Module description
What is war to the combatants, civilians and paramilitaries who have experienced it? And in what ways have those who are not direct witnesses of war encountered representations of conflict, both public representations such as the media, museums and monuments, and personal accounts, including oral histories and autobiographies. This module takes human experience as the basis for exploring different types of warfare, undertaking a ‘ground up’ approach to analysing war by focusing on the men and women who experienced it (as opposed to privileging the voices of generals and military strategists). A broad chronological and geographical lens is adopted using global case studies from different conflicts and a wide range of cultural sources including films, cartoons, photographs and computer games, will be engaged with to provide a strong foundation for future study.
The course consists of one-hour lecture sessions, as well as guest lectures by academic specialists, visiting experts and ex-military personnel. These are coupled with seminars designed for students to engage with key academic debates, build practical skills through weekly learning tasks (such as researching a contemporary conflict and analysing a podcast), and critically engage with the concept of war experience in the context of society and culture.
Assessment details
| Critical Source Evaluation 1 |
2000 words |
50% |
| Critical Source Evaluation 2 |
2000 words |
50% |
Educational aims & objectives
- To explore the various experiences of war, including military, civilian and paramilitary, as well as war in the air, on the land and at sea.
- To examine different ways of approaching experience by focusing on gender, class, race and sexuality.
- To consider different types of sources to study war experience, such as cartoons, photographs, oral histories, films, computer games, novels, poems, paintings, memorials and museums.
- To provide focused study on experiencing war in the twentieth and twenty first centuries, while also referring to earlier periods.
- To provide case studies from across the globe, including Western and Eastern Europe, North, Central and South America, Asia, Africa and Australia.
- To encourage reflection on the meaning and value of experience and the relevance of experience as evidence.
- To offer students the opportunity to experience and engage with personal accounts of war by service personnel, civilians and paramilitaries.
- To promote an understanding of experience in relation to other aspects of war.
Learning outcomes
Students who successfully complete this module should have:
- demonstrated a firm understanding of empirical approaches to studying war experience.
- demonstrated a firm understanding of theoretical approaches to studying war experience.
- developed the ability to critically analyse a wide range of scholarly texts about experiences of war.
- developed the ability to critically analyse both historical and contemporary sources about experiences of war.
- 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 in terms 1 and 2, with weekly lectures and seminars. The one-hour lectures are delivered by the course convener, with occasional guest lectures delivered by external speakers, veterans and other KCL academic staff.
One-hour seminars will be led by a graduate teaching assistant (GTA) with seminar preparation guidelines (core readings, learning tasks and discussion questions) available on the module’s KEATS page. Students will often engage in small group discussion and group feedback in the seminars. 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.