Sociology (Placement Year)

This module is designed around active learning – helping you to develop skills to do your own research.

Lectures address cross-cutting methodological debates as well as established methods (such as interviewing, discourse analysis, ethnography and quantitative surveys). Most of your time, however, is spent in seminars where you will try out methods such as interviewing, analysing media texts, and doing observation on campus.

There are ample opportunities for feedback as you develop ideas for your project-based final assessment, and build diverse skills to support your final year dissertation.

This module introduces the development of social theory from the Enlightenment in the eighteenth century to contemporary debates about the character of knowing. This module will introduce important models developed by classical social theorists (and especially Marx, Weber, Durkheim and Simmel) for analysing modern societies and considers how they have been adapted, updated, or displaced by recent social theories. It explores how these theories have been shaped by social and political change in eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth century Europe. Particular stress is placed on relating theories to contemporary social life. You will critically consider different current understandings of the role of social theory as privileged knowledge, tool of social control, ideology, and discourse. You will explore critically the theme of everyday life in modernity.

This module offers the opportunity to learn skills in reading, analysing, comparing, and critically evaluating major social theories of the rise of modern societies.

This module will introduce students to sociological thinking on climate change. Debates about climate change are shifting, and beginning to make much stronger links between a vast and complex planetary perspective (a globe in crisis) and the private sphere (the home, low-carbon lifestyles, urban living, consumer demand, etc.). In this context, social theorists have been considering what sociological thinking can offer to contemporary debates on climate change issues. The module aims to introduce you to a range of new and emerging sociological analyses which examine: climate change and social change; new subjectivities, institutions and collectives under climate change; climate activism; dynamics of crisis and denial; the contested politics of climate change science; the global political economy of climate change; utopias and dystopias of climate change.

This module explores how consumption, advertising, branding and promotion shape society. In the module we will ask questions such as:

• Why do many people find shopping so appealing?
• How does consumption relate to our identities, our hopes and our futures?
• What is consumption doing to the world? Are we shopping ourselves to death?
• Does consumption shape inequalities – both at a national and global level?
• How does advertising and branding speak to us?
• Do we now live in a ‘promotional culture’ in which we must ‘sell ourselves’?
• Why do some people resist consumer culture?

This module explores the question of how information and communications technologies, in their multiple forms, figure in our everyday lives. The aim of the module is to develop an appreciation for the range of experiences affected by digital media, including the progressive expansion of life online, and the increasingly intimate relations between life online and off. We’ll explore global divisions of digital labour; hactivism. The module will consider the new possibilities that the changing social infrastructure of digital technologies afford, while also learning to look at the rhetorics and practices of the virtual 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.

Do we need to take Rachel Dolezal’s claim to ‘identify as black’ seriously? How does the visibility of figures like Caitlyn Jenner help ordinary trans* people? Does Rihanna’s video for Bitch Better Have My Money glamorise violence against women? Is Beyonce, as bell hooks argues, a ‘terrorist’ for her affect on young women of colour, or does her argument disempower Beyoncé’s huge female audience? Is fan culture reshaping the media landscape, or are fans just dupes of consumer capitalist media corporations?

The relationship between gender and representation has never been more contentious or more contested than it is today, as a new generation of feminists take on media images of gender. This course does not attempt to give answers, but instead focuses on asking questions. Our focus will be on engaging closely and critically with media through feminist scholarship and activism.

Media studied include TV dramas ( Orange is the New Black, Game of Thrones, Cucumber), reality TV and (RuPaul's Drag Race,America’s Next Top Model), images of masculinity from the camp gay stereotype of the 20th century to lad culture, and the changing nature of celebrity from Marilyn Monroe to Beyoncé.

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.

Everyday life is often described as bombarding us with images, and contemporary culture is therefore frequently understood as a visual culture.

• What do such statements actually mean?
• How far is our culture a visual culture?
• What role do 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 module will introduce theories and practices that have addressed these questions. Examples of topics studied include:

• 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.

On this module you will have the opportunity to gain a critical understanding of recent and ongoing themes in Media and Cultural Studies and Sociology on the topic of vision and visuality, media and culture, develop different reading and writing skills and participate in lively discussions and analytical exercises.

This module 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 you 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.

In this module we explore the challenges facing young people in the UK today, particularly those involved with the criminal justice system. Youth justice has been a contentious area of social policy for many years, and the contemporary situation is no different, with the national and local policy formulations posing particular considerations for social work within the values, ethics, skills, and methods which are so important to it, within a multi-professional and multi-agency setting.

