DELC211: Understanding culture

• Terms Taught: Lent/Summer Term only
• US Credits: 4 Semester Credits
• ECTS Credits: 7.5 ECTS credits
• Pre-requisites: None

Educational Aims

• 'Understanding Culture' gives an insight into twentieth and twenty-first century definitions and analyses of 'culture'. Some key questions we explore on the module include: How has 'culture' been defined and how have these definitions changed during the 19th, 20th and 21st century? How does culture define who we are? What is the relationship between 'culture' and 'power'? How does a 'culture' endorse or suppress markers of identity? How is normativity constructed, questioned or undermined? How can cultural studies and their methodologies help us to understand artistic expressions and cultural practices, and to constructively respond to what matters to others? What role does the body play in our understanding of culture?
• Texts studied on the course may vary, but will typically be organized around the topics of culture and class, gender, sexuality, race, imperialism and decolonization, and cultural resistance.
• Throughout the course students are encouraged to approach cultures as standing in relation to each other, to develop cultural critical self-awareness, and intercultural competence.

Outline Syllabus

Texts studied on the course may vary, but will typically be organized around the topics of culture and class, gender, sexuality, race, imperialism and decolonization, and cultural resistance.

• Weekly Lecture and Seminar outline

  Week 1: Introduction: Approaches to ‘Culture’ and Judy Giles and Tim Middleton, ‘What is Culture?’

  Week 2 Approaches to ‘Understanding’ and Excerpts from Silvia Federici, Witches, WItch-Hunting and Women, and her lecture '‘Women, Witch-Hunting and Primitive Accumulation’', hosted by Culturgest

  Week 3 Culture and Ideology and Corey Robin, ‘Conservatism and Counterrevolution’ from The Reactionary Mind

  Week 4 Culture and the State and David Graeber, ‘Dead Zones of the Imagination’ from The Utopia of Rules, p. 45-82 , Interview with a representative Klett-Cotta, the German publisher of The Utopia of Rules.

  Week 5 Culture and Class /Voicing Class and Edouard Louis, Who Killed My Father

  Week 6 Voicing Blackness and Frantz Fanon, ‘The Fact of Blackness’, from Black Skin, White Masks

  Week 7 Voicing Gender and Excerpts from Hélène Cixous, Sorties; or Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera; or Audre Lorde, 'The uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism’ and ‘A Woman Speaks’ and ‘Power’

  Week 8 Voicing as Self-Enquiry: White Privilege and Richard Dyer, ‘The Matter of Whiteness’, and Peggy McIntosh, ‘The White Privilege Invisible Knapsack

  Week 9 Case Studies: Environmentalism and Ecocriticism and Arundhati Roy, ‘The Greater Common Good’

  Week 10 Case Studies: Cultures of the Extreme Right, Culture and Anti-fascism and Julia Ebner, ‘Redpilling for Beginners: Undercover with Generation Identity’, from Going Dark: The Secret Social Lives of Extremists, Exhibition Peng! Kollektiv: AntiFa, Myth and Truth

• Language: This module is taught in English and all texts are available in English

Assessment Proportions

• Coursework: 60%
• Exam: 40%

DELC212: Society on Screen: The Language of Film

• Terms Taught: Lent / Summer Terms only
• US Credits: 4 Semester Credits
• ECTS Credits: 7.5 ECTS credits
• Pre-requisites: None

Course Description

How do films deal with aspects of society like migration, environment, artificial intelligence and gender? Do they entertain viewers, instruct them, or both? In what ways do cinematic techniques play a part? This module explores connections between European and Latin American films and their socio-historical contexts. It also considers form and technique: the language of film. To these ends, there will be introductory lectures on cinema and society and on film aesthetics and content in the first week of the module. During the remainder of the module, the connections mentioned will be the focus of seminars and presentations within the four typical topic areas: the environment, gender, artificial intelligence and migration.

