[This is a certified Communication-intensive (CI) Course which meets all of the requirements endorsed by HKU’s Senate, including (i) the teaching assessment of written and visual communication ‘literacies’; and (ii) at least 40% of the course grade is assigned to communication-rich assessment tasks.]

Course Description

How do socioeconomic inequalities affect our bodies? In what ways do governments, corporations, and institutions regulate and control bodies and populations? How are new technologies transforming the ways in which we understand our bodies? How have relationships among mind, body, and society changed across cultures and historical periods? This course addresses these important questions by exploring how bodies are produced, portrayed, and contested in different times and places across the globe. We will challenge the preconception that bodies are natural and pregiven entities which exist outside of the forces of culture, politics, and history. We will use the body as a lens for exploring the intersections of local worlds and global processes, investigating how our daily lives are shaped by the forces of culture and power. Lectures and tutorials will draw upon diverse multimedia sources including movies, music, advertisements, exercise trackers, and participant observation. Creative assignments will empower students to reflect upon both their own and others’ embodied experiences, via blogging about individual bodily practices and collectively curating an exhibition on visual representations of bodies. For more information visit the course website: https://bodypolitics.hku.hk/.

Course Learning Outcomes

On completing the course, students will be able to:

1. Identify and analyze the ways in which different kinds of bodies are made, controlled, consumed and portrayed in local, regional, and global contexts.
2. Generate their own thoughts and arguments about issues around contemporary body politics, articulating these ideas both verbally and in writing.
3. Connect their own embodied experience with global issues, gaining greater self-understanding of how their own embodiment is shaped by broader cultural processes and structures of power.
4. Articulate how forms of embodied experience differ cross-culturally.
5. Collaborate with peers to create multimedia exhibitions and communicate ideas both on- and off-line.

Offer Semester and Day of Teaching

First semester (Wed)