GEN.101: Gender Studies: Identities, Inequalities and Politics

• Terms Taught:
  • Full Year only
  • Michaelmas Term only
  • Lent / Summer Terms only
  NOTE: If you are studying with us for a Full Academic Year and you select a course that has full year and part year variants, you will not be allowed to take only part of the course. 
• US Credits:
  • Full Year course - 10 Semester Credits
  • Michaelmas Term only - 4  Semester Credits
  • Lent / Summer Terms only - 6 Semester Credits
• ECTS Credits:
  • Full Year course - 20 ECTS Credits.
  • Michaelmas Term only - 8 ECTS Credits
  • Lent / Summer Terms only - 12 ECTS Credits
• Pre-requisites: None

Course Description

Have you ever wondered why women in Britain are paid, on average, 13% less than men? Why women's bodies are used in advertising? Do you think that class is a women's issue? Is being white simply about skin colour? Does the Law treat men and women in the same way? Are these questions relevant to the world we inhabit? This course explores such questions.

Educational Aims

This course aims to develop an understanding of a range of perspectives central to Gender Women's Studies, introducing students to some of the disciplines, main theoretical concepts, and most recent research involved in the field.

The course is divided into five main sections:

• Gender and social institutions;
• Women's movements;
• Cultural representations of gender;
• Identity and difference;
• Making bodies.

Students are encouraged to discuss these themes, drawing on their own experiences, as well as on reading.

Outline Syllabus

This course introduces some of the central concepts and issues in Women's Studies. We examine the history of Women's Studies as a discipline, and its relation to different kinds of feminist theories, focusing on the two themes of 'women, power and resistance', and 'women and difference'.

Particular areas covered include:

• The social organisation of gender relations
• The cultural representation of gender
• Constructions of gender identities
• Women and political organisations

Assessment Proportions

• Coursework: 60%
• Exam: 40%

MCS.101: Transformations: From Mass Media to Social Media

• Terms Taught:
  • Full Year only
  • Michaelmas Term only
  • Lent / Summer Terms only
• US Credits:
  • Full Year course - 10 Semester Credits
  • Michaelmas Term only - 4 Semester Credits
  • Lent / Summer Terms only - 6 Semester Credits
• ECTS Credits:
  • Full Year course - 20 ECTS Credits
  • Michaelmas Term only - 8 ECTS Credits
  • Lent / Summer Terms only - 12 ECTS Credits
• Pre-requisites: None

Course Description

In this module, you will consider competing definitions of the terms ‘culture’ and ‘media’, engage with a wide range of academic writings on culture and media, and analyse a diverse range of cultural material from different media including: television, films, photography, newspapers and magazines, video games and the world wide web. You will explore the ways in which our identities, aspirations, beliefs and value systems are shaped by the cultural environment in which we live.

Educational Aims

This module aims to enable students to:

• Identify and explore a range of theoretical approaches to the study of culture, media and communication
• Employ key theoretical and critical approaches in the analysis of various media texts, particularly visual and popular cultural texts
• Develop analytical and critical skills in relation to theoretical texts and media texts and practices
• Develop understanding of the audio, visual and verbal conventions through which sounds, images and words make meaning
• Develop understanding of the ways in which people engage with cultural texts and practices and make meaning from them
• Develop understanding of the narrative processes, generic forms and modes of representation at work in media and cultural texts
• Develop an understanding of the material conditions of media and cultural consumption, and of the cultural contexts in which people appropriate, use and make sense of media and cultural products
• Develop an awareness of how media products might be understood within broader concepts of culture.
• Have a critical appreciation of the complexity of the terms culture and media
• Understand the ways in which identities are constructed and contested through engagements with culture
• Understand how social divisions play key roles in modes of representation in media texts
• Have opportunities for the development of a range of transferable skills that include: working as a member of a team; written and oral communication skills; and foundation skills in Audio visual and ICT technique
• Develop a range of independent research skills, presentation skills and organisational/time management skills

Outline Syllabus

Blocks will present and examine themes such as:

• Key perspectives in Media and Cultural Studies (definitions, concepts, themes, examples)
• Popular and everyday cultures
• Visual culture
• Mediation and technology (from mass to digital media)
• Representation, ideology and politics
• Consumer culture
• Resistant cultures and subcultures
• Media audiences
• Embodied cultures
• Fashion and style

In these blocks, students will be introduced to the complex relations between cultural forms and practices, media technologies and constructions of class, gender, sexuality, race and ethnicity, national identity, and age. Students will look at how culture is a domain of contestation and the ways in which media are bound up with asymmetrical forms of power. As part of the programme, students will undertake a group project with the guidance of their seminar tutor, exploring a topic covered on the course involving the production of a cultural artefact (poster, website, photographic collage/album, film etc.).

Assessment Proportions

• Coursework: 60%
• Exam: 40%

MCS.210: Digital Cultures

• Terms Taught: Michaelmas Term only
• US Credits: 4 Semester Credits
• ECTS Credits: 8 ECTS
• Pre-requisites: Two semesters of sociology.

Course Description

This course explores the question of how information and communications technologies, in their multiple forms, figure in our everyday lives. The aim of the course is to develop an appreciation of the range of experiences affected by digital media, including the progressive expansion of life online and the increasingly intimate relations between life online and offline. We’ll explore global divisions of digital labour; the rise of the military entertainment complex; e-waste; social media, social movements and hactivism. The course will consider the new possibilities that the changing social infrastructure of digital technologies afford, while also learning to look at the rhetoric and practices of the ‘network society’ with a questioning and critical eye. Throughout the course we’ll be attentive to issues of gender, race and other marks of ‘sameness and difference’ as they operate among humans, and between humans and machines.

Educational Aims

This course aims to give students:

• A better understanding of sociological analysis of information cultures and on-line sociality
• Familiarity with key theoretical debates on cybercultures
• Improved skills in reading and applying various theoretical approaches to information cultures
• Improved skills and confidence in contributing effectively and positively in academic debate

Outline Syllabus

The course has four parts: introduction, identities, communities and transnational contextualising. These themes will introduce you to some key debates on information cultures in Western societies.