Educational Aims

Students view and discuss modern European and Latin American films which highlight the core topics. Lectures will situate the films in terms of the social and historical context of the period and countries in which they were made. Artificial intelligence, migration, the environment and gender, for example, are differently manifested in each of the countries studied. The course will explore the relationship between cinema, such issues and their representation. Students will acquire a broad understanding of cinema of the period (1960s-present) together with an ability to analyse, contextualise and compare varying cinematic representations of a number of themes, together with the techniques used in those representations.

Outline Syllabus

The module consists of two introductory weeks on form and society then four two-week strands on typically the following topics: migration, environment, gender and artificial intelligence. Each strand will be introduced with a lecture and followed by seminars on the set films.

The films mentioned here are indicative only. They are subject to change. The films listed here give you an idea of a typical syllabus and the kinds of films that are analysed: I’m Your Man/Ich bin dein Mensch (Maria Schrader, 2022), My Life in Pink/Ma vie en rose (Alain Berliner, 1997), Tony Manero (Pablo Larraín, 2008) and Dislocation (Jianxin Huang, 1989) and Land and Freedom (Ken Loach, 1995).

Assessment Proportions

• Essay(s): 40%
• Exam: 45%
• Clip Analysis: 15%

DELC215: Language and Identity in France, Germany, Spain and the Sinophone World

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

Course Description

This module will introduce second-year students to the role that the language used by institutions plays in shaping individual perceptions of identity. It will provide them with a basic theoretical framework that allows them to understand the relationship between language and power as reflected in current language policies at regional, national, and supranational levels. It will enable them to recognise forms of prestige and stigma associated with varieties of the three main languages under study. It will therefore raise critical awareness of the portrayal and representation of linguistic variations in the media and in the sphere of literature.

Educational Aims

This module aims to:

• Familiarise students with the linguistic realities of France, Germany, Spain and the Sinophone World.
• Introduce them to country-specific materials and provide them with a better understanding of regional and social variation.
• Provide students with a theoretical framework that allows them to understand discourses of power that revolve around the concept of nation.
• Increase their awareness of languages as instruments of social prestige and identity formation.
• Enable students to make cross-country comparisons involving three major national identities in Europe.
• Develop their critical perception of linguistic variation within their home country, and of the role of the media, films and literature in portraying national and sub-national identities.

Outline Syllabus

Topics to include:

• Language and Power: An Introduction Language.
• Nation and Standard: An Introduction.
• European language policies.
• German as a pluricentric language.
• Gastarbeiter language and policies.
• An Overview of the linguistic Situation of France: Regional Variations.
• Linguistic Diversity: A threat to French National Identity?
• The languages of Spain (Castilian Spanish, Catalan, Basque, Galician). Language attitudes in Spain.
• Beyond Europe: Language and Power in the Sinophone World.
• QA session.

+ revision sessions in Summer Term

Assessment Proportions

• Essay(s): 40%
• Exam: 45 %
• Written Commentary 15%

DELC364: Latin America and Spain on Film: Violences and Masculinities

• Terms Taught: Lent / Summer Terms only
• US Credits: 4 Semester Credits
• ECTS Credits: 7.5 ECTS credits
• Pre-requisites: None

Course Description

Violence is a consistent feature of the cinemas of Spain and Latin America. The vast majority of violent acts in Latin American and Spanish films are carried out by men, raising specific concerns about the representation of links between men and violence on film. This module looks at key motifs as well as broader themes such as the absent patriarch and depictions of the male body. Students will examine representations of different kinds of violence, including structural, psychological and political violence. You will be expected to discuss the connections made between these and the masculinities with which they are associated. To this end, theoretical support will be given throughout towards current ideas about masculinities and violence in both sociology and cultural studies.

Educational Aims

The aim of this module is to provide students with a grasp of both the historical contexts for violence and masculinities as they are depicted in Spanish and Latin American film as well as an understanding of theoretical approaches which can help to enrich analyses of such violence and evolving masculinities. The course seeks to pluralise violence so that it is understood by students as physical, non-physical, criminal, psychological, structural and invisible. Masculinities will always be considered in the plural. Another aim is to ensure students have the terminology to discuss such contexts and approaches in relation to specific films in a coherent and intellectually appropriate framework.

