MA in Art & Politics

The central goal of A&P1 is to examine, using a variety of historical, theoretical and aesthetical perspectives, the nature of the relationship between Art and Politics. The module cuts across historical trajectories and focuses upon four themes which are central to Art, Politics and the relationship between them. These are:

1. Autonomy

2. Conflict and Pain

3. Power

4. Agency/Affect. 

Underlying these four themes is a single meta-theme – that of change. Each section, in its own way, asks if and/or how it is it possible for particular aesthetico-political theories and practices to affect larger socio-political regimes and structures?

This is a core module for all students studying the MA Art and Politics. Through practice-based group activity and pre-arranged project work, students create work that engages with themes agreed to between the students and the tutors and arrived at through course discussion, interaction, site visits and through harnessing and channelling the creativity, originality and imagination of the participants themselves.

In a set of site-specific practices that avoid overt engagement with either art or politics in the traditional sense (where art is treated as a set of techniques and politics is treated as self-evident) students are invited into new mental spaces. Combining site-specific work with related theoretical reading the module offers students an opportunity to engage with politics and art as a way of seeing the world differently. These project-based projects offer spaces where ideas and proposals can be put into a practice-based environment that leads to a set of material outcomes enabling students to reflect upon how and where a public or audience encounters such work.

The Politics Master's Dissertation is an extended piece of written work of ten thousand words on a research topic of your choice (but subject to approval). It is compulsory for all MA and MRes students who have passed al written papers and is undertaken after the Summer term (i.e. during the 'vacation' period). The dissertation comprises a critical review of the literature and/or original analysis of documentary and/or other evidence on a chosen topic within the fields of your programme. Your work for the dissertation will be supervised by a member of staff with particular expertise of interest in the area chosen for study. The dissertation counts as one full module unit.

This subject is built around glimpses of, and insights into, the lives of ordinary Chinese people and the rules and rituals that govern their existence. You will discuss the ways everyday life was governed under socialism and the ways that control is now breaking down with the emergence of a consumer culture, enabling a close scrutiny of the politics of everyday life. Picking up on themes as diverse and quirky as Mao badge fetishists, hoodlum slang, and the role of the tattoo, the subject examines the way a range of people not only live but resist dominant social discourse.

We will employ an array of critical thinking from Western social theorists and it is this that is highlighted through themes such as ‘commodities and collection’, ‘authorship and biography’, questions of power, violence and excess  as well as themes of fore-thrownment, sacrifice and desire. You will gain a grounding not only in the politics of everyday life in China but also in Western theoretical engagements with the everyday.  

This module will give you an insight into different values systems and political forms and in taking up the issue of politics in a culturally different way gaining an understanding of the heuristic value of certain schools of social, cultural and political theory

The project-based element of the MA Art and Politics programme is designed to develop the students’ critical and reflexive skills in a manner that compliments and critiques the other elements of the programme.

The project provides a space to explore small to medium size ideas through the act of trying to find an appropriate form, context and public for these. 

The module offers an introduction to contemporary political philosophy in the Middle Eastern and Islamic world, from early engagements with colonial powers to more recent developments. A survey into the political thought of some of the most relevant thinkers will allow students to problematise classical categorisations of Muslim intellectual life as either reformist or reactionary, modernist or anti-modern, secular or religious, nationalist or universalist.

The course discusses Islamic reformism in the 19th and early 20th century, the radicalisation of Islamic Political Thought in recent decades and more secular engagements with both turath (Islamic tradition) and modernity. A thematic discussion in the second part of the course will then give students an opportunity to think about fundamental categories in international politics from a comparative perspective, with focus on critical debates such as human rights, democracy, Islamic citizenship, gender and the tension between state and dawlah.

The course aims to fully disclose the internal complexity and dynamism of contemporary Arab and Islamic thinking, highlighting its practical relevance for present-day issues in world politics.

There is nothing new to the concept that space is infused and structured according to dominant forms of power in society - be they nationalism, neo-liberalism, the state, or patriarchy - and that such articulations have corresponding representational forms in maps, charts, surveys, and censuses.

Far from being the neutral scientific endeavour it is often claimed to be, cartography has always tended to reinforce and replicate dominant spatial logics, erasing indigenous claims to land, ostracising minorities from the political landscape, and setting racial, gender and class hierarchies (quite literally) in stone, brick and asphalt. Increasingly, however, we are seeing a growing number of both artists and social movements coming to an awareness that our representations of space carry with them an intendant politics. Intent on redressing this imbalance, counter-mapping is the still somewhat speculative practice of harnessing dominant representational strategies in an effort to invert, subvert, and make clear what has been erased in an effort to seek political change.

From feminist re-mappings of the city according to safe and dangerous places, to indigenous narratives of ancestral wanderings; from students co-opting google maps to avoid police tactics of ‘kettling’, to artist Janet Cardiff’s memory walks; from local anarchist groups revealing locations of CCTV cameras in Camberwell Green, to W.G. Sebald’s literary re-mapping of East Anglia; this module not only studies emerging forms of counter-mapping, but encourages students to engage in their own practice of re-mapping, re-walking, and re-appropriating the cityscape.

From western antiquity until modern times, the body in the west has been aestheticised, vilified, eroticised and pathologised. It is in and through the body that both self and society have been fashioned and disciplined.