• Introduction (weeks 1-3): The first three weeks will be dedicated to looking at the history and the development of concepts such as cyberspace, cyberbody, virtuality and life on-line.
• Identities (weeks 4-6): The next three lectures will look at the ways gender, race, ethnicity and sexuality are constituted on-line.
• Communities (weeks 7-8): These two lectures will look at the ways a sense of community can be created, negotiated, disrupted or ruined in various forms of on-line interaction.
• Transnational contextualising (weeks 9-10): The last two weeks will contextualise internet cultures in a transnational perspective.

Assessment Proportions

• Dissertation: 80%
• Written Assessment: 20%

or

• Coursework: 50%
• Exam: 30%
• Written Assessment: 20%

MCS.224: Media and Visual Culture

• Terms Taught: Michaelmas Term only
• US Credits: 4 Semester Credits
• ECTS Credits: 7.5 ECTS
• Pre-requisites: Two semesters of sociology.

Course Description

Everyday life is often described as bombarding us with images, and contemporary culture is therefore frequently understood as a visual culture. But what do such statements actually mean? How far is our culture a visual culture? What role does media play in a visual culture? How is vision linked to practices – including representation, the gaze and embodiment – of power and inequality? In what ways might these practices be challenged or resisted? Does vision only involve seeing, or is visual culture multi-sensory? This course will introduce theories and practices that have addressed these questions.

Educational Aims

The aim of this module is to introduce and examine recent and ongoing themes in Media and Cultural Studies and Sociology. It will provide students with an opportunity to:

• Compare and contrast competing and complementary critical perspectives on vision and visuality, media and culture;
• Develop a sophisticated understanding of theories and practices of visual culture;
• Express, discuss and debate complex ideas and abstractions in a confident and coherent manner;
• Develop a sophisticated understanding of studies of visual culture.

Outline Syllabus

This module will cover topics including:

• The relationship between vision and knowledge;
• The gaze and power (eg the gaze as gendered and raced);
• Media, representation and identity;
• Technologies of vision;
• Material practices of vision;
• Vision as multi-sensory.

Assessment Proportions

• Coursework: 75%
• Group montage: 25%

MCS.227: Gender and Media

• Terms Taught: Michaelmas Term only
• US Credits: 4 Semester Credits
• ECTS Credits: 7.5 ECTS
• Pre-requisites: Two semesters of Sociology

Course Description

The media are hugely influential in shaping, reflecting and challenging gendered power relations. Feminist theorists have been attentive to the ways in which our lives are mediated, suggesting that we construct and perform our identities in relation to media representations of gender, sexuality and the body. This 15-credit module focusses on these issues, exploring some of the key cultural, social and political questions surrounding gender,?sexuality and the media. The module draws on key concepts in feminist theory, queer theory, body image, Marxist feminism, masculinity studies and feminist activism to explore how gender works across a wide range of media platforms. Specific media studied include film, advertising, fashion media and celebrity culture, politics, television genres such as reality television and soap opera, and gaming and digital media.

Assessment Proportions

• Media Analysis (750 words) (20%)
• Essay (3000 words) (80%)

MCS.232: Television, Culture and Society

• Terms Taught: Lent / Summer Terms only
• US Credits: 4 Semester Credits
• ECTS Credits: 7.5 ECTS Credits
• Pre-requisites: Two semesters of Sociology

Course Description

Television remains the most pervasive and prevalent of the communication mediums. It is to television that we turn in moments of crisis, it is television that remains our principle source of news and information, the central piece of furniture in any communal space, a technology that enables the flow of advertising into our everyday living spaces, and it is via the 'small screen' that filmmakers are increasingly turning to tell big stories. Television shapes how we perceive and make sense of the nation, and offers representational frameworks through which a sense of identity and community can be constructed. Television has its critics - who consider it vulgar, mundane, stupefying, 'chewing gum for the eyes' - yet despite consistent predictions of its decline, television appears to have weathered the storm of fragmentation and digitalisation and remains a crucial media site that shapes national values and debate. This module introduces students to the field of television studies, its empirical and theoretical tools and the critical perspectives that help us explore and evaluate the recent history of television and explore its possible futures.

Educational Aims

The educational aims of this module fall into three areas:

• Theoretical: students will become familiar with a range of media, cultural and social theory and concepts that they can use to evaluate the television landscape, processes, cultural and social impacts
• Critical: students will be able to reflect on how screen media such as TV shapes and reflect inequalities; effects social change; circulates hegemonic discourses; reproduces and/or disrupts cultural meanings
• Empirical: students will learn and practice skills of screen analysis and independent research skills; how to study texts, contexts and audiences, how to use sociological tools and concepts to examine television and screen media

Outline Syllabus

Television remains the most pervasive and prevalent of the communication mediums. It is to television that we turn in moments of crisis, it is television that remains our principle source of news and information, the central piece of furniture in any communal space, a technology that enables the flow of advertising into our everyday living spaces, and it is via the 'small screen' that filmmakers are increasingly turning to tell big stories. Television shapes how we perceive and make sense of the nation, and offers representational frameworks through which a sense of identity and community can be constructed. Television has its critics - who consider it vulgar, mundane, stupefying, 'chewing gum for the eyes' - yet despite consistent predictions of its decline, television appears to have weathered the storm of fragmentation and digitalisation and remains a crucial media site that shapes national values and debate. This module introduces students to the field of television studies, its empirical and theoretical tools and the critical perspectives that help us explore and evaluate the recent history of television and explore its possible futures.

