Teaching power at Conférence Universitaire De Suisse Occidental (CUSO)

The Conférence Universitaire De Suisse Occidental (CUSO) runs intensive graduate level workshop programmes delivered over three day residentials with students from across the four Swiss universities. They are delivered by internationally renowned academics. The module “Power Displaced” (Module II sur le pouvoir) ran in Morges Switzerland in 2014. It follows on from the first module on mainstream approaches to power. It introduces students to various “critical” approaches to power, including post-structuralist, post/de-colonial, feminist, queer, affective and critical race and whiteness approaches. The Course leaders were Dr Rahel Khunz and Dr Noémi Michel. Dr Shona Hunter delivered this intensive along with the Course leaders and co-Instructor Professor Himadeep Muppidi from Vassar College.

The focus of my contribution was on three linked post graduate level workshop sessions developed from my single authored book Impossible Governance: Power, Politics Emotion. The aim is to enable students to understand contemporary governance practices as interdependently materially, discursively and affectively enacted via a process I call ‘relational politics’ and generate understandings as to how this can be approached methodologically via feminist psychosocial analysis.

Session 1: Thinking relationally about power and governance

Session 2: Feminist Psychosocial approaches to analysing relational politics

Session 3 Soft Skills: Developing a strategic approach to doing criticality in academic contexts