Students will first be required to view films in historical contexts which highlight key themes in the selected films. Students will be encouraged to observe and analyse structural violence, criminal violence, gender violence and political violence in these films and to understand their relationship with such categories as hegemonic, protest and patriarchal masculinities. Such violence(s) and masculinities will not only be contextualised historically but also approached through theories on aesthetics, film reception, gender and ideology. In this way students will be able to approach questions concerning the 'invisible' nature of domestic violence, violence as a means (or not) of providing 'cheap shocks' and different aesthetic approaches towards the depiction of state violence.

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

• contextualise Spanish and Latin American films by placing them in their appropriate historical settings and by understanding the relationship between those historical settings and the films concerned.
• apply their historical contextualisation with an understanding of theories of violence and masculinities.
• analyse these films with due reference to the cinematic contexts for each country (eg. censorship, strength of film industry, availability and sources of capital etc.), using appropriate film terminology and critically engaging with existing interpretations of the corpus of films.
• present material on film, learning to juggle effectively stills, secondary sources, dialogue and their own analyses.
• examine cultural products or texts in socio-historical contexts.

Outline Syllabus

There will then be 8 weeks of study of four separate strands, each strand consisting of two weeks study of two films. The strands are: Structural Violence, Crash Cinemas, Gender Violence, Boys and Men. The second hour of the second week of each strand will consist of presentations by students either individually, in pairs or in groups of three.

In a typical year, the films concerned will include Memories of Underdevelopment (Cuba, 1968); La frontera (Chile, 1991); Amores perros (Mexico, 2000); Abre los ojos (Spain, 1997); Camila (Argentina, 1984); Te doy mis ojos (Spain, 2003); City of God (2002) and El espinazo del diablo (Spain, 2001).

The films are in Spanish or Portuguese with English subtitles. The vast majority of secondary texts are in English and the teaching is also in English.

Assessment Proportions

Essay(s): 40% Presentation (Assessed): 15% Exam: 45%

Presentations will be delivered by individuals, pairs, or groups of 3. In pairs and groups, each student will receive the same mark in order to encourage teamwork in the preparation process. Students will be required to deposit their powerpoint presentation on Moodle.

Feedback for both essay and presentation will follow current departmental practice. Presentations will be recorded (audio only) and students will be sent feedback by email. The feedback will contain two to three paragraphs of prose. The essay will focus on one submodule which must not be the submodule they have studied for their presentation. Written feedback will inform revision for the exam.

In the written examination (45%) students will pick one question out of several proposed options and write an essay responding to that question. The questions will address the concepts and material discussed in the lectures and seminars. Students must choose a question on a topic they have not studied in either their presentation or their CWA essay for DELC364.

FREN233: Shaping Contemporary France: Moments and Movements

• Terms Taught: Full Year module
• US Credits: 4 Semester Credits
• ECTS Credits: 7.5 ECTS Credits
• Pre-requisites: None

Course Description

‘Shaping Contemporary France: Moments and Movements' provides students with awareness of the ‘must-know’ historical moments as well as political and aesthetic movements that have shaped French and Francophone cultures, while systematically enhancing their skills of cultural analysis in diverse media. The course will hone their close-reading skills, yet also provide a broad awareness of French modernity through a thematic approach that casts back to key nineteenth-, twentieth-, and twenty-first-century texts, songs, and films that have come to define French contemporary society.

Through the topics of ‘Resistance, trauma, and memory’; ‘Colonies and conflicts, identity and alterity’; ‘The postmodern condition’; and ‘Digital art and society,’ the module takes students on a journey through key moments and movements across two centuries of French cultural history, encountering along the way some of the most radical thinkers, writers, filmmakers and creative artists that make the intellectual tradition of France so distinctive. From plays to popular songs, students will experience a stimulating range of cultural forms and be equipped with the skills to reflect critically on them as expressions of France's multi-faceted, nuanced societies.

The main aim of the module is twofold: to build students' reading knowledge of French while giving them a flavour of the rich cultural output that has defined the Francophone realm over the past two hundred years.