Topics covered will include:

• What is the TV of TV studies?
• Everyday cultures: the box in the corner
• The Economics of Broadcasting - or should we have a TV licence?
• Narrating the Nation: television and the public sphere
• TV Time: Liveness, Immediacy, Event Television
• Educating, informing, or entertaining? Documentary TV and political change
• Feminist Perspectives on Soap
• Reality television, celebrity, visibility
• 'Governance at a Distance’: How-to Television and Citizen Training
• Talking back to TV: fandom, textual poaching and the ‘GIF’ economy
• TV Activism
• Post-television and screen media: 'It's not TV’ – or is it?

Assessment Proportions

• Critical Review: 30%
• Essay: 70%

MCS.302: Fans and Audiences in a Global Context

• Terms Taught: Michaelmas Term only
• US Credits: 4 Semester Credits
• ECTS Credits: 7.5 ECTS
• Pre-requisites: Five semesters of sociology; two may be from cognate disciplines such as media, communication, and cultural studies

Course Description

How do we make sense of the various understanding of being a fan nowadays? How has the experience of being part of a media audience transformed over the decades in different parts of the world? In what ways do fan culture and audience community manifest social transformations in both the local and global scale?

This module aims to provide students with a critical understanding of fandom and audiences in a global and transnational context. Students will first be introduced the contested concepts and typologies of ‘audience’ and ‘fan’ and the cultural hierarchy of knowledge underneath theses definitions. The module will focus on four key dimensions: participation, pleasure, performance, and power by investigating fan culture and audience communities of a wide range of transmedia texts (television, music, film, and other media) in a global perspective. Students are encouraged to analyse the multi-layered dynamics between individual fan, fan community, audience participation, media texts, and the industry through sociological and interdisciplinary lenses, for example, cultural studies, feminist studies, queer studies, and postcolonial studies.

Assessment Proportions

• Essay: 60%
• Project: 40%

MCS.303: Social Media and Activism

• Terms Taught: Michaelmas Term only
• US Credits: 4 Semester Credits
• ECTS Credits: 7.5 ECTS
• Pre-requisites: Five semesters of sociology; two may be from cognate disciplines such as anthropology or social psychology.

Course Description

Pro-democracy revolutionaries, internet freedom hackers, feminist mediasmiths, anti-capitalists, anti-corporate globalization activists, racial equality actors, indigenous rights workers, data leakers, and others use the internet to distribute their ideals and organize their social movements. In this fast-paced, participatory, and creative module students will execute their own social movement. This hands-on course invites students to work together and design, implement, and reflect upon their own political campaign. Each week we will discuss social movement theories and student social movement experiences to better understand how social movements form and use communication technologies. Students will interrogate their efforts to make political change through two group presentations, group website creation, group social media use, group video production, and a group-written annual report

Educational Aims

On successful completion of this module students will be able to:

• Explain how the basic architecture of the internet and the affordances of social media impact the organization of social movements;
• Understand the role of the nation state in internet policy
• Explain how business expectations for the internet and social media help or hinder the development of social movements.

Outline Syllabus

The module sessions cover the background and overview of the internet as a socio-technical system and looks at some of the tensions and contradictions that structure the cultural and politics of the internet. The module draws on specific, often ethnographically informed, cases of cultures using the internet in forms of political actions.

This module will include weekly topics that draw from the following:

• Who Built the Internet
• Hippies Built the Internet
• Hackers Built the Internet
• Reinterpreting the History of the Internet
• Cool Start-Up Work
• Geographies of the Internet
• Digital Labour: You are working while you are on Facebook?
• The Social and Ecological Cost of Convergence
• Politics or Profit of Platforms
• What the Internet is Hiding From Us
• Myth of Digital Democracy
• Leaks and Spins: WikiLeaks
• Anonymous and Hackivist
• The Internet and Arab Spring Revolutions
• Occupy Movement and Media
• Pirate Culture, Twitter, Hacktivist, and WikiLeaks

Assessment Proportions

• Practical: 50%
• Presentation: 20%

MCS.309: Journalism and Multimedia Production

• Terms Taught: Michaelmas Term only
• US Credits: 4 Semester Credits
• ECTS Credits: 7.5 ECTS
• Pre-requisites:  Five semesters of sociology; two may be from cognate disciplines such as anthropology or social psychology

Course Description

In this module, you will learn about the basics of journalism -- reporting and storytelling using digital technologies. From audio recording and video production to writing, photography, and innovations using data, technology, and interviews, this module is an introduction to journalism of today and tomorrow. You will also interact with key theories and practices of journalism, discussing and debating international perspectives. In the end, you will have a final journalistic product based on a story of your selection.

Educational Aims

The aims of this module are to:

• Introduce students to the academic study of journalism as a professional practice and cultural force in contemporary society
• Apply journalistic techniques to create content that conforms to the conventions of journalistic publishing
• Familiarize students with the changes taking place in journalism with respect to globalization and the advent of new technologies
• Introduce students to issues of journalistic ethics, legal constraints, and codes of conduct

Outline Syllabus

n this module, you will learn about the basics of journalism -- reporting and storytelling using digital technologies. From audio recording and video production to writing, photography, and innovations using data, technology, and interviews, this module is an introduction to journalism of today and tomorrow. You will also interact with key theories and practices of journalism, discussing and debating international perspectives. In the end, you will have a final journalistic product based on a story of your selection. The module meets for 1 hour lecture and 1.5 hour workshop.

Assessment Proportions

• Practical: 50%
• Proposal: 20%
• Report: 30%

SOCL101: The Sociological Imagination

• Terms Taught:
  • Full Year only
  • Michaelmas Term only
  • Lent / Summer Terms only
  NOTE: If you are studying with us for a Full Academic Year and you select a course that has full year and part year variants, you will not be allowed to take only part of the course.
• US Credits:
  • Full Year course - 10 Semester Credits
  • Michaelmas Term only - 4 Semester Credits
  • Lent / Summer Terms only - 6 Semester Credits
• ECTS Credits:
  • Full Year course - 20 ECTS Credits
  • Michaelmas Term only - 8 Semester Credits
  • Lent / Summer Terms only - 12 Semester Credits
• Pre-requisites: None

Course Description

This course offers a general introduction to sociological issues, ideas, concepts, evidence and argument by examining some key aspects of the contemporary world. The topic areas covered in the lectures include: privatisation, identity, globalisation, city lives. A number of different sociological skills are emphasised in order to provide basic tools for applying sociological reasoning in relation to empirical examples. It provides a general understanding of sociology for all and a foundation for more advanced study.

