Useful reading

To help you best prepare for your degree, your Programme Director has identified some pre-reading materials which you may want to engage with

Please note that each course that you study will have required and recommended weekly readings, as well as a bibliography of further reading. So, rather than provide another long list of texts, I’ve curated three short readings to get you thinking as you start the programme.

This interview with political philosopher Nancy Fraser will help you to prepare for your studies by introducing you to a framework for conceptualising social justice (we will draw on this in much more depth on the semester 1 compulsory course, Theories and Politics of Social Justice).

 

This transcript of a keynote speech by Mae Shaw will help you to prepare for Community Engagement: Co-Constructing Knowledge with Communities by provoking you to think critically about the possibilities for community action and education in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic. Writing at the time of the pandemic, Shaw was reflecting on the possibilities and limits of community, power analysis as an educational task, and the relationship between structure and agency. Although Shaw’s reflections speak directly to a UK context, the questions she poses have wider resonance. It is an interesting exercise to reflect back to this time period and ask where we are now! 

This brief overview introduces some of the late bell hooks’ ideas for social justice. Many of these ideas are relevant to our courses across the programme and this short article is an accessible primer to them: 

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