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Identity and Culture

Overview

  • Credit value: 30 credits at Level 4
  • Convenor: Akane Kawakami
  • Assessment: (1) an annotated portfolio of five pieces of evidence and 1000-word accompanying text; (2) a creative response to a topic covered on the module and critical reflection on the response (50% each)

Module description

In this module we investigate how the arts and humanities engage with identities across the human lifecycle from before the cradle to beyond the grave, illuminating how we come into the world and what happens when we leave it, and allowing insight into various life-stages in between.

You will be introduced to a variety of cultural objects from across different cultures, helping you to understand how the identities across the lifecycle can be imagined differently across distinct cultural, historical and geographical contexts. You will also be given the tools to analyse different kinds of texts and objects and the critical frameworks in which to explore how they might impact our understanding of the real social worlds we inhabit and the challenges we face in them.

Indicative syllabus

  • Visualising identities: how Jo Spence used photographs to question her own identity in relation to that of others
  • Disability and identity: how disability has been understood, represented and contested as a category of identity
  • Linguistic identity: style and identity; deaf culture and identity
  • Material identities: how identities are shaped by the unwanted physical remnants of armed conflict
  • Historical identities: the complexities of identity in the past
  • Activist identities: case studies on political dissident identity and mental health activism and mad studies
  • Posthumanism and the Anthropocene: an exploration of ‘post-human’ identities

Learning objectives

By the end of this module, you will be able to:

  • understand different notions of identity, both in their historical context and in relation to a contemporary globalised society
  • demonstrate an awareness of the ways in which identities can be conceived according to different political, geographical, cultural and linguistic contexts
  • analyse and compare different kinds of identity using appropriate critical and analytic tools
  • show knowledge of critical frameworks in which to understand the relationship between identities and the contexts in which they are produced and in which they are read.