| Unit name | Gender, Feminism and Futurity |
|---|---|
| Unit code | GEOGM1416 |
| Credit points | 20 |
| Level of study | M/7 |
| Teaching block(s) |
Academic Year (weeks 1 - 52) |
| Unit director | Professor. MacLeavy |
| Open unit status | Not open |
| Pre-requisites | |
| Co-requisites |
none |
| School/department | School of Geographical Sciences |
| Faculty | Faculty of Science |
This unit brings together scholarship from different theoretical traditions to generate debate around the new times and new spaces of feminism. Since the 1980s, debates over the status of feminism in academia have focused on the diversity of subjects, methods, and objects of feminist research. This has seen the institutional location of feminism called into question, reflecting anxieties over the transformation of feminism from a political project into a disciplinary formation. Accompanying these debates over the status of feminism are also narratives of feminism&�s current malaise, in which invocations of &�postfeminism&� have been used to suggest that feminist theorising and feminist politics are no longer relevant to the conditions of contemporary life. This unit explores the diversity of feminist and gender-sensitive scholarship across the social sciences and humanities as a means of questioning suggestions that feminist theory and practice are no longer relevant for analysing political, economic, and social transformations.
The unit aims to introduce students to scholarship informed by feminist analyses in areas as diverse as economic geography, welfare state restructuring, political ecology, community organizing, and science and technology studies. Specifically, it examines how feminist and gender-sensitive scholarship is shifting taken-for-granted conceptions of space and time, key concerns of geographers as well as other social scientists.
Learning objectives To develop an awareness of the diversity of feminist and gender-sensitive scholarship in geography and across the social sciences and humanities; To develop an awareness of the performative nature of geographical concepts such as space, place, and location; To develop an awareness of the need to recognise the contextuality of all academic research; To develop an awareness of the politics of feminism in relation to globalisation and colonialism, demonstrating clearly that feminism is never confined to a singular geographical space or historical time Pre-requiste none,