Outline Syllabus

This course provides a general introduction to sociology by way of an integrated scheme of lectures, seminars and workshops. Theories, methods and the findings from sociological research are covered selectively. Principal themes include:

• Rationalisation
• Consumer culture
• Privatisation
• Comparative social development and inequality

Assessment is varied and includes a report on a research project carried out by students themselves.

Assessment Proportions

• Coursework: 60%
• Exam: 40%

SOCL218: Socio-Cultural Approaches to Advertising

• Terms Taught: Lent Term only
• US Credits: 4 Semester Credits
• ECTS Credits: 7.5 ECTS Credits
• Pre-requisites: Must be a second-year major or minor in sociology.

Course Description

This half unit introduces a range of debates about the social and cultural status and impact of advertising. From a sociological perspective it explores: advertising in the nineteenth century; the practices of contemporary advertising agencies; advertising controversies; advertising regulation, methods of textual analysis for advertisements, gender and advertising; challenges to advertising and the subversion of advertisements; and sociological accounts of branding and ‘promotional culture’.

Educational Aims

On successful completion of this course, students should be able to:

• Demonstrate knowledge of key theoretical approaches to advertising
• Demonstrate skills of argument supported by evidence
• Demonstrate an ability to evaluate competing explanations
• Critically apply methods of analysis to advertising
• Demonstrate knowledge of the role of advertising and discourses of consumerism in shaping identities

Assessment Proportions

• Coursework: 70% (3,000 word essay)
• Exam: 30% (unseen exam)

SOCL221: Climate Change and Society

• Terms Taught: Lent / Summer Terms only
• US Credits: 4 Semester Credits
• ECTS Credits: 7.5 ECTS Credits
• Pre-requisites: Must be a second or third-year major or minor in Sociology.

Course Description

This half-unit course will introduce students to sociological thinking on climate change. Climate change debates are beginning to make much stronger links between a vast and complex planetary perspective (a globe in crisis) and the social (the home, low-carbon lifestyles, consumer demand, etc.). In this context, sociological thinking can make a significant contribution to contemporary debates on climate change issues. The course will introduce the phenomenon of climate change and review emerging sociological perspectives around it, aiming to give students an understanding of issues such as: climate change and social change; climate modelling; the politics of climate change; climate change and consumption; climate justice; political economy of climate change; climate change and social activism; technological fixes for a warming climate; utopias and dystopias of climate change etc. This half-unit module goes well with another half-unit: SOCL 220 Sociology of the Environment.

Educational Aims

After taking this module students should have a good knowledge of the range of contributions that sociology has made, to date, to the understanding and framing of climate change. The module will take students through different sociological perspectives via the close reading of academic texts, seminar discussions,seminar exercises, group work, empirical study of climate change and society, short presentations and debates. As a result students should be able to think critically about the different ways in which climate change is framed and debated in both public and academic arenas. They should be able to discern how different approaches foreground certain issues and background others and to judge for themselves which approaches they feel important to developing sociological analysis and critique on climate change issues.

This module will provide students with opportunities to develop skills in: critical reading; empirical study of climate change and society; using the internet to source materials for analysis; presenting and debating ideas; academic writing and referencing.

Outline Syllabus

Indicative course outline - lecture/seminar topics will include:

• Introduction: sociologies of climate change
• Culture and controversy in climate change science
• Climate change and capital
• The political economy of climate change
• Climate change and emerging economies
• ‘Adaptation’, ‘mitigation’, ‘transition’ 'innovation' and the utopia of a low carbon society
• Climate change and social change
• Climate change and the mobility paradigm
• New subjectivities, institutions and collectives under climate change
• Climate change dystopias (insecurity, war)

Assessment Proportions

• Coursework: 65% (3,000 word essay)
• Reading Diary: 35%

SOCL243: Racisms and Racial Formation

• Terms Taught: Michaelmas Term only
• US Credits: 4 Semester Credits
• ECTS Credits: 7.5 ECTS
• Pre-requisites: Two semesters of Sociology

Course Description

This course focuses on racism and racial formations in the world today in both historical and contemporary perspectives. We will consider how ideas of race are historically constructed and look at how racism takes on different forms. Topics may include: the slave trade, colonialism and imperialism; ‘everyday racism’; structural racism; the social construction of ‘whiteness’; anti-racists politics and movements. The aim of the course is for students to gain an overview of various sociological approaches to explaining ‘race’, but also to gain an understanding of how such theories make a difference in the world today.

Educational Aims

General Aims of the Course

• To call into question popular and scientific understandings of ?race' as a fundamental category of human difference.
• To critically examine the 'race relations' paradigm and contrast it with sociological understandings of racial boundaries and racial formation as social constructions
• To compare differing histories of racial formation in the U.K. and its colonies with similar processes in the United States and other parts of the world
• To develop an understanding of how histories of colonialism, migration, and post-colonialism have shaped contemporary 'race relations' (or understandings of 'race relations'), and in particular how constructions of 'whiteness' matter
• To identify various types of racism, to explore various efforts to counter racism, and to examine contemporary social issues and policy debates surrounding race through the analysis of current events reported in the British media

Outline Syllabus

In this module, you will learn about the basics of journalism -- reporting and storytelling using digital technologies. From audio recording and video production to writing, photography, and innovations using data, technology, and interviews, this module is an introduction to journalism of today and tomorrow. You will also interact with key theories and practices of journalism, discussing and debating international perspectives. In the end, you will have a final journalistic product based on a story of your selection. The module meets for 1 hour lecture and 1.5 hour workshop.