The module seeks to draw out the particular features of a system which contains within it a variety of identifiable views on the causes of youth offending, and various means to deal with the problems which the young people themselves might face, and problems which they may present to others.

Social work is a messy, unpredictable, complex and intangible activity. This is because it is tied up with human emotions and emotions are very difficult to explain, quantify, objectify or fit into neat boxes. Actively engaging and using the emotions involved, both in terms of the practitioner and service user, enables a deeper social work approach to take place and enables the forming of relationships. Such relationships can then be used as the tool themselves to bring about positive changes for children and families who are receiving intervention from youth justice social workers.

Social workers working within the youth justice system know through their experience what is most likely to be effective in meeting the aims of the system – that is prevention of offending. To achieve this means real questions need to be asked about the effectiveness of the technical-rational risk focused approach of the current youth justice system in favour of a system which adopts the principles of Munro (2011). Such a system empowers social workers to actively use critically reflective and reflexive practice and supports the use of self to build powerful social work relationships with the vulnerable children they work with.

This module focuses upon developing your understanding of the contribution that social work can make to the lives of disabled and older people who use adult social care services or who may be in need of support.

Its starting point is that concepts such as the social model of disability, independent living and personalisation are ways of thinking as well as doing. This requires social workers to understand the philosophy and principles that underpin ways of delivering support and that enable choice and control for people who use services.

This module helps you to appreciate how working effectively in partnership with service users and the wider community around them requires social workers to understand the legacy of paternalistic, oppressive and dependency cultures in creating ways of understanding the problems of disability and old age, and the forms of provision that these understandings have led to.

This module helps you to apply a wide range of knowledge and skills to help build family relationships, resource and resilience so that the welfare of the child remains paramount. You will learn the latest child care law, policy and statutory guidance, and how to think critically about the assumptions, language and practices that underpin ‘risk’ assessments and social work practice relating to child care.

We explore the role played by developmental psychology in shaping concepts of childhood within welfare and protection practices. We also consider child harm and crimes against children and the problematic nature of child-rearing practices in conditions of poverty, isolation, single parenthood and cultural diversity.

You are introduced to key elements of effective practice, with a particular focus on how to safeguard and engage children and families – especially when the social worker also has to balance the often competing interests of parent and child and to deal with the challenges of multi-agency working.

The importance of timely assessment and intervention to prevent family breakdown is also stressed, as is the need for care planning and partnership working with parents whose children have become subject to legal proceedings. You will study court structures, roles and processes relevant to child care social work.

The module exposes you to the latest research, including analysis of serious case reviews, enabling you to demonstrate a high level of skill in evidence based, effective social work approaches to helping children and families which support change.

You will spend your third year working in a graduate-level placement role. This is an opportunity to gain experience in an industry or sector that you might be considering working in once you graduate.

Our Careers and Placements Team will support you during your placement with online contact and learning resources.

You will undertake a work-based learning module during your placement year which will enable you to reflect on the value of the placement experience and to consider what impact it has on your future career plans.

This module provides an opportunity to bring together knowledge and skills you have developed into an 8,000 word dissertation that you complete in your final year. You will have the opportunity to undertake an independent piece of research (under supervision) and to apply your general understanding of the research process to real world examples that are of particular interest to you. There is the option of conducting your dissertation as part of a placement with an appropriate organisation or group.

You will plan, present and design a dissertation proposal in tutorial groups, with a detailed, step-by-step web-based guide available for extra support. This will help you develop an idea for a research project, work out what is possible, which methods to use, and begin to plan it. You will have opportunities to get feedback from other students and your supervisor during regular meetings. After carrying out your own data collection and analysis, you will then write it up as a dissertation.

All sociologists are supposed to know their classics but most only know them from second or third hand summaries. In this module we offer the opportunity to have an intimate encounter with one of the classics, texts that are often referred to in the social sciences. The text will change on an annual basis. Past examples include Zygmunt Bauman’s prize-winning book Modernity and the Holocaust (1989) and Jean Baudrillard’s America (1988). The chosen text will be used as a point of departure for exploring some central debates and themes in sociology and media and cultural studies.

