University College Cork

Students explore the ideas of "rural" and "rurality," how these ideas are constructed, and evaluates different definitions of these terms. It identifies both historical and ongoing processes that shape (and cause conflict) in rural spaces. As part of the European Union, Ireland is subject to a wide range of EU policies that influence agricultural, environmental, economic, and social sustainability. These policies and their impacts are discussed in conjunction with issues and processes that underpin rural decline.

This course offers a theoretically and methodologically informed analysis of culture, art and literature drawing on sociology and anthropology. Students are introduced to key sociological and anthropological concepts which facilitate the interpretation of art-works as both reflective of society and potentially transformative – whether literary, cinematic, musical, or whatever sort – including liminality, play, and social performativity. Effectively, these suggest that by creating imaginative spaces of narrative and symbolism, art can consider elements of society, and variously re-think and re-evaluate them, or even critique them.

In this course, students are introduced to current philosophical debates about the nature of mind and its place in the natural world. Prominent theories of the mind are considered with particular attention paid to their capacity to capture the first-personal, the apparently private, and experientially rich nature of mental life.

This course analyzes a range of the most recent work from contemporary film directors from American, European, and world cinema. Students examine the films from a number of critical and theoretical perspectives and engage with key concepts and concerns such as nationalism and cinema, transnationalism, postmodernism, and audience reception.

Students are introduced to theories and practices in film and screen media industries. Historical and cultural contexts of a variety of creative industries are examined. Detailed case studies of specific productions, from inception and funding/development to production and promotion, are analyzed. Practitioners from the film/screen media industry and from creative culture industries deliver a series of workshops to illuminate contemporary approaches and practices during the course.

This course offers students the philosophical and critical theoretical tools to analyze the complex phenomenon of violence by exploring the contemporary field of the Environmental Post humanities. Assembling perspectives from contemporary feminist and political philosophy with environmental post humanist approaches, violence here is examined as an (im)material socio-political phenomenon that is impacted by categories such as gender, race/ethnicity, dis/ability, class, sexuality, age, and others and the societal power relations that have been engendered by these – and other intersecting – categories. The course focuses on the analysis of eco-violence, the more-than-human, and processes of de/humanization.

This course examines concepts and perspectives in mental health and distress, including social perspectives and service-user-based knowledge, with regard to issues of human rights and social justice. This course includes historical perspectives; ideologies of institutional and community care; key concepts in mental health; social and intersectional perspectives; service-user/survivor knowledge; epistemic and social injustice; Mad studies; and human rights in mental health.