Teaching / Lehrveranstaltungen

M.A. Course Mobility and Gender studies -theoretical, methodological, and empirical explorations (not taking place in SoSe 2022 due to sick leave)

Course description: The course introduces- the key debates in mobility studies about how people, objects, and ideas move around focusing on social phenomena through the lens of movement. Simultaneously, the course provides a comprehensive understanding of why gender is a critical category in mobility studies asking how mobilities enable/disable/modify gender practices. In addition, the course engages with the dialectic relationship between mobility and gender by examining subjective experiences, identity constructions, respective gender performances, gender relations within postcolonial, feminist, and intersectional conceptual investigations based on empirical (historical and contemporary) accounts. Specifically, students will learn theoretical and analytical concepts of power and mobility, enabling them to analyse how differential mobility regimes produce class, sexual, racial, able-bodied and gendered subjects and how their “moves” are allowed or denied. Throughout the course students analyse im/mobilities on various scales from the body through various technologies of everyday mobility but also ideas, images, cultural representations, and information, to show their role in shaping (and being shaped) by gendered power relations. Such analysis will disclose, for instance, dominant associations of mobility with modernity, progress, and privileged forms of masculinity, religious and cultural norms, rules, and fashions that have enforced and fetishized women’s immobility (such as foot-binding in China), and the gendered nature of many developments of new (transport) technologies.