This module investigates gender inequalities within society through a focus on historical and contemporary debates in feminist theory and activism. The module 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 module 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 the continued relevance of the idea of ‘The Personal is Political’ and ‘consciousness raising’. We will overview feminist approaches to social research and explore feminist interventions in practices of gender inequality, for example inequalities in paid and unpaid work, childcare and women’s health. You will complete an intergenerational interview research project on ‘women, work and social change’ through which you will analyse and reflect upon your experience of the research process.

We will also take the feminist manifesto as a central document which expresses lived experiences of gender inequalities and collective desire for social change. Through some practices of inequalities, such as art, beauty contests, capitalism and patriarchy, we will explore the contemporary resonance of ideas such as black feminisms, art activism, the occupy movement and backlash.

By the end of the module you will have been given the opportunity to become familiar with some of the key debates within feminism today. We aim for you to be able to make connections between feminist theory and forms of feminist practice. The module engages you in debate, original research and feminist activism through analysis of varied media including academic texts, advertising, art, film, news media and social media.

Economic inequalities have widened in advanced capitalist countries and yet many people are reluctant even to acknowledge the existence of class. The module analyses how inequalities of class and status are generated, how they relate to other kinds of inequality, and how they are experienced. It explores how the social forms and mechanisms of capitalist economic organisation interact with other sources of inequality, not only producing an unequal distribution of resources and opportunities but affecting the ways in which people value themselves and others. Linking social structure to personal experience, the course applies social theory, including that of Pierre Bourdieu and Henri Lefebvre, to the ‘common sense’ about class and to their people’s everyday experiences.

Mental health is an increasingly complex area of social work practice, due to competing rights and sanctions, fast-paced legal change and controversial case law precedents. The boundaries between lawful and unlawful practice are not easily identifiable, which presents a challenge for social work – especially given our duty as social workers to defend people’s human rights.

This module is designed to enable you to develop a critical understanding of the nature of contemporary mental health services, and the associated legislative, policy and practice context. It emphasises the importance of alternative constructions of mental health, as opposed to the dominance of the medical model, and asserts the importance of service user expertise.

The module concludes by re-evaluating the role of social work in mental health services and considering implications for future practice.

Belonging to a nation is widely seen to be as natural as belonging to a family or a home. This module will explore how such assumptions about national belonging come about by introducing students to a range of theoretical approaches and debates.

You will explore how notions of belonging are socially constructed, how the nation is defined, who belongs and who doesn’t. The module addresses these notions by examining what everyday practices, discourses and representations reveal about the ways people think about, and inhabit, the nation. The module also pays particular attention to nation formation in relation to debates about multiculturalism, diversity and migration and asks: What are the impacts of migration and multiculturalism on definitions of the nation? How is multiculturalism defined and perceived?

Although focus will be 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).

This module introduces and explores the writings of a number of key twentieth-century social and cultural theorists, and radical thinkers offering perceptive and provocative critiques of some of the many ills of modern western capitalist society, such as 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.

This module provides an opportunity for you to engage with perspectives in the social sciences that 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 are called into question.

This module considers not only how to interpret the world in various ways, but also how to change it.

This module will explore how the politically powerful and the politically radical use the internet to consolidate and revolutionise the distribution of power around the globe.

Like many communication platforms before it, the internet is mobilised by the politically and economically powerful as well as those seeking radical change. However, unlike other platforms, it has created an almost universally accessible platform for public dialogue. Pro-democracy revolutionaries, freedom hackers, feminist mediasmiths, anti-capitalists, data leakers, and others use the internet to organise their social movements. Conversely, those opposed to the liberal project, such as authoritarians and extremist groups, also use the affordances of the internet to distribute their message and rally their supporters.

This module examines these issues and investigates the implications of “big data” control by governments and corporations. The module looks also at the understanding social networkers and other content uploaders have of this “big data” control along with the consequences that it comes with.

This module addresses contemporary debates in sociology and cinema by focusing on a single film each week. Its overall aim is to employ cinema for the purpose of social diagnosis.

The module engages with cinema as a social fact, before linking together cinema (producing images of the social) and sociality (socialisation of the image) for analysis.

We live in societies in which forecasting and planning for the future is an important activity for governments, institutions, businesses and individuals. We live in societies in which imaginings of the future as a better time or as a more fearful one circulate in the here and now, calling us into action or invoking threats or desires. This module considers how we should understand the future from sociological and cultural perspectives. The module will address both how we can look into the future through various techniques in order to gain a foresight into what might happen, and we will look at the future – how images of the future circulate in the present through the work of scientists, artists, filmmakers, writers, academics, politicians and others.