240088 SE VM5 / VM7 - Socialisms Engendered: Social Movements, Politics and the State (2020S)

Goals:

The aim of the seminar is to enable students to write a thought-provoking seminar paper based on original material and theoretical reflection. Students will learn to critically analyze, from a gender history perspective, how socialisms engaged with class, global inequality, development and other categories of inequality. As they engage with different traditions and perspectives of development studies the seminar participants will develop their own scholarly interests which they bring to this course and translate this interest into the work on their seminar papers. As they engage with the seminar theme students are supported in specifying, expanding, (self-)critically reflecting and deepening their interest in the field of development research.

Content:

“Socialisms” in this seminar are defined as including the entire spectrum of collectives and discourses which, from the 19th to the second half of the 20th century, identified, in terms of their world view and politics, with the left. This included anarchism, pre-1917 socialism, social democracy and post-1917 communism, utopian and libertarian socialism, trade unions, Maoism, Trotskyism et.al., cooperative socialisms, various forms of anti-colonialism, operaist movements and many more. The seminar papers and the seminar itself explore how social movements, networks and parties, as well as self-identified leftist states, and addressed and discussed gender issues, pursued (explicit and ‘hidden’) agendas in their gender policies. We also examine how women within (and outside) the left helped shape these socialist women’s and gender policies. Of particular interest are international networks/organizations and contexts, cross-border encounters, and the socialism lived in different regions of the world. There are numerous particular topics and questions to be discovered in all these areas, and during the seminar the students receive support in this regard.

Format and Methods:

In the first part of the seminar we will critically examine the state of the art in research on socialisms and gender. While the scholarship in the past few decades repeatedly has been caught up in the thought patterns and debates of the past it also provides extensive knowledge and significant insights. We will read up a bit on this scholarship, and we will take a closer look at the most promising new approaches and research results.
In parallel the students will develop the planned topic of their seminar paper and do their own preliminary research (see below).
During the course of the seminar, the students will present a preliminary, then a final proposal for their seminar paper, and finally the draft of a (partial) chapter of the seminar paper. These texts will be commented on and discussed in detail in the group. The careful introduction to material available in libraries, archives, and databases containing printed and unprinted original material as well as relevant publications on the encounter between socialisms and the gender question provides assistance in both developing the seminar paper topic and spotting the material to be analyzed.
At the beginning of the course the students present their own interest in the course and formulate their own learning goals for the seminar. At the end of the course, these initial statements will be reflected upon again within the group, and with reference to the work during the semester as a group and individually.