Bodies, Politics and Morality will provide a wide-ranging introduction to historical and contemporary understandings of the body and embodiment in society, and their intersection with inequality, resource distribution, and social (in)justice. The course explores how symbolic and material bodies are shaping and shaped by wider socio-historical structures.
Students will also learn to anchor theory in empirical examples, and see how the two have been interwoven in shaping experience, knowledge, and political action. We will draw on historical and contemporary empirical sites of embodied inequality from the UK and global contexts. Although the focus on the module is on the body, students will develop an understanding that bodies can never be divorced from their social contexts.
Students will develop critical, analytical and reflective skills in understanding embodied identity and the distribution of value. They will do so by engaging with texts and reflexively draw on their situated experience.