University College Cork

This course provides an insight in the molecular-physiological mechanisms that plants use to adjust to their environment. Students learn how light, light quality, and daylength control plant growth and development. The course examines temperature as an environmental signal for plants, how the phytohormone mediate environmental impacts plant to plant competition, and plants and herbivores.

This course looks at the evolution of modern China's political and economic system; the Chinese state in comparative perspective; issues and problems of China's political and economic development. This course explains the Chinese political system and state administration, the characteristics of China's socialist market economy, and analyses the role of the Communist Party of China. Students assess different theoretical approaches used in current research on modern China, and develop and present individual research interests on China's political system.

This course examines various collective strategies adopted to selectively know and understand inhumane conduct and consider how publics morally disengage from acts of extreme violence and rationalize inhumane conduct, especially during periods of upheaval social unrest. It asks if social and political under-reactions to widespread evidence of violence, hunger, poverty, or ecological destruction today offer us any insights into the relationship between knowledge of suffering (its production and dissemination), social relations among humans, and propensity to act? Using classical Marxist and Weberian analysis, it will explore how social and affective identification with fellow humanity is routinely blocked. It will also assess the role of narrative in establishing the acceptability and coherence of certain violent realities today. The second part of this course considers occasions when societies choose to engage with traumatic memories of violence. Topics include collective trauma, denial, forgetting, societal guilt, inhumanities, the by-stander society, alienation, and societal learning.

In this course, students gain a broad understanding of the roots and character of the international trade in illicit drugs, and the difficulties in restricting its strength and influence. The course goes over the origins and history of the global drugs trade, relationships between the international drugs trade, globalization, and capitalism. Students learn about the spatial distribution and general economics of the drugs trade globally and the social harm to populations of this trade. They gain knowledge on the efforts to regulate, control, and eradicate the international trade, and evaluation of those efforts.

The Celtic literatures contain a variety of strong and memorable female and male characters, some positively portrayed and others negatively. The idealized gender characteristics which may underpin these portrayals is explored in the lectures. In the case of the ultimate model of masculinity, the male hero, the myth of heroic prowess coupled with the underlying threat of unpredictability and violence is examined. In addition, the blurred lines of gender identity in poetry is a particular focus. Saints' Lives of the Middle Ages, often an expected source of gender role reversal and fluidity, is also covered. A range of representative texts are read in translation, and discussed and analyzed in lectures.

This course offers an introduction to the history of cultural anthropology, tracing the formation of anthropological theory from its roots in the Enlightenment and European colonial expansion up to the present. Partly an intellectual history of the discipline, students explore key texts that mark critical shifts in anthropological thinking about what it means to be human. In doing so, students explore theories and critiques that have shaped, complicated, and haunted anthropological conceptions of humanity, including ideas about nature and culture, notions of race, progress, and civilization, and theories of personhood and social life.

This course considers how intrinsic war is to human nature (the Hobbes/Rousseau debate), the causes and escalation of conflict, the conduct of warfare, its physical manifestation and immediate outcomes. The focus is on small-scale societies of prehistoric and recent date, using archaeological information and ethnographies of conflict to study and define "primitive" war as an anthropological phenomenon. The course takes a comparative, evolutionary, and historical perspective, to look at the broader impact of war and conflict in a sample of early and indigenous societies.

The course allows students the opportunity to explore through embodied engagement a range of methods of movement practices in order to performatively understand place, movement, and cultures. Students study, through practice and seminar, some of the key writings and practices of movement and place in contemporary culture. This can include a range of contemporary and historical approaches to dance, choreography, physical theatre, somatic practice, and contemplative practices.

Ethnography as both the methodology and the set of methods by which anthropologists gather our data from the field has a long and controversial history emerging during European colonial expansion. Students critically examine the early ethnographic works, particularly in relation to Ireland as well as abroad. Contemporary texts comparatively show core issues and debates in how the "other" is written. As students move through these texts we engage with different ethnographic methods developing the student's own skills in collecting and curating social data.