Assessment Proportions

• One formative analytic exercise (1500 words): 35%

• One 3000-word essay: 65%

SOCL248: Global Families and Intimacy

• Terms Taught: Michaelmas Term only
• US Credits: 4 Semester Credits
• ECTS Credits: 7.5 ECTS
• Pre-requisites: None

Course Description

Family and intimate relationships form a crucial part of everyday social life. We are born into family and intimate relationships. We establish, maintain and dissolve family and intimate bonds over the life course. We navigate our changing relationship with parents, siblings, and relatives. We establish, maintain and re-establish intimate ties with partners and perhaps children.

But what are ‘families’? What makes intimate relationships ‘intimate’? How do people date, marry, separate, divorce, and re-partner? How do people ‘do’ families and intimacy in the everyday vicissitudes of match-making, romance, conflicts, care, money, domestic labour, and power? Why do people practise families and intimacy as they do? How do broader social, economic, political and cultural institutions configure our ‘private’ lives? How do the ways in which we relate to family members and intimate others shape the societies in which we live?

In an increasingly interconnected world, family and intimate relationships — personal and private as they are — are increasingly shaped by social forces operating on a global scale. The changing forms and practices of families and intimacy also help shape social trends as grandeur as globalisation.

In this module, we explore theoretical and empirical issues pertaining to the resilience and transformation of family and intimate relationships in a global context.

Educational Aims

This module will provide students with an opportunity:

• to compare and contrast competing and complementary critical perspectives on family and intimate relationships in contemporary society;
• to develop a sophisticated understanding of family and intimate relationships in a global context;
• to develop an understanding of methodological approaches — qualitative, quantitative, and mixed-methods — to the study of family and intimate lives;
• to express and discuss complex sociological ideas and abstractions in a confident and coherent manner.

Outline Syllabus

Indicative course outline

Specific contents will vary from year to year to reflect theoretical, empirical and contextual developments in related fields, but will broadly follow the outline below.

Enduring bonds? Family and intimate relationships over the life course

What are family and intimate relationships? Are they 'barbaric', premodern holdover institutions, perpetuating irrational relations and inherited forms of inequality? Or are they a ‘haven in a heartless world,’ the only thing left that is not commodified — a bastion of resistance to the encroaching state and market — and one of the few places where people still have any loyalty to anyone but themselves? This module provides an overview of the key debates, theoretical perspectives and empirical dimensions in the study of dynamic family and intimate relationships over the life course.

Children and multigenerational relations

The module examines the dialogical relationship between children and adult family members in a multigenerational framework. It discusses how children relate to adult members of the family, namely parents, grandparents, siblings and other relatives. It also explores the potential consequences of children for adult family members. Key debates such as the ‘grand advantage,’ ‘motherhood penalty’ and ‘fatherhood premium’ will be considered. The module explores the ways in which multigenerational relations may serve to reinforce and (re)produce social inequalities for both children and adult family members.

Dating, romance, cohabitation and marriage

This module covers the formation of family and intimate relationships. It examines the diverse life-course trajectories of union formation, such as dating, unmarried cohabitation and marriage. It introduces theoretical concepts such as assortative mating, status-exchange and ‘marriage premium,’ as well as their implications for social mobility and stratification.

Separation, divorce and widowhood (and re-partnering)

The module examines the dissolution of family and intimate relationships, in terms of separation, divorce and widowhood. It also explores the implication of these life events for distinctive re-partnering considerations and trajectories.

Going solo? Living apart together and living alone

Going beyond the couple norm, the module explores alternative ways of practicing family and intimate relationships, such as solo living, living apart together, etc. Against the backdrop of ongoing debates on ‘societal individualisation,’ the module explores the socio-economic, cultural and political causes and consequences, as well as individuals’ lived experiences, of these ‘non-traditional’ relationships.

Global families and intimacy

The module explores the establishment, maintenance and dissolution of family and intimate relationships across the boundaries of nation-states, race and ethnicity. It discusses the implication of rising ethnic and racial diversity and global population mobility for changing family and intimate relationships. It considers the role played by family relations in generating new and reproducing existing global inequalities.

Gender, sexuality and families

The module explores the gendered construction of family and intimate relationships. It examines the gendered division of paid and unpaid labour in contemporary families. The module also explores unfolding developments of LGBT families and ongoing debates on LGBT parenthood.

Regulating family and intimate relationships

This module explores the socio-legal regulation of family and intimate relationships. It considers the role played by state and transnational institutions in regulating and stratifying family relations, in areas such as inheritance, child removal and placement, (transnational) family migration, and institutional care provision.

International family change: Ideational perspectives

The module explores changes in social values, ideologies and attitudes pertaining to family and intimate relationships. It considers the importance of ideational perspectives and sociocultural imaginaries in understanding family change in an international context.

Intimate futures? Changing family and intimate relationships in a global world

The module explores the plural futures of family and intimate relationships, informed by unfolding social trends such as commercialisation and individualisation. It concludes the module by inviting students to consider what the analysis of family and intimate relationships can offer sociological understandings of social change in a global context.

Assessment Proportions

• 1 x blogpost (1000-1500 words): 35%
• 1 x essay (2000 - 2500 words): 55%
• 1 x group presentation: 10%

SOCL307: Modernity and its Discontents

• Terms Taught: Lent / Summer Terms only
• US Credits: 4 Semester Credits
• ECTS Credits: 7.5 ECTS Credits
• Pre-requisites: Five semesters of sociology.

Course Description

This module introduces and explores the writings of a number of key twentieth-century social and cultural theorists, radical thinkers offering perceptive and provocative critiques of the many ills of modern western capitalist society: alienation, reification and domination; environmental exploitation, pollution and the destruction of nature; media supersaturation, cultural commodification and ideological manipulation; technocracy, instrumentalism and ‘scientism’; violence, genocide and the perpetual threat of nuclear extermination. Building on some of the theories and concepts encountered in SOCL200 Understanding Social Thought, this module provides an opportunity for students to engage with some of the most stimulating and challenging perspectives in the social sciences, ones which interrogate our common and comfortable assumptions about the supposedly benign and beneficent character of contemporary capitalism, scientific development, technological innovation, and affluent consumer lifestyles. In so doing, the very concepts of historical ‘enlightenment’, ‘progress’ and ‘civilisation’ themselves are called into question. This is an essential module for those for whom sociology is not just intended to interpret the world in various ways, but concerned to change it.

