two questions raised by Doreen Massey: ‘What does this place stand
for?’ and ‘To whom does this place belong?’ We will explore frameworks developed by feminist, anti-
racist and anti-colonial scholars such as Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Mahmood Mamdani and Lisa Lowe. The
scale of inquiry will range from the rural, through neighbourhoods and cities to whole countries. We
draw on critical ethnographies to consider how class-based inequality is and has been lived in
communities, and ways in which racisms have emerged and shifted historically, including through the
language and practices of colonialism, and their effects on the present. ‘Community’ itself will be
unpacked to be understood as something always containing tensions and contradictions, for example
around unequal land ownership and gender inequality. In terms of praxis we will think through
geographies of hope, solidarity, resistance and abolition, drawing on writers in the black radical
tradition, and on coalitional and inter-generational politics within and beyond higher education.

Module learning outcomes

Summarise and explain key concepts

Demonstrate a systematic understanding of key interdisciplinary
debates on class, community and nation

Recognise and critically evaluate knowledge and understandings of
the diversity of scales at which class, community and nation
become meaningful to people as well as the interrelation between
those scales

Identify, explore, and discuss appropriate empirical evidence in
relation to the key concepts of class, community and nation

View timetable

Timing

Submission deadlines may vary for different types of assignment/groups of students.

Weighting

Coursework components (if listed) total 100% of the overall coursework weighting value.

How to read the week pattern

The numbers indicate the weeks of the term and how many events take place each week.

Dr Simon Rycroft

Assess convenor
/profiles/8703

Prof Ben Rogaly

Convenor
/profiles/28173

Prof Julian Murton

Assess convenor
/profiles/30834