Course Catalogue

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This course explores the relationship between socio-cultural inequalities and the body. The course critically engages with the body and embodiment as a sociological, and anthropological, lens through which to understand society, inequalities, social relations and marginalisation in contemporary contexts.

The course will examine aspects of lived experience and inequalities through intersecting social identities and marginalised groups such as race/racialisation, gender, indigeneity, disablement, health, fatness and others. The course will cover a range of key conceptual debates and empirical insights into the body and embodiment, the body as a social agent and the social research into the body including methodological insights and challenges.

Weekly two-hour sessions often consisting of a lecture (1 hour) followed immediately by a seminar (1 hour); in person, on University of Glasgow campus.

In order to take this course, you need to have met the requirements for entry into our Honours and Joint Honours Programmes in Sociology. Entry into Honours Sociology requires a grade point average of 12 through Sociology 2A and Sociology 28 on first attempt.

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Summative Assessment 1: Reflexive Discussion 30%: (1000 words)

Summative Assessment 2: Written assignment (3000 words) 70%: Critical essay

This course aims to introduce students to the Sociology of the Body by examining the body as a locus of social inequality and marginalisation. It aims to do this by focusing on sociological and anthropological theories of the body, socio-cultural processes of marginalisation and oppression and lived experience as a category of analysis.

By examining sociological and anthropological theories of embodiment and the body, along with empirical examples of lived experiences of marginalisation the course aims to facilitate a new lens through which society can be viewed and inequalities can be understood and challenged. The course will engage with established sociological issues such as everyday life, the production of dichotomies and individualisation but will do so by examining a human universal attribute, the body. It will ask students to consider bodies as social agents, bodies as sites of inequality and power, and legacy social processes of bodily subjugation.

The course is intersectionally grounded, bringing to the fore marginalised groups and areas of inequalities often invisiblised (such as people with learning disabilities, indigenous peoples and fat bodies) in mainstream sociology. It aims to engender critical thinking and extend understand marginalisation beyond familiar social categories and examples.

By the end of this course, students will be able to:

■ Demonstrate an understanding of the key conceptual frameworks underpinning sociological and anthropological approaches to the Body and Embodiment

■ Critically evaluate empirical and theoretical scholarly outputs, research and scholarship on sociologies and anthropologies of the Body

■ Develop an understanding of the relationship between the Body and inequalities in contemporary societies.

■ Apply sociological and anthropological concepts to make sense of the Body as a category of sociological analyses.

■ Critically and reflexively engage with contemporary examples of inequalities and establish how an understanding of the Body can help make sense of these processes.