Corsi di Studio del Dipartimento di Culture, Politica e Società

The course will provide students with a foundation in law and society in Asia, as one of the most important, but also challenged and challenging, area in the world today. Our objective is to facilitate a critical understanding of how law operates in Asian societies, and to prepare students for future engagement with the legal-political systems of (selected) Asian countries in various professional contexts.

In particular, the course will focus on South-East Asia, particularly Islamic countries, and India, in light of the complex social, legal and economic fabric that characterizes these areas, both building on historical and cultural heritages going back thousands of years.

The goal is to make the students familiar with the following topics:

- What observers of cultures and trends mean when they say that the 21st century will belong Asia? Is that correct to discuss the current economic prosperity of many Asian nation, using the label "Asia", "Asian Values", etc., to refer to specific qualities, such as strong family ties, hard work, etc? How the inherent cultural, linguistic, ethnic, and social diversity of Asia fits in with the world's perception of Asia as a cultural unit?

- Indian socio-legal history

- Current trends in Indian feminist movements and indigenous issues

- Have acquired a sound knowledge of Asian legal systems and an understanding of their origins and functions.

- Be able to evaluate the role of Asian legal, political and cultural spaces as means of achieving social change and social justice.

- Be able to illustrate how Asian laws are embedded in social life and to identify the nexus between law and culture, identity, religion, economy, and politics.

- Be able carry out interdisciplinary analysis of Asian legal issues, with an appropriate awareness of the purposes and limits of such a methodological approach.

- Have acquired a deeper knowledge of various social science approaches to research into Asian laws, and an understanding of their usefulness in relation to more narrowly legal approaches.

The teaching will be mixed, combining live-streaming (recorded) lessons, PowerPoint presentations, live Q&A sessions and reading materials.

The slides of the lessons and the related materials will be uploaded on the Moodle platform in advance, in order to allow the students to prepare themselves on the topic that will be discussed during the class. Students are therefore invited to sign up on the Moodle platform as any communication will be circulated via Moodle.

Students will take the exam in a written form.

 

ATTENDANCE

In order to be considered as attending students, the students will have to submit one reaction paper at the end of each week (250 words) on the topics discussed during the lessons. The deadline for the submission of the weekly reaction paper is the following Monday, 9 AM (please submit the paper to rakhmat.hidayat@unito.it for Module 1 and chiara.correndo@unito.it for Module 2). The papers submitted after the deadline will not be taken into consideration. Failing to submit one reaction paper, students will still be considered as attending students; failing to submit 2 reaction papers, they will be automatically considered as non-attending students.

 

FINAL EXAM

Attending students:

- attending students will have to submit two papers (3000 words each), one per module, at least 10 days before the date of the exam on which they intend to register the mark.

- attending students will have to deepen one of the topics tackled during the module at their choosing

- the bibliography will be assessed (at least, 10 references: 4 book references and 6 international journal references). Newspaper articles or blog entries will not be taken into consideration.

 

Non-attending students:

- N.a. students will have to submit two longer papers (4500 words), one per module, at least 10 days before the date of the exam on which they intend to register the mark.

- N.a. will be assigned a topic, so they are kindly invited to contact us

- N.a. students will be given longer readings on which they will build their papers

The course will be articulated in two modules.

Module one

This module introduces students to Southeast Asia—one of the “crossroads of the world”—in the world. Southeast Asia is a large and complex region. The module adopts an interdisciplinary approach which introduces students to the peoples, cultures, and history of Southeast Asia as well as the political and economic systems and its religious traditions. Societies to be addressed are those today subsumed within the nation states and territories of Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Thailand, Burma (Myanmar), Malaysia, Singapore, Brunei, Indonesia,East Timor, and the Philippines. The course will be mainly focused on Indonesian studies and will explore the political and cultural dynamics in contemporary Indonesia from historical and anthropological perspectives, which will include major ethnic groups, key historical dynamics, political culture, and interaction between modernization and traditional lifeways.

 

Module 2 (Dr. Chiara Correndo) will focus on:

• Law and society: relevant literature and the Asian context
• The Indian legal tradition, with specific attention to the Hindu one
• Colonialism in India: burden and impact on the contemporary Indian legal culture
• Contemporary Indian legal system: Constitution, personal laws and current legal challenges
• Women's rights: a feminist analysis of dowry, marriage and the condition of women, with a specific focus on the hijra community
• The Adivasi communities in India: the indigenous issue and the relevant environmental case law

Texts and documents (for attending and non-attending students) will be communicated during the course and they will be shared on the Moodle platform.