University of New South Wales

This course examines some of the leading theories of justice in contemporary political thought and their implications for designing political institutions and public policies. Questions include: What is a fair distribution of society’s resources? Should parents be entitled to pass on their wealth to their children? Should offensive speech be regulated? Should our public policies treat every citizen the same or allow for gender and cultural differences? Can historical injustices be rectified? What does environmental justice look like? Are animals entitled to justice? In pursuing these questions, students explore topics such as rights, distributive justice, gender equality and multiculturalism, historical injustice and reconciliation, and pluralism and the clash of values. 

This course examines  the history and foundational institutions and principles that underpin the Australian legal system. It covers current legal issues in Australia, and explores these in critical and comparative perspectives. 

This course examines what drives development interventions, their impacts on communities, and the ways they respond. It also explores the processes and influences that operate at a global level and that impact such fundamental concerns as human rights, population health, environmental and climate change, and migration. 

This course examines how the idea of sustainable development has emerged as an effort to redirect economic growth to produce more socially just and environmentally benign outcomes. It covers how human-environment interconnections, across different scales and in different contexts, come together to demonstrate how environmental issues are situated in, and shaped by political and economic contexts. 

This course examines Australia’s rich and complex Aboriginal linguistic heritage in contemporary and traditional contexts. It covers language and the land, kinship and social organization, narrative and conversation, language acquisition, language contact, language and education, language maintenance and revival. There will be a focus on how new ways of speaking are created, how languages are lost, and the ways in which Aboriginal speakers are teaching and reviving their traditional languages today. 

This course examines the ways in which processes of colonization and de-colonization affect contemporary politics, resistance, transition, justice, the global order and localized and global challenges. 

This course examines the fundamental presuppositions of every area of human life and inquiry. This course looks at philosophy by taking up questions about the nature of knowledge, the human mind and its relation to the body, the principles of right action and of a good life, and freedom and constraint in a just political order. It examines both contemporary and historically influential approaches.

This course examines influential theories of nature and the environment in philosophy and a range of interdisciplinary writings, from Aristotle to the present.  The course explores the following questions: Is there a connection between how nature has been conceived in philosophy and science and the current environmental crisis? Is the notion of nature still a meaningful term in the Anthropocene?  What is the difference between ‘nature’ and ‘culture’? How should humans understand their relationship to ‘nature’? These questions will be addressed from a range of perspectives, such as: Phenomenology, Critical Theory, German Romanticism, environmental ethics, Ecofeminism, contemporary thought and non-Western approaches. Drawing on these diverse traditions, the course examines possible alternatives for understanding the human-nature divide.