Prof Chetan Bhatt

This course is available on the MSc in Culture and Society, MSc in Economy and Society, MSc in Human Rights, MSc in Human Rights and Politics, MSc in Political Sociology and MSc in Sociology. 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. For information on controlled access courses, including eligibility, application processes, deadlines, and departmental contact details, please refer to the Controlled Access Courses webpage.

This course has a limited number of places. For information on how to apply for a place on this course, please see Courses offered and related information.

The course is not an introductory course in social theory. It is ideally suited to students familiar and comfortable with advanced modern social and political thought, philosophy, and political philosophy, including complex, advanced, and challenging readings in these areas.

Contemporary Social Thought covers several areas in contemporary social theory and links these areas to traditions of Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment thinking. Following an overview of Enlightenment philosophical traditions, the course considers a variety of traditions of thought that vary by year but can include: poststructuralism and humanism, postcolonial and decolonial theory, critical theory, postmodernism, deconstruction, queer theory, and transhumanism. The course includes critical assessment of Enlightenment philosophers such as Kant and Hegel and more recent thinkers. Recent theorists covered in the course vary by year, but can include Michel Foucault, Gayatri Spivak, Theodor Adorno, Jacques Derrida, Achille Mbembe, Donna Haraway, Jean-Francois Lyotard, Stuart Hall, Judith Butler, and Walter Mignolo.  The course also aims to link theoretical areas with new and emerging social and political issues – for example, how theoretical approaches can be used to analyse a contemporary phenomenon.

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

This course is usually delivered through a combination of lectures and seminars. There will be two hours or more of teaching each week in WT.

Essay plan.

Students will be expected to complete an essay outline of 1,000 words in WT.

A. Loomba (2015), Colonialism/Postcolonialism [Third Edition], Routledge.
A. Elliott (2014), Contemporary Social Theory: an introduction [Second Edition], Routledge.
J. Wolff (2015), An Introduction to Political Philosophy [Third Edition], Oxford University Press.

Essay (100%, 4000 words) in May.

The course is assessed by a 4,000 word essay chosen from a list of essay titles.