Introduction to Power in the Digital Age

Overview

This cross-disciplinary, team-taught unit introduces the core themes and breadth of the new major, Power in the Digital Age. It presents a range of critical perspectives on the question of power drawn from a range of scholarly approaches.

Learning outcomes

Teaching methods

Hawthorn

Assessment

Content

• What is Power? Definitions and Use of the term - Power, authority, legitimacy; faces of power; old and new power.
• Social Power. Looks at how social life is highly ordered without the need for coercive force thanks to socialisation / norms /values, along with ideas on legitimate forms of power and leadership as well as some aspects of biopolitics.
• Political ideologies. Conceptions of the nature, purpose and exercise of power and the state; liberalism, conservatism, socialism; critiques of pluralism.
• Institutions of state. Institutions as means of exerting power, constraints on power and mechanisms of accountability.
• Power in Australia. Power relationships and societal divisions in Australia and their history.
• Power and Technology
• Power and the Self
• Language, power & propaganda.
• Power in International Relations: liberal, realist, Marxist and constructivist approaches to IR.
• Power Shifts at the Global Level : power relationships and consequences at a global level
• Gender as Power