Intercultural love

The course explores how love is understood and socially organised in different parts of the world. The focus is on the impact that globalisation and migration have had on such understandings over recent decades. Students explore how love is practised across borders (for example, through digital communication), what happens to love when people cross borders (for example, through migration), and how love is reshaped and adapted to new contexts when differences in culture, language, generation, ethnicity, race, religion, gender, class and other identities are involved. The course also addresses intercultural love by enabling students to examine examples of intimacy between romantic partners, parents and children, and friends. Students engage with the concept of intercultural love in both private settings (for example, within the home) and public contexts involving formal and informal forms of social interaction (for example, in educational institutions, places of work and leisure settings), as well as within national and international politics (in relation to, for example, migration, marriage and adoption). The course provides students with both practical tools (applications for thinking about and practising love in everyday situations) and theoretical perspectives (ideas, concepts and intellectual traditions relating to intimacy) to support their understanding of love in intercultural contexts.