Educational Aims

This module will provide students with an opportunity:

• To study social and cultural theory in a focused manner at an advanced level;
• To embed sociological theories in their historical, social, political and intellectual context;
• To read, reflect upon and evaluate a range of primary and secondary textual sources;
• To compare and contrast competing and complementary critical perspectives on modernity;
• To express, discuss and debate complex ideas and abstractions in a confident and coherent manner;
• To develop a sophisticated understanding of the contested concept of modernity;
• To engage in interdisciplinary work.

Students will be able to develop the following skills:

• Researching, summarising and critically assessing a variety of texts;
• Evaluating competing perspectives;
• Advanced academic writing and analysis including referencing skills;
• Oral presentation and debate during seminars and workshops.

Outline Syllabus

Topics will normally be drawn from the following:

• Introduction: what is ‘modernity’? The principle contours of this complex and much-debated concept are sketched as an initial point of departure for the critical explorations which follow.
• Critical Theory and the Frankfurt School: the writings of the ‘first generation’ of critical theorists writing in the immediate post-war period are introduced and explored in relation to two main themes: the critique of instrumental reason and the rise of the so-called culture industry.
• One-Dimensional World: the radical writings of Herbert Marcuse are examined in relation to two key aspects: his advocacy of social revolution and sexual liberation; and, his thoroughgoing critique of the unfreedom of affluent American ‘liberal’ capitalism.
• Countercultural critics: the 1960s saw a proliferation of sometimes excoriating, sometimes exuberant critiques of western capitalism, the warfare state and of the banality of mainstream culture in the name of ‘liberation’. Galvanised by the Vietnam War, and influenced by Marcuse’s writings, a number of these writers their transgressive ideas are considered here: Norman O. Brown, Paul Goodman, Theodor Roszak, Charles Reich, Philip Slater.
• Society of the Spectacle: the provocative and subversive writings of the Situationist International are considered in relation to their critique of everyday life; their reconfiguration of metropolitan space; and, Guy Debord’s famous conception of capitalist society as ‘spectacle’.
• Redeeming the Wretched: the pioneering anti-colonialist social-cultural psychology of Frantz Fanon is explored in relation to the struggle of indigenous peoples for emancipation and the radical transformation of Black self-identities.
• After Work, Beyond Affluence: the Austrian-born writer André Gorz provides one of the most compelling accounts of the potential for post-industrial societies to minimize alienating work and avert the catastrophic consequences of unchecked consumerism and economic rationality.
• Consuming Mythologies: picking up the theme of ‘consumer society’, attention is paid to two French writers who critically and presciently reveal the semiological and mythological character of our contemporary obsession with commodity culture: Roland Barthes Jean Baudrillard
• Welcome to the Hyperreal: at the turn of the millennium,, the proliferation of signs, simulations and ‘information’ has led some thinkers, such as Jean Baudrillard and Paul Virilio and others, to question our ability to identify the ‘real’ at all. What happens to sociology when the social itself is in danger of disappearing or has already long vanished?
• Desert of the Real: this provides an opportunity to examine the writings of some leading(Baudrillard, Virilio, Slavoj Zizek) for whom the events and aftermath of 9/11 are symptomatic of wider aspects of contemporary Western hegemony and media supersaturation: the mediatization of war, the spectacle of violence and the ‘spirit ‘ of terrorism.
• Empire and Multitudes: this session looks at contemporary writers such as Hardt and Negri who have critically engaged with the negative consequences of the prevailing neoliberal hegemony and ‘globalisation’ understood as the world-wide neo-imperialist penetration of transnational corporate interests and communications media.

Assessment Proportions

• 1 x 4000 word extended essay (80%)

• 1 x 1500 word critical analysis (20%)

SOCL308: Terror

• Terms Taught: Lent / Summer Terms only
• US Credits: 4 Semester Credits
• ECTS Credits: 7.5 ECTS Credits
• Pre-requisites: Five semesters of sociology.

Course Description

This module analyses the relationship between society and terror taking point of departure in the discussion of 9/11 and the political responses it has provoked. The course focuses on how different forms of terror are related to the changing nature of the society and how terror can be theorized from a sociological point of view. It also explores how the study of terror can contribute to the discipline of sociology. The key concepts are terror, the war against terrorism, dispositif, nihilism, flow, consumerism, post-politics, and politics of security.

Educational Aims

The aim of this module is to analyse the relationship between society and terror taking point of departure in the discussion of 9/11 and the political responses it has provoked.

This module aims to impart knowledge of how terror(ism) relates to contemporary social change. The overall aim of the course is to introduce and develop skills of methodological reasoning, interpreting comparative studies of different societies (western and eastern Europe, North America and the Middle East), and critically assessing competing theories and empirical evidence through texts, presentations and discussions.

Outline Syllabus

Introduction: terror as concept (the history of the concept and of actions specified as terror)

• Terror as nihilism (the generic link between the discussion of nihilism, especially in the 19th Century Russia, and the concept of nihilism).
• Terror in network society (the new types of terrorism developing in the contemporary society with focus on technologies of mobility)
• Terror, sovereignty and the culture of exception (the link between terror and sovereignty with focus on 'state terror' as a dispositif)
• Politics of security and fundamentalism (the 'clash of cultures' thesis and the war against terrorism)
• Camps and human rights (Agamben's theory of the camp and its link to biopolitics with focus on human rights)
• Control, surveillance and the culture of fear (fear as a sociological category and the uses of fear for social regulation)
• Terror and cinema (the link between terror as fantasised in cinema and modern terrorism - terror as continuation of Hollywood films by other means)
• Terror and literature (terrorism in modern literature exemplified with the French bestselling author Houellebecq's work)
• Terror as dispositif (terror as new governmental dispositif replacing Foucault's 'discipline'; the link between 'control society' and terror).