It is at the heart of the emergence of sexuality as a modern discourse, and a constituent feature of the politics of identity, formed around race, gender and sex. For all the different debates the body has generated, they have always been framed within the mind/body, and nature/culture distinctions, which have been at the core of western thinking since the eighteenth century. 

This module focuses on how societies emerging from different types of conflict (such as war, genocide, ethnic violence and grave human rights abuses) engage in the process of coming to terms with their past. It examines official mechanisms of ‘transitional justice’ such as trials and truth commissions, as well as cultural forms of remembrance and local community practices.

By exploring the complex relationship between conflict, memory and justice in various cross-cultural settings, it seeks to provide an understanding of the ways in which such processes can promote or hinder reconciliation and the rebuilding of social and inter-communal ties.

The module will also assess the role of external factors (particularly through the creation of international war crimes tribunals) in terms of how they have affected such internal processes of facing the past. Various case studies, including Germany, Japan, Serbia, South Africa, and Rwanda will inform the theoretical discussions and provide a comparative perspective. 

This module aims to raise questions about whether the concepts and categories through which we usually study the ’international' or ’global' are adequate to the task. It critically examines categories of the social sciences and humanities that are usually simply presupposed and ’applied', and which, despite their Western or European origins, are assumed to be ’universal'. It does this by closely examining some of the most important theoretical writings of the post-WWII period, focusing upon books and debates which had repercussions far beyond their immediate disciplinary boundaries, including books by Kuhn, MacIntyre, Foucault, Said, and others.

Students explore the claim(s) that far from being objective and universal, our knowledge is shaped by culture, history and politics. In seminars we ask, can different ’conceptual schemes', ’paradigms' or ’traditions' be compared to see which one is better, or are they incommensurable? Do theories and explanations triumph over rival theories because they are ’better'- or for other reasons? Does knowledge serve to unmask power, or is it always caught up with and complicit with power?

This module requires students not simply to advance their knowledge of politics, but to explore the politics of knowledge, and to do so, in particular, by enquiring into whether the categories and concepts of the social sciences are genuinely  international and universal, or merely modern/Western and parochial.

This module focuses on the political and cultural economy of finance through the empirical lens of the global economy. It seeks to foster a deeper understanding of finance as a technical practice but also as a powerful transformative process that shapes politics and public policy.

*In order to study this module you must have taken Economics modules at levels 4 and 5.

Pending

This MA level module explores the contemporary politics of human rights. Drawing on political philosophy, legal theory and international relations approaches, the module will examine the complex issues raised by human rights, and some of the difficulties and challenges in applying human rights in the contemporary world – the violence and human rights violations committed by state and non-state actors, wars and conflicts around the world, and the current global refugee crisis. It will also explore some of the important critiques of human rights from Marxist and postcolonial perspectives.

Students will be introduced to the major theoretical frameworks for understanding state compliance with human rights obligations using both historical and comparative approaches to the topic. We will focus on particular case examples and general cross-national comparisons in the effort to understand why states commit violations.

The module will explore the influence of political and economic conditions such as regime type, conflict, economic development in the protection or violation of human rights, the impact of human agency and decisions and the role of states, international legal instruments and NGOs in the promotion of human rights. Finally, it will examine questions of intervention, the development of accountability mechanisms and the management of the blame for human rights violations. 

The workings of power, authority and freedom have implications as much for our subjective, or psychic, organisation as they do for institutions and programmes of government. Psychoanalytic theory looks to the unconscious motivations of human behaviour and the strange, often perverse effects these can have on social relations. Ideas of leadership, cultural identity or personal choice, for example, involve identifications that often distort one’s sense of self and delimit its autonomy. Secret desires for subjugation to the powerful or the willful denial of suffering (in oneself or in others) are central themes of psychoanalysis. 

‘Psychopolitics’ thus comprises the fantasies, obsessions, obscene desires and precarious repressions that structure political reality and supply it objects for intimate investment. This module explores how we study politics from a psychoanalytical perspective. It focuses primarily on key texts by Freud and Lacan – as well as by other thinkers – to develop a vocabulary of psychopolitical analysis to apply to the study of contemporary events.

This module provides a survey of the classical, critical and newly emerging theories of international relations, namely: realism/neorealism, liberalism/neoliberalism, Marxism, constructivism, post-modernism, feminism, post-colonialism, the aesthetic turn in IR and theories of justice.

You will approach each of these theories through the concept of power, seeking to explain the radical shifts that have occurred both in our understanding of power as well as the role that it plays in international politics in the last century. The module combines its examination of theory with debates on contemporary case-studies that serve to showcase the link between theory and practice.

This module considers both theoretical and empirical analysis of gender and politics: the course begins with a discussion of a range of political thinkers who have helped develop our understanding of gender including Judith Butler, Catherine MacKinnon, RW Connell, Patricia Hill Collins and Jack Halberstam.

The second half of the course will focus on substantive issues which allow us to consider the various discursive, juridical and classificatory ways in which gender impacts upon our everyday lives as well as the geopolitical sphere.

The module draws upon examples from various world regions and time periods to assess: debates concerning equal rights, the organisation of social movements and the construction of various femininities and masculinities.

Gender theory has provided a radical and challenging critique of mainstream political ideology and the module will consider the multiple ways in which gender equality activists seek to resist biological determinism. By examining the conceptual and empirical impact of gender upon the study of politics this module introduces students to the complex ways in which gender relations permeate both formal institutions and societal relations.