PR&UG (Unit4)

Unit: Gender Debates and Dialogues

The course ‘Understanding Gender in Society: Concepts and Trends’ forms an excellent introduction into the question of gender and how it shapes our everyday lives.

Gender today is an essential part of our vocabulary and through this course you will come to understand gender as an important analytical concept. This course will not only provide conceptual clarity on several gender related terms, but also examine and explore these concepts from a practical angle in our daily lives. Issues that affect men and women, both positively and negatively, need to be addressed in a constructive manner; relationships within the home and the workplace need to be examined from a gender perspective.

The course goals clearly define gender as being the relationship between men and women and how societies and cultures determine what is masculine or feminine, as well as how power is allocated and used differently by men and women. It aims at directing your attention towards social and cultural processes and interventions, developing a clear and precise conceptual clarity on gender and its ramifications, and understanding the range of theories and complex dynamics of socialisation processes in term of them having differential effects on men and women and on the relationships between them. Further, the course does not look at women in isolation; rather, it sees both men and women as being an integral part of the gender debate and dialogue.

Last modified: Friday, 12 February 2016, 2:51 PM