Please note: Due to alternative arrangements for teaching and
assessment in place from 18 March 2020 to mitigate against the restrictions in
place due to COVID-19, information shown for 2019/20 may not always be accurate.
Please note: you are viewing unit and programme information
for a past academic year. Please see the current academic year for up to date information.
| Unit name |
Secrecy, Power, Politics |
| Unit code |
POLI30033 |
| Credit points |
20 |
| Level of study |
H/6
|
| Teaching block(s) |
Teaching Block 2 (weeks 13 - 24)
|
| Unit director |
Dr. Van Veeren |
| Open unit status |
Not open |
| Pre-requisites |
none
|
| Co-requisites |
none
|
| School/department |
School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies |
| Faculty |
Faculty of Social Sciences and Law |
Description including Unit Aims
In the post-9/11, post-Wikileaks, post-Snowden and #metoo era, secrecy has gained new currency as an area of political significance and worthy of investigation. At the same time, with the rise of social media and reality television, some argue that we now live in a ‘confessional society’ where secrecy is a dirty word. This unit therefore offers an exploration of the concept of secrecy and its practices. Drawing on studies of secrecy – classic and cutting edge – from across politics, security studies, sociology, law, religious studies, anthropology, and cultural studies, as well as using cognate concepts such as surveillance, revelation, transparency, obfuscation, passing, ignorance and covert, we look at how secrets are made, why, and by whom, how secrets are normative and knowledge-making, how economies and new cultural practices grow around secrets, how secrets can be both global and intimate, how secrets are contested and challenged, and therefore how secrecy is powerful and an essential concept and set of practices for understanding (world) politics. Over the course of the unit, we will also take part in a number of practical exercises that may involve walking tours and field trips to develop the skill of ‘seeing secrecy’. In other words, over the course of this unit we explore the secrets of secrecy!
Unit Aim
• The central aim of this unit is to explore the power of secrecy as a varied set of practices.
Intended Learning Outcomes
On successful completion of the unit, students will be able to:
- Explain how secrecy connects to power as knowledge-making (‘power-knowledge’, subjectivity);
- Demonstrate an understanding of a range of secrecy concepts and approaches including transparency, ignorance, panopticism, technologies of the self, opacity, passing, confession, obfuscation, allure and revelation;
- Identify, detail, analyse and contrast a range of secrecy practices across multiple epistemological domains of knowledge-making;
- Critically assess the interconnections between secrecy practices, secrecy concepts, and subject formation.
Teaching Information
10 x 3 hour seminar
Assessment Information
- 1,000 word essay (25%)
- 3,000 word essay (75%)
The assessments will evaluate all of the intended learning outcomes listed above
Reading and References
- Bail, Christopher A. (2015) ‘The public life of secrets: Deception, disclosure, and discursive framing in the policy process,’ Sociological Theory, 33:2, pp.97-124.
- Bok, S. (1989) Secrets: On the Ethics of Concealment and Revelation Secrets, Second Edition, London and New York, Vintage Books.
- Costas, Jana and Christopher Grey (2016) ‘Walls and Corridors’, Secrecy at work: The hidden architecture of organizational life, Stanford: Stanford University Press, pp.69-90.
- 4. Croissant, Jennifer L. (2014) ‘Agnotology: Ignorance and absence or towards a sociology of things that aren’t there’, Social Epistemology, 28:1, pp.4-25.
- Dean, J. (2002) Publicity's Secret: How Technoculture Capitalizes on Democracy, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
- Horn, Eva. (2011) ‘Logics of political secrecy,’ Theory, Culture & Society, 28:7-8, pp.103-122.
- Lochrie, Karma (1999) ‘Tongues Untied’, Covert Operations: The medieval uses of secrecy, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, pp.12-42.
- Mills, Charles (2007) ‘White ignorance,’ in Shannon Sullivan and Nancy Tuana (eds) Race and Epistemologies of Ignorance, New York: SUNY Press, pp.26-31.
- Piliavsky, Anastasia (2011) ‘A secret in the Oxford sense: thieves and the rhetoric of mystification in western India,’ Comparative Studies in Society and History, 53:2, pp.290-313.
- Sedgwick, Eve (1988) ‘Privilege of unknowing,’ Genders, 1, pp.102-124.
- Simmel, G. (1906) "The Sociology of Secrecy and of the Secret Societies," American Journal of Sociology 11: 441-498.
- Tefft, S. (1980) Secrecy: A Cross Cultural Perspective, Human Sciences Press.
