GV4L4      Half Unit
Critical Theory and Political Action

This information is for the 2025/26 session.

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This course engages students in the study of ‘critical theory’ in a broad and inclusive sense, with a special interest in exploring how theory can inform and be shaped by political practises. Students first will consider formative texts and ideas in twentieth-century critical theory from Gramsci and the early Frankfurt School, confronting issues such as the relation between advanced capitalism and popular thought-forms, the critique of positivism, and philosophy’s entanglement with material, cultural and political history. Next, we turn our attention to late twentieth-century and twenty-first century writings that attune critical theory to dynamics of race, gender, sexuality, and the intellectual agency of dominated groups. We take up the Birmingham School’s critical development of Gramscian theory to analyse racial power and resistance in Britain as well as Paulo Freire’s theory of popular education. We also examine more recent writings in Marxism, feminism, and critical race theory. We explore relations between capitalism and racial domination, gender power, and sexual norms, and we consider the implications for political action that arise from critically investigating these relations. The course also highlights questions of method related to the task of placing theory and practical politics in dialogue, thus inquiring how to generate grounded and engaged critical theory.

20 hours of seminars in the Autumn Term.

This course has a reading week in Week 6 of Autumn Term.

There will be a 2-hour seminar each week, with a combined lecture and discussion in that time-block.

Essay in Autumn Term Week 8

One 1,500-word formative essay will be due in AT Week 8. The essay will mainly provide preliminary examination of a question or debate in critical theory but also will include a brief proposal for a contemporary political phenomenon to analyse in the summative research essay.

Essential readings typically include the following texts:

• Gramsci, Antonio. 2001. Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci. Edited and translated by Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith. London: Electric Book Company.
• Adorno, Theodor W. 1973. Negative Dialectics. Translated by E. B. Ashton. New York: Continuum.
• Hall, Stuart. 1988. The Hard Road to Renewal: Thatcherism and the Crisis of the Left. London: Verso.
• Freire, Paulo. 2000. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Translated by Myra Bergman Ramos. New York: Continuum.
• Weeks, Kathi. 2011. The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics, and Postwork Imaginaries. Durham: Duke University Press.
• Davis, Angela. 1998. The Angela Y. Davis Reader. Edited by Joy James. Oxford: Blackwell.

Essay (100%, 4000 words) in Winter Term Week 1

One 4,000-word essay due after the term’s completion (i.e., in January, WT Week 1, given that this is an AT course). The essay will analyse a contemporary political practise or movement that has a popular or mass base, chosen by the student, using key concepts drawn from the course’s main readings.The summative essay will account for 100% of the course mark.