GI426 Half Unit
Gender and Human Rights
This information is for the 2025/26 session.
Course Convenor
Dr SM Rodriguez
Availability
This course is compulsory on the MSc in Gender (Rights and Human Rights). This course is available on the MSc in Culture, Justice, and Environment, MSc in Gender, MSc in Gender (Research), MSc in Gender (Sexuality), MSc in Gender, Development and Globalisation, MSc in Gender, Media and Culture, MSc in Gender, Peace and Security, MSc in Gender, Policy and Inequalities, MSc in Human Rights and MSc in Human Rights and Politics. This course is available with permission as an outside option to students on other programmes where regulations permit. This course uses controlled access as part of the course selection process.
Students should apply by 10am UK time on Friday 26 September 2025. Offers will be made after 10am on this date and will continue until all places are filled.
All students on the MSc Gender (Rights and Human Rights) (for whom the course is compulsory) will be given a place. Priority is then given to home department students and then to those who have the course listed in their programme regulations who apply in the first 24-hours (by 10:00am, Friday 26 September 2025), space permitting. Please note the timing of your request within the first 24-hours will not impact chances of being accepted onto the course. Requests received after this timeframe, or outside option requests, will be allocated randomly if space remains.
Please do not email the Course Convenor with personal expressions of interest as these are not required and do not influence who is offered a place. Contact gender@lse.ac.uk with any queries.
Requisites
Additional requisites:
A background in the Humanities and/or the Social Sciences with a basic familiarity with human rights and/or gender studies.
Course content
This course will provide the students with a transnational and intersectional gender perspective on contemporary theories and practices of rights/human rights and humanitarianism. It brings together different sets of scholarship: gender theories, decolonial, queer and postcolonial scholarship, theoretical perspectives on human rights alongside with legal and policy perspectives - and will be of interest to students wanting to study the question of human rights in an interdisciplinary manner but also one that is crucially sutured to the question of gender. Consequently, the course will introduce students to key scholars: CLR James, Sylvia Wynter, Gayatri Spivak, Michel Rolph Trouillot, Ratna Kapur, Hannah Arendt, Audra Simpson, Walter Mignolo, Girogio Agamben, Jacques Rancierre, Judith Butler, Lila Abu Lughod, Wendy Brown among others while drawing attention to the evolution and working of international legal frameworks for securing women's rights and other marginal groups. The course will pay special attention to the struggles over 'humanity', 'civilisation' and 'indigeneity', as well as to tensions between citizenship rights and human rights, and the transformation of the former in the light of the latter. It will also focus on feminist demands and struggles over sexuality, sexual rights, bodily rights, culture, development and citizenship; over entitlements to material resources; to gendered protections in conflict; and on vulnerability and precarity under neoliberal economic and political regimes. The course is focused on encouraging critical thinking on human rights together with introducing students to alternative, decolonial and anti colonial perspectives on rights and human rights.
Teaching
15 hours of seminars and 15 hours of lectures in the Autumn Term.
This course has a reading week in Week 6 of Autumn Term.
Formative assessment
Formative assignment.
Indicative reading
- Trouillot, M.R., 1995. Silencing the past: Power and the production of history. Beacon Press.
- James, C.L.R., 2001. The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution. Penguin UK.
- Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis
- McKittrick K. (2015) ed. 'Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis', Duke University Press.
- Lughod, L. (2013) 'Do Muslim Women Need Saving', Harvard University Press.
- Kapur, R., 2018. Gender, Alterity and Human Rights: Freedom in a Fishbowl. Edward Elgar Publishing., Giorgio. Homo sacer: Sovereign power and bare life. Stanford University Press, 1998.
- Arendt, Hannah. The Origins of Totalitarianism. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1973.
- Balibar, Étienne. Equaliberty: Political Essays. Duke University Press, 2014.
- Fassin, D. ( 2012) 'Humanitarian Reason', Harvard University Press.
- Moyn, Samuel ( 2010) 'The Last Utopia', Columbia University Press.
- Correa, Sonia, Rosalind Petchesky and Richard Parker ( 2008) (eds.) Sexuality, Health and Human Rights, Routledge, New York.
Assessment
Essay (100%, 3000 words)
Key facts
Department: Gender Studies
Course Study Period: Autumn Term
Unit value: Half unit
FHEQ Level: Level 7
CEFR Level: Null
Keywords: human rights, gender, decolonising global human rights, law, international development, sexuality, theory, humanitarianism, peace and security
Total students 2024/25: 60
Average class size 2024/25: 15
Controlled access 2024/25: NoCourse selection videos
Some departments have produced short videos to introduce their courses. Please refer to the course selection videos index page for further information.
Personal development skills
- Leadership
- Self-management
- Team working
- Problem solving
- Application of information skills
- Communication