Law and Biopolitics Fall term, 1 credit
Legal Studies, cross-listed with Gender Studies and Political Science
This course addresses several biopolitical episodes and policies from human rights perspectives. Throughout history and even today many attempts have been made to control the size and composition of populations. From the sterilization of the mentally ill to the generous and targeted social welfare benefits offered to support child rearing, and to shaping gender balance, these goals were based on different ideologies from eugenic thinking, through neoliberalism to populism and to the anti-gender measures introduced by illiberal democracies.
The selected topics of biopolitics lie at the intersection of law, political science, gender, and philosophy. Contemporary mechanisms of promoting human rights have managed to reflect on and regulate some of them, since the prohibition of discrimination, as well as enforcing women’s rights and the right to privacy can rule out at least the most drastic population control measures. The interplay between demographic control and human rights provides an innovative approach to this course and offers to the students the possibility to study human rights in this special context, as well as to analyze population politics and biopolitics by developing critical reflections based on human rights perspectives.
The course offers a unique cross-disciplinary approach by introducing the human rights framework into the analysis of classic and contemporary forms of biopolitics and reproduction policy. Works by authors such as Agamben, Duster, Foucault, Habermas, Jasanoff, Rose, and Nussbaum will serve as the theoretical basis for the discussions and seminars that will aim to analyze different types of biopolitical endeavors from all parts of the world. Students will be encouraged to bring examples and cases from their own countries and to present on and analyze a selected field within biopolitics.
- Instructor: Judit Sandor