Overview
What is modernity? Where is power, and how is it exercised? Are there limits to our abilities to understand and empathise with other people? Where is Humanities scholarship heading?
About this paper
| Paper title | Key Debates in the Humanities |
|---|---|
| Subject | Humanities |
| EFTS | 0.25 |
| Points | 30 points |
| Teaching period | Semester 1 (On campus) |
| Domestic Tuition Fees ( NZD ) | $2,498.25 |
| International Tuition Fees | Tuition Fees for international students are elsewhere on this website. |
- Limited to
- MA(Coursework)
- Contact
Co-ordinator for 2026 to be announced.
- Teaching staff
Co-ordinator for 2026 to be announced.
- Textbooks
A selection of theoretical texts.
- Graduate Attributes Emphasised
- Scholarship.
View more information about Otago's graduate attributes. - Learning Outcomes
To be advised.
Overview
What is modernity? Where is power, and how is it exercised? Are there limits to our abilities to understand and empathise with other people? Where is Humanities scholarship heading?
Although diverse in their approaches and methods, the academic disciplines that comprise the Humanities wrestle with similar questions and draw upon many of the same theorists. This paper aims to introduce MA students to some of the key questions that have gripped scholars and communities as they grapple with modernity and the specific embodied experiences, challenges and perspectives that modern life provides.
For the last two hundred years, and in particular since the 1960s, humanities scholars have been deeply concerned with questions of power: where is power located? How is it exercised? What limits our abilities to understand and empathise with other people? These questions are often purposefully abstract and capacious and are frequently focused on the life of the mind. In this paper, however, we are going to follow what has been called the corporeal turn. We are going to study modernity and the key debates in the humanities by grounding ourselves in the locus of so many power struggles: the body. We move through the world as the specifics of our bodies permit, navigating societies that are primed to read the languages and hierarchies of physical forms. Studying theories of the body and embodied power enables us to understand the material foundations of knowledge production, competing conceptions of history, the construction of race and gender, the impacts of colonialism and the influence of economic and technological change on humanity and the nature of identity.
This course is not designed to generate passive knowledge about key debates and theorists. Instead, it is designed to whet your appetite for reading, writing and arguing and to help you reflect on how the scholarship discussed in this paper relates to your own research and lives. All our disciplines engage in varying ways with the body, and in our period of climate change, pandemics and global political unrest, understanding how the body is conceptualised by structure and by discourse is vital, not simply as scholars but as citizens and members of our various communities.
About this paper
| Paper title | Key Debates in the Humanities |
|---|---|
| Subject | Humanities |
| EFTS | 0.25 |
| Points | 30 points |
| Teaching period | Semester 1 (On campus) |
| Domestic Tuition Fees | Tuition Fees for 2027 have not yet been set |
| International Tuition Fees | Tuition Fees for international students are elsewhere on this website. |
- Limited to
- MA(Coursework)
- Contact
- Teaching staff
- Paper Structure
The three-hour weekly seminars will help students find useful techniques for critically evaluating scholarly works and intervening in important debates. Through class participation and presentations, the course encourages students to develop effective strategies for group cooperation and oral communication. The final assignment helps to prepare and motivate students to identify those ideas and thinkers that excite them and then to pursue those passions outside of class.
- Textbooks
A selection of theoretical texts will be provided via eReserve.
- Graduate Attributes Emphasised
- Global perspective, Interdisciplinary perspective, Lifelong learning, Scholarship, Communication, Critical thinking, Research, Self-motivation.
View more information about Otago's graduate attributes. - Learning Outcomes
Students who successfully complete the paper will be able to:
- Present to an academic audience a range of scholarly debates concerning the ways the body is represented and employed within modern discourses of power.
- Demonstrate sophistication in describing a set of works and theories written by some important thinkers in the Humanities.
- Read theory-heavy texts with confidence, care and (a bit more) enjoyment.
- Engage responsibly and reflectively in seminar conversation and peer-led discussion.
- Write and speak about the work of other scholars in ways that display both attentiveness to scholarly arguments as well as the ability to critically appraise and compare them.
- Creatively and conscientiously compare and contrast the ideas, terms, agendas, backgrounds and styles of various Humanities scholars.
- Apply theoretical models from other Humanities' disciplines to one's own scholarly research and lives.
- Show initiative and appetite for debating and assessing scholarship.
- Discuss and reflect on the importance of the Humanities in society.