Module description
What is war to the people that experience it, and why does that matter?
This module examines human experience as a source of truth, knowledge and belief about war. Representations of human experiences of war play a significant role in human culture and society, often defining social memories and collective understandings of war. As such, this module examines how human experience is transmitted and interpreted via historical sources as well as cultural objects such as films, novels and video games. It will also engage students with key social, political, and moral arguments about the representation of war experience in the media, museums, monuments, and commemoration rituals.
Assessment details
One Critical Source Evaluation (3000 words) worth 100% of the module grade.
Educational aims & objectives
- To explore the various experiences of war – individual, group and community, direct and indirect,battlefield (land, sea and air) and home front, military and civilian, empirical and cultural.
- To develop the ability of students to analyse the role of politics and identity in shaping human experiences of war, and the ways in which wars are remembered.
- To encourage reflection on the meaning and value of experience and the relevance of experience as evidence.
- To promote an understanding of experience in relation to other aspects of war.
- To familiarise students with a wide range of disciplines across the arts, humanities, and social sciences, and consider how and why their approaches to human experience differ.
- To introduce students to the use of memoirs, biographies, personal testimony, battle studies, media, literature, art, film, video games, and other arts to illustrate the impact of war at various levels – individual, group and community, direct and indirect, battle (land, sea and air) and home front,military and civilian.
- To offer students the opportunity to experience personal witness statements by surviving servicemen and civilians and to engage with them.
- To introduce students to a broad range of historical, biographical and cultural sources on the experience of war.
Learning outcomes
Students who successfully complete this module should have:
- Familiarity with key theoretical issues related to the use of human experience as evidence, and the representation of human experiences of war.
- Developed the ability to critically analyse a wide range of sources of human experiences of war.
- Demonstrated a firm understanding of empirical approaches to studying war and warfare, and the relationship between empirical and theoretical approaches to both.
- Gained practice and knowledge in analysing academic arguments, particularly those that rely upon, or interpret, human experience as a key source of evidence.
- Engaged in a variety of reflective learning activities to critically engage with their own understandings of how human experiences of war should be represented in society.
Teaching pattern
The module runs with physical lectures and seminars. The lecture sessions delivered by the course convener are roughly 1 hour. Each lecture will end with a Q&A session to give students the opportunity to raise questions they have regarding the lecture. Guest lectures will be a variety of formats, each involving a lecture and Q&A session to enable students to interact with the guest lecturers.
One-hour seminars will be led by a graduate teaching assistant (GTA) with seminar preparation guidelines available on the module’s KEATS page. Each seminar features two discussion questions, and students will engage in roughly 10 minutes of small group discussion and 20 minutes of group feedback and discussion of each question. It is expected that members of the class will have made themselves familiar with aspects of each topic and will be in a position to contribute to class discussion, and that there will be a significant contribution from students in order to shape the classroom debate focusing on the topic at hand.