Assessment Proportions

• 1 x 3000 word essay: 70%
• Presentation: 30%

SOCL310: Migration, Citizenship and Belonging

• Terms Taught: Michaelmas Term only
• US Credits: 4 Semester Credits
• ECTS Credits: 7.5 ECTS
• Pre-requisites: Five semesters of sociology; two may be from cognate disciplines such as anthropology or social psychology.

Course Description

'Belonging' to a nation is widely seen to be as 'natural' as 'belonging' to a family or a home. This course undermines assumptions about national belonging by introducing students to a range of theoretical approaches and debates. How are the nation and national belonging socially constructed? How is the nation defined? Who belongs, who doesn't? What are the impacts of migration on definitions of the nation? In turn, how is migration enabled or constricted by national borders and boundaries?

The module focuses on nation formation in relation to migration. It will explore what everyday practices, discourses, and policies reveal about the ways we think about, and inhabit, the nation and migration? Although we will focus on the example of Britain, the issues raised will be of interest to all students concerned with the effects of nationalisms and ideas of belonging and entitlement, which many countries of the contemporary world are presently debating in the context of the 'Age of migration' (Castles and Miller 1998).

Examples of topics covered include: ‘We the people’ – the forging of nations; the racial state; gender, sexuality and the nation; migration, citizenship, and integration; language as border control.

Educational Aims

This course aims:

• To introduce sociological issues surrounding the concepts of nation, migration and multiculturalism
• To develop an understanding of discourse analysis
• To introduce questions of power and politics surrounding the processes of identity formation

Outline Syllabus

Lecture topics include:

• 'We the people': the forging of nations
• A country idyll
• Migrant belongings and transnational connections
• Consumer culture, diversity and 'eating the other'
• Multiculturalism and the hybrid nation

Assessment Proportions

• A compilation of short reflective pieces (approx. 1500 words): 30%
• One Essay (3000 words): 70%

SOCL314: Feminism and Social Change

• Terms Taught:
  • Full Year only
  • Michaelmas Term only
  • Lent / Summer Terms only
  NOTE:  If you are studying with us for a Full Academic Year and you select a course that has full year and part year variants, you will not be allowed to take only part of the course.
• US Credits:
  • Full Year course - 8 Semester Credits
  • Michaelmas Term only - 4 Semester Credits
  • Lent / Summer Terms only - 4 Semester Credits
• ECTS Credits:
  • Full Year course - 15 ECTS Credits
  • Michaelmas Term only - 7.5 ECTS Credits
  • Lent / Summer Terms only - 7.5 ECTS Credits
• Pre-requisites: Five semesters of sociology; two may be from cognate disciplines such as anthropology or social psychology.

Course Description

This challenging course investigates gender inequalities within society through a focus on historical and contemporary debates in feminist theory and activism. The course has an 'intersectional' focus that means we will consider gender inequalities as bound up with other forms of discrimination and marginalisation, particularly racial and ethnic inequalities, disability and social class.

The first term will challenge you to think about 'what feminism means today' through a consideration of key aspects of feminist thought and activism from the late 1960s onwards. We will consider ideas such as ‘the personal is political’, consciousness raising and the contemporary relevance of sexism. We will also consider feminist research practices and methods and the idea of work as liberation to prepare you to carry out an intergenerational interview on the theme of gender, work and social change. In the latter part of term 1 we will explore the Women’s Health Movement and explore contemporary feminist activism through current examples of everyday activism. In the second term we take the feminist manifesto as a central document which expresses lived experiences of gender inequalities and collective desire for social change and explore the contemporary resonance of ideas introduced in the first term through engaging with topics such as breast cancer activism, anti-feminist backlash, and black and cyborg feminisms.

Throughout the course we will interrogate social constructions of sex differences and consider how lived experiences of inequality are perpetuated. By the end of the course you will be familiar with some of the key debates within feminism today and be able to make connections between feminist theory and forms of feminist practice. This course will challenge you to interrogate your own assumptions about sexual difference and inequality and we expect you to take a full part in lively class discussion and debate. The course involves analysis of varied media including academic texts, advertising, art, film and news media.

Educational Aims

• To examine key concepts and theoretical approaches in contemporary feminist theory
• To develop core skills of critical scholarly analysis, evaluation, and interpretation
• To improve written and spoken expression, argumentation, criticism, and use of evidence
• To introduce and develop methodologies for interpreting visual and textual sources
• To develop confidence in scholarly reading and writing

Outline Syllabus

• Introduction: The Nature-Culture debate
• Gender
• What is Sex and Gender?
• Performativity
• Transgender
• Sustaining Feminisms - Women, Work and Class
• Essay Writing/Reading Week
• Sex Work/Prostitution, Migration and Trafficking
• Media and Body Image: Workshop
• Overview of the First Term

Assessment Proportions

• 1 x 3,000 word (or equivalent) group analytical exercise based on individual empirical research (interviews), with assessed verbal and written presentation (30%)

• 1 x 2,500 word (or equivalent) group analytical exercise, supervised individual research diary and presentation at exhibition based on original research (Mapping project) (40%)
• 1 x 3,500 word (or equivalent) group analytical exercise (manifestoactivist output) and individual essay (30%)
• *Instead of analytic mapping exercise and essay, students can write a 6,000 word dissertation (70%)

SOCL316: Sociology goes to Hollywood

• Terms Taught: Lent / Summer Terms only
• US Credits: 4 Semester Credits
• ECTS Credits: 7.5 ECTS
• Pre-requisites: Five semesters of sociology; two may be from cognate disciplines such as anthropology or social psychology.

