English

This seminar takes a deep dive into histories and theories of rubbish, discards and waste, from the proposition that to be human is to make waste, through to the claim that humans can 'design out waste' in order to survive. Questions include when and where does something become rubbish, and how can its value be transformed? What does it mean to waste something, and when does waste become ’toxic'? This course examines how the politics of waste and its (mis)management lie at the heart of contemporary debates concerning environmental degradation, social and economic injustice, and the planetary crisis humans face. 

This course is an introductory survey of the major schools of Chinese Philosophy.  Students begin their exploration of Chinese thought with a reading of Confucius’ Analects where they focus on central concepts such as “filial piety”, “ritual propriety”, “rectification of names”, “mandate of heaven”, and “benevolence”.  Students also explore the two main Daoist classics, the Daodejing and the Zhuangzi, considering such concepts as “non-action”, “non-speaking”, “emptiness/absence” and theories of relativism, perspectivism and non-attachment. This course is also dedicated to introducing the four main schools of Chinese Buddhism; Chan, Huayen, T'ian Tai, and Mind-Only and their contrasting ideas of enlightenment, emptiness, truth, and co-dependent origination.

This course covers algorithm expression methods, functions and processing processes, analysis of difficulty, techniques for designing efficient algorithms, applications, and categorizes and utilizes previously developed algorithms by topic. 

This taster course focuses on helping students engage in basic daily social interaction using Cantonese.

In this course the views of a number of classical thinkers on capitalism will be discussed: Adam Smith, Karl Marx, Max Weber, Friedrich Hayek, John Maynard Keynes, Milton Friedman and Thomas Piketty. What was, in their view, the nature of capitalism? Which problems does the system have? And how should these shortcomings be remedied?

This course explores the evolution of women's work inside and outside of the home; traditional and emerging views relative to women and domestic and/or care work; and current models that include greater State involvement and societal support for domestic and care work as prerequisites for gender equity and more robust democracies in Latin America. Students derive the conceptual tools for their own critical analyses, developing an amplified understanding of the role of care and domestic work in Latin America; the role that women play in the same, and what this classic equation has meant for the region's development trajectories. Likewise, the course introduces existing models and policy alternatives. It is divided into two parts: the first part covers Latin American women's inequality in labor and in society, and the second part considers emerging responses.

This course examines the history of East Asian civilization from earliest times to 1600, with emphasis on China and Japan, including social, intellectual, and economic developments as well as political history.

This course equips students with basic research and analytical skills that are needed to understand and respond to social policy problems. Its main focus is on statistical data available in online databases that are widely used to describe such problems and design policy solutions to them. Students learn about major relevant databases for Ireland and the EU and receive guidance and hands-on experience on how to access those databases, search through them for data on specific social policy topics, select and extract particular relevant indicators into Excel spreadsheets, present the data in graphs and tables, and write brief descriptive commentaries on what the data reveal. For illustrative purposes, the course focuses on unemployment as a representative social problem and concentrates on analyzing that problem and policy responses to it in Ireland and in the EU. A special focus is on the impact of Covid-19 on the labor market and its effects on employment and unemployment among younger cohorts in particular.