Educational Aims

This module aims to:

• Develop students' knowledge and understanding of the written and spoken French language
• Introduce students to key concepts and methods in the interpretation of different kinds of text in their socio-historical context
• Enable students to engage with a history of ideas and forms focused through a series of significant moments and movements
• Develop students’ abilities to independently research, write, and present creative work
• Develop students’ abilities to participate actively in class and small group discussion

Assessment Proportions

100% coursework

CWA1: 750 word commentary on creative work* OR 1500 word comparative essay (Mich): 35%

CWA2: Learning Journal on sub-modules 1 and 2 (Michaelmas): 10%

CWA3: feed-forward session on essay plan (Lent, optional): 0%

CWA4: Learning Journal on sub-modules 3 and 4 (Lent): 10%,

CWA5: 2,500-word essay (Lent/Summer): 45%

*Students are to work on a creative response to material covered in Michaelmas. Examples of pieces may include but are not limited to: audio-visual work, i.e. videos, recordings, animation; collage; drawing or other art work, e.g. graphic fiction/comic; musical piece; creative writing; interviews; performances; quiz. The creative work must be accompanied by a 750 word summary of how their piece responds to the course material.

GERM233: Shaping Contemporary German-Speaking Europe: Moments and Movements

• Terms Taught: Full Year module
• US Credits: 4 semester credits
• ECTS Credits: 7.5 ECTS credits
• Pre-requisites: None

Course Description

'Shaping Contemporary German-Speaking Europe: Moments and Movements' provides students with awareness of the ‘must-know’ historical moments as well as political and aesthetic movements that have shaped German-language culture, while systematically enhancing their skills of cultural analysis in diverse media. The course will hone their close-reading skills, yet also provide a broad awareness of German modernity through a non-chronological, thematic approach that casts back to key nineteenth-, twentieth-, and twenty-first-century texts, moments, and movements.

Through the four themes of Myth, Magic, Money and Minor Identities, the module will introduce students to key works by, for example, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, E. T. A. Hoffmann, Thomas Mann, Irmtraud Morgener, r and Sharon Dodua Otoo. This module thus takes students on a journey through moments and movements across two centuries of German-language cultural history, encountering along the way some of the most radical thinkers, writers, filmmakers and creative artists that make the German-language intellectual tradition so distinctive. Students will experience a stimulating range of cultural forms and be equipped with the skills to reflect critically on them as expressions of multi-faceted, nuanced societies.

The main aim of the module is twofold: to build students' reading knowledge of German while giving them a flavour of the rich cultural output that has defined the German-speaking realm over the past two hundred years.

Educational Aims

The module aims to:

• Develop students' knowledge and understanding of the written and spoken German language
• Introduce students to key concepts and methods in the interpretation of different kinds of text in their socio-historical context
• Enable students to engage with a history of ideas and forms focused through a series of significant moments and movements
• Develop students’ abilities to independently research, write, and present creative work
• Develop students’ abilities to participate actively in class and small group discussion

Assessment Proportions

100% coursework

CWA1: 750 word commentary on creative work* OR 1500 word comparative essay (Mich): 35%

CWA2: Learning Journal on sub-modules 1 and 2 (Michaelmas): 10%

CWA3: feed-forward session on essay plan (Lent, optional): 0%

CWA4: Learning Journal on sub-modules 3 and 4 (Lent): 10%,

CWA5: 2,500-word essay (Lent/Summer): 45%

*Students are to work on a creative response to material covered in Michaelmas. Examples of pieces may include but are not limited to: audio-visual work, i.e. videos, recordings, animation; collage; drawing or other art work, e.g. graphic fiction/comic; musical piece; creative writing; interviews; performances; quiz. The creative work must be accompanied by a 750 word summary of how their piece responds to the course material.

LICA250: Documentary Film: History and Theory

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

Course Description

The course traces the broad impact that documentary cinema has had on contemporary culture, examining a variety of documentary forms from the origins of cinema to the present. Assessment is by essays and class presentations.