Course Description

This module will be of interest for all those MCS and Sociology students who are keen to explore the intersections of the cinematic and sociological imaginations. How might particular films represent and critique present-day societal patterns and everyday life? How might sociological themes and ideas enable us to situate and read films more productively as interventions in the social world? Each week we will view and analyse one single film – mostly mainstream American cinema, sometimes independent – carefully chosen for its dramatization of selected sociological themes and debates. What might these films, ordinary films not obscure specialist documentaries, tell us about, for example, violence and power; community and conflict; hegemonic masculinities; the workaday neoliberal world; forms of alterity; modernity and tradition?

Educational Aims

On successful completion of this module students will be able to:

• Critically evaluate different theories and approaches to cinema
• Analyse in detail a chosen film
• Give a coherent account of diverse ideas and actions
• Compare and employ a range of theories and approaches, demonstrating confident knowledge of the issues involved in the analysis of films in a sociological perspective
• Recognise and understand the implications of different approaches to the sociology of cinema investigate, gather evidence about, and think critically about cinematic objects and artistic ideas

Outline Syllabus

In general the course covers the sociological theories of network society, liquid modernity, orientalism, the camp, exclusion, sexuality, violence and security.

Topics to be covered include:

• General introduction to the course
• Fight Club: networks, violence and capital
• Lord of the Flies: crowds and power
• The Turkish Bath: the ground zero of society
• City of God: camping as social (non)relation
• Brazil: terror and surveillance
• Jarhead: war as post-politics
• Life is Beautiful: ethics of the rem(a)inder
• Borat: the force of humor
• Climates: disjunctive syntheses of nihilism

The contents of the course stated here are illustrative, and some of them might chance in line with the future social transformations, theoretical innovations, and the production of new films suitable for the course.

Assessment Proportions

• 1 x 3000 word essay: 70%
• 1 x presentation: 30%

SOCL329: Classic Encounters

• Terms Taught: Michaelmas Term only.
• US Credits: 4 Semester Credits
• ECTS Credits: 8 ECTS Credits
• Pre-requisites: Five semesters of sociology; two may be from cognate disciplines such as anthropology or social psychology.

Course Description

All sociologists are supposed to know their classics but most only know them from second or third hand summaries. In this course we offer the opportunity for advanced students to have an intimate encounter with one of the core texts by one of the classics, texts that are referred to all the time in the social sciences. Our choice is Karl Marx’s Capital, a huge book which has influence social science, economic thought and philosophy ever since it was first published. Regarding the recent rise of interest in Marx’ analysis and critique of modern capitalism it is worth the while of every budding social scientist to become acquainted with this highly complex text, widely praised and renowned for its analytical insights. Capital is far more than a book on ‘the economy’, it is a critique of modern capitalism and modern, bourgeois society, as well as a critique of the mystifications and myths of everyday life and thought in modern times.

Educational Aims

• Analyse critically a highly complex classic sociological text comprising different, competing and complementary perspectives
• Reflect upon the historical context and the history of a large sociological research project, comprising history, theory and empirical research
• Reflect upon the development of “big theories” and big concepts and their impact in the social sciences
• Develop an advanced, highly sophisticated understanding of the importance, the complexity and the variability of modern social and economic processes in time and space
• Evaluate competing claims, arguments, perspectives and theories about modern capitalism and modern society
• Researching, summarising and critically assessing a challenging and highly complex text
• Advanced academic writing (including referencing skills)
• Oral presentation and debate during seminars and workshops
• Appreciation of and confidence in interdisciplinary work

Outline Syllabus

The exact syllabus will be different according to the choice of the classical text and author the module/s will focus upon. However, the following main themes will always be covered for every text: The classical text will be presented together with its author in its historical context, regarding major intellectual influences, links to other authors in the field, main sources, philosophical background, empirical base, state of the art in the discipline or disciplines involved.

The text will be assessed regarding its general outlook, tasks, achievements and impacts – which conceptual and theoretical and methodological innovations, which new vista’s, which old or new problems settled or left unsettled, which debates triggered at the time of publication, which legacy for the following generations of scholars.

What follows is an example based on Karl Marx’s Capital. Outline and bibliography will be different depending upon each year’s choice of the classical author to become acquainted with (e.g. Max Weber, Emile Durkheim, Georg Simmel and others).

Marx’s Capital, published for the first time in 1867, 1885 and 1894 (the three volumes, respectively) has become one of the most influential texts of all times for all the social sciences. In sociology, in political economy in particular, it is hardly possible to engage in any major debate on modern economies and societies without at least some firsthand knowledge of it. Capital and its analysis of the modern world has served as a model, as a starting point or as a bone of contest for many theorists of modern capitalism, it can be regarded as the basic and most widely spread theory of capitalism. Capital is not easily accessible. We will study the major parts and key concepts of the work, explain its context, its history and familiarize ourselves with the debates it has triggered and the tremendous impacts it has had upon the social sciences. We will present and study it as an example for a peculiar kind of theorizing and social research, by the same token as an unfinished project and work in progress.

The following topics will typically be tackled in the course:

• The meaning of the basic categories of commodity, money, capital, wage labour, modern industry, accumulation, development and growth
• The concept and the theory of value
• Exchange, markets and prices
• The analysis of the labour market
• Labour relations in modern industry
• The development and the logic of the factory system
• Hidden or less well known theories in Capital; The theory of ideology, the theory of fetishism, the theory of innovation and social change
• The historical context of the critique of political economy
• The range and scope of Marx’ research project
• Marx’ famous method in Capital
• The overall structure of Marx’ theory as presented in the three volumes of Capital
• Debates on the unsettled problems of Marxian economics
• Where Marx was right and where Marx was wrong
• The impact of Capital as a classical text of the social sciences

Assessment Proportions

• 1 x 3500 word essay (80%)

• 1 x 15 minute class presentation (20%) delivered in a workshop sessions seminar and written up as a 1000 word text, with additional handouts and power point slides