POLS 103. Power, Identity and Culture


Power, external and objective, is also internal and subjective, invisibly working to shape understandings of who we are even as it performs the visible rituals of regulation typically associated with states and governments. This course takes as its central thesis that immaterial and invisible forms of power are power's most effective form as well as the most difficult for political science to measure and understand. Alternating between case and theory, and looking at power both naked and sublime, we will examine the struggle by the state and other elite actors to shape subjectivities through culture and identity formation in order to secure quiescence and rule. Close attention will be paid to how socializing agents, including schools and the educational system, media and film, and families and local communities, shape and reshape formal efforts to have ordinary citizens internalize what Stuart Hall describes as "the horizon of the taken-for-granted," those ruling ideas and beliefs that consist "of things that go without saying because, being axiomatic, they come without saying; things that, being presumptively shared, are not normally the subject of explication or argument." This course seeks to understand how such efforts succeed, falter, and change as they face the negotiations of the ordinary and the less powerful. Authors include Antonio Gramsci, Steven Lukes, James C. Scott, Clifford Geertz, Michel Foucault, Joel Migdal, Stuart Hall, and Robert Dahl.
Social sciences.
2 credits.
Catalog chapter: Political Science  
Department website: http://www.swarthmore.edu/political-science


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