Somatechnics: Power Relations, Embodiment and Agency

Course goals

After completion of this course, the student is able to:
 

Content

Somatechnics is a term that articulates the entangled relation of embodiment and technology while challenging their commonsense and essentialized understandings. Can we understand a body as not ending at our skin, as Donna Haraway asks? Is technology only a material device (a tool, a machine, a system) or software? Can we consider also social power relations as a form of technology that governs not only (human and more than human) lives but also death?

Starting from these questions and the notion of Somatechnics, we will analyze how hegemonic sociopolitical and environmental norms operate through the entanglements of embodiment, subjectivity, environment, technologies of power, and normative conceptualizations of who counts as human. The goal of the course is to equip students with analytical tools they can mobilize in both academic and non-academic contexts to examine sociopolitical problems through the prism of power relations I.e., to develop an analytical lens for conceptualising how intersectional social power relations saturate both structural and quotidian aspects of our lives and how they operate socio-environmentally. To do so, we will also question the foundational binaries that shape our understanding of the world, such as nature and culture or human and non-human.

The course employs an interdisciplinary approach grounded in Gender Studies and Critical Theories.

Additional information

The entrance requirements for Exchange Students will be checked by International Office and the Programme coordinator - you do not have to contact the Programme coordinator by yourself.