Educational Aims

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

• Knowledge of documentary aesthetics, conventions and characteristic modes of address in documentary film
• The ability to apply realist and other critical theory to the analysis and evaluation of documentary texts
• A clear understanding of the context of documentary production and the ethical, institutional and technological considerations that inform it
• Fluency and skill in the research, planning and presentation of ideas in both academic writing and verbal presentation
• A critical understanding of key theoretical readings and films in relation to documentary film
• Demonstrate an understanding of the aesthetic, social, cultural and ethical contexts which inform documentary film

Outline Syllabus

Topics to be covered include:

1. What is Documentary?
2. Performative Documentary
3. Observational Cinema
4. Political and Social Rhetoric in Documentary
5. Documenting History
6. Fake Documentary
7. Documentary and the archive
8. Art and Documentary: intersections
9. Documentary and portraiture
10. Subjective documentary

Assessment Proportions

• Coursework: 100%

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.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%

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%

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

SPAN233: Shaping Contemporary Spain and Latin America: Moments and Movements

• Terms Taught: Full Year module.
• US Credits: 4 Semester Credits
• ECTS Credits: 7.5 ECTS credits
• Pre-requisites: None

Course Description

'Shaping Contemporary Spain and Latin America: Moments and Movements' provides students with awareness of the ‘must-know’ historical moments as well as political and aesthetic movements that have shaped Spanish and Latin American culture, while systematically enhancing their skills of cultural analysis in diverse media. The course will hone their close-reading skills, yet also provide a broad awareness of Hispanic modernity through a thematic approach that goes back to key Golden Age, nineteenth-, twentieth-, and twenty-first-century texts, moments, and movements.

The modules on the Golden Age (Siglo de Oro), Historical Memory, Revolutions and Dictatorships will be based on Spanish and Spanish American texts, both visual and literary, from the period of empire through to the present day, highlighting themes such as power, resistance, trauma, gender, ethnicity and nation. Writers, artists and filmmakers will be studied in their historical and cultural contexts, with due regard to any relevant global trends such as imperialism, colonialism, postcolonialism, democracy, neoliberalism and nationalism. This module thus takes students on a journey through six centuries of Spanish and Latin American cultural history, encountering along the way some of the most radical thinkers, writers, filmmakers and creative artists that make the intellectual tradition of Spain and Latin America so distinctive. Students will experience a stimulating range of cultural forms and be equipped with the skills to reflect critically on them as expressions of Spain and Spanish America's multi-faceted, nuanced societies.

The main aim of the module is twofold: to build students' reading knowledge of Spanish while giving them a flavour of the rich cultural output that has defined the Spanish-speaking realm over the past seven hundred years.

Educational Aims

This module aims to:

• Develop students' knowledge and understanding of the written and spoken Spanish Language
• Introduce students to key concepts and methods in the interpretation of different kinds of texts in their socio-historical context
• Enable students to engage with a history of ideas and forms focused through a series of significant moments and movements
• Provide students with an outline of the major political, social and cultural events of Spanish history since the time of the Spanish Empire
• Develop students' capacity to reflect on the connections between and the interpretation of those political, social and cultural events
• Encourage students to reflect on the relationship between historical and contemporary societies
• Develop students’ abilities to independently research, write, and present creative work
• Develop students’ abilities to participate actively in class and small group discussion.

Assessment Proportions

100% coursework

CWA1: 750 word commentary on creative work* OR 1500 word comparative essay (Mich): 35%

CWA2: Learning Journal on sub-modules 1 and 2 (Michaelmas): 10%

CWA3: feed-forward session on essay plan (Lent, optional): 0%

CWA4: Learning Journal on sub-modules 3 and 4 (Lent): 10%,

CWA5: 2,500-word essay (Lent/Summer): 45%

*Students are to work on a creative response to material covered in Michaelmas. Examples of pieces may include but are not limited to: audio-visual work, i.e. videos, recordings, animation; collage; drawing or other art work, e.g. graphic fiction/comic; musical piece; creative writing; interviews; performances; quiz. The creative work must be accompanied by a 750 word summary of how their piece